The Little Prisoner (7 page)

‘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 bad-mouthing 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.

Although Mum made it clear to me that she hated living with Richard, she seemed to have the same delusions about the need to be violent as he did. One day a boy from across the street got me in the eye with a pellet from a potato gun. I thought I was blinded and ran into the house crying. Mum sent me straight out to hit him back and show him the error of his ways. Knowing that I would be in big trouble if I lost the fight, I did as I was told and unleashed all the pent-up anger I could find, spurred on by the pain in my eye. The poor boy didn’t know what had hit him, and even though he was a pretty tough kid himself, his mum had to come running out of the house to separate us.

‘Your Janey’s a bleeding lunatic,’ another neighbour told Mum admiringly, which Mum seemed to take as a fine compliment. I felt proud of myself for upholding the family honour and doing my duty.

One summer holiday my cousin Tracy came to stay with us for a few weeks. I was so excited when I heard because no one ever came to stay with us and it would mean I had a girl I could play with instead of just my brothers. It also meant she would be staying in my room, which might mean Silly Git would have fewer opportunities to do things to me.

Although he still found ways of getting at me, even with Tracy there, she did obviously make it harder for him and he started to resent her presence around the house quite soon after she arrived. He began being unpleasant to her in the hope that she’d ask to go home, but she seemed not to take any notice, having no idea just how dangerous he was when he didn’t get things his own way.

One afternoon we were all playing in the garden and Richard and Mum were sitting on the patio watching us and drinking tea. Tracy and I were doing handstands on the grass and my brothers were running races. Silly Git must have been feeling left out and bored, or maybe plain mischievous. He wouldn’t have liked seeing me having fun like a normal little girl, not unless my happiness put me in his debt in some way.

‘Jane,’ he shouted. ‘Get over here.’

Tracy trotted innocently over with me.

‘Fuck off, Nosey,’ he snarled at her. ‘I weren’t calling you!’

Once she was out of earshot he beckoned me closer. ‘That Tracy’s being nasty to your brother,’ he told me. I knew it wasn’t true, but there was nothing I could say so I just looked at him, waiting to hear what would come next. ‘So what are you going to fucking do about it?’

‘Tracy and me were playing handstands,’ I said, trying not to sound as if I was arguing, a sick feeling of foreboding building in my stomach. ‘The boys were playing on their own.’

‘Don’t argue,’ he shouted. ‘You just go and hit her. Stick up for your brother.’

‘I don’t want to,’ I protested, knowing as I spoke that it was pointless to say anything now that he was getting angry.

‘We’re a fucking family,’ he snarled. ‘We fucking stick up for each other. You show some fucking loyalty and hit her for what she’s done to your brother.’

Not only did I not want to hit Tracy because she was my cousin and my friend, but she was also a lot bigger than me and would beat me up. I didn’t mind that so much, but I knew that if I lost the fight Richard would punish me later for letting the family down. We were all supposed to be these hard people who never let anyone take any liberties with us. It was a question of pride or something.

I tried pleading once more. It was no use. ‘Just fucking get on with it,’ he instructed and I knew there was no getting out of it.

I went back to Tracy with a heavy heart. ‘What did you be nasty to Tom for?’ I asked.

She looked puzzled.

‘Go on then!’ my stepfather shouted from the patio, impatient for the fight to begin.

‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered and gave her a gentle push.

Confused by all the shouting and the sudden end to our game, Tracy pushed me back and a few seconds later we were rolling on the floor punching, scratching, pinching and pulling hair. My stepfather was cheering me on from the sidelines like a proud parent watching their kid performing in a school match. It wasn’t long before Tracy had managed to pin me to the floor and was laying into me with quite justifiable anger. There was hair everywhere and our faces were covered in deep scratches. We were both crying because of the pain we were inflicting on one another and because we’d been having such a good time a few minutes before and now it was all spoiled. My stepdad was becoming furious with me for losing and letting the family down, screaming at me to beat Tracy up, but she was too strong for me and I didn’t want to hurt her any more anyway.

Both of us had tired ourselves out, but Richard hadn’t seen nearly enough sport yet. He dragged Tracy off me, grabbing both our collars and hauling us inside the house, excited by the fighting, furious that his fighter was losing and determined to get revenge on Tracy. He pulled us roughly up the stairs and into one of the bedrooms, pushing two of my brothers’ beds apart to make a boxing ring. ‘Now you’re fucking gonna do it properly,’ he ordered. I knew he meant we had to box and kick and abide by rules he laid down, two little bare-knuckle fighters. There was to be no more girlie hair-pulling or scratching. And this time he knew I would win, because he’d trained me, along with my brothers, in how to box.

We started out by hitting each other softly, but Richard knew we were pulling our punches and shouted that I’d get a good hiding from him if I didn’t get on with it and beat her up, so I started fighting for real because I was far more scared of him than I was of poor Tracy. We fought for him like pit-bull terriers for what seemed like ages before Mum couldn’t take it any more and split us up.

Tracy was sent home after that. She got such a telling off for the ‘trouble she’d caused’, but there was nothing I could do about it. Maybe my stepfather was jealous, wanting to have his family all to himself and to exclude any outsider who didn’t understand that he was to be feared and obeyed without question. Eventually he fell out with Tracy’s parents and they steered clear of us for years, just like everyone else.

Richard used to like to make us fight each other as well, even when the boys were tiny. If we were arguing about something, as brothers and sisters always do, he’d order us to fight it out properly. I was made to kneel down, because I was so much taller than them, and I wasn’t allowed to scratch, but those were the only rules.

I didn’t want to hit the boys, because I loved them and they were just little kids, but Richard would make us punch each other as hard as we could. We could also pull hair, bite and strangle one another, but the boys always had shaved heads so I had nothing to get hold of. We’d all be in tears because we didn’t want to do it, tufts of my hair would be pulled out and there would be blood and bruises on all of us. Although I would try not to hurt my brothers, they would be forced to hurt me and sometimes I would lash out automatically because I’d been punched in the face or one of them had his hands tight round my throat. If I did as I was told and really punched one of them in the hope of ending the fight quickly, I’d be hauled off and punished for being too violent with someone so small. There was no way we could win and we would always end up sobbing and miserable. At times like that I knew the boys hated their father as much as I did.