Wake Up, Mummy (10 page)

However, although Carl apparently despised me for ruining my mother’s life, he still abused me sexually and, while she was in hospital, he seemed to take great pleasure in doing it in the bed he normally shared with her. He’d come into my room every night, lift me out of my bed and carry me into their bedroom. If I woke up, I’d soon fall fast asleep again when he put me down on his bed. But he’d take hold of my hand and place my fingers around his penis. He tried to teach me what he wanted me to do, but every time he took his hand away from mine, I let go, and he’d curse at me and start all over again. Eventually, it became easier just to do what he wanted and try to get it over with as quickly as possible. Also, although I didn’t know what he was doing at the time, he often tried to have full intercourse with me. But I’d scream out in pain and push him away.

Every night he kept me awake for hours, abusing me again and again until I was so exhausted I’d fall fast asleep on top of him. I’d try to slide my body off him so that I could lie with my head on the pillow, but he’d keep dragging me back into position until he’d finished. Sometimes, I’d wake up to find myself lying beside him, naked and without any memory of how I got there, and my stomach would churn as I wondered what he’d done to me while I slept.

Every morning, Carl’s alarm went off in time for him to send me back to my bedroom before Chris woke up, so that we could get dressed and set off to school together, like normal children. On a couple of mornings, though, Chris woke up first and saw me coming out of Carl’s bedroom. The first time it happened his expression was a mixture of disbelief and disgust as he asked, ‘Did you sleep in there – with Carl?’ I felt my face burning with embarrassment as I denied it. And then Carl came out of the bedroom behind me and said, ‘She had a nightmare, so she came into my room’ – as though that would have been the most normal thing in the world for me to have done.

Afterwards, on the way to school, my brother laughed at me and teased me for getting into bed with ‘that disgusting old man’. I shrugged off his accusation, pretending I didn’t care. But the truth was that it upset
me, because I felt he should have known I hated Carl so much I’d rather have been ripped apart and eaten by the monster we used to imagine lurked in the corner of the bedroom we used to share than have willingly spent a single night in Carl’s bed.

Despite his occasional teasing, my brother was the only person I really loved and trusted, and we were very close. There was no point trying to tell him about what Carl was doing to me, because he was too young to understand. But on any other topic he was the one person I could talk to, because he was sharing most of my experiences. Although we couldn’t protect each other physically, we
were
able to give each other emotional support and, with Chris there, at least I wasn’t alone.

However, Chris was as troubled as I was, and his bed-wetting was just one of many manifestations of his deep distress and unhappiness. He’d been kicked out of nursery school because his behaviour was already uncontrollable, and he became more destructive and aggressive as he got older.

‘You’re vicious, just like your fucking father,’ my mother used to scream at him, and she eventually tried to have him put into care. I assume it was on the grounds that he was beyond her control, although I can’t imagine the reasons why social services decided he was better off staying with her. She was always telling him that as soon
as he was old enough, she was going to make him join the army; then she’d wind herself up into a tightly coiled spring of fury and frustration when nothing she said seemed to have any effect on him. But I could see beneath his tough exterior, and I think I was the only person who understood how profoundly hurt and miserable he really was.

Remarkably, although my mother tried to get Chris taken into care, for some reason no one ever reported
her
to the social services, not even her doctor, who must have known exactly what she was like. Years later, a family that lived in our street had very similar problems to the ones we had when Chris and I were young, and some of the neighbours got together to discuss whether they should report the mother to social services. But they decided eventually to do nothing, on the basis that ‘some kids are happy living in their own shit’. So I suppose that’s what people thought about us – that we were simply ‘a bad lot’ who were best avoided and left to our own devices. And although ours was clearly a very dysfunctional and unhappy family, no one ever really knew what was going on
inside
our house, particularly because Chris and I would always lie and back up my mother’s repeated and indignantly determined claim that she never drank and that everything at home was fine.

But although we never discussed our lives at home with anyone else, Chris and I did talk to each other, and I don’t think I’d have been able to cope at all throughout the months when my mother was in hospital if I hadn’t had his support.

I REALISED AS
soon as Tyrone had gone that I’d made a mistake. My relationship with my mother was volatile and dysfunctional and mainly involved fighting and screaming at each other. And I was completely intimidated by Keith, who was a vicious bully and a control freak. He’d tell me what to wear, which of my friends I could see and which of them I had to drop, and when he organised a birthday party for me, he refused to allow me to invite a single friend of my own. He was deliberately and systematically separating me from my own world and drawing me into his, so that I’d be completely under his thumb and dependent on him. He kept going on and on at me about moving in with him. But, fortunately, I had just enough common sense left – or perhaps just enough of an instinct for self-preservation – to refuse. Because I knew that, however grim and depressing it was to live at
home with my mother, I’d never get away from Keith if I put myself in a position where he was able to control me 24 hours a day.

I hadn’t had a period for a couple of months, since before I started seeing Keith, and it began to dawn on me that I might be pregnant. Just the thought of it made me panic, because the baby would be Tyrone’s – an escaped prisoner who was on the run and who I’d probably never see again. I didn’t have anyone to turn to for advice or even just to talk to about it, so I tried to push it to the back of my mind, telling myself that it wasn’t something I needed to deal with anyway until I knew for certain that the problem existed.

The thought of having a baby filled me with almost paralysing anxiety. I was just 17, and I appeared to be repeating all the mistakes my mother had made. I was hurtling down a road towards self-destruction, just as she was doing, and, like her, I seemed to have no interest in looking for the brake pedal.

One day, when I turned up at Keith’s house and let myself in with the key he’d insisted on giving me, I found him in bed with the girl who was my best friend at school. I knew Keith didn’t really care about anyone except himself, and I should have realised that he wasn’t the sort of man to be faithful to one person. But what shocked and hurt me most of all was finding him with my
friend. She must have known how I felt, because she lay there, clutching the sheet under her chin with both hands and looking terrified.

I went crazy, grabbing everything within reach and hurling it at them both, screaming obscenities as I ran backwards and forwards between the door and the end of the bed. Eventually, when I couldn’t find anything else to throw at them, I stormed out of the bedroom and ran down the stairs. I could hear Keith calling after me, ‘Babe. Wait a minute, Babe. I can explain.’ And as I slammed the front door, I almost wished I’d waited to hear his explanation of what it was they were actually doing, stark naked in bed together in the middle of the afternoon!

Even though I didn’t love Keith, it still felt like a slap in the face. I kept on making wrong decisions, and so I kept on being disappointed. It was inevitable; I should have known that. Because of the choices I was making, disappointment was waiting for me around every corner. But, each time, I just hoped that somehow, this time, everything would turn out all right. It wasn’t ever going to happen, and deep down I knew it, which is probably why I felt so stupid for believing it might – particularly with someone like Keith.

I went home that day and told my mother I thought I might be pregnant, and that, if I was, Tyrone was the father.

To my mother, there was no such thing as a secret – at least, not when it concerned anyone other than herself. She told everyone everything, including the most intimate and embarrassing details of anything related to Chris and me. So I knew it was foolish to tell her something so private. But I’d reached rock bottom and I had no one else to talk to. I just couldn’t go on keeping everything bottled up inside me any longer, however sensible it would have been to do so. Just like I’d done when I got involved with Keith – and so many other times in my life – I told myself that this time it would be all right; this time my mother would be sympathetic and understanding and, rather than blabbing to anyone and everyone, she’d give me good advice and help me to deal with this latest crisis. Of course, she let me down, and it wasn’t long before word spread that I was pregnant.

A few days after I’d spoken to my mother, I was walking along the road near our house when a car pulled up beside me. I looked down and saw one of Tyrone’s brothers leering up at me from the driver’s seat.

He wound down his window, stared pointedly at my stomach for a moment and then said, ‘Someone told me you’re pregnant.’

He was with three of his mates, and I began to feel uneasy, although I managed to sound more bored than anxious as I replied, ‘Yeah, so? Have you come to congratulate me?’

This time, he looked directly into my face when he spoke, and I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. ‘Someone told me that Tyrone’s the baby’s father.’

I looked away and he gave a short, unpleasant laugh.

‘I told them they’d got that bit wrong. Because Tyrone’s got a new girlfriend – a girl his family likes…this time. And we’d be really, really upset if you tried to get back into his life.’

He reached out and touched my arm. It was a gesture that might have appeared to a casual onlooker to be friendly, but it was actually a clear indication to me that he was in control as he said, ‘So, tell me,
is
Tyrone the baby’s father?’

I wanted to snatch my arm away and tell him to fuck off. But instead I looked down at my feet and answered, ‘No.’

He patted my arm a couple of times and then withdrew his hand and asked, ‘So, who
is
the father?’

He spoke slowly, as though talking to an idiot, and I had to resist the urge to reach through the open window of the car and punch his stupid, smug, bully’s face as I said, ‘I don’t know. It’s not Tyrone though.’

‘So there’s no reason for Tyrone to know anything about it?’ It was clearly a statement, although he made it sound like a question.

He revved the engine of his car, filling the air with noise and oily fumes, so that he almost had to shout,
‘After all, you’ve got the health of your baby to think about now, as well as your own.’ Then he pulled away from the kerb and sped off down the street.

I’d already told my mother that the baby would definitely be Tyrone’s, but she refused to accept that it wasn’t Keith’s. I think she was afraid I might leave her and go off with Tyrone, and although she treated me like shit, she knew she couldn’t manage without me. Keith was almost 30 and everyone who knew him had heard him say how much he wanted to have a son of his own. And, as usual, my mother was thinking about herself rather than about what might be best for me when she decided to take matters into her own hands and tell him that the baby was his.

I was furious with her when I found out what she’d done. But she never apologised for anything she ever did, and this time was no exception.

‘You should thank me,’ she told me huffily. ‘I’ve done you a favour. Tyrone’s gone, but Keith’s still here.’ Then she wiped an imaginary tear from her eye and added dramatically, ‘I want my grandchild to have a dad.’

I had a sudden urge to slap her. Calling my unborn child
her grandchild
was typical of her need to make everything all about her. And it was news to me that she considered being the child of an absent father to be a handicap, as she’d never once shown any understanding
to my brother and me while we were growing up without
our
father. I saw through her, though, and I knew that all she really cared about was making sure I stayed and didn’t abandon her. And, in her mind, that meant that Keith had to be the father of my child, or at least he had to think he was.

I hadn’t seen Keith since the day I’d caught him in bed with my friend, but when I saw him at a nightclub shortly after I’d had the conversation with my mother, it was clear he was convinced that the baby was his. Like my mother, he was someone who could easily persuade himself to believe that whatever he wanted to be true
was
true. So I asked him if he’d have a paternity test when the baby was born, and he agreed.

I didn’t see him again after that until I was nearing the end of my pregnancy, when we bumped into each other at a party and he told me, ‘I’ve always wanted a son, and I don’t care who the mother is.’

I WAS TOTALLY
alone throughout my pregnancy, and by the time Christmas came round, I was looking forward to spending the day with my mother and my brother and to being able to pretend we were just like any other, real, family.

Christmas morning started off well, and we were about to start preparing our Christmas dinner when my mother
told us she was popping out to see a friend who lived nearby, ‘Just to wish her a Merry Christmas.’ Two hours later, she fell in through the front door of our house and lay on the floor in the hallway, laughing and mumbling to herself, totally drunk. As I looked down at her, I could feel my eyes filling up with hot tears of frustration and disappointment. I brushed them away angrily with the back of my hand and as my mother staggered to her feet she hissed at me, ‘It’s fucking Christmas, for Christ’s sake.’ Then she opened the door of the living room, lay down on the floor and passed out.