Mummy Knew

by Lisa James

  When Ros saw me out, she gave me a really warm handshake. I had to suppress a wince because my right hand had been painful since Dad had stamped on it over the Indian doctor thing. Ros asked me to ring her the next morning and she’d let me know.

  The first thing Dad wanted to know was how much I would get paid, and whether it was weekly or monthly.

  Next morning, he walked me to the phone box under the railway bridge and stood outside while I rang Ros.

  ‘Hello, Lisa,’ she said. ‘I’m pleased to tell you you’ve got the job. Can you start next Monday?’

  Dad took me up the market so I could buy some work clothes. I got a couple of skirts and jumpers and a new pair of shoes. I was all kitted out, and suddenly the sky looked brighter. I read my horoscope in The Sun that day and it said I was about to enter a new cycle. I felt as though I was on the crest of a brand new wave.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I started work at the record company and suddenly my life went from four walls and Dad’s abuse to mixing with a lot of musicians. The rest of the staff there were young and carefree, going to gigs most evenings and socialising with the bands. I’d fill out contracts for the gigs, complete with the bands’ requests for vodka and cheese-and-onion crisps in the dressing room. I was always being offered free tickets to concerts but of course I could never go.

  Dad liked the fact I brought home a wage every month. He marched me up to the bank to open an account, and every month my salary was paid in. He took most of it, saying it was to pay for my keep, but I got a small allowance for toiletries such as sanitary towels and the odd new skirt.

  I wasn’t allowed to mix with the other young people who worked at the company and I could tell they thought I was a bit of an oddball. Matters were made worse by the fact that every lunchtime Mum and Dad would meet me at the pub opposite. It used to be very awkward because everybody at the office used the pub too, and they would wonder why I didn’t say hello. If I had, Dad would think I was ‘having it off’ with them, even if it was a woman.

  So there I’d be, relatively normal in the office and yet at lunchtime I couldn’t even make eye contact with people who only a minute before I’d been chatting with at the photocopier, or making a cup of coffee for. It was especially awkward with Harry and Graham, my bosses. They were only young, and would often flirt with me, flashing smiles and making jokes, as they would with all the other young girls in the office. Over time I think they came to understand that my inhibition was less to do with shyness than something weird.

  Sometimes, at five to one, just as I was getting ready to leave and meet Mum and Dad, Harry would ask me to go over to the sandwich shop and get him an egg mayonnaise on brown. My blood would run cold because I knew it would make me late for Dad, and there was no explanation as far as he was concerned other than that I had been having it off behind the filing cabinets.

  At home Dad started a new regime. Every day when I got in from work there would be a knicker inspection in which I would have to remove my underwear and let him check it for semen. Some days I’d get an exploratory finger up the vagina too. Even if there was no evidence of sperm, I would be punished if Dad deemed it too moist because according to him that meant I had been fantasising about having it off behind the filing cabinets

  I used to wonder why Dad let me go to work. Was it because he wanted time with Mum for ‘afternoon naps’? I hoped they might fall in love all over again, but in the mean-time I began to plan how I would get away. It was difficult to imagine, because life was like a treadmill, each day running into the next with my every moment accounted for. Dad had timed the walk to work and if I was even a few minutes late home he would hurt me in countless ways. On the days he didn’t meet me at lunchtime he would insist I came home, so I never had a moment to myself.

  Since Dad had told Mum I was now his girlfriend, they had continued to share a bed, but one day I arrived home from work and found her transferring her possessions into my room. She was doing a swap. Even though things were bad, this was even worse. It seemed to make everything more real.

  ‘What are you doing,’ I asked, feeling faint.

  ‘What’s it fucking look like?’ she snapped. ‘This is what his Lordship wants, and what he wants, he gets.’

  I looked on, paralysed with shock. I had to find a way out of this. But I didn’t have a clue where to turn.

  At Christmas 1983, the record company were having a party for employees in the West End. When I told Dad, I expected him to refuse to let me go, but he thought that might appear odd and above all he didn’t want me to lose the job. He knew that everyone wondered about my failure to mingle, so decided that if I were to stand any chance of keeping the job, I would have to go to the Christmas party. However, he announced that he would come along–as my boyfriend.

  I felt physically sick at the thought of going anywhere in public with Dad, not to mention introducing him to everyone at work, so I was delighted when I found out that partners weren’t invited. But Dad was furious. He’d already been down the market together with Mum and chosen a grey suede dress for me to wear. It was really tarty and not me at all. Because it was so clingy, it rode up when I wore tights. I said I didn’t want to wear it but for some reason Dad insisted: ‘We’ve paid good money for that.’ He told me to put stockings on instead of tights. ‘I can look forward to you coming home, then,’ he smirked.

  My heart sank, because you could see the outline of the suspenders through the fabric.

  I couldn’t work out what was going on. What was he doing pushing me to go to a Christmas party in a tarty dress with stockings showing through?

  ‘I feel sick,’ I said, trying to find a way to get out of it because I knew it would only mean trouble.

  ‘You’re fucking going,’ he said.

  On the night, I met the receptionist, a girl called Susie, because we had planned to travel there together in a taxi.

  ‘You should come out more often,’ she said. ‘Get to know everyone.’

  I tried not to look happy because I knew Dad was watching from the corner and I didn’t want to make him angry. When we arrived at the restaurant, the first thing I did before checking in my coat in was go to the loo and remove the stockings Dad had told me to wear. I put them in my coat pocket.

  When I walked into the restaurant I could see all my colleagues were taken aback by my transformation. Usually I wore frumpy clothes but tonight the dress was what would be considered quite sexy. I felt very uncomfortable and tried to slink into the background and not draw attention to myself. I grabbed a glass of champagne from a tray that was being handed round to try and ease my nerves. I wasn’t used to alcohol and it went straight to my head, but thanks to that champagne I was able to get through the evening without worrying too much about what would happen when I got home.

  After the meal, everyone said they were going on to another club, but I knew I had to get back. I remember standing in the queue for the coats and when I got mine, Susie noticed the stockings poking out of my coat and pointed them out to Graham, my boss. They had a little laugh about it, to my great embarrassment. Outside, Susie and someone else I worked with called Neville put me in a black taxi.

  When I got home, I jumped out and paid the cab. It pulled off. As I approached the front door to let myself in, Dad flung it open and dragged me in by the hair. I had never seen him in more of a rage. He beat me senseless, kicking me all over the room. Much of it’s a blur but he was shouting that I had come home in a white Rover car instead of a black taxi and he wanted to know who was in the car. I was the biggest cunt, the biggest slut in the world. Look I’d even taken the stockings off. He pulled my hair and bit me all over. He stripped me of my clothes and raped me anally. Usually he tried not to mark my face but the next day I had a big bruise down one side of it. He interrogated me mercilessly all night long, while drinking vodka and flicking lit cigarettes at my eyes.

  All the while Mum was upstairs. She couldn’t possibly have slept through it because he
was screaming and raging like a madman. I remember at one point he made me drink neat vodka. I was choking and a part of me just wanted to die. I was sick immediately afterwards, and for that he beat me even more. By the end of it all I was delirious with confusion and I was even starting to wonder whose white Rover I had come home in and who I had had sex with in the back.

  For days and days the interrogations and beatings continued. I had to go over everything about the evening in minute detail. He kept asking me about the white Rover but I didn’t know anything about a white Rover. He even dragged me down to the restaurant in the West End to check on the road configuration and the flow of traffic in the place where I said I had got the taxi. The whole time I had been at the record company I had never flirted with anybody, even though there was plenty of opportunity since everyone I worked with was young and there were lots of bands in all the time. I just knew it was more than my life was worth to flirt with anyone, and I got upset if any of the guys were playful with me. I didn’t know how to handle normal social interactions like that.

  Christmas was terrible, with Dad’s violence continuing as viciously as ever. I was a nervous wreck. On my seventeenth birthday, just before New Year, Dad’s sister Lesley turned up unexpectedly with her two sons Charlie and George and another relative I hadn’t met before.

  Nobody apart from Mum knew what Dad had done to me. As far as they were concerned, I was still the daughter. I ran and hid in the bathroom because I didn’t know how to behave in front of them–it was all too much. I found it hard not to scream and blurt out what was happening to me. Dad followed, and told me through gritted teeth to get that grey dress on as we were all going over the pub.

  Now that I was older, Dad allowed me to drink wine and I took refuge in that, standing alone at the end of the bar as Dad chatted to his nephew in the corner. At one stage I went to the toilet and when I came back everyone had gone. Just like that. I walked over the road home and it was obvious there had been a row of some sort. Everyone was being cagey and because I was still treated as a ‘child’ nobody explained anything. In fact, nobody spoke to me. Lesley and her boys had gone but the female relative I had never met before was still there.

  Suddenly there was a bang at the door. A few voices said ‘There they are’ and Dad got up to go to the door, looking strangely reluctant.

  There were a few raised voices then I heard some crashing sounds. We all ran out to see what was going on and found Dad face down on the pathway with blood pooling at the side of his head.

  I knew that the fight was about me because everyone turned to look at me, and I started crying hysterically. After the sustained beatings I had taken over the mystery white Rover during the past couple of weeks, I knew Dad would blame me. He might even kill me, as he was always saying he would.

  I couldn’t take any more. In bare feet and the stupid skimpy dress, I ran out of the door, past where Dad lay on the ground, and across to the pub. The barman who had been serving us all night was leaving because it was after closing time. ‘What’s happened?’ he asked but I didn’t answer, just kept running.

  I came to a phone box and realised that if Dad was dead, I should tell the police, and if he wasn’t, he would be mad as hell that I didn’t get an ambulance and save his life. I stopped at the phone and called both the police and an ambulance. The lady on the switchboard told me to go back home so I did.

  As I got there, a squad car was just pulling up. I noticed Dad was no longer lying on the ground. The front door opened and Mum pulled me in quickly. I could hear somebody explaining to the police that it had all been a misunderstanding. Dad was sitting on a chair holding a cloth to his head. At that moment I just wanted it to all come out, I wanted the police to know what had been going on, and I started screaming. But the front door had been closed by that time and the police were driving off. The relative I didn’t know came over and gave me a hard slap.

  ‘Calm down, darlin’,’ she said. ‘Your Dad’s alright–look.’

  Like everything else, the incident was never mentioned again but Dad let something slip, which was to confirm to me that Lesley and her family now knew about the ‘secret’. He said that when I went off to the toilet that night he could see his nephew Charlie following me with his eyes. Because Dad was drunk and careless he said to him, ‘Too late. I’ve had her, she’s mine.’

  I like to think that a sense of decency prompted one of them to knock him out, but I don’t know the full truth.

  Some time early in the New Year, Dad’s elder brother Keith came to the house. I remember my mum saying to Dad ‘Keith’s here’ and Dad saying ‘You’ve told him, haven’t you, you cunt?’

  I ran upstairs, mortified and frightened. I crouched on the landing outside my bedroom from where I could hear Keith saying to Dad ‘But she’s almost the same age as my Alison.’ That was his own daughter, who was only a few months younger than me. ‘How could you do this? You said you wanted to adopt her when she was little.’

  Dad replied, ‘I love her.’

  Keith said, ‘What about her? Bring her down here. I want to hear it for myself.’

  Dad came up the first flight of stairs and said, ‘Come down here and tell him.’

  I could see the warning in his eyes and hear it underlying his tone of voice but there was no way I was going to go down and tell Keith what Dad wanted me to say, which was that I loved him too and it was a dream come true. It was all a lie. All I could do was cry like a baby and say I didn’t want to. Keith must have heard that, at least. In my confused head, I even thought this would be the end of it. Perhaps Keith would take me home. I wondered if they’d let me live in their caravan?

  But just like everyone else who found out that this brute of a man was sleeping with the stepdaughter he had brought up since she was four, Keith accepted it. As if a young girl like me, with the rest of her life in front of her, would make that ludicrous choice. As if one day after my sixteenth birthday I’d looked at Dad over the oven chips and decided, without any coercion or grooming, that yes, he was the violent drunken bully for me. He was the one. None of them insisted on getting to the truth. None of them tried to speak to me without Dad’s looming presence. I had no one to help me, and I didn’t have a clue how to help myself. My isolation was total.

  Chapter Nineteen

  As well as insisting on seeing me at lunchtime, Dad took to ringing me at work during the day and screaming obscenities down the phone. Susie the receptionist asked me who the man was that kept calling me. I had to tell her it was a boyfriend because he certainly wasn’t acting like a dad. It became a standing joke with the office girls that I was seeing an ‘old bloke’ who was a bit of a jealous nutter. So whenever Dad rang, Susie the receptionist recognised his voice and she would say to me ‘It’s your mad boyfriend’. I’d have to dart into a spare office or an empty corner where nobody could overhear the screaming coming from the phone. He would rant that he was going to storm in and kill me and everybody else there.

  One day he called in the middle of the afternoon from the phone box in the street downstairs, demanding that I leave the building. He said that if I didn’t come down in the next five minutes, he would come up and get me. At that time, I thought that he was the most powerful man on earth. Totally fearless. I thought that if I didn’t go out to him, someone might get hurt. I don’t know why, but clearly upset I asked to see Ros Newman, the woman who had originally given me the job. In a garbled fashion I explained that I had to go home early. I told her that I had a very jealous boyfriend who had become convinced I was having an affair with someone who drove a white Rover and it had all started after the office party. I didn’t tell her that the boyfriend was my Dad and that he was effectively keeping me prisoner. She seemed concerned about me but gave me permission to leave.

  As I got down the office stairs I could see Dad waiting for me, and my legs were shaking with fear. He seemed wild with rage. Without seeming to care who saw, he dragged me into the office car park and pulled me by
the hair over to a white car. I was petrified.

  ‘What the fuck’s that then?’ he screamed. ‘It’s a white fucking Rover, you whore.’

  I was in the worst nightmare imaginable. After kicking me about the place and screaming in my face for answers he pinned me by the throat to the back windscreen and started choking me. Just when I thought I was going to pass out, he threw me aside on the ground and shouted ‘fucking cunts’ at the top of his voice. With that he brought both fists down on the back window of the car and it shattered into smithereens. There was a shocked stillness for a moment or two. I think he was surprised at his own strength.

  As I lay sprawled on the ground sobbing and Dad stood motionless by the car, the company accountant happened to be passing with some paperwork.

  He squinted into the gloom, took everything in and said hesitantly, ‘What are you doing in there? That’s Stuart King’s car.’

  At that point a whole crowd of people emerged from the studio to see what was causing all the noise. There were murmurings about the police being called so Dad grabbed my arm and dragged me off. All the way home he kept pushing me into shop doorways to hit and kick me.

  ‘Who the fuck’s Stuart King?’ he kept spitting in my face.

  I tried to tell the truth, that I had barely spoken to him the whole time I’d been at the company, but Dad wasn’t in a mood to listen. When he got me home he raped me sadistically and covered me with bites all over.

  As I had told Ros Newman about a raving boyfriend and a white Rover, and the next minute a member of staff had witnessed me sobbing on the ground next to a smashed-up white Rover, I wondered if perhaps the police might pay us a visit, but they never came. I think Ros took pity on me and didn’t want to cause me any trouble, but it was another lost opportunity for the abuse to come out.