Mummy Knew

by Lisa James

  Ewan began to laugh. ‘Bog, bog,’ he kept saying.

  It wasn’t long before Diane arrived home. I flew into her arms, tears streaming down my face. She looked just the same as I remembered her: long dark hair, parted in the middle, the same colour eyes and skin as Mum. She was even wearing the same Afghan coat she had on when I last saw her. I sat glued to her side and ran the soft white trim through my fingers.

  It wasn’t until Diane shrugged off her coat that I noticed she was expecting a baby. She had just been for a scan and she spent a while explaining in detail to Mum what position the baby was in. Watching the two of them together, it was as though they had never been parted. I could tell from the conversation that they hadn’t kept in touch but even so, their bond was so strong they seemed to pick up where they had left off. I didn’t know how Mum had Diane’s address but guessed someone must have passed it to her behind Dad’s back.

  Diane explained they were only staying at the house until they found somewhere else.

  ‘I should bloody well hope so, too,’ said Mum. ‘It’s a right dump. Who’s Ewan, when he’s at home?’

  ‘He came with the house,’ Diane laughed. ‘He’s alright though.’

  When Diane suggested I go and put my bag upstairs in her bedroom, I knew they were going to be talking about Dad and me. I planned to listen to what they said outside the door but the floorboards creaked, and besides, I didn’t think I could bear to hear them talk about it. I felt too ashamed.

  I walked up the stairs and found Diane’s bedroom on the left. It was pretty, and there were more things I recognised from years ago–knick-knacks and framed photographs that showed Diane and Cheryl standing beside Mum, who was wearing three-quarter-length Capri pants and a scarf over a small beehive. It must have been taken in the early 60s.

  ‘Hello, Lisa.’

  I spun round to see Diane’s boyfriend Martin standing in the doorway. ‘Christ, you were only this high when I last saw you,’ he said, holding his hand at waist height.

  ‘Hello, Martin.’

  ‘What’s Frank been up to this time, eh?’

  I just stared at the floor and felt my face burn bright red.

  When I went back downstairs, Mum and Diane were still talking over a cup of tea.

  ‘Anyway, I thought it best to bring her here for a while, ’cos he said if I take her home he’s gonna fucking kill her.’

  Diane shook her head in disbelief. ‘You’ll be alright here with us for a while, won’t you, Lisa?’

  I covered my face with my hands, so sick of crying. I was confused. I didn’t understand who knew what, and because I didn’t want to be judged as dirty, I couldn’t bring myself to speak about the things that were tearing me apart inside.

  When Mum stood up to go, she gave me a casual wave of the hand, but I flew across the room and hugged her tight. It felt odd to rest against her softness and breathe in her smell. She never hugged me herself, just stood with her hands held awkwardly to the side. I wished with all my heart that she would love me the way I loved her. No matter how cold she was, how abruptly she treated me, or how many times she let Dad take me up to his bed, I couldn’t stop the love I felt. I knew she was a bad mother, but I still yearned for her love and would have done just about anything to please her.

  ‘I’ll come and get you when he’s calmed down,’ she said.

  I nodded and Diane passed me a bit of toilet roll to blow my nose. I wanted to ask why Dad wanted to kill me but I was frightened of the answer, so instead I stood with Diane at the front door and waved Mum off back down the glass-strewn path.

  ‘Simple Ewan’ turned out to be really nice. We played Monopoly and card games together. Every day I’d ask Diane if Cheryl and Davie might come to visit, or whether we could go and visit Nanny and Jenny, and she promised we’d see them all soon.

  The house may have been ramshackle, with broken doors and windows, but I noticed it was very clean–much cleaner than at home–and cosy in its own way too. Every morning I’d wake up in my sleeping bag on the sofa and the first thing I’d notice was an absence of fear. Each day that passed brought a lightness of feeling. I wasn’t weighed down with the thought of Dad. I didn’t have to worry about the filthy things he did to me in the bedroom, and I didn’t have to worry about his violence.

  It was like being on holiday. If I walked in front of the television while someone was watching a favourite programme, there wouldn’t be a kick on the back of my legs as punishment, or if I accidentally knocked over a glass of water there would be no slap to the head. But most importantly, my private places were my own. I began to dread Mum arriving to take me home.

  ‘Can’t I stay here with you, Diane?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Lisa. You belong with Mum.’

  ‘Mum wouldn’t mind,’ I said, thinking to myself that she might actually be pleased with the idea.

  ‘No,’ Diane said, and I realised I shouldn’t have asked. She had her own life to lead. ‘It’s just, you know, what with the baby coming.’

  ‘It’s alright,’ I said. ‘I understand.’

  I began to resign myself to the fact I would have to go back to Dad, although I felt sick to the pit of my stomach. A small part of me hoped that Mum would simply forget about me–but she didn’t. I had been with Diane exactly a week when I saw Mum walking back up the path towards the house and my heart plummetted. It was time to go home.

  Diane walked us to the bus stop. By the time the bus arrived I had run out of tears, and I felt as though I was wearing a tight salt mask.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ said Diane softly. ‘You cried when you got here and you’re crying when you’re going home. What is it? Why are you so upset?’

  I realised then that she didn’t know about what I had to put up with at home. Mum held my arm and I felt her grip tighten as she manoeuvred me onto the bus.

  ‘It hurts,’ I said, then called over my shoulder. ‘I’ll miss you.’

  ‘We’ll visit. Promise,’ shouted Diane as the bus started to pull away, but I knew she wouldn’t. I stood on the open platform clinging on to the white pole and watched Diane waving goodbye.

  ‘Could I go and stay with Nanny and Jenny instead?’ I asked Mum on the way home.

  She gave a nasty laugh. ‘You must be bleedin’ joking. They wouldn’t have you.’

  I didn’t want to believe her, but a niggling voice at the back of my mind reminded me that nobody ever came to see if I was alright, and a sharp pain jabbed inside. I knew that everybody was scared of Dad, but he was only one person and they were a group of adults. I imagined them all turning up with burning torches like they did in films when they wanted to drive the baddie out of the village. If only they would do that, life would be so different. We could all be together, happy again.

  Chapter Eleven

  When we arrived home, my stomach flipped in fear as Mum put her key in the lock. The house was very quiet because Kat was still at school.

  ‘You better go up and say hello to him,’ said Mum before I had even taken my coat off.

  ‘I don’t want to,’ I mumbled, afraid he might hear.

  ‘You get up there,’ she commanded. ‘Don’t you start him off again. My nerves can’t take it.’

  I dragged my feet up to the first floor, where I heard the faint mumble of the television. He was sitting on the sofa in the front room wearing a short towelling dressing gown. He flicked the TV off as I came in.

  ‘Alright, Dad,’ I said, sitting opposite him in the armchair. This felt odd in itself because normally I had to sit at his feet.

  He didn’t say anything to me, only stared, the expression on his face close to absolute hatred. I couldn’t believe Mum had sent me up to see him knowing he was still in his ‘gone mad’ mood. I sat in the chair and stared at my lap, occasionally looking up in the hope that his expression had softened but it remained the same. I remembered all the times in the past when he’d given me the hot and cold treatment, and I knew eventually he wou
ld call me over to him. I didn’t want to be sitting there in a stuffy room, not knowing if I was going to be hit or pawed and slobbered over. But I knew if I got up and said ‘See ya, I’m sick of all this,’ I wouldn’t even make it to the door.

  True to form it wasn’t much longer before he stood up, flashing his genitals as he tightened the belt on his dressing gown, and said, ‘I’ll be in the bedroom.’ I understood that he meant me to follow him and, with a heavy heart, I obeyed.

  ‘Get your clothes off and get your nightie on then,’ he instructed as I walked in the door.

  I obeyed slowly, without looking at him.

  ‘Hurry up!’ he urged cheerfully. ‘I haven’t got all day.’

  The next morning I woke up to find that overnight I had become a pariah. Dad, Mum and little Kat were in their bedroom having a cup of tea and he was screaming obscenities through at me.

  ‘Little cunt features’, ‘shit-face’, ‘piss-arse’ and ‘Fuck off out of it with the other cunts’, he yelled.

  I sat and sobbed, wishing there was a way I could fuck off out of it.

  As Dad shouted his insults through the thin bedroom walls, I heard Mum chuckling and making light-hearted comments. Maybe she was trying to calm him down, but a part of me knew she was pleased when I was out of favour because Dad paid more attention to Kat and her.

  I felt as though my head was going to explode. I had to get out. I would run away and live under an arch somewhere. It couldn’t be any worse than this.

  As quickly as I could, I pulled on my clothes from the day before and pushed my bare feet into my plimsolls. I ran down the stairs two at a time, stopping briefly in the dining room for my anorak, which I’d last seen hanging on the back of a chair. I grabbed it and turned to leave but the way to the front door was blocked by Dad, wearing only a pair of Y-fronts. His chest heaved up and down as he tried to catch his breath. He had obviously run down the stairs after me.

  ‘You’re not going anywhere,’ he said menacingly.

  ‘I am,’ I said, surprising myself with a tone of defiance I’d never used before. ‘You hate me, and you’re…you’re always hurting me.’ I wanted to say I didn’t like the way he touched me between the legs and masturbated himself at the same time, but I wasn’t quite that brave.

  He sprang towards me and I braced myself for the usual blows. Instead, he caught me in a huge bear hug that hurt almost as much as a slap or a kick. I could hardly breathe. My face was buried in his right shoulder so I couldn’t see the expression on his face. I wasn’t sure if what he was doing was meant as a form of affection or punishment. When he put me down I saw that his eyes had misted over.

  ‘You know I love you,’ he said, ‘but if you ever try to do anything stupid like run off somewhere, I’ll fucking kill you, and you know that as well, don’t you?’

  I nodded. I knew it, alright. To me, Dad was all-powerful. I had never seen anybody stand up to him. Everybody was frightened of him. What chance did I have?

  Anything I valued, Dad would, at one time or another, rip to shreds as punishment for some imagined misdemeanour–either before or after a slap, but never instead of. I tried not to show an attachment to any particular possession because I knew it would be the first thing Dad went for. He brought me a guitar once, which he said he had found in the bin at a recording studio where they had a cleaning contract, and insisted I learn how to play it. He sent me to the library for a how-to book and stood over me as I tried to learn the chords. The strings bit into my fingers and I hated every minute of it. One day he became angry when I couldn’t stretch my fingers into the right position on the frets so he snatched it from me and booted it across to the other side of the room. It made a loud twang as the base splintered on the toe of his shoe. At least I didn’t have to endure any more guitar lessons after that.

  Although Dad had always drunk quite heavily, during this period he stepped it up a gear and began a particularly heavy phase of drinking spirits. He’d keep cans of chilled Special Brew as a chaser to wash down as much brandy or gin as he could guzzle, and every few days he would send Mum over to the off-licence to replenish his stock. She’d have to make sure there was a constant supply of sliced lemons and ice too. At Christmas he would fill the drinks cabinet with bottle after bottle of different spirits, even though he would be the only one drinking it. The most Mum would have is an occasional weak Martini and lemonade. She couldn’t trust herself to drink because she had a very low tolerance for it, and in the early days of their relationship Dad had mistaken her giggles for flirtatiousness with other men. He had knocked her about so much over it that now she hardly dared touch the stuff.

  During these periods Dad would spend all day drinking. More often than not he would be in no fit state to wake up for work at 3.30 in the morning, and when Mum was particularly under pressure, maybe with one of the other cleaners off sick, she’d come into my room and shake me awake so I could go and give her a hand. After a long night cleaning I would get the bus home on my own while Mum stayed on to do her extra duties, then I’d have to rush to get Kat ready and walk her to school. If I was lucky Dad would let me go to school where I’d spend all day yawning; if not he would insist I come home again.

  Dad was very fussy about the glasses he drank out of. If it was gin, the glass would be long and tall, polished by Mum until it sparkled. Brandy was drunk in a balloon-shaped glass, in which he liked to swirl the amber-coloured liquid around like some sort of connoisseur. As fussy as he was about the shape and shine of his glasses, he didn’t seem to notice that he himself looked like a tramp going through a rough patch. He wouldn’t bother to shave or wash, and he’d wear the same food-stained clothes for days on end. The room in which he sat would often be overflowing with half-drunk mugs of tea, and ancient copies of The Sporting Life and The Sun.

  From the minute he poured the first drink of the day, the house would go into ‘batten down the hatches’ mode. With any luck, after a few hours he would fall into a deep sleep, during which time we’d all creep about, freezing in our tracks if the floorboards creaked. On a few occasions either Mum or I would have to rush and extinguish a cigarette he’d left to burn between his fingers. Once a cushion beside him began to smoulder and I had to extinguish it with the dregs of the ice bucket. Luckily he slept through the whole thing, filling the house with thundering snores.

  If it didn’t put him to sleep, drink seemed to fuel him with a supernatural energy, so that his rages went on for hour upon hour. Once I had to sit opposite him while he questioned me at length about whether I’d eaten his last jam tart. After about two hours of something akin to the Spanish Inquisition, I confessed I’d eaten it, even though I hadn’t. I was just hoping to take my punishment and be allowed to go to bed. But instead he kept me up for another hour, flicking lighted cigarettes at my face and lecturing me on what a ‘greedy bastard’ I was.

  Because he did most of his drinking at home rather than out in a pub, there was no respite. He would either drink in bed or lying flat out on the sofa, but wherever he was he would usually insist that I was there with him. There was no escape.

  Drinking made him reckless in all respects. He gambled money away with careless abandon, not even bothering to study the form any more. He might as well have stuck a pin in the paper. It simply came down to whether he liked the name of the horse or not, or whether he could feel the psychic vibes. Occasionally he would win. Once he stood to win a few thousand pounds on some sort of multiple bet, but the final race in the series depended on a photo finish. Dad was pacing up and down, and swilling back his lager as he waited for the result. The tension in the house was palpable. I locked myself in the toilet and waited to hear Dad’s roar of either jubilation or anger. I prayed it wouldn’t be the latter. It wasn’t. I could hear him jumping up and down and shouting ‘Yes, fucking, yes!’ Relief swept over me.

  Although a lot of the money went straight back to the bookies he also spent quite a bit on the house. He wanted to create his own mini version of the
offices where we cleaned. He ordered lots of shag-pile carpet and began stapling it to the walls in the living room. He also bought mirror tiles and stuck them absolutely everywhere. Leather sofas completed the look. I once saw a documentary about Hugh Hefner, the Playboy millionaire; by the time Dad had finished the renovation of our front room, it looked like a cheap imitation of Hefner’s den. But he loved it.

  My thirteenth birthday passed like any other day. Birthday cakes and parties had never been part of my world, but I was disappointed that I didn’t at least have a card to open. I had long since given up hope that the lost members of my family would remember–after all, out of sight out of mind–but I did expect a card from Mum, and I felt quite disappointed not to get one. It was a Saturday morning, and usually I would have got up at 6am to go cleaning with Mum or Dad, but this week they had decided to have a lie-in, and I was grateful for that. My friends at school managed to do all sorts of interesting things at the weekend, like drama club or dancing lessons, but all I had to look forward to was a Mars bar and a packet of cheese and onion crisps during my break from pushing an industrial-size carpet cleaner or emptying bins. But the old saying that you don’t miss what you never had is true. I was just grateful if Dad remained in a good mood for a whole day.

  When Mum finally got up around 11am, I had already made Kat’s toast and done the washing-up from the night before. As she stood waiting for the kettle to boil, Kat piped up: ‘Mummy, it’s Lisa’s birthday today.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ she said. ‘I’ll get you something later, alright?’

  It must have been one of those weeks when Dad had lost all the money at the bookies because when she went out later for a packet of cigarettes at the paper shop, she bought me a plastic necklace kit and handed it over to me unwrapped with the fifty pence price label still on. It consisted of a length of elasticated string and ten green plastic beads. The recommended age on the box was 6+.