by Lisa James
One day he announced that we were going on holiday. He was going to take Kat and me to Florida for three weeks.
‘What about Mum?’ I asked, alarm bells ringing.
‘I’ll be staying here,’ she said. ‘Someone’s got to work. That building won’t clean itself, you know.’
My stomach began to churn at the prospect of being trapped with Dad in one room for three weeks. It didn’t matter to me that it would be in Florida; I knew it would be a nightmare, and, what was worse, little Kat would be coming along too, and might witness his sexual abuse of me or maybe he’d even try it on her. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to stop himself.
Dad leered at me from his place on the sofa.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Mum. ‘Most kids would be bleedin’ happy.’
I bit my lip to stop me saying something I shouldn’t. ‘I just don’t feel well, that’s all,’ I said.
‘You never fucking do,’ she replied. ‘Moan, whinge, moan fucking moan. That’s all she bleedin’ does.’
I ran up to my room. Mum was right–most kids would be happy. But I wasn’t most kids. And Dad wasn’t most dads. The worst thing was, I wouldn’t just have myself to worry about, I’d have to try and protect Kat from him as well. As usual, I felt powerless to do anything about it. My only hope was that Mum would see sense and find some last-minute maternal instincts. She knew how quickly he lost his temper and became violent, and by now, I suspected she knew without a shadow of a doubt just what Dad had been doing to me. How could she continue to bury her head in the sand? She was never actually in the room when Dad was violating my body, but most of the time she was in the house while he abused me in his bed upstairs for hours on end. There were many occasions when she had seen him touching me in an inappropriate manner. She was also witness to his overly possessive behaviour. He had to know exactly where I was at any given time, and wouldn’t allow me to go out for the evening like other teenagers. She was well aware that he was prone to violent rages and paranoid suspicions, but when she saw me crying, with my hair and clothes in disarray, all she would do was roll her eyes and say, ‘You’re not boo-hooing again, are you?’
Mum was actually a very bright woman, so pure ignorance didn’t work as a defence. She wasn’t stupid in the least. She knew Dad was lewd and lecherous and behaved in an overtly sexual manner towards me. She was often present when he demanded I parade in front of him wearing different outfits. On one occasion he bought me a pair of pink candy-striped jeans, which he demanded I wear without knickers on: ‘Otherwise you can see the line of your drawers.’ I tried my best to refuse in such a way that he wouldn’t hit me, but he was insistent. Mum sat on the sofa next to him, drawing deeply on her cigarette, seemingly calm and still except for her foot, which was jiggling up and down.
I went up to my room to put the jeans on. They were so tight I could hardly sit down, which didn’t seem to matter to Dad as all he wanted was for me to stand in the corner with my back to him.
‘She’s got some fucking arse on her, I’ll say that,’ Dad commented, turning me this way and that so he could study me from all angles.
I blushed beetroot red, conscious that Mum was seething beside him. The jiggling foot was a giveaway. I knew she was angry, but she was angry with me, not him. She saw me as a rival and seemed to believe that I encouraged him to behave like this, instead of understanding that I was the innocent child. What was I supposed to do? Refuse to try on the jeans? Refuse to go up to bed with him every night? Whenever I’d tried, Dad’s response was brutal violence.
‘You wait till she starts packing on the weight,’ said Mum. ‘She’s already got a spare tyre.’
‘With an arse like that, she’s sitting on a fucking goldmine,’ said Dad. ‘We’ll have to get you on the game, Lisa.’
A lot of the time he would dress up his disgusting one-liners as a joke, which seemed to make them acceptable to Mum, but they reminded me of the vile things he was doing to me every day and tears would come to my eyes.
‘I’m fucking joking, you silly bitch,’ he said, and turned to Mum. ‘Tell her, Donna.’
Mum gave me a withering look and told me not to be so melodramatic. ‘She’d give Liz Taylor a run for her fucking money, that one.’
‘Can I take them off now?’ I asked in a neutral voice, desperate to kick the candy-striped jeans into the furthest corner of my bedroom and climb back into my comfy cords.
‘What, are they cutting you up the minge?’ Dad cracked up with laughter. I ignored him and started to leave the room, but he hadn’t finished. ‘You know where I am if you need any ointment rubbing into it.’
Surely Mum would find his comment a step too far, even for her? But no, as I walked out the door, they were both laughing.
‘Oh, you are awful,’ she said, echoing Dick Emery’s famous catchphrase. ‘If your wit was shit you’d have diarrhoea.’ This was one of their favourite sayings, something they said to each other all the time.
Sometimes Mum would be irritated when he paid me compliments. Sometimes I felt he did it on purpose to wind her up.
‘See how fresh she looks when she gets up in the morning,’ was one comment that was always guaranteed to make Mum bristle.
Every time her response was the same: ‘Yeah well, she is only fourteen and she doesn’t have to get up at 4am every fucking morning, does she?’
At times like that, Mum directed looks of pure hate at me, her brown eyes flashing dangerously. It was as if she was displacing all the anger she felt for him towards me, because I was the easier target. I couldn’t have made it any clearer that I hated his attention. I did everything I could to camouflage my body, wearing trousers and long sleeves even in summer. But even that would irritate her because when she realised that I was deliberately trying to make myself unattractive, she didn’t like the implications that in itself raised.
I didn’t have a lot of clothes. My wardrobe was very basic, filled with practical clothes for cleaning and sitting round the house, and a few bits and pieces for school, where a strict uniform policy was enforced. I had to make do with garments that were nearly or sort of OK. For instance, if policy demanded a grey jumper, a beige one gone muddy in the wash would have to do. I was forever being told off but in the end, the teachers knew I didn’t have much control over what my parents bought me and decided to look the other way. They did that quite a lot. In those days the lax school office could barely muster up a letter home about my lengthy and often unexplained absences, let alone things like the dress code.
Everything in my wardrobe had a function. I didn’t have party clothes because I didn’t go to parties, but one day Dad handed me a rainbow-coloured summer dress and told me to put it on. My heart sank. It was a beautiful dress in a silky material, the sort of thing most girls would look forward to wearing, but it had shoestring straps that ran over bare shoulders. I didn’t like wearing clothes that left so much of my flesh exposed, and as I slipped it over my head in the privacy of my bedroom I wanted to cry. I had just bought my first bra from a stall down the market, and I usually wore it under a white vest, desperate to smother a developing body that was only making things worse with Dad. I kept both the bra and the vest on, even though I could see the type of dress demanded nothing underneath.
As I walked into the front room Mum and Dad were waiting for me.
‘What the fuck you kept your vest on for?’ asked Mum, in such an over-the-top incredulous voice that I knew she had guessed the answer. ‘You look ridiculous.’
‘Yeah, get it off,’ said Dad. ‘And the bra and all.’
My stomach was churning, but I knew I didn’t have a choice except to do as I was told. I went into the bathroom and removed my vest and bra. Standing there looking in the mirror, I could see the dress was very pretty on me, but I felt almost naked. I had never been a girly girl, probably because I had grown up without lots of frills and luxuries. I stayed in the bathroom for a long time, but eventually Dad became impatient.
‘Whe
re’s she gone, fucking Timbuktu?’ I heard him shout.
I walked back into the front room, holding my arms awkwardly in front of my chest.
Dad whistled. ‘Look at that,’ he said, drawing out the words as if mocking me. ‘I can see your little titties.’
I flashed a look at Mum as if to ask how she could let him talk to me like that.
‘Put your arms down, Lisa, and stop being stupid,’ she said. ‘Who’s gonna look at you, anyway?’
I could barely believe she had the gall to ask that question. There was a slight challenge in her voice as if daring me to say something in front of Dad. She must have guessed I wanted to shout ‘My dad, your husband, as you well know.’ But she knew I was terrified of Dad’s anger, and who knew what he would do if we all dropped the pretence and spoke openly about my abuse?
But it was becoming harder for Mum’s carefully positioned blinkers to stay in place as Dad grew bolder by the day. She was sharp and didn’t miss a trick, but for some reason she chose to accept his perverted behaviour rather than act to protect her child. It wasn’t that she lived with her head in the clouds. She knew what was going on but stood by and did nothing. In fact, her negligence actually enabled my abuse to continue and to progress to a life-shattering stage.
One Sunday she actually saw it happening. Dad had me pinned beneath his legs on the sofa while he slept off his Sunday lunch of roast beef and half a bottle of brandy. For once Mum was sitting in the chair opposite with her head in her hand, watching television, instead of in her usual place downstairs.
Dad was snoring, in what seemed like a very deep sleep. He was lying on his side with his feet in my lap. He suddenly snorted, waking himself up momentarily and as he resettled himself he reached down through his legs to rub my genitals. I’m not sure if he realised Mum was in the room or not, but he gave a loud groan of pleasure and muttered ‘Lisa’s juicy pussy’.
I shifted away quickly, but there was no doubt–Mum had seen it quite clearly. I wasn’t sure if I was glad or not. Despite everything, I loved her and didn’t want to hurt her. But my overriding emotion was one of fear. I knew that she blamed me for the way Dad behaved, because to blame him would be finally to face the fact she’d thrown away her whole family for nothing. It occurred to me that she had decided to wait out his obsession with me in the hope that I would leave home as soon as I was old enough, just like Cheryl. But it would be another year and a half before I turned sixteen.
She remained sitting as if frozen in the armchair, a twitch in her foot and an angry frown the only signs to betray her feelings. She fixed her eyes on Dad’s hand, which now lay in a slightly more acceptable position on my left leg. I stared at her like a frightened rabbit, waiting for her to meet my eyes and confront the truth. Surely she couldn’t avoid it now? She had seen and heard it all clearly, and the thing that upset me most was that her face hadn’t registered any sense of shock or surprise, only a form of annoyance. A small part of me still clung to the hope that I was wrong, and Mum was living in a blissful cloud of ignorance, but I couldn’t delude myself any longer. Not now. The message I took quite clearly from this incident was that she would never stand up to Dad; she had effectively given me to him to do with whatever he wanted, the only condition being that he didn’t actually have sex with me in front of her. He could be as verbally rude or as violent as he liked, but anything else had to happen in another room. That was why she would always sit on her own downstairs and tell me to ‘Fuck off upstairs to him.’
After a minute or so, she turned back to the TV as if nothing had happened.
A short while after, as I sat pinned under Dad’s legs, a programme came on the TV about ‘wife-beaters’ and how difficult the women found it to break away. The first part of the programme was full of women who reminded me of Mum. They were often totally isolated from their families and even though they sported black eyes and broken ribs, some of them speaking from their hospital beds, they were determined to stand by their man. One of them used the phrase, ‘He could charm the birds from the trees’, something I’d heard Mum say about Dad.
But there was one woman who was different. She had been jailed for hitting her husband over the head with a frying pan after she found out he’d slept with her sister. I wondered what it would take to make Mum really angry and spur her into some kind of action to save us all?
Chapter Fourteen
I tried not to think too much about the forthcoming holiday to Florida, because the images and possible scenarios I conjured up in my head were too much to bear. When I told Karen about the holiday one day at school, she was incredulous. How on earth was Lisa, with her raggedy clothes and lack of lunch money, suddenly going to America?
I was as surprised as she was, because although Mum earned good money cleaning, Dad usually gambled it away so we always seemed poor. Some weeks Mum struggled to come up with the bus fare to get to work, and that’s why there wasn’t usually any money for luxuries. Mum didn’t give me lunch money because she usually didn’t have it, and when she did, we were both so used to me not having it that neither of us remembered. It was torture watching everyone else eat at lunchtime. Most days there was only enough bread in the morning for Kat’s toast, so I went without breakfast too. Sometimes when Karen had extra lunch money, she would offer to buy me a roll, but most of the time I didn’t like to accept even though my stomach was rumbling.
‘You’re getting so skinny,’ Karen said, concerned. ‘Your shoulder blades are sticking out. Why doesn’t your Mum give you any lunch money?’
‘She’s a bit broke at the moment,’ I’d reply.
So it seemed strange for me suddenly to be going on a three-week holiday to Florida, a destination that was only just becoming popular. However, Karen was even more surprised when I explained that Mum wouldn’t be coming with us.
‘How can you go on holiday without your mum?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, flustered. ‘She’s got to go to work.’
In fact, Mum and Dad had been arguing about the fact that he was going on holiday and she was expected to stay at home working ‘like some fucking mug’. Dad gave in after many rows, during which new dents were put in the walls and doors, and booked a last-minute Easter break in Majorca for Mum, Kat and me. I was astounded when Mum told me I would be going too. I didn’t understand why Dad had agreed to it. He usually found a way to keep me with him at all costs, and right up until the last minute when we got on the train to Gatwick Airport, I thought he would change his mind.
Our holiday in Majorca was like a tonic. The minute I waved goodbye to Dad and he secretly cupped my bottom, I put him out of my mind. I think Mum did too. She was like a different person. Gone was the bitterness and the seething anger, which always seemed to be bubbling under the surface at home, and in their place was a woman who looked as though a great weight had been lifted from her shoulders. She liked to sunbathe by the pool or on the beach while I played with Kat in the water. She gave me no unfriendly stares, and treated me almost the same as she did Kat. I even got an occasional hug. It was as if, away from the bad atmosphere of home, she was able to see me as a daughter and not a rival of some sort.
We ate in the hotel’s restaurant every night, and afterwards went through to the lounge bar to watch the Spanish dancing for a while. Once or twice the handsome male dancer in tight black trousers pulled Mum up onto the dance floor. I shuddered as I imagined what Dad would do if he found out. Mum was much more outgoing on holiday. She chatted to people as if she didn’t have a care in the world, which she could never do at home.
One day we went out on a glass-bottomed boat and sailed to a small island with a beautiful white sandy beach and caves set back in the surrounding hills. I was in seventh heaven. Everything about it was special; even the air smelled different. The captain of our boat cooked a huge vat of paella, which he served on the beach at lunchtime, and it was the most delicious food I had ever tasted.
The holiday was special because there was no fear,
but as the week drew to a close, I noticed the familiar weight of oppression beginning to settle again, and Mum started to return to her usual snappy self. I understood why. I knew it was because we would soon be going home to Dad and the anxiety was starting to set in. I felt it myself.
When we arrived back, Mum tried to be jolly to dissipate the thunderclouds that were brewing above Dad’s head.
‘Who’d you talk to then?’ he asked, looking at Mum and me in turn.
‘What d’ya mean, who did we talk to?’ said Mum, momentarily thrown by his question. ‘We didn’t talk to anybody.’
‘Who’d Mum and Lisa talk to, Kat?’ he said, spinning round to my five-year-old sister, who was sitting as unobtrusively as she possibly could in the corner. She looked confused at the question.
Dad asked her again, but louder, and I saw Kat struggle for a satisfactory answer. ‘Tony and Linda,’ she spluttered.
Tony and Linda had been the couple who sat at the next dining table and occasionally they’d lean over to Mum like the nice sociable couple they were and comment on the weather, or how they missed a nice cup of tea: ‘We forgot to bring our PG Tips.’
But Dad made it into something else entirely. ‘Who? Who the fuck’s Tony and Linda when they’re at home?’ he demanded, slamming his hand onto the smoked glass and chrome dining table.
‘Just people on the next table,’ said Mum.
‘Couple of fucking swingers, more like,’ said Dad. I could see he was working himself up into a frenzy.
Mum gave as good as she got, bolstered perhaps by the fact that Dad hadn’t hit her for a couple of years. ‘You’re bleedin’ mad, you are,’ she said. ‘And I think you’ve got a right bleedin’ cheek an’ all, having a go at me. Especially after what you’ve done…’
Her eyes flickered over to me, and I knew she was talking about me. Feeling scared, I grabbed Kat’s hand, and tried to leave the room.