The Little Prisoner

by Jane Elliott

  The police assured me that once he was arrested he would be held on remand and we would be safe. As it was, they let him straight back onto the streets.

  ‘You promised me you would hold onto him,’ I groaned when they told me.

  ‘I’m sorry, Janey,’ Marie said. ‘It was decided that he was on too much medication for them to be able to risk it. If something went wrong and he got ill in custody the whole case could fall to pieces and he could end up suing the police. We just couldn’t take the risk.’

  ‘But he’ll come looking for me,’ I pleaded. ‘I would never have started this whole thing if you hadn’t promised he would be put away.’

  ‘We’ll do everything we can to protect you,’ she assured me, and I knew she meant it. But what could she do if Richard or my brothers decided to wait outside the local school and lift Emma for a few hours, just to show me that they still had the power to do it? What would they do if the phone calls started coming in the middle of the night, or the notes came through the letterbox? What would they do if our house mysteriously caught fire in the night or Steve’s car was run off the road on the way to work?

  Although I didn’t regret going to the police, I wasn’t sure how I was going to get through the coming months of looking over my shoulder and jumping every time I heard a car pulling up outside the house or the telephone rang or Emma was a few minutes late coming out of school.

  Once inside the house I hardly ever left, apart from taking the children across the road to school, and even then I didn’t always make it, having to ask Steve or a friend to take them for me. It was as if my brain was too exhausted to cope. Every little thing Emma or Sophie asked for seemed as hard as climbing Mount Everest. If they wanted a drink I could barely summon the energy to find a beaker and fill it up.

  Ideas of killing myself kept on coming to me and I wrote a long letter insisting that if I died the girls should both stay with Steve. My worst nightmare would be for Emma to be taken away and given back to my mother. I also wanted to make sure it was in writing that I didn’t want Richard or Mum or my brothers coming to my funeral.

  Every evening, after a hard day at the office, Steve would have to sit and listen to me drunkenly droning on about killing myself. In the end he lost patience.

  ‘If you’re going to do it there’s nothing I can do about it,’ he said one night. ‘Just do it and get it over with. I’m going to bed.’

  He went upstairs, leaving me snivelling in the lounge.

  ‘Okay,’ I thought, ‘if I am going to do it then there are a few things I need to sort out.’

  I had never got round to explaining to Emma about Paul being her real dad. Steve had been doing such a great job and she was so happy with him it hadn’t seemed to be worth muddling things in her mind. But I didn’t want to leave any unfinished business. It had been five years now since we had escaped. Emma was eight and old enough to understand. I sat her down at the kitchen table after school one day and explained it all to her. She listened with rapt attention, asked a few questions and seemed completely cool with the whole thing. I thought I should make contact with Paul and reintroduce him to his daughter before I got round to topping myself.

  If I was going to make contact, however, I was also going to have to give him the full story of why we had to leave and all the things that had been going on behind his back when we were living together. I knew from the one or two people that we had managed to talk to in the old area that he had got engaged and that Emma now had a half-brother. I wanted Paul to meet her again and to think about introducing her to his other child, but I didn’t know how to contact him.

  Then Steve went for a lads’ night out and bumped into a bloke he used to go to school with who played football with Paul. When he found out they still played, he asked if he would give Paul his number. The bloke assured him he would and we waited for the call. When it didn’t come I was surprised, because I’d been sure Paul would call straightaway. Eventually the call did come and he told us the mutual friend had forgotten to give him the number. We met up and I told him the whole story. He was just as revolted and horrified as Steve had been, but I could almost see the pieces fitting into place in his head as he took my words in.

  ‘So all those times when I came home early and the chain was on the door… ‘ he said and I nodded, feeling sickened all over again to think of the things I was being forced to do every day of my life until we escaped.

  Paul couldn’t have been more understanding or more supportive. He promised to do everything he could to help me in the trial.

  Now that I was finding my courage, I made contact with my dad and my baby brother Jimmy as well. Dad was happily remarried and had a successful painting and decorating firm which gave him a comfortable life. We started to visit him, but always had to keep ourselves hidden if anyone else from his family came round in case word got back that we were in the area. My mum’s brother lived just over the road.

  Dad was still living in blissful ignorance of the hell that I had been forced to live through after he left me. When I told him some of it I could see that he could hardly bear to listen, so I held back most of the details. It was then that he told me about how he used to get the dinner ladies at school to report back to him about how I was.

  Even when I had explained everything to him he didn’t seem to be able to take it all in. ‘I can understand how he could do those things to you as a child,’ he said one day, ‘but how could you let him go on abusing you once you were a grown up with a baby of your own?’

  I didn’t feel it was my responsibility to enlighten him any further. Perhaps it would have been kinder to have left him to live out his life in blissful ignorance about the whole thing anyway. He shook his head in disbelief when I told him some of the things Mum had done too.

  ‘She must have changed so much, Janey,’ he said. ‘I would never have married a woman like the one you’re describing.’

  Meeting Jimmy again after so many years was a shock. I don’t know what I had expected, but it wasn’t what I found. Jimmy’s life experience since we had been parted couldn’t have been more different from mine. He had been adopted by some kind people who had enough money to indulge his every whim. He was their only child and seemed to have no problems in his life, but still he wasn’t happy and was having difficulty adapting to adulthood. I found I had little patience with him, and Steve had even less. It was disappointing after I had been carrying his memory around in my heart for so many years. Perhaps I was hoping that we would still be soulmates, as we had been when we were tiny and as we had remained in my mind all the years since. Maybe Jimmy was so damaged by his early years that no amount of love and security could overcome it, or maybe there was a genetic inheritance that he just couldn’t shake off. Yet despite all that has happened over the years and the different paths that we have followed, I still love the man who was once the little boy I was forced to leave behind at the foster home and used to talk to through the birthmark on my arm.

  Although in some ways my life was getting better, the black clouds of depression that I had always feared would arrive one day were growing darker all the time. I was constantly thinking about how much better off everyone would be without me, especially Steve and the girls. I was always miserable and felt I was no use to them at all.

  I was continuing to buy drink and tablets, getting ready to make myself do something that I didn’t really want to do. Eventually, having sat alone in the kitchen one morning screaming and crying, I drank enough to pluck up the courage to swallow a handful of powerful tranquillizers and anti-depressants. I’d already made arrangements for someone else to pick up the kids after school and keep them at their house until I came for them, believing I would be dead by then.

  I don’t think I can have taken enough tablets, though, because I was still able to walk to the front door when someone refused to stop banging on it.

  ‘What have you done?’ my friend asked when I opened the door and she saw the state of me.

/>   I crumpled onto the floor in the kitchen, crawling into a corner and bawling my eyes out, just wanting it all to be over. I couldn’t make my legs work any more. Every time I stood up, I fell down again. My friend went mad at me, shouting and screaming, and knowing what I had done because I’d been talking about it for so long. She called her mum, who was a nurse and lived just across the road, and the pair of them were shouting questions at me: ‘How many have you taken?’

  I tried to reply, but I wasn’t making any sense, my words too slurred and my face numb.

  My friend rang her husband, who came home from work and drove me up to the hospital. Once I got there I felt like a fool. I couldn’t have taken enough tablets at all because they didn’t even pump my stomach out, but they wouldn’t let me go until they’d done some tests. I just wanted to sleep, I was so tired, but they wouldn’t let me.

  Steve came in later and wasn’t pleased. ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ he said. ‘I’m taking you home.’

  After this I realized I was going to have to get a real grip if I was going to beat my demons and be a decent mother to the girls.

  One of my main tasks in the year until the case came to court was to find as many witnesses as possible who would come forward and support my story. I needed people to testify how violent and frightening Richard was and how easily he would have been able to intimidate and bully a child into doing as he wanted. In my naiveté I thought that once they saw that I wasn’t afraid to stand up to him, all the other members of the family would feel able to speak up too. He had beaten up, attacked and intimidated them over the years, so I actually thought they would be grateful to me for finally exposing him for the vicious, idle, cruel bully that he was. I remembered all the times Mum and the boys had said how much better life would be without him. Mum had always believed the boys would be the ones to save her from him when they were grown up, but maybe I would have to be the one to do it.

  Unfortunately, I had underestimated Richard’s powers to intimidate. One or two of my girlfriends from the past took my calls and agreed to be witnesses for me, but all of them rang back after talking to their husbands and partners to withdraw their support. No one, it seemed, wanted to put their lives, their homes and their families at risk. It appeared that Richard had succeeded yet again in making an entire community too terrified to stand up to him, even when they were offered the chance, but I completely understood how they felt. Hadn’t he been able to keep me silent for twenty years?

  There were also people I deliberately didn’t approach because I knew they were too vulnerable. I knew they would do it for me, but Richard would kill them. Cheryl, for instance, had done a lot to help me over the years and I couldn’t ask her to put herself in any more danger on my behalf.

  I hadn’t seen Hayley for so long I was very hesitant to contact her now and ask such a big favour, but eventually I could see that I needed all the help I could get.

  ‘Of course I’ll help you,’ she said as soon as I asked, and I remembered how we had become blood sisters that day all those years ago. ‘You should have asked me ages ago,’ she went on. ‘Your mum has already been round asking my mum to be a witness for them.’

  ‘What did your mum say?’

  ‘She said no, but their solicitors keep knocking on the door.’

  It was wonderful to find that there were some people who had found the strength to stand up for what they believed to be right.

  The more I found out, the more my head was spinning. I was shocked by how many of the older neighbours said that they had always known what was going on between Richard and me, as if it was inevitable and there was nothing they could have done about it. Maybe there was nothing they could have done, but at least they could have tried. Perhaps they assumed I was a willing participant in the relationship. Was that really possible?

  Uncle John, who had been my friend in the days when he lived next door to us, also agreed to stand up and speak out against Richard.

  ‘I know your granddad would never forgive me if I didn’t help you when I had the chance,’ he said. He would pay a terrible price later, branded a traitor to the family for siding with me against the precious patriarch.

  Another of my uncles, who I knew had been beaten and bullied by Richard in the past, rang to tell me that Richard had asked him to be a witness for the defence and that he couldn’t get out of it. I checked with Marie and she assured me that he would be perfectly within his rights to say no. I rang him back and told him he didn’t have to do what Richard asked.

  ‘But you know, Janey,’ he whinged, ‘I used to go down the pub with him sometimes. He’s really just an ordinary bloke.’

  As far as I knew Richard hardly ever went to the pub. The one occasion when he did go with this uncle he rolled back home blind drunk, having picked a fight on the way home then fallen over and dropped his Chinese all over the front garden. I think he knew that he couldn’t handle his drink, which was why most of the time he and Mum just drank endless cups of tea.

  ‘How can you be talking to me like that about a man who raped and abused me almost every day of my life for seventeen years?’ I demanded.

  ‘Oh, now hang on there, Janey,’ my uncle cautioned, as if he was some wise elder of the family. ‘We don’t know that for sure. Everyone’s innocent until they’re proven guilty.’

  ‘Why would I make stuff like that up?’ I yelled, beside myself with fury that I was hearing this from a man who had himself suffered at Richard’s hands. ‘How could I imagine seventeen years of terror and pain?’

  In the end they nearly all caved in except Hayley, Uncle John, Paul and Steve. I asked my dad if he would be at the court and he promised me he would. Steve’s dad and two friends sat in for moral support.

  Now that I was talking openly with so many people about what had happened in the past, things were beginning to click into place in my head and I was starting to feel better.

  By now Steve was doing really well at work and had managed to buy us a better home in a nicer area which was even further from where my family was rooted. He had done brilliantly to earn enough to get a bigger mortgage and afford a nice house on a pleasant estate. The house was modern and nothing like the places I had lived in as a child. I should have felt that I was finally escaping my past. But I still found it impossible to enjoy anything good that happened to us. For so many years I had been conditioned to think that if something nice happened you would have to pay a penalty, do someone a favour or take a beating that I couldn’t now believe it was possible our lives might be getting better.

  As the first day of the case loomed closer I became increasingly nervous. What if no one believed me and the jury let Richard off? What if the men in the jury were doing the same things to their children that he had done to me? What if the judge did those sorts of things, or the barristers? What if I had to live the rest of my life in fear of Richard coming back for revenge? What if I was never able to get any sort of acknowledgement of what he had put me through? What if his bullying tactics proved to be successful in the end? How would I live with any of that?

  Chapter Eleven

  On the morning of the trial we saw the girls off to school before setting out for the court, trying to pretend that it was a normal day, but I doubt if we fooled them. They must have been able to sense the tension in the air.

  We’d arranged to meet Marie and her colleagues from the police in the car park behind the court building, so they could let us in through a back entrance.

  ‘They’ll be waiting for you at the front entrance, trying to intimidate you,’ Marie explained. ‘We don’t want you to have to meet up with them.’

  Ushered quickly into the building, we were taken upstairs to a room that was set aside for witnesses waiting their turn in the box. None of us were allowed to talk to one another, even though Steve and I had been in a car together until a few minutes before. There were armchairs and we just had to sit and wait until we were called. There was no sign of my dad.

  N
othing happened for hours, while the jury was being sworn in and other rituals that we knew nothing about were being gone through. We had assumed that they would call Steve first. He was looking forward to taking the stand. Richard had put him through a lot over the years and he relished the idea of putting things right at last.

  ‘Jane Elliott,’ an official called out. My heart lurched. I was going in first! I didn’t want to leave the room full of friendly, supportive faces, knowing that Silly Git was going to be waiting for me in the courtroom and that there were going to be people trying to prove I was a liar and making me talk about things I didn’t even want to think about any more. I walked out in a trance.

  As I made my way into the courtroom one of my uncles and my brother Pete, whom I had more or less brought up as a little boy, were sitting by the door with their arms folded, just staring menacingly, trying to intimidate me, hoping to make me back down like every other person who had ever tried to put a stop to Silly Git’s reign of terror. That was the first time I noticed that my brother had a tattoo on his neck, just like his dad.

  ‘Don’t look at them,’ my officer instructed, trying to move me forward quickly. ‘Don’t look at them, they’re just trying to unnerve you.’

  I was shaking with fear, but I stared back at them as if I didn’t care. The tension had been building towards this moment for a year, never mind the twenty or more years before that. I wasn’t going to back down now. I had no respect for any of the people who had caved in and refused to back me up. After all he’d done to them as well. I stared back defiantly at my brother and uncle and shook my head, as if telling them that I couldn’t believe what they were doing, that I was disappointed in them as men. I have no way of knowing whether they felt any shame or whether they had grown so used to obeying Richard that they actually believed it was right and normal. It certainly seemed he had been very successful in his campaign to convince them that ‘families must stick together no matter what’.