The Little Prisoner

by Jane Elliott

  ‘I don’t know,’ I muttered guiltily.

  What made her think that I knew anything about them? Why would she imagine that a little girl would be storing pornography in the loft, unless she suspected the truth?

  When Richard got home she showed him the magazines. ‘Look what that dirty bastard left in the loft when he moved out,’ she said, referring to the previous owner of the house. ‘I knew there was something dodgy about him.’

  ‘Disgusting,’ Richard agreed. ‘I wouldn’t want anything to do with filth like that.’

  I have no idea if Mum believed him or not, but it certainly wouldn’t have been a good idea for her to express any doubts if she had them.

  Life continued as if nothing had happened.

  Chapter Four

  I always wanted to believe that Mum knew nothing about what was going on. No child wants to believe that their mother knows they are suffering and chooses to do nothing about it. Because I knew how much she suffered at Richard’s hands as well, I put her on a pedestal and was always determined to protect her if ever I could. I believed that if I let her know what was going on, I would be putting both our lives in danger. I would never forget the feel of that carving knife on my throat and I never doubted for a moment that Richard was capable of carrying out his threat to murder her if I said anything.

  When I got older Mum and I used to go out shopping together, giggling all the time, and she liked to believe that people were looking at us and thinking we were sisters. Although she let me down a lot by not protecting me from Richard when she could have done, I still thought the world of her. One of the bonds between us was woven from my knowledge of what he did to her.

  Once, when I was about ten, Mum’s screams woke me up in the middle of the night. I knew that meant Richard was hitting her as usual, but this time the noises coming from the bedroom next door sounded especially loud. I was shaking and telling myself to just stay calm and it would soon all be over, it always was. I knew that if I went in he would turn his fury onto me for interfering and it wouldn’t make anything better for her. Now he was shouting at the top of his voice and there was a repeated banging noise, which sounded like her head being smashed against the adjoining wall. I was terrified that this time he really would kill her and then I would be left alone with him. As I lay there, praying she wouldn’t die, the screams stopped but the banging continued. I could hear the boys crying in their beds, too frightened to move. Mum was making a groaning noise, ‘Huh, huh.’

  Fear giving me courage, I climbed out of bed and ran out onto the landing, pushing open their bedroom door. The light from the hallway illuminated the sight of my mother on all fours, wearing nothing but her knickers, while Richard stood astride her, pulling her head back by the hair, his other hand under her chin, about to smash her head against the wall again. They both froze and looked at me.

  ‘Leave her alone!’ I screamed.

  ‘Go back to bed,’ Mum whispered.

  Richard looked at me for a second longer, then let my mother’s limp body drop onto the floor and started running out after me. I managed to get into my room and slam my door, but by the time I reached my bed he’d burst through and caught up with me and shouting, punching and throwing me around. It was one of the worst beatings I’d ever endured.

  Then I heard Mum’s voice coming from behind him. ‘Get off her,’ she said, and it sounded as though she meant it.

  I looked up and saw her standing behind him, holding the carving knife that she always kept under her mattress. She looked as though she was hyperventilating as she panted and shook with a mixture of pain, fear and rage.

  Richard stopped beating me, threw me down on the bed, straightened up and walked out of the room, still shouting abuse.

  Mum came in and sat on the bed, laying me across her lap and rubbing my back to comfort me. I must have been winded because I was having trouble getting my breath. I kept watching the door, knowing he would be back, that he wouldn’t be able to let her have the last word like that.

  A few minutes later he was there again, exploding into the room, picking up my chest of drawers and hurling it at us. It hit me full in the back, knocking me off Mum’s lap, and she leapt up, screaming, the carving knife back in her hand, and stabbed him in the side of his stomach.

  I curled up into a ball by the bed, trying to make myself as small as I possibly could. They both began to shake as they saw the blood oozing out and Mum started to apologize to him over and over again as he stood there, looking at her, his hand over the wound, the blood seeping through his fingers. Suddenly it was as if they’d never been fighting at all, as if they were a united force.

  ‘I’ll drive to the hospital and get it stitched up,’ he said matter-of-factly.

  He left the house and Mum put on her nightie and began using towels to mop up the trail of blood which led from my room down the stairs, working like a robot.

  ‘Go and wash your face and sort yourself out,’ she told me.

  When I limped back from the bathroom she sent me down to the kitchen to make her a cup of sweet tea for the shock while she tried to get the stains out of the carpet with soap powder and washing-up liquid. Then she came downstairs, pushing the bloodied towels into the washing machine and rinsing the knife as if removing evidence of her crime. She tidied up my chest of drawers, put all my scattered clothes away neatly and told me to go back to bed once I’d made her tea.

  ‘You’re not to say a word to anyone about what’s happened,’ she warned me, although the whole street must have been able to hear the screams that night. It was to be just one more secret amongst the hundreds that were already cluttering my head and my conscience.

  As I climbed back into bed I sent up a prayer that Silly Git would bleed to death on the way to hospital or would become so weak he would crash the car and be killed on impact. I was really excited at the thought of him not coming back. Even if he did try to come back, I reasoned, surely Mum would leave him after all this.

  The carving knife wasn’t the only weapon that Mum kept handy for when he attacked her. She had other knives around the house and a pair of shears that she kept hidden behind the drainpipe outside the back door. The funny thing was Richard knew all these weapons were there but never did anything about removing them (apart from the brass soldiers), before starting an argument with her. It was as if he enjoyed the danger.

  Whenever their fights started, Mum would be screaming at me to call the police and Richard would be shouting at me not to dare. Once or twice I was so frightened he was going to kill her that I ran next door and asked them to phone for help. They did that for me a couple of times, but he made their lives such a misery afterwards that they refused to become involved after that. Eventually, they wouldn’t even open the door to me, though no doubt they could hear what was happening through the walls.

  Sometimes, when Granddad wasn’t living next door, Mum would shout at me to fetch him and I would run up to his house as fast as I could. If I managed to get there in time he would arm himself with a piece of wood and come back with me to break the fight up. Usually, however, Richard would catch me before I got there, carry me back and give me a good hiding for daring to involve other people in a family matter.

  In the end everyone had been alienated or intimidated and there was no one left to run to for help, so my brothers and I would sit quietly, not daring to move as Mum and Richard raged around us, just waiting for the fights to exhaust themselves and hoping she wouldn’t be killed before his temper had burned itself out.

  A few hours after Richard left for the hospital I heard the dreaded sounds of his Cortina returning, his key in the lock and his feet on the stairs. To my horror I realized he was coming into my room first. I lay very still dreading what might come next.

  ‘Janey,’ he whispered as I pretended to be asleep, ‘I’m really sorry.’

  He’d never ever apologized to me for anything before, but maybe he was only doing it now because he believed I was asleep and couldn
’t hear him. He went back out and closed the door quietly. A few moments later I could hear him and Mum talking in their bedroom.

  ‘I told them the can opener slipped and stabbed me,’ he told her.

  ‘You could have come up with something better than that,’ she laughed.

  They carried on chatting and laughing as if they had just enjoyed a grand adventure together and eventually I fell asleep, disappointed that they had made up and that it didn’t sound as if Mum was going to be leaving him.

  The next morning they allowed me to lie in, telling the boys to let me sleep. This was another first. I got up and washed when I felt ready and went downstairs, expecting them to be angry with me. When I walked into the front room the sight of my mother shocked me. Her whole face was swollen and bruised and seemed to have changed shape from the beating she’d received. In the drama of the night before I hadn’t noticed the damage, or maybe it had taken a few hours to come through. She was barely recognizable.

  Richard smiled at me cheerfully, as if this was a normal morning in a normal family. ‘Do you want some breakfast?’ he asked.

  I nodded, not sure how to react to all this. To be allowed to lie in and then to have Richard make me breakfast was unheard of. I kept thinking there must be a catch. All day I was allowed to sit around and not asked to do anything. I wonder now if perhaps I was as bruised as my mother, because Richard had often kept me off school in the past when he had gone too far and left physical marks. I had no way of checking my appearance. The only mirror in the house was in Mum’s room, so I only got to look in it if I was vacuuming or taking in some washing.

  Although I didn’t go back to school for a week that time, Mum and Richard soon got bored with being nice to me and by the next day I was back to doing the household chores. I didn’t speak, apart from saying ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ for a few days, until Richard had had enough and shouted at me for being a ‘sulky cunt’ and it was back to business as usual.

  We all lived in hope that Richard would leave us, and those hopes were fulfilled when he got himself a girlfriend.

  The first I heard of it was when Mum refused to iron his shirt for him one day.

  ‘Get your black fucking whore to iron it for you!’ she screamed.

  He must have been waiting for an excuse, because he left immediately. The boys and I were over the moon and begged Mum not to ask him back.

  ‘We don’t want him back, do we, Mum?’ we said. ‘It’s all nice now.’

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ she assured us. ‘He won’t be back.’

  She must have believed that herself, because a few days later she accepted a friend’s invitation to go out to the pub, which was something she would never do without Richard’s permission. While she was out he arrived back, bearing a big gold necklace as a peace offering. When he realized she’d gone out and was having a good time, his mood changed immediately. He waited like a thunderstorm brewing on the horizon. I’ll never forget the look of terror on her face when she breezed back in and found him there.

  I don’t know what happened with the other woman; she was never mentioned again.

  Thinking back now, with all that I have found out, I begin to wonder how much Mum did know about what was going on. There was one occasion particularly which didn’t make sense.

  Richard was always very proud of his sheds, which he would build himself at the bottom of every garden he moved to. He built at least three different ones in the years I lived with him. They were very well built, even using proper windows, which we then had to clean as if they were part of the house. Inside, Richard’s belongings were always immaculately neat and orderly, like everything else in his life.

  Sometimes I would have to go in there with him to ‘help him sort out his tools’ and he would lock the door behind us. The door had four or five bolts and a chain on the inside, so there was never any chance of us being disturbed. It was only later, when I thought back to those times, that it occurred to me how weird it was that no one else questioned why he was so keen to secure the door from the inside. To me it was just the way things were.

  I remember that on this occasion he took me in there while the boys were playing in the garden outside, locked the door and made me stand in front of the window and watch for anybody coming.

  ‘Make yourself look busy,’ he instructed, pulling his trousers down to his ankles and standing behind the door. He crouched down and I felt him sliding his hand into my knickers, playing around with me while he masturbated himself. Just a few yards away I could see Mum washing up in the kitchen. Every so often she would look up out of the window and shout at the boys to stay off the grass and on the patio, away from the shed, which was strange, as it was summertime and they were usually allowed to play on the grass at that end of the garden.

  I was staring straight into my mother’s eyes as I pretended to be tidying up the work surface.

  That night I had to hide my knickers inside my dirty clothes because Richard’s hands had left big black grease marks and I was frightened Mum would see them and know what was happening.

  Richard’s mum seemed to hate me almost as much as he did and was always pinching and poking at me when we went round there. She and Mum got on quite well, going to Bingo together and everything, but when I was tiny Mum used to make sure she stood between Nan and me.

  Nan lived about five miles away from our house to begin with and Richard often used to take me with him on visits because it involved long walks through the woods. We would always have to stop on the way there or back so that I could do him a favour. If there were too many people around and he wasn’t able to get me alone he would become really angry and we would have to keep walking until we found a secluded spot. Sometimes he got so carried away with it all we wouldn’t have time to go and see his mum and would have to go straight back home after doing it.

  On one of these occasions we were meant to be borrowing some sugar or something and when we got back Mum asked for it. When she saw we didn’t have it, she asked if we had actually been to Nan’s.

  ‘No,’ Richard said, obviously worried she might ask Nan.

  ‘Yes,’ I said simultaneously, assuming he would want me to lie.

  ‘I mean, no,’ I corrected myself quickly, pretending not to see Mum’s perplexed expression.

  When Nan said she needed a fireplace building in her front room Richard agreed to do it for her, and of course I had to go with him every day. Nan had gone away while the work was being done but one of my cousins was living there and wanted me to play with her when I went round.

  One day Richard said I could play out for a bit. ‘As long as you don’t go too far,’ he warned.

  After a while he called me back in and I knew what it was for.

  ‘I’ll come in with you,’ my cousin said.

  ‘No, don’t,’ I begged her. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’ But she wouldn’t listen. She was getting annoyed with Richard and me because she didn’t understand why I always had to be with him.

  When he saw her coming in with me he became angry, just as I knew he would. He told her to go back out.

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘I live here. I can do what I want.’

  My blood would always run cold when other people argued with my stepfather, as I knew that he would be taking his anger out on me later. Now he wasn’t going to climb down and became so angry that eventually my cousin went upstairs, shouting abuse as she went.

  ‘Fuck off!’ he shouted after her. ‘You fat ugly bitch!’

  He then took me into the front room, where he was building the fireplace, shut the door and leaned against it, pulling his trousers down and telling me to masturbate him while he played with my chest.

  After a few minutes I heard my cousin coming downstairs, calling me to come back outside. She tried to open the door but Richard was leaning his full weight against it, shouting at her to fuck off or he was going to hit her. Eventually she gave up and went outside, shouting as she went.
He finished himself off but still wouldn’t let me go with her, forcing me to stay in the living room with him and watching while he worked. When Nan got home he told her how bad my cousin had been and how she needed a good hiding, and made me back him up.

  His Cortina provided him with another venue for getting me on my own. He would take me with him as he drove around the various DIY stores that he liked, making me sit or lie on the floor in the back with my arm round his seat so that I could masturbate him in the front while he drove. I always knew what he was planning because he would go to the toilet before we left and get a wad of toilet roll or a rag to clear up his mess. Sometimes it would take ages to finish him off as we drove around the lanes and my arm would be burning with pain from the angle I had to work from, but I wouldn’t dare to stop until he told me to. If it was dark and we had reached somewhere deserted, we would pull up and he would let me sit in the front seat next to him to do it. When I got older and was too big to squat in the back, I would sit beside him with a newspaper or jumper over my arm while I did it for him.

  Once we were at the DIY stores he would make me swap the stickers on the products he wanted with cheaper ones. He was always looking for an angle to get out of paying his way. I used to walk around behind him, terrified that one of the shop assistants would challenge him or not treat him with the respect he felt he deserved and he would start a vicious fight in the aisles.

  His car gave him a whole other area to vent his aggressions on the rest of the world. If any other motorist did anything to offend him, like changing lanes in front of him, driving too close or causing him to slow down, he would go after them. If their windows were open he would shout abuse and spit at them. Once he’d caught up with them and forced them to stop he would be out of the car and attacking them with his wheel brace. If it was a woman driver he would send my mother to do his dirty work or, when I was old enough to pick fights with adults, me.