The Little Prisoner (5 page)

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 dad 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

T
orture 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.

Richard never made any secret of how much he hated all black and Asian people and the fact that I had dark hair and an olive skin that tanned the moment I looked at the sun was enough to categorize me as different and inferior to the rest of the family, someone he could treat in any way he wanted.

He would tell me to sit on the floor in the front room because I was a Paki slave, while they all sat on the comfortable chairs and the sofa. Just as I sat down he would snap his fingers.

‘Paki slave, make me and your mum a cup of tea.’ ‘Paki slave, clean the boots.’

‘Paki slave, take the washing out.’

‘Paki slave, put the immersion on.’

It would be said as if it were just a game, but I knew I would have to obey the orders with a smile if I didn’t want to get a beating for being a bad sport.

By the time I came back into the room with the tea Richard would be giggling with my brothers, encouraging them to snap their fingers like him and send me on another errand. ‘Make her do what you want,’ he’d tell them, and they would laugh, treating it like the game he was pretending it was. But I had to do what they told me as well, or I would have been accused of not joining in the fun and would have been punished for being a miserable cow.

This ‘joke’ went on for years. I didn’t blame the boys – they didn’t know any better and they were as anxious to do as they were told as I was. If the shoe had been on the other foot I expect I would have done the same in order to avoid the beatings. When he was throwing us from wall to wall and punching and kicking us, Richard didn’t seem to care what damage he might do. It was as if shutters came down in his brain and he lost all control and reason. No one ever wanted to be on the receiving end of one of those explosions.

At other times, however, he was entirely in control of what he was doing and his malice could not be excused by temper. He used to make me light his cigarettes for him, even when I was small. He got the boys to do it as well, but they just used to lean them on a bar of the electric fire or the top of the cooker until they started to smoulder, whereas I was made to get down and puff to make them light more quickly.

Richard believed that we should be taught how to inhale properly, especially the boys. Sometimes he would make them smoke a whole cigarette, while he and Mum laughed at them and exclaimed how cute they looked as they turned green and coughed as if they were going to choke.

When my brother Dan was two or three they made him light up and suck the smoke in and he started choking and turning red and purple. After a while their laughter turned to panic and they started screaming at him to breathe and banging him on the back. Richard picked him up by the ankles and smacked him like a newborn baby, yelling at me to go and get him some water.

Lighting those cigarettes gave me a taste for smoking by the time I was eleven or twelve, but I knew that if Richard found out I’d taken up the habit he would find some way to turn it into a torture, so I tried to keep it secret for as long as I could.

When I was thirteen I went on a school trip to Belgium that my granddad had paid for. I must have stunk of fags when I got back. The following evening Mum went out to have a cup of tea with a friend across the road, leaving me with Richard.

‘You’re smoking, aren’t you?’ he said as soon as we were alone.

‘No.’ I wondered what was coming next.

‘You are,’ he said, overruling my protests. ‘Here’s a fag. You either smoke it or you eat it, unless you tell me the truth.’

I took the cigarette, lit it up and smoked it in front of him.

‘Inhale it properly,’ he ordered. ‘I ain’t wasting my money buying you fucking fags if you ain’t gonna smoke them properly.’

Once I’d proved to his satisfaction that I was able to smoke properly he gave me a pack of ten, which I took straight up to my bedroom. By the time Mum came back across the road I was leaning out of my bedroom window puffing away happily.

‘Alright, Mum?’ I said cheerfully.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked, obviously horrified at the thought of what would happen if Richard saw me.

‘I smoke now. It’s alright, Dad says I can.’

I guess it didn’t bother them because they worked out that if I was a smoker they would soon be able to cadge cigarettes off me when they ran short.

To start with Richard offered me a choice: I could have money for sweets each day or I could have fags. I chose the fags and for the next few mornings there would be a pack of ten waiting for me in a brass horsecart on the mantelpiece. It soon dwindled down to one or two loose ones, which I would use to refill my packet.

There was an awful lot of brass around the house – horse brasses on the wall, brass ornaments on every surface – all of which had to be polished regularly. Mum and Richard did have two big heavy brass soldiers as well, but he got rid of them because Mum kept using them to defend herself when he attacked her.

‘You’re gonna fucking kill me!’ he’d protest whenever she laid into him while fighting back.

As well as cleaning the house from top to bottom several times every day, we had to clean all our boots and shoes, and it had to be done properly, melting the polish into the leather in front of the fire before brushing it in. Everything had to be spotless and shiny, right down to the toilet seat, which was polished so often it was hard not to slide off it. Richard would insist that I made my bed with hospital corners that were exactly ninety degrees. I had no idea what ninety degrees meant, but he still warned me he would be checking them. If ever I complained to Mum, he would tell her he was just joking and that I was a stupid cow to take him seriously, but when we were alone he
was
deadly serious. If I did anything wrong I would be hit or have to pay a penance.

Every little task that he set me I did to the very best of my ability, but it was never enough. If anything, it seemed that the more I tried to please him, the further he wanted to push me, just to show that he could, just to inflict pain, just to show me that I was only allowed to live because he chose not to kill me.

The idea of hurting me must have been playing on his mind all the time, the urge to prove his power over me too delicious to resist. One of his favourite tortures, which started almost as soon as I came home from care, was to suffocate me in bed with my pillow, or with one he brought into the bedroom with him, pressing it down onto my face so hard that I was sure he was sitting on it with all his weight, although he was probably just using his hands. He was very strong when he was excited or angry.

The first few times it happened I was unable to stop myself from screaming as I fought for breath, but I soon learnt that that made it worse because it used what little air there was in my lungs and nobody could hear through the pillow anyway. I would thrash around in my panic, trying to escape, but there was no hope of that happening until he was ready to release me.