by Lisa James
An old lady passed us, her mouth hanging open in shock.
‘And you can fuck off, an’ all,’ he told her.
As he kicked open our rusty front gate and pushed me ahead of him up the path, I felt pure cold fear. I was only grateful that he was stone cold sober; drunk he would have been worse.
As soon as we were inside the house, he started kicking me and shouting at the top of his voice. ‘What, was his curried cock too fucking hot for you, or something? So fucking hot you had to take your bastard coat off while he did you from behind?’
He pushed me through the kitchen door and I landed on my knees in front of Mum, who was sitting at the table.
‘What’s going on now?’ she asked, rolling her eyes and shutting the newspaper.
I scrambled to my feet, aware that Dad was right behind me and desperate to get away. I ran to the recess beside the fridge and pressed myself as far back as I could, absolutely terrified.
Dad came after me, placed one hand round my throat and started banging my head repeatedly against the wall. Urine dribbled down my leg; I couldn’t stop it.
‘Mum,’ I croaked.
‘Oi, now calm down,’ she said to Dad, putting a hand on his shoulder. ‘What’s happened?’
‘It’s her, the cunt,’ he said, spittle flying into my face. ‘She’s just had it off with the doctor.’
Mum laughed. Mum always laughed at times like this. I think it was her way of trying to diffuse the tension but I couldn’t help feeling hurt that she found it all so funny.
‘I didn’t,’ I wailed, trying to shake my head.
Dad let me go then and I collapsed coughing onto the floor. He stamped on my hand, leaving the imprint of his heel and a graze that oozed blood. He then tipped a full ashtray over my head. I realised I had got off lightly this time, but my body was wracked with pain, and my hand had started to swell.
‘Is there ever a day when she’s not boo-hooing?’ asked Mum, sitting back down to resume reading the paper, while Dad cracked open a lager.
I sat amongst the cigarette butts, almost motionless for the best part of an hour. I daren’t move until Dad said it was OK. Mum sat smoking fag after fag, gradually filling up the ashtray again, her foot jiggling at double speed.
Finally Dad said, ‘Oi, piss-arse, go and clean yourself up, you’re stinking the place out.’
Mum didn’t look at me, but as I went out the door she asked him if we had picked up the pills from the chemist.
‘Not with her winding me up like that,’ he said.
‘That’s fucking marvellous, that is. I suppose I’ll have to go and get ’em,’ she said.
And she did.
Chapter Seventeen
Once I had finished school and gone on the Pill, Dad made no effort to conceal his jealous rages. He was free to beat me up in front of Mum in the way a deranged boyfriend would, spouting nonsense about me sleeping with doctors, the newsagent, or the mechanic who worked on the corner in the garage. It was like history repeating itself, except now it was me on the receiving end of his boot rather than Mum. By this time he hadn’t hit Mum for years.
Despite everything, Mum and Dad’s relationship remained much the same. They worked together, and still shared a bed together at night. The only difference was that Mum had effectively given her blessing to Dad raping me on a regular basis. At night when they had sex, Mum wasn’t quite as vocal as she used to be and I noticed that she had become reluctant to join Dad in a ‘nap’ during the day when he suggested it.
‘What, with her here morning, noon and night?’ she said, incredulous. ‘I tell you what, you must think I’m some fucking mug.’
I realised she must have felt a degree of shame herself, because not only were we all living in some kind of sick ménage à trois, but she was actually making an active choice to let the situation continue when she could have ended it with a single phone call. I started to wonder if she was protecting herself in some way. After all, if anybody else found out, what would they think of her? Surely she must wonder this herself.
In the evenings Mum still worked as a receptionist, and Dad would spend this time dishing out what had become nothing short of sexual torture. Once Kat was in bed upstairs, he’d make me kneel naked in front of him until I confessed who I’d been sleeping with. I tried to reason with him, asking where I was meant to have met these men since I was never allowed out, but this seemed to make him angrier. In between drinks, he would kick me in the head or he’d leap on my back, hold me by the hair and shove my face in the carpet until I could hardly breathe and I thought I was going to black out. These sessions would practically always end with my rape.
One night Dad was drinking heavily after losing £700 on a horse. He grabbed an empty bottle and threatened to smash it in my face, before trying to assault my private parts with it. I was in such fear for my life that when he stumbled to the toilet I ran into the street half naked. I had struggled back into the jeans which he had ripped off me earlier but the zip had bust so I couldn’t do it up, and I only had slippers on my feet. My top half was completely naked but I managed to grab a thin jacket from the banisters as I ran to the front door. I heard his voice behind me, shouting ‘Go on, fuck off, you cunt!’
As I tripped out into the cold night air, I started to run and didn’t stop until I was sure Dad wasn’t following. I was shivering, and trying my best to cover myself, but I hadn’t a clue what to do or where to go. After sitting on a bench for about an hour, reality dawned: I had no money, nowhere to go, and was wearing hardly any clothes. I didn’t have a clue how to help myself. It was so ingrained for me to shun contact with others that when a lady passed by and asked if I needed any help, I shook my head. Mum was my only option. I found a call box and reversed the charges to the company where she worked, knowing she would answer the phone at reception.
‘Not again,’ she moaned as if I was being a great inconvenience. ‘You’d better come down here then. I suppose I’ll have to send a cab as you’ve got hardly any bleedin’ clothes on. Wait in the phone box.’
When I arrived at the other end, the cabbie said to Mum, ‘She alright?’
I caught sight of myself in the mirrored reception and saw I looked a right state. My face was swollen, my hair sticking up all over the place, and I was covered in scratches and bruises. I showed Mum my fresh bite marks, but all she did was roll her eyes as she always did and make a tutting sound.
‘Well, you knew what he was like with me,’ she said.
Anger suddenly flared in me. ‘Do you think I chose to be with him?’ I screamed. ‘He forced me from when I was little. I’ve never had a choice, and you’ve done nothing about it!’
‘Don’t blame me,’ she said, shrugging. ‘You’re sixteen years old.’
I begged her to find me somewhere to stay. ‘Where are the rest of the family living? Surely I could go and stay with them?’
Mum looked shocked and frightened. She didn’t want me to contact Jenny and my brother and sisters, because then the truth would come out about what was going on at home and how long she’d known about it.
‘I ain’t got no addresses,’ she insisted, ‘so you can get that idea out of your head, do you hear me? They won’t want anything to do with you anyway. Not after all this. What do you think Jenny will say when she finds out what you’ve done?’
‘What I’ve done?’ I cried, unable to believe my ears. ‘I was a child. I’m the victim, Mum!’
‘Look, just come home with me. He’ll have fallen asleep now.’
‘How can you say that?’ I asked, tears streaming down my face. ‘Look what he’s done to me.’
She picked up the Yellow Pages and made a half-hearted attempt to find some kind of hostel for me, then closed it again. ‘I can’t do this, he’ll kill me.’
‘Please, I can’t go back there.’
Mum rang one of the ads and spoke to someone for a few minutes, wrinkling her nose as if it was the most distasteful thing she had ever done. She slammed
the phone down.
‘Fuck me, you can’t go there. They asked if you had your own fucking blanket!’
I couldn’t see that was a problem–surely I could get a blanket somewhere? But Mum obviously thought it preferable that I go back to be raped and beaten by Dad. She spent the next half hour pleading with me to return with her, because if I didn’t, surely I knew what Dad would do to her? And then there was Kat. What if he got so mad because of me running away that he turned on her?
The minute she said that, my blood chilled, and I asked her the question I had been worrying about for a long time. ‘What if he does to Kat what he’s done to me? Would you do anything then?’
I thought she was going to hit me. ‘Don’t talk fucking stupid. She’s his own flesh and blood. What kind of filth is that you’re talking?’
‘But he’s been my dad since I was four.’
‘It’s not the fucking same thing. She’s his blood!’
I wanted to believe her, but there was no way I could. If Dad was capable of doing those things to me, he was capable of doing them to anyone.
I went back home with Mum that night, and luckily the next morning Dad woke up with such a bad hangover and poor recollection of what had happened that I wasn’t given an extra punishment for running away.
Bolstered by my taste of rebellion, I tried it again the following week, but this time Dad was sober and ran after me. I had a few minutes’ head start down the road before he realised I was gone, and at first I thought I was free. I was just wondering where I should run to, when I looked over my shoulder and saw Dad sprinting after me. It was still daylight and I ran past a boy I’d sat next to in junior school. He stared at me open-mouthed. My hair and clothes were in disarray and I must have looked as though I was running for my life.
‘Lisa,’ he shouted after me. ‘Are you alright?’
Even though I felt as if I was in some kind of horror film being chased by a monster, I felt guilty for ignoring him. But if I had answered, Dad would have heard and a boy I hadn’t exchanged a word with in six years would no doubt have been turned into a secret boyfriend in his twisted mind. It didn’t take long for Dad to catch up with me, and I got a vicious beating that lasted for several days, making me too scared to attempt to run away again.
I had been paralysed by my own fear and Dad’s absolute control over my every movement for so many years that I began to think suicide would be my only way out. Surely he couldn’t take it out on Mum and Kat if he were to find me swinging from the banisters? From then on, while he was raping me and I was trying to use the away-in-my-head technique to cope, I’d be thinking of how best to end it all. It looked so easy on the television–a quick slash on both wrists and a warm bath and that was it, sweet release. I’d even broken open one of Dad’s Bic razors once and held the blade against my wrist. The reality was that I didn’t think I could ever drag the blade across my skin and watch myself bleed. The truth was, I really wanted to live–just not with Dad.
Sometimes when I was pinned under Dad’s legs watching television and a music video or travel programme came on, I’d feel a bubble of excitement rise up within me. I was becoming aware that the world was a big place. Most of my time had been spent staring at the same four walls, or the bottom of an office dustbin, and I yearned to see more. I didn’t want to end up in a bath of my own blood because that would mean Dad had got away with murder.
Flicking through the paper one day I noticed an abundance of jobs in the back. They all sounded really exciting. Some of them even promised ‘a six-figure salary, a new car and holidays abroad’ in exchange for commitment and although I knew I would never walk into a job like that straight away, the thought was exciting. An idea came to me. Mum could hardly bear to look at me now because every time she did, I reminded her of what a terrible mother she was. I had heard her bending Dad’s ear about me being under her feet in the house all day, and about how she couldn’t relax in her own home. I decided to put a flea in her ear about me getting a job. I didn’t dare raise the subject with Dad, because I was likely to get a slap.
‘It’d be good if I could get a job, wouldn’t it, Mum?’
‘Yeah, it bloody would,’ she said, her eyes widening as if she’d just had a brilliant idea. ‘Don’t see why it should be just muggins here slaving away.’
Over the next few weeks, Mum kept mentioning the possibility of me getting a job. Dad, of course, was dead set against it. He had waited for years until I was free of school and wouldn’t contemplate it at first. He only had to raise his voice and slap a warning fist down on the table for Mum to shut up but she’d bring it up again later and eventually she touched on the one area that made him waver–money.
‘She’ll be bringing in a wage, Frank,’ she said. ‘We could do with the extra ’cos you haven’t had much luck lately, have you?’
She was referring to the fact that although they earned good money cleaning, there was never enough to fund his gambling addiction and money was always tight. The electricity had been cut off twice in the past year, and we’d had to bump around with candles until they found the money to pay the bill. After that, Dad asked around at the pub over the road and, for a small fee, a bloke came and did something to bypass the meter, so we never got cut off again. But some weeks there was barely enough money for cigarettes and Mum and Dad would buy half an ounce of Old Holborn each to roll their own. When things were really bad, they’d dig through the dustbin and salvage scraps of tobacco from their dog-ends.
So it may have been the prospect of a little more money coming in that finally made Dad change his mind and allow me to get a job. I was dumbstruck but overjoyed when he hit me over the head with the Evening Standard one lunchtime and said, ‘OK, get a fucking job then.’ Suddenly the pinprick of light at the end of the tunnel enlarged, and I had fresh hope of finding a way to escape.
Dad was sceptical I would be able to find one. ‘Got no qualifications now, has she?’ he laughed spitefully.
But straight away my eyes landed on an ad for a junior secretary at a record company. At first Dad was against it, but when he found out it was only ten minutes’ walk away his eyes lit up.
‘You can come home for lunch!’
My heart sank, and so did Mum’s by the way she rolled her eyes and gave a loud tut.
On the day of the interview my hands were trembling as I dug around in my drawers for something to wear. I couldn’t find anything smart enough. I wore jeans when I went cleaning, and they wouldn’t do. I ended up putting on my old school uniform, which looked alright because it hadn’t been a proper uniform at all–just a light grey skirt and grey blouse, which had started off white.
It was a bright sunny February day, and Dad walked me the short distance to the record company offices. My confidence was at rock bottom because ever since I’d got the interview, Dad had been extra nasty, telling me I was a useless ‘spastic’ who didn’t know my arse from my elbow. He continued now.
‘They won’t want you anyway,’ he said. ‘You haven’t even got any O’ Levels.’
Before I could stop myself I said, ‘Yeah, but I would have had some, wouldn’t I?’
‘What do you mean by that?’ he demanded, stopping in his tracks.
Alarm bells began to ring. ‘I just meant that if I had stayed on at school, I would have sat them, and I might have got some.’
‘So is that what you’re gonna tell them, that you weren’t allowed to go to school?’ he asked. ‘’Cos’ if you’re gonna try and land me in any of that shit, I’ll knock you out now.’
‘No! No…’
‘’Cos I’ll take you back home right now and you can forget all about a poxy fucking job.’
We stood and stared at each other in the street. All I could do was wait and see what happened.
‘Come on or you’ll be late,’ he decided at last.
The job I was applying for was to work for the boss’s nineteen-year-old son Harry, who was starting an artists’ management division, and an
other guy called Graham who ran the agency that booked bands into gigs. The only typing experience I had ever had was the time I typed ‘the cat sat on the mat’ while out cleaning, so I didn’t reckon my chances much, but the ad hadn’t asked for previous experience so I kept my fingers crossed.
My interview was with the financial director Ros Newman, a birdlike, raven-haired woman with the blackest eyes and longest nails I had ever seen. When I filled out the bit on the application form about qualifications, I simply listed the ones I would have taken had Dad let me go to school and left the grades blank.
She gave me a typing test and I seemed to do okay. She asked me whether I took shorthand and I said no, but mentioned I might sign up for a speedwriting course I had seen advertised in the Standard. I didn’t actually know what speedwriting was, but Ros seemed impressed.
‘That shows initiative, Lisa,’ she said with a smile. ‘This is only a junior position, so we don’t expect you to have brilliant skills to start with. You can learn as you go along.’
I smiled, and tried not to think about Dad waiting for me downstairs. Then she said something that made my heart skip a beat.
‘Tell me about you, and about your family.’
I opened my mouth and stuttered for a moment, mindful of what Dad had drilled into me for years about not answering questions; the need to keep ‘our fucking business, our fucking business.’
Ros’s smile faded as she waited for me to speak. What could I say about Mum and Dad and my family set-up that would make anyone want to give me a job? I went for the only positive thing I could think of. ‘My parents have worked for a record company in the West End for years.’ I named it, and her eyes lit up.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘I know Saul very well. Jewish family, like us. What do your parents do there?’
She may have been disappointed when I said they were the cleaners, but she positively glowed when I told her Mum always said the Jews were the best people you could possibly work for. I was thinking on my feet and putting a positive slant on Mum’s views. What she actually said was ‘They’re alright, but they work you into the fucking ground for peanuts, tight-fisted bastards.’