Mummy Knew

by Lisa James

  I tried to hide my disappointment, but it was hard. I understood that Mum couldn’t buy me something if she didn’t have the money–there were many times we had all looked down the back of the sofa for lost change and felt as though we had struck gold if we found ten pence–but it was just the general lack of care I felt hurt by.

  That’s not what spoiled my birthday though. When Dad got up, he immediately started making lewd innuendos about me being a teenager now. He kept reciting a limerick, over and over again: ‘When roses are red, they’re ready for plucking; when girls are thirteen, they’re ready for fucking.’

  I would have traded all the birthday gifts in the world just to live my life without him sexually interfering with me. I knew what fucking was by now, and the thought terrified me. The words coming out of Dad’s mouth sounded like a threat. All day I tried to keep out of his way, fearful that he would try to fulfil the lyrics of the limerick this time. I wouldn’t put anything past him.

  Later that year, The Police brought out ‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me’, a song about a schoolgirl with a crush on her teacher and the teacher’s discomfort about it. Dad took to singing it to me at every opportunity. ‘I’m the teacher and you’re the saucy teenage tart,’ he’d say, getting hard at the thought.

  Dad had been sexually abusing me for over a year by this stage. Ironically, it had started during one of his short sober periods, so I knew that he was compos mentis and couldn’t blame it on being out of his mind on drink. When he had been drinking heavily, he took the abuse to a new level, and there it would remain for months whether drunk or sober. It was during one of these hard drinking phases that he started removing my knickers for the first time. Previously he had touched my genitals over the top of my knickers while he masturbated himself. I felt much more vulnerable without knickers and it used to hurt a lot more afterwards because he’d try to shove his fingers inside me.

  I was grateful that he never spoke on these occasions, or referred to them in any direct way in the real world. That way it was easy for me to detach myself somehow from what was happening. My mind would drift off and I’d think about school. Once I’d tried to think about Nanny and Jenny, but this was so painful that I trained myself never to do it again. I couldn’t bear to think about people I loved while Dad was poking and prodding me between my legs. I felt dirty and the pain was too much to bear. So instead I’d think about a project I’d worked on at school or a programme on the television–casual things that didn’t matter.

  It usually took fifteen minutes or so before Dad groaned and thrust his hips up into the duvet. When he’d finished he would remove his hand, leaving me so sore that it hurt whenever I went to the toilet. I would slide out the side of the bed, careful not to make sudden movements for fear of making him angry. It was easier to pretend to myself that it hadn’t happened if we didn’t speak or make eye contact afterwards. There would be no prolonged goodnight routines where I’d have to endure him rubbing his hands up and down my body. I would simply leave the room without a backward glance. He was satisfied and peaceful, lighting up a cigarette and flicking over the telly with the remote.

  I was grateful if I escaped his rages and violence. I’d lie in the dark in my bedroom afterwards and sometimes I’d cry but mostly I just felt numb. After a few minutes I’d hear Mum plodding up the stairs to bed and then the noises of them having sex would begin. How could she cope when she had to get up at 3.30am? Why didn’t she ask me to get out of her bed sooner? It was in her power to save me but she never did. I was angry and incredibly sad all at the same time.

  One night when Dad had been drinking brandy for most of the day, a beauty pageant came on the television. I was stroking his feet as he provided a running commentary on the girls’ figures.

  ‘Look at the arse on that!’ and ‘Cor, I’d love to give her one.’

  My face burned in embarrassment and in a way I was glad that we were in the front room while Mum was sitting watching telly downstairs. I knew it was the brandy talking because he was being much cruder than normal.

  When the programme finished, he grabbed his bottle and glass and stood up. He swayed from side to side for a few minutes.

  ‘Let’s go upstairs,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve got a belly ache,’ I replied, desperately searching for a reason not to go upstairs with him.

  ‘Wassa matter?’ he slurred. ‘Got a bloody cunt? I like my steaks rare.’

  ‘I’ve got to do my homework,’ I tried. ‘It’s got to be in tomorrow.’

  ‘Fuck the fucking homework,’ he said.

  I was all too aware I had strayed into dangerous territory and he was becoming angry.

  He slammed his foot down on my bare toes and I let out an agonised cry.

  ‘What is it? Don’t wanna be with me all of a sudden?’

  ‘No, Dad,’ I said, drawing my grazed feet beneath me.

  ‘What am I? A fucking coon, like the wogs at school you wanna hang around with?’

  I hated Dad with such a passion that day that I fantasised about smashing the big marble ashtray onto his head. My left foot was throbbing. I didn’t want him to hurt me any more but when he insisted I go up to his room and lie down in the bed beside him, I didn’t think I had any choice in the matter. I knew that after fifteen minutes of pain and humiliation, I would be allowed to go to my own room and get a good night’s sleep. But on this occasion things were to get even worse than they had been before.

  Fuelled by brandy, Dad escalated my abuse to another level. Instead of simply using his hand on me that night, he ripped my knickers off, crouched down on his knees and began to lick me between the legs. I was as shocked as the first time he touched me. I couldn’t quite believe what was happening, except it was all too real. The more I squirmed away the more he dug his nails into my thighs and pulled me towards him. After a while, he stopped, looked down at his erect penis under the duvet and began to masturbate.

  I had never cried openly while he abused me before, because somehow that would be breaking the spell of silence that existed between us. But now that he had taken it to another revolting level, one that was impossible to pretend wasn’t happening, I couldn’t stop crying. Whether it was because he was drunker than he had been for a long time or not, I don’t know, but the sounds of my distress didn’t seem to bother him. If anything they spurred him on.

  I realised there was no point in holding back my cries. I wanted Mum to hear. I wanted her to help me. I was fed up with keeping quiet. Usually, when Dad touched me, whether we were in the bedroom or on the sofa in the front room, I didn’t dare utter a sound in case Mum walked in on us. I was ashamed and I believed she would blame me because it was easier. Dad had never needed to instruct me to keep it as our little secret. The overwhelming guilt and shame I carried every day ensured I wouldn’t tell a soul, and the very real threat of violence ensured my silence and cooperation.

  Besides, who did I have to tell? I was completely isolated from anyone who could possibly have helped me. Mum was choosing to turn a blind eye and making things easy for him. I couldn’t imagine any of my friends’ mothers allowing their husbands to watch telly naked in bed with their daughters every night. All she had to do was sit in the front room with us each evening instead of watching the same programme downstairs on her own. As for seeking help from someone at school, or even the police, the possibility didn’t even enter my consciousness. In a strange way, the last thing I wanted was for anyone else to find out. It was too shameful.

  As if it wasn’t bad enough that Dad was abusing me with his mouth between my legs, he also started talking about it for the first time, and the words he used were bewildering and distressing in the extreme.

  ‘Lovely tight pussy,’ he said as he came up for air. ‘You’ve got such a pretty cunt. I love plating you.’

  It wasn’t until much later that I worked out that ‘plating’ was slang for licking the plate, a crude reference to oral sex.

  I tried to go off in my head, think
ing about what was happening in Coronation Street or Crossroads, but his assault on me was so direct and present that I found it impossible to be somewhere else. My life had just got a whole lot worse.

  Soon licking wasn’t enough and he started to bite me, savaging my private parts with his teeth, causing unbelievable pain. I screamed at the top of my voice and he suddenly stopped what he was doing, sat up and raised a hand as though he was going to punch me. I couldn’t look him in the face so I shut my eyes against a vision no child should ever have to see. When he started again, I bit my lip until it bled to stop myself crying out.

  At last he stopped and said, ‘Have a wash and go to bed,’ before collapsing between my parted legs. A drink-induced sleep had finally arrived to save me. I pulled myself out from under him and rushed to my room, where I lay hoping to die in my sleep.

  When Dad sobered up the next day, he could hardly look me in the eye. He had temporarily lost his usual confident swagger, almost as though he had shocked himself the night before. But it didn’t take long for him to do it again, and thereafter licking and biting me became his new habit.

  He began to be increasingly rough. One night I couldn’t stand it any more and, in a mad moment, I rolled off the bed and ran to my room, determined that I wouldn’t let him put his mouth or hands between my legs ever again. My heart pounded hard in my chest. I reached my bedroom in only a few short steps along the landing, then time seemed to slip into slow motion as if I were in a nightmare and desperate to escape a frenzied serial killer. I stood with my back against the bedroom door feeling as though I was going to have a heart attack. Then absolute terror set in as I heard him coming after me, muttering the vilest of obscenities. I began to whimper as I felt him kick the door open behind me.

  I was thrust forward onto the bed and in a moment he was on top of me, stark naked, his full weight making it hard for me to catch a breath. Reaching up with his right hand, he grabbed a handful of my hair and shook my head viciously from side to side until I felt the hair being ripped from my scalp. Then he tore the buttons from the front of my floral nightdress and exposed my bare chest. For some reason I found this more humiliating than anything else I had suffered so far. It felt too intimate. I didn’t want his eyes on me.

  Throughout he repeated the words ‘fucking bitch’ over and over again as if chanting some kind of mantra.

  When he finally got off me, I was literally seeing stars. I barely felt his parting kick, but I knew I could never run away ever again. Not unless I was prepared to drive a stake through his heart first.

  A new pattern was set. He finally felt free enough to roam all over my body, flipping me this way and that to derive his pleasure. Now when I went to bed I would often have to wipe his sperm from my face or buttocks. He also started to speak a lot, mainly to himself, as if narrating a porn film, like the ones he liked to play to me on his video recorder. He spoke about what he was going to do next, and throughout it all I might as well have been a dead body for all the reaction he got. I stopped crying quite so much, but inside I was a mass of turmoil. When I heard him spit onto his fingers to lubricate them before pushing them into me, it was all I could do to stop myself vomiting.

  I was so sore that it burned when I peed. I kept getting a fever and a sick, dull pain in my lower back but Mum wouldn’t let me go to the doctor’s. She’d mix me a drink of bicarbonate of soda in warm water and that would usually clear it up until the next bout. But not always.

  ‘Mum, please, it’s so painful, that stuff hasn’t worked,’ I cried, doubled up on the floor one day. ‘Why can’t I go to the doctor’s?’

  ‘It’s only cystitis, for Christ’s sake,’ she said. ‘Anyone’d think you were dying. It’s the “honeymooners’ disease”. I’m always getting it myself.’

  ‘But I’m not a honeymooner,’ I groaned. ‘I shouldn’t have it.’

  ‘Which is precisely why you can’t go to the fucking doctor’s,’ she said. ‘Can you imagine what they’d say? If you think I’m gonna put my Kat at risk from the social services, you’ve got another thing coming. You’ve made your fucking bed, now you lie in it.’

  Her words were at once cryptic and clear as day. She didn’t care what happened to me. She was determined to pretend it wasn’t happening.

  I waited for the day she would face up to what Dad was doing to me. There were numerous occasions when she walked into a room and he wasn’t quite quick enough to tuck his penis back into his trousers. She’d look away quickly, and continue as if she hadn’t seen a thing. There was the fact that I spent most evenings in bed with him, and he kept grabbing me in full view of her.

  Once he bit me on the chest through my nightdress, pulling away just as Mum walked into the room. We all noticed the dark saliva imprint in the shape of his teeth on the fabric and Mum’s eyes widened before she set her face in its usual impassive expression.

  He would openly grab my hand and make me feel his erection through his jeans. ‘Look what you’ve done,’ he’d say, leering at me, and Mum would quickly turn her face away. And now I had recurrent bouts of cystitis, and she didn’t want to know.

  See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil–that was her policy. What she refused to acknowledge couldn’t harm her.

  Chapter Twelve

  Mum had abandoned me to Dad, and since my abuse had got worse, she was having a much easier time of it. He was just as erratic and prone to fits of temper, smashing things and screaming the house down, but ever since he had knocked her teeth out he had remained true to his word and hadn’t hit her again. Instead, I became the focus of his violent rages; except with me, he had to be very careful not to mark my face.

  At this stage I was still going to school at least half the time, and if he had given me a traditional black eye or any visible injury, he must have known that the authorities would start taking a very close interest. Dad was many things but he wasn’t stupid enough to bring down the whole house of cards when he could hurt me equally as much in places where the injuries stood little chance of being spotted. He found a plastic fly swot and took to smacking my bare bottom and back with it until I had red, raised welts all over the skin. There were many times when I literally found it hard to sit down, my bottom was so painful. He also used to bite me all over so that I was left with black and purple bruises in the shape of his teeth.

  I knew Dad was looking forward to the day when I left school for good and there was little danger of outside agencies becoming involved in what he considered to be private family business. Then he would be able to relax, the master of his domain.

  School was my only sanctuary, and I was heartsick on the days Dad wouldn’t let me go. I loved to learn. English and drama were my favourite subjects. I used to enjoy reading aloud to the class and my teacher, Miss Connelly, often said I should be an actress. At lunchtimes I sometimes went to the school library and looked for books with scripts in. I read them to myself, doing all the voices, and dreamed of performing on stage one day. I found a book all about the National Youth Theatre but didn’t dare dream I could ever attend one of their summer workshops. Drama was the only lesson where I could truly forget my problems at home. I hated myself for allowing bad things to happen to me. I was tainted, and it was a relief to pretend to be someone or something else for half an hour, even it it was only a tree swaying in the wind!

  The drama studio in our school was painted red and had big floodlights hanging from the ceiling. When we were allowed to use them, the small space would heat up and the air would become acrid as months of dust burnt off. Everyone would cough and splutter, but to me the smell was pure theatre: greasepaint and alter egos.

  Once the music and drama departments came together to stage a production of The Boy Friend, a musical set in the French Riviera in the 1920s. For some reason, despite my erratic school attendance, they wanted me for the part of Lady Brockhurst, the domineering wife. For the first time in my life I felt special and part of something that didn’t involve violence and a heavily weigh
ted cloak of shame. But after my initial euphoria at being chosen wore off, I started to worry about the commitment. What if Dad wouldn’t let me go to school? And how was I meant to attend the two evening performances when he never let me out after school?

  As it turned out, rehearsals coincided with a phase when I was allowed to go to school more often than not. I only ended up missing a few in the end, and when it came to the two evening performances, Dad agreed I could go, probably aware that to refuse might open up a can of worms.

  Karen played one of the flapper girls, glamorous to the end, and we had a laugh throughout the rehearsals. On the nights of the performance, the whole cast were peeking out through the curtain, trying to find their family in the audience. I was relieved that Mum and Dad weren’t going to attend. I would have been worried all night about him picking fights with the other parents.

  After the last show, Karen and I took off our make-up and followed the sixth formers over to the pub, where we stood outside and managed to get hold of a Babycham each. I felt alive and carefree. The alcohol made me feel happier than I had felt for years.

  Karen was my only friend, the one person who could make me forget my troubles at home and have a laugh. With her, I could become someone else, someone free of sexual abuse and violence. I never gave her much information about what went on at home, so school was one long drama lesson where I pretended to be another person. She still couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t come out in the evenings. I wanted to, more than anything, but there was no way I could. Most nights I had to go with Mum on her early evening cleaning job, and then when I got home around nine o’clock, Dad would begin his nightly ritual of abuse before I was allowed to go to bed.

  ‘Please, Lisa, it’ll be such a laugh,’ she would say. ‘There’s a disco on.’