by Lisa James
It had taken him years to get to this point, and although I hated him with every fibre of my being, I also detested myself for letting it happen. I felt dirty right through to the core of my being. I imagined that most girls would throw themselves from the top of a building rather than allowing their own father to rape them. I didn’t understand my own powerful instinct for survival–in fact, I felt betrayed by it. I was fifteen years and three months old and my life was a living nightmare. Something had been done that could never be undone. I wasn’t a virgin any more, and my virginity had been taken by my own dad.
Now I had been ‘broken in’, Dad became even more of a sex-crazed animal. Everything I had experienced up to this point had been like a walk in the park compared to the reality of my life now. He raped me at every possible opportunity, many times a day. On the days when I was going to school he would push me into the bathroom and enter me while Kat ate her toast in the kitchen. On one occasion I retched in the gutter on the way to school as I thought of what he had done to me only twenty minutes earlier. A well-spoken lady tutted as she walked past with her sausage dog: ‘That’s no way to lose weight,’ she said. It seemed a bizarre thing to say and I had no idea what she meant by it but humiliation burned my cheeks. I sat on a wall and let her get far enough in front of me that I wouldn’t have to pass her again.
From six to nine in the evening I would usually go cleaning with Mum, but Dad would always rape me when I came home, either in the front room or in his bedroom upstairs in front of the portable telly. But at least I wasn’t trapped under his legs all evening too.
Then a few months later things got worse for me. The company Mum cleaned for asked if she could sit on the front desk for a few hours every evening to let people in and out. The money was better than for her evening cleaning job, so she gave this up and for the first time in years I was free to stay at home. Unfortunately this meant Dad had even more opportunity to rape me, once Kat had gone to bed.
One evening, while Mum was still at work, Dad gave me some alcohol.
‘Get a bit of this down your neck,’ he said, filling a tumbler with Liebfraumilch. ‘It might loosen you up a bit.’
I hated the taste but drank it down in one or two gulps. I remembered the feeling my surreptitious swig of Babycham had given me on the final night of the school play, the way it made me float and not care about anything very much, and I hoped the glass of warm white wine Dad handed me would recreate that experience. I wanted to float away as far as I could from the horror I lived in every day. As I drank the wine I fought the urge to gag. It didn’t taste very nice, but the warmth it spread from the inside of my belly outwards was fairly instantaneous. I felt some of the long-held tension draining out of me, and my shoulders seemed to drop a couple of inches; I was forever bunching them up around my ears as if trying to use them to shield me from hurt.
Lately, Dad had been talking about love a lot. He did it now, pausing only to swallow alternate mouthfuls of gin and wine straight from the bottle.
‘I love you. I can’t help myself,’ he declared, before asking, ‘Do you love me?’
I knew that the love he talked about wasn’t the kind of love that normal fathers felt for their daughters. It was different to the kind he had spoken about when he told his brother a few years ago that he loved me like his own child and wanted to adopt me. Dad was trying to change the rules to make what he had done seem more acceptable. He was trying to paint himself as my boyfriend. But he had been my dad since I was a tiny girl of four, and even though he now raped me more frequently than he washed or brushed his teeth, that’s what he would always remain–my dad. I felt only disgust and revulsion for him.
His eyes watched me as I stared into my empty glass and braced myself for the slap or kick that was only ever a moment away.
‘Are you fucking deaf or something? I said, do you love me?’
The wine must have given me courage I had never previously possessed. I took my time to find the right words.
‘I love you as a dad,’ I muttered not quite brave enough to tell him that I hated him, tears springing to my eyes. ‘You’re meant to be my dad.’
It was like lighting a fuse.
‘You fucking little whore,’ he shouted, knocking glasses and bottles flying as he threw himself on top of me and began to slap and punch. ‘You like your dad’s big cock, don’t you?’
I found myself bent over the sofa face down, my nose painfully squashed into the cushions so the only way I could breathe was to open my mouth wide and try to suck warm air through the foam. He released me for a moment and I twisted my head to the side. I felt him rip my knickers sideways, the cotton cutting into me, and then I heard the sound of him undoing his flies.
‘I’m going to ram this right up your tight little cunt,’ he said, ‘’cos that’s what you want, ain’t it?’
‘No, it’s not!’ I cried–whether out loud or in my head, I’m not sure.
‘You’re my fucking girlfriend now,’ he snarled, ‘not my daughter.’
During the course of this assault, he entered my anus. The sudden pain was overwhelming and I heard myself scream, and scream again.
Dad didn’t give me alcohol again until I was much older. He said I couldn’t handle it–but maybe it was him who couldn’t handle the courage it gave me.
Chapter Sixteen
A couple of months short of my sixteenth birthday, Dad stopped me attending school for good. I didn’t even have a chance to sit my mock O’ Levels. Karen came to knock for me a few times and she couldn’t believe I wasn’t going to sit the exams.
‘But you’re so bright,’ she exclaimed. ‘How’re you going to get a good job without any qualifications?’
I shrugged, aware that Dad was listening to every word. The thought of a job, a life away from Dad, had never entered my mind as a real possibility. I had often dreamed of escaping, but knew that Dad would never let me go. He had told me he would kill me before he let that happen, and I believed him with every fibre of my being.
‘You’re mine,’ he’d say, ‘and if you ever try to walk out that door, I’ll find ya, fuck ya, and kill ya. Got it?’
Eventually Karen stopped knocking for me. It hurt me to think we’d never laugh together again, but I was skilled at putting painful thoughts into boxes and shutting them away in my mind where they couldn’t hurt me, and that’s what I did with Karen.
Now that I wasn’t attending school and was fast approaching my sixteenth birthday, when I’d be ‘legal’, Dad’s behaviour took a turn for the worse. He started drinking and gambling more than ever, and became more abusive on every level. He would openly touch me in front of Mum, pawing my breasts or bottom and making lewd comments. Despite all that he had done to me, and how defeated and powerless I felt, when he did these things, I always retained the ability to see that it was wrong. This way of living might have become my state of normality, but it was far from normal, and my face would burn in shame and embarrassment to reflect my feelings. Mum continued to turn a blind eye, just leaving the room if Dad started carrying on with me.
Around this time, she began to lose a bit of weight and take more pride in her appearance. One day she came home from a trip down the market, wheeling her pull-along shopping trolley behind her. In amongst the King Edward potatoes and cans of Special Brew lay a small plastic bag. She pulled it out and placed it in the middle of the kitchen table.
‘’Ere, look at these, Frank,’ she said, pulling out a tangle of what looked like black, red and pink netting. ‘Got myself some new drawers. What do you think?’ She held the flimsy black knickers with red and pink bows against her groin and waited for Dad to comment.
He grunted from behind his copy of The Sun, and continued to pick his teeth with a broken matchstick, totally ignoring her.
‘That’s fucking charming, that is,’ she said, stuffing them back into the bag, and flashing me an angry look as she did so. It was as if she blamed me for all that Dad had done, and the way he treated h
er. She thought I had stolen her man from her.
In that moment, I realised how much their relationship had changed. Years ago, she wouldn’t have dared to buy herself new underwear, or any other clothes, without Dad’s permission. If she had, he would have convinced himself she was having an affair and given her a right-hander, or worse. It was as if he had transferred all that obsessive jealousy onto me. Now Mum was free, to a large extent, and it was me who had to account for my every waking moment, every new item of clothing or bottle of deodorant.
‘Men can’t help acting on Impulse, eh? What the fuck you buying that shit for, you slag.’
At night when I lay in bed, I’d do my best to block out the sound of Mum and Dad having sex. He was insatiable and still wanted his conjugal rights with her despite the three or four times he’d have raped me earlier in the day. Every inch of my body hurt. Only an hour or two before, I was lying in Mum’s bed exactly where she was lying now, while Dad pounded into me. When he was finished, he would press the sticky condom into my hand and I’d have to go and flush it down the toilet.
Once Mum went in after me and I heard her shout, ‘I wish people would flush the fucking toilet properly in this house.’ She must have seen the condom floating on top of the water.
Dad was drinking and gambling heavily every day. There was no escape for me. I was trapped with him all day, every day. I wasn’t allowed out on my own, except to run round the corner if Mum or Dad needed something from the shop. I mean run, literally. Dad would time me, and if there was a particularly long queue I’d start to panic. When I got home red-faced and breathless from the run, Dad would be convinced I had been having sex with someone. He’d shout and rant and rage, and take me upstairs to the front room where he’d thrust his fingers between my legs and sniff them.
‘I can smell spunk, you cunt.’
‘No, Dad,’ I’d say, cowering in the corner. ‘I haven’t done anything. Please, don’t.’
One day Dad read a letter on the problem page in The Sun. It was about a woman who was fed up with her husband wanting sex several times a day.
‘Who’s been writing letters about me?’ he laughed, looking from me to Mum. There was an awkward silence during which Mum and I carefully avoided each other’s eyes.
‘Joke,’ said Dad, turning to the sports pages to study the horseracing form.
Later, when they weren’t looking, I read the letter myself. The man was just like Dad, with an insatiable sexual appetite, and the wife couldn’t stand it any more and had started to hope he would have an affair. The agony aunt was of the mind that open relationships were something of a rocky road, and she suggested marriage guidance, as I noticed she did with all the other problems on the page.
I thought about what an ‘open’ relationship was, and it struck me that Mum and Dad, who were still the best of friends in their own way, had created their own format. Mum allowed Dad to do things to me, as long as he didn’t go elsewhere. It would take more than marriage guidance to fix what was wrong with them.
I wondered if Mum was glad Dad only did it to her at night in bed these days? I imagined she must have felt relieved that she didn’t have to put up with him wanting sex throughout the day like he used to when they first met, because he had me now. Sometimes he’d wait until Mum was out of the house before bending me over the stairs or the sofa, but other times he’d do it while she was pottering about downstairs. He didn’t use condoms on these occasions, which he referred to as ‘a quick bunk-up’. There wasn’t enough time, so he would simply withdraw at the last moment and leave me to clean up the mess. He was so rough that I often found it painful to sit down afterwards, and suffered increasingly severe bouts of cystitis.
Now that I was a little older, Dad became much more violent. He was still careful not to mark my face, although occasionally he’d make a mistake and I’d be left with a bruise or a bright red hand mark across my cheek. But mostly it was the rest of my body that bore the marks of his increasingly sadistic tendencies.
I’d only have to look at him the wrong way, or use margarine instead of butter on his toast, and he’d be off, pinching and biting my breasts and buttocks. Later I’d look in the mirror and watch the oval teeth-shaped bruises appearing. Over the coming week they’d change colour running through purple, blue, green and yellow, only to be replaced by new ones as soon as they disappeared. Just as one part of me healed, there would be another tender spot to take its place. Now that my pubic hair was growing, he decided there was no better entertainment than dragging me around by it. Once or twice after a loss on the horses, he burnt me with his cigarette, grinding it painfully into my hand. But more often than not, he’d simply smoke his cigarette and instead of putting it out in the ashtray, he’d flick it at me, so I’d have to dodge it or quickly shut my eyes. Then I’d have to find where it had landed before it caused a fire. He’d do this a lot when he’d been drinking, seeming to find it hilarious. If Mum saw, she would just chide him like a naughty child, saying, ‘Now, now, Frank, it’s time you had a lay down before we go up in bleedin’ flames.’
One night, shortly after my sixteenth birthday, I overheard a momentous conversation that confirmed one of my worst fears. It must have been around one in the morning and I had been tossing and turning in my bed for at least a couple of hours. My back was grazed where Dad had kicked me earlier that evening, and it hurt no matter what position I tried to lie in. I needed to use the loo but I was frightened I might bump into him again. Usually I could hear him either snoring or having sex with Mum in their bedroom at night, so I was worried he might still be up and roaming around downstairs. But I was desperate, so I decided to take my chances anyway. As I crept down the stairs towards the loo on the first floor, I heard Mum and Dad talking downstairs in the kitchen.
Ordinarily I wouldn’t hang about to listen, but something made me stop and what I heard sent a chill down my spine. They were talking in casual tones, as if discussing nothing more significant than the weather.
‘But you were meant to be her father, not her lover,’ said Mum, reasonably.
‘I know, but I’ve told you I can’t help it,’ Dad explained. ‘For ages now I’ve thought of her more as me girlfriend than a daughter. You knew that.’
‘You promised you’d stop doing it,’ said Mum. ‘No other woman would have put up with this for so long.’
I wanted to pass out and throw up all at once. How long had Mum known for sure? They were discussing the situation as if it was an old subject they were revisiting for the hundredth time. There was no shock, anger or surprise on Mum’s part. It was final confirmation to me that she had known, if not all along, then for a very long time indeed. How could she let him do this to me, her daughter? How could she tolerate him touching her, knowing what he had done to me?
I had so many questions, I felt dizzy. I crept into the bathroom and stood there in the dark spitting bile into the toilet bowl. My heart pounded as I realised Mum had betrayed me in the worst possible way. She had seen me beaten black and blue, prevented from living a normal life like any other teenage girl. How could she do this to me? The feelings of guilt and shame, of being tainted and dirty, weighed heavily upon me. I knew I hadn’t wanted any of what had happened to me, had felt powerless to stop it, but I couldn’t help feeling that if Mum wasn’t angry with Dad, if she wasn’t running screaming to the police or hitting him over the head with a frying pan, then she must be angry with me instead. And I couldn’t work out how you could be angry with your own child in such a situation. Had she convinced herself I was a willing participant? I thought back over all the times she had been cold and distant, shooting me hard stares, and I felt terrified. I literally didn’t have a friend in the world.
As I lay in bed that night, listening to the usual grunts and groans coming from the bedroom next door, I cried until eventually I drifted off into a merciful sleep. The next morning my heart still hurt, but I made up my mind that I was going to bring it all out in the open with Mum when she came h
ome from work. I was filled with fresh hope that the nightmare would finally come to an end then. Surely she would have to send me off to stay with Diane or Jenny? Once I’d told her that Dad forced me to have sex with him and I hated it, she couldn’t let it continue, surely? I knew that this day would mark a turning point, and somehow I hoped that by the end of it I’d have a whole new direction, a new life. The thought of what Dad might do left me petrified, but between the two of us, me and Mum, we could deal with him. Dad had never let us have a phone installed–he preferred us to be totally cut off from the outside world–but if we both screamed loud enough, maybe the neighbours would ring the police.
I stood at the sink and did the washing-up from the night before. I hoped Mum still had that piece of paper with Diane’s address on it. If I went there, I could finally meet my little niece or nephew. Or maybe she might be able to remember where Jenny lived in Kent. It would be hard to look my family in the face after all Dad had done to me, but I knew they’d understand that it wasn’t my choice. They might even be annoyed with Mum for letting it go on so long. I realised it would take a lot of courage for Mum to face them after everything that had happened, and it was then that all my little dreams of freedom began to waver. If Mum had known for some time, why hadn’t she tried to help me before? What would be different now? I began to feel overwhelmed with confusing feelings. I just wanted to be a normal teenager, like Joanie out of Happy Days. Was that too much to ask?
By the time Dad slammed into the kitchen and bent down over the stove to light his morning cigarette, my eyes were streaming with tears and my shoulders were heaving.
‘What’s up with you?’ asked Dad, his usual self.
I had planned on being so sensible and grown-up. I had turned sixteen but I felt as if I were six years old again. It was all too much to handle and I could find neither the words nor the courage to express the way I felt.