The Little Prisoner

by Jane Elliott

  Every sound told me a story. The living-room door opened downstairs and I could sense Richard’s stealthy footsteps on the stairs. I closed my eyes, trying to stop my body from shaking so that I could pretend to be asleep. I thought maybe I would be safe because Pete was lying beside me and Richard wouldn’t want to wake him up. I was always clutching at straws like that to give myself some hope, and I was always disappointed.

  I could tell the door was opening beside my head and I could feel Richard moving me about to wake me up. I opened my eyes and looked at him.

  ‘Come out here,’ he whispered, ‘quietly.’

  I climbed out of the warm bed, leaving Pete sleeping peacefully, and Richard closed the door behind me. I stood on the landing, waiting as he shut the other doors on the landing and knelt down in front of me.

  ‘We’re going to play a little game,’ he said. ‘Shut your eyes and don’t you dare open them.’

  I obeyed him without question and heard him unzipping his trousers.

  ‘Don’t open your eyes,’ he repeated. ‘We’re going to play the game now.’

  I nodded, not wanting to make him angry.

  ‘I want you to play with my thumb. You hold it, and stroke it and move it up and down, and something magic will happen.’

  I knew it wasn’t his thumb that he put into my hand, which also makes me think something must have happened before that, but I played along and pretended, just as he had told me. The more cooperative I was, I thought, the sooner I could get back to bed and the more likely I was to avoid a beating.

  ‘What is it you’re holding?’ he asked every so often as I worked away.

  ‘Your thumb,’ I replied obediently and then the magic happened and he told me to go to the bathroom to wash my hands. Some of his mess had spilled on the carpet and he rubbed at it with his foot, making the scratching noise that I would hear so many times over the coming years.

  As I came back out of the bathroom I looked at the patch of disturbed pile on the carpet and couldn’t believe that Mum wouldn’t notice it when she got home. As the years went by more and more of these patches would appear, reminding me every time I walked past of the things I’d had to do.

  ‘Do you want something to eat then?’ Richard asked, and I nodded. ‘Come downstairs and I’ll make you some toast and tea.’

  He was really nice to me that time, just as if we had been playing a game that we’d both enjoyed, but he wasn’t always so pleasant after he’d had his way. One night he took me into the kitchen and grabbed the long wooden-handled carving knife from the drawer, pinned me against the wall and pressed the razor-sharp blade against my neck.

  ‘If you ever tell anybody what we’ve done I’ll kill you,’ he snarled in my face, ‘and then I’ll kill your mum and no one will ever know because I’ll just tell them you both ran away.’

  I believed he was capable of it because I’d seen how hard he beat Mum when she made him angry, slamming her head against the floor or the walls and smashing chairs down on her while I sat on the sofa watching and hugging my little brothers as they screamed. He would always tell me that it was my fault, and I believed him. I felt so guilty, and I was terrified he would kill Mum and then I would have no one to protect me from him at all.

  Almost as soon as I got back home I was old enough to go to infant school. I loved everything about it, but most of all I loved the fact that it allowed me to get out of the house and be with people who appeared to like me. All through my school years there were several people who seemed to go out of their way to talk to me and ask me how I was. Only later did I discover that they were friends of my dad’s and that they were trying to find out if I was alright for him. Right from the beginning one of my friends’ mothers was reporting back to him. Because I was always so happy at school, and because I didn’t carry any visible signs of abuse, they were able to report back that all was well. If only I had known that, I could have communicated with my dad through them and maybe he would have found a way to get me out of that house.

  I think there must have been some people who had an idea about some of the things going on in the house, though, because social workers would come to the door sometimes, but Richard would physically throw them out and I never knew what happened after that because when the police went to look for my files years later they’d disappeared. None of the social workers ever came to speak to me. I can’t blame them if they were frightened off; Richard frightened almost everyone. I dare say there were people around who were as physically strong or even stronger than him, but when he went into one of his blind rages he lost all his inhibitions and very few people were able to match his levels of aggression and viciousness.

  Family life provides so many little opportunities for grown ups to inflict pain on their children if they so choose. Mum always bathed us when we were little, but a couple of times Richard got to do it. I guess Mum was ill or too heavily pregnant and he was able to make it sound as if he was doing her a favour by taking over this chore.

  One night he told me he was going to wash my hair and I was trembling with fear as we went upstairs, wondering what horrors he had planned. There was no way out. Stepping into the bath I was like a condemned man walking up the steps to the guillotine. Everything went as it should for a few minutes and I stayed as quiet and happy-looking as I could manage. Richard was giving no clues as to when he might pounce or how, but I wasn’t fooled, I knew it was coming.

  When it was time to wet my hair I felt his hand gripping me tightly. He pushed my head under the water and held it there, no doubt enjoying the feeling of having the power of life or death over me. As I fought for breath and the water rushed into my mouth, I thought I was going to die, that he had finally decided he hated me so much he was going to kill me. My childish struggles were useless against the strength of his hands and only served to make him angrier.

  After what seemed like an age he pulled me up into the air by my hair, squeezing my face painfully as I wailed and hitting me round the head.

  ‘Shut up and stop screaming!’ he hissed through gritted teeth.

  I forced myself to be silent as he washed my hair as though nothing was wrong, knowing that in a few minutes I was going to have to rinse the soap out and certain he wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation of repeating the attack. When the moment came I tried to hold onto both sides of the bath, but he ordered me to loosen my fingers and pushed me back under the water again, infuriated even further by this futile attempt at self-defence, this challenge to his power. I came up a few seconds later, spluttering and screaming, and he put his hand over my nose and mouth, swearing in my ear to shut me up. He then dragged me painfully out of the bath, gripping my arms so hard I thought he would crush them and banging my legs on the hard edges.

  ‘Get your pyjamas on!’ he shouted and I obeyed, relieved to be out of the water and still alive.

  I went downstairs to the front room on wobbly legs and when I saw Mum I burst into tears.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she asked.

  ‘He tried to drown me,’ I replied.

  He must have heard me and came charging into the room, screaming and shouting about how naughty I had been, how I had refused to have my hair washed and had made a fuss when the soap went into my eyes.

  ‘Oh, she never likes having her hair washed,’ Mum agreed. It was always easier for her to agree with him if she didn’t want to get a beating herself.

  I was sent to bed with a smack for being so uncooperative.

  Sometimes when I was in the bath Richard would put a ladder up the side of the house and look in the window, treating it as a joke. Mum would laugh, too, telling me I had to get over feeling shy about myself. Richard always managed to make it sound as though he was doing everything for my own good, as though everything that happened to me was my own fault.

  When we were little we were only allowed to have baths on Sunday evenings and always had to share the water in order to keep the bills down. As I got bigger Richard starte
d to let me have one during the week as well. Sometimes he would come down from having his own bath and tell me to have one in his water. He would always leave something that looked like semen floating on top of the water. The first time it happened I tried to get out of it by wetting my hair in the basin to look as if I’d had a bath, but he came upstairs to check on me. He opened the door and smirked at me as I climbed into his filthy water, no doubt knowing how disgusted I was. When I came downstairs afterwards I was quiet and ‘sulky’ so I got a good hiding and was sent back up to bed.

  When I was seven I decided that I couldn’t face going home any more. The time had come to run away. I used to daydream about escaping all the time, but when it actually came to doing it things seemed to become more complicated. I was convinced at that stage that Richard could read my mind and that he would be able to tell what I was planning, which made me doubly anxious.

  Sometimes he did seem to know things that I was sure I’d never told him. Only years later did I realize that they were things I’d told my mum and that she must have passed them on to him, betraying my confidence every time.

  Other times he would trick confessions out of me. ‘I know you was mucking about at school today,’ he would tell me when I got home, ‘because the school board woman came round.’

  I would rack my brain for the slightest thing I might have done which could have resulted in being reported like this. Filled with guilt as I always was, it wasn’t hard to find something and to convince myself that Richard truly did know everything. Believing it was hopeless to try to resist his powers, I would admit that I had been bad and he would then be free to punish me in whatever way he pleased. I doubt if I ever really did do anything very bad at school, apart perhaps from talking too much.

  I had a friend at school called Lucy and had told her about my stepdad beating me and threatening to kill me. I hadn’t told her about any of the other stuff; that would have been too embarrassing. Lucy said she wanted to run away as well, although I don’t think she was having any particular problems at home, just fancied an adventure. I wasn’t trying to escape from school, because I really liked my teacher, but it seemed more sensible to us to go during the lunch hour, when we were less likely to be missed, than to wait until the end of the day.

  ‘I want to take my sister with us as well,’ Lucy told me as we were laying our escape plans. Her sister was in the infant school, which was next door to the junior school where we were in our first year.

  ‘How are we going to get her?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ll tell her dinner lady that she has a dentist’s appointment,’ Lucy explained, apparently confident that this would work.

  I waited in the bushes beside the playground while she disappeared into the infant school. I was so excited by the prospect of finally getting away that my heart was thumping.

  A few minutes after going in Lucy reappeared and came running across the playground towards me.

  ‘The dinner lady didn’t believe me,’ she panted. ‘She went to check, so I had to run for it.’

  ‘We’ll have to go without your sister,’ I said, and she nodded her agreement.

  We ran as fast as we could to get out of the area of the school, which wasn’t easy for me because I had such stupid shoes. Silly Git always went with me to buy my clothes and shoes and for some reason he wouldn’t let me go into the shop that sold sensible school shoes. He always made me buy high-heeled court shoes with pointed toes and then insisted on putting blakeys (those little metal tips) on the heels so that I would make a noise when I walked in them and everyone would turn round to look as I went clacking past on my skinny little legs. I suppose it must have turned him on or something, but I kept twisting my ankles because I wasn’t used to walking in heels. He didn’t care about details like that. Lucy was always really keen to borrow my shoes, believing them to be the height of sophistication. I would have been happy never to have seen them again as long as I lived.

  By the time school was over we had managed to get a long way away and had reached a row of shops on a new estate.

  ‘I’m really hungry,’ I complained. ‘Have you got any money?’

  ‘I’ve only got five pence that my mum gave me for crisps,’ Lucy said dubiously. ‘That won’t get us far. We’ll have to nick something.’

  I’d never stolen anything in my life and the thought of it filled me with horror. What if we were caught? They would be bound to take us home and that would give Richard the perfect excuse to beat me half to death. But hunger got the better of my fears and we went into a little supermarket to see what we could get. We must have been looking very suspicious, hanging around for too long, because the woman behind the till threw us out, by which time Lucy had managed to steal a cake but I had only managed to get a plastic Jif lemon, having panicked and grabbed the first thing that came to hand.

  ‘Can I try your shoes?’ Lucy asked as we sat munching on the cake in a nearby underpass.

  I agreed happily, since my feet were hurting from walking so far in them. We changed socks at the same time, so that I could have her long ones with pictures of the Flintstones up the sides, and then continued on our way.

  I was desperate for the toilet, but there was nowhere else to go other than beside the path. I was just getting down to business when a woman came round the corner with her kids. Unable to run away, I had to answer her questions about where our parents were and whether they knew we were there. I don’t suppose my answers were very convincing. She eventually went away, but I suspect she was planning to ring the police the moment she got to a phone.

  We continued on our journey and by the time we reached open fields it was starting to get dark. Lucy was beginning to talk about the possibility of going home, but then she didn’t have anything to be afraid of when she got there. I knew that my parents would have been told of my disappearance by now and that I was going to be in serious trouble. I wanted to keep walking forever. I didn’t care how dark or cold it got, nothing could be as frightening as stepping through my own front door.

  Some bigger children were coming out of a senior school and we had to walk past a bunch of them. They were all staring. I guess we must have looked like the runaways we were. There wasn’t much chance that we were going to get away with our break for freedom for much longer and in fact the next figures who appeared out of the darkness were a couple of police officers. A terrible fear gripped me when I realized they were going to take me home. I would rather have lived in the woods forever than take another beating. But I could tell Lucy was quite relieved to have been found before night set in.

  The police told us off for all the trouble and worry we had caused everyone and escorted us back to their car.

  ‘Why did you run away?’ one of them asked as we drove towards home.

  ‘Her dad says he’s going to kill her,’ Lucy replied, ‘and he beats her all the time.’

  Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, they had. ‘Is that true?’ the policeman asked.

  ‘No,’ I shook my head. ‘I was lying when I told her that. It never happened.’

  I looked down at the floor to avoid his eyes and realized we were still wearing the wrong shoes and socks. I would be in even more trouble if I got home without my own stuff.

  ‘Quick,’ I whispered to Lucy, ‘swap back.’

  I was now more frightened about the punishment for this than I was about the punishment for running away. We were practically at my house by this time and only had time to change the shoes. I would have to take my chances with the socks.

  The moment my mother opened the door she was shouting at me. She didn’t seem at all relieved that I was safe, just angry at what I’d done. I was freezing cold and sweating at the same time with fear. When I heard the policeman telling her what Lucy had said about Richard beating me and threatening to kill me, I knew that I was really in trouble.

  ‘Get upstairs to your bedroom,’ she shrieked the moment the police had gone, ‘and wait there until your da
d gets home so he can deal with you.’

  He was out, apparently searching for me, and so I got ready for bed with a heavy heart, knowing just what was going to happen once he returned. I couldn’t sleep as I lay there listening for the sound of him coming back into the house.

  Eventually he was there and I could hear him shouting like a lunatic at Mum and then there was the sound of his feet running up the stairs. His voice was so loud and angry I couldn’t make out the words as he ripped the blankets off me and started punching me so hard I thought he was going to kill me. The pain was so bad I actually hoped that this time I would die. In my panic I wet myself and it soaked his arm, making him even angrier and more violent.

  I didn’t go back to school for about a week after that and was bought lots of new clothes and things, so the bruises must have been pretty bad. They always kept me off school if there was any chance the teachers would see what they’d done to me.

  Chapter Two

  Torture and cruelty can so easily become routine. Just as Richard could make a joke of pretending to spit in my food to disguise the fact that he was actually doing it, so he could also refer to me, apparently jokingly, as ‘Paki slave’. I had to pretend not to mind, otherwise I would have been the one who couldn’t take a joke and I would have got a hiding for lacking a sense of humour.