The Little Prisoner: How a childhood was stolen and a trust betrayed

I hurried down the road and got to the shop in record time, but the people behind the counter wouldn’t sell me cigarettes and so I knew I was going to have to stand outside as usual asking other customers to buy them for me. That could sometimes take ages, as most people would refuse. This particular day it took what seemed like hours and I was becoming increasingly agitated. If I went back without them I would be in trouble, but if I took too long Richard would think I’d gone to play with a friend, disobeying his orders. It looked as if there was going to be no way out of getting a smack at the very least.

Eventually a man came along who lived opposite us and I begged him to help me, promising that I was buying the cigarettes for my parents. He seemed to believe me, got the cigarettes for me and then asked if I wanted a lift home. We’d been told never to accept lifts from strange men, but I often played with this man’s daughters and knew his wife. There didn’t seem to be any danger and I was eager to get back as quickly as possible in the hope of avoiding a punishment, so I accepted his offer, assuming he would park in the car park round the corner and my stepfather wouldn’t see me getting out of the car. To my horror, however, the neighbour, presumably thinking he was doing me a favour, dropped me off right outside the house. As I came in through the front door Richard went berserk, shouting and screaming, hitting me around the head and kicking me.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ I kept saying over and over again, but I couldn’t make him stop.

‘Stand against the backroom window,’ he ordered, ‘and put your arms down by your sides.’

There was no one else in the house to intervene. I did as he told me, terrified of what new torture he might have thought up but equally terrified of moving and angering him still further. So when he pulled back his fist I didn’t flinch, taking the punch full in the face.

‘You deserve that,’ he shouted, finally happy that he had taught me a lesson. ‘Never get in anyone’s car again.’

As the boys grew older my duties towards them increased. I didn’t mind that too much because I loved them when they were little and they were very affectionate back. The younger ones used to call me ‘Mum’ a lot of the time, which would make me laugh. I liked it when they did that; it made me feel they were grateful for what I did for them.

Richard kept wanting more children because he was trying to have a girl of his own. Even when Mum got ill and lost a kidney, he insisted that they went on trying.

Mum and Richard would stay in bed in the mornings once I was able to get the others up and sort out their breakfasts. I was always turning up at school with safety pins all over my clothes from changing nappies.

If the boys woke up early they would come into my room. All of us were terrified of making a noise and disturbing the sleeping adults. To entertain them and keep them quiet until it was time for breakfast I would sit them in a line and dress them up in my clothes, doing their hair as if they were my dolls. They loved it, but when Richard found out he went mad, saying I was trying to turn them into ‘poofs’.

If Mum got up, Silly Git would stay in bed and I would be sent up to give him cups of tea. On each trip I would have to do him some horrible little ‘favour’. He would make me come right up to the edge of the bed, lifting up my skirt and tugging my knickers down so that he could touch me. I would then have to play with him under the covers for a few minutes until Mum called me back downstairs again.

‘Bring me up a fag,’ he would say as I went out the door, and the same thing would happen again when I returned. He always insisted on having two cups of tea before he got up, both brought to him by me.

As the years went by we all used to confide in one another how much we hated Richard, but never when he was in earshot. Mum used to tell us how she was just waiting until the boys had finished school and then we would all be off. Sometimes, when he had given her a beating, she would tell me that once the boys were grown up they would all turn on him for her.

On a few occasions Mum did pluck up the courage to leave him, with all of us walking along behind her like a parade of baby ducks. But he always did whatever was necessary to drag her back, regardless of who might be watching.

On one occasion he was driving his car when he came for her, winding the window down and driving slowly along beside her as she looked straight ahead and pretended not to see him.

‘Get in the fucking car!’ he ordered.

‘Fuck off!’ she replied.

Without another word he reached out of the window and grabbed her hair, then reversed the car back up to the house, literally dragging her back by the hair, not caring about the danger or who might see.

Sometimes he would playact being pathetic and unable to remember whether he had taken his tablets. He took them for the pains in his legs, something to do with trapped nerves, although no one ever really got to the bottom of it. He used to go to pain clinic and I had to go with him once to learn how to give him acupuncture, sticking needles in his back. Richard knew I was too frightened to be tempted to do him any damage with the needles.

Being in pain often made him moody.

‘Have I taken my tablets?’ he would whine.

‘No,’ one of us would lie, ‘I don’t think you have.’

‘You give them to him,’ Mum would whisper to me if we were in another room. ‘Maybe they’ll finish him off.’

‘No,’ I would hiss back, ‘you do it!’

But he would only be pretending. Whenever one or other of us plucked up the courage to take the potential overdose out to him, he would look pensive. ‘You know,’ he would say, as if the thought was just occurring to him, ‘I think I did take them.’

Richard seemed to actually get a kick out of fighting people, whether they were relatives, neighbours or just strangers on the street. There was never any logic to why he would decide to pick on them – he would just trump up some reason from nowhere to justify spreading his hatred around and demonstrating his superior strength. He had enemies everywhere, but only occasionally would they be brave enough to retaliate.

One Sunday evening, when my brothers and I were about to get into the bath and we were naked at the top of the stairs, bricks started crashing through the glass in the front door.

‘Stay there!’ Mum shouted as we began screaming, and she ran downstairs. Silly Git was arming himself with a thick rusty chain and we watched as he ran outside barefoot to face the men who were waiting in the car park for him. There were about eight of them and some of them had machetes and similar weapons. Mum ran outside after him, screaming and waving a carving knife. Family honour, it seemed, was at stake here.

We stood at the window and watched them fighting until the police came to take them all away. It was like watching the Incredible Hulk at work. Richard was angry and when that happened he didn’t care who he took on or how bad the odds were. Displays like that made me all the more certain that he was capable of killing me and Mum if I ever disobeyed him.

He enjoyed making the rest of us fight as well, seeing it as a badge of honour for the family if we pulped someone else’s face. If Mum had made friends with another woman in the street he would tell her that she had been badmouthing her and would send her round to sort her out. I’m sure Mum must have known he was making it up, but she pretended to believe him in order to avoid a beating herself, I guess, and would go round to the woman’s house and beat her up instead.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.