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5
Despite struggling to cope with everything that was going on at home, I did make some friends when I moved up to the high school, where I did quite well academically too. Then Dad’s sister died and he had to clear out her house, which caused more trouble at home and didn’t do anything to help his mental state, especially when he ended up having to bring a lot of her stuff back to our house and Mum gave him a really hard time about it.
Dad had been close to his sister. They’d kept in touch over the years, even though we didn’t see them very often, and after he came out of hospital and things got worse between him and Mum, he started going to stay with her at weekends and going out for meals with the cousins I’ve never really known. Eating out was something our family had never done and I think it was like another life for him, perhaps the sort of life he’d have been living if he hadn’t met and married Mum.
It makes me very sad to think that Dad might have missed the opportunity to be the person he could have been. And it must have been really difficult for him trying to cope with everything after his sister’s death without any support or sympathy from Mum, who used to scream at him when he brought stuff home, ‘You can’t bring all that crap in here. You can’t fit two houses into one, you stupid bastard.’
One of the things Dad brought from my aunt’s house was a step machine, which Mum suggested I should put behind my bedroom door at night. ‘I saw your dad watching you while you were asleep,’ she told me. ‘If you pull that in front of your door when you go to bed, he won’t be able to open it.’ So every night before I got into bed, I dragged the heavy step machine into place, then lay there listening for the sound of the door banging against it. I heard Ben asked Mum one day why I did it, to which she replied, ‘Oh just ignore her. She does daft things. You know that.’ But I still thought she’d allowed me to put the step machine in my room because she was trying to protect me and keep me safe from my dad.
When I was 12, I started having flashbacks. They seemed to be of real events that had occurred when I was younger and were always very disturbing, even though they didn’t make any sense. For example, in one of them I was wearing a nappy and sitting on the baby gate that used to block off the doorway between the living room and kitchen when I was a toddler. Mum was there, but it was Granddad who lifted me up and put me on top of the gate so that I was straddling it with one leg on either side. Then he pushed me down somehow, so that the top of the gate was rubbing against my private parts.
It sounds daft, I know, and I probably would have forgotten all about it by now if it hadn’t been for the fact that when I mentioned it to Mum some years later, she told me, almost defensively, ‘It was just a game. You loved him doing that. He did it all the time.’ So then I knew it was a real memory, although in view of everything else I knew by that time, it did seem like a very odd thing for her to have allowed him to do.
One of the other flashbacks I started having seemed to be related more to a feeling than to what was actually happening. Nan was there and I was sitting on my granddad’s knee – I think it was at my grandparents’ house – and Granddad had his hand up my skirt. During the brief moment when the image was clear in my mind, I had an overpowering sense of being upset and not wanting him to do whatever it was he was doing. But, again, it didn’t make any sense.
Once the flashbacks started, I began to remember other things too, like the bikini and other clothes Nan used to dress me up in when I was four or five years old, and her telling me, ‘You mustn’t say anything to anyone about these special clothes.’ Then Granddad took photographs of me standing with my legs open and doing other poses he told me to do, which weren’t the sort of poses I’d have done naturally as a little girl and which made me feel awkward and uncomfortable, although I didn’t know why.
I’ve still got one of the photographs Granddad took when I’d gone with him to visit one of his friends one day. It’s a perfectly innocent-looking photograph – I’m sitting on a piano stool with a little lad who was also at the house – and I never understood why it made my skin crawl whenever I looked at it, as though there was something creepy associated with it. So in the end I put it away.
Although those visits to my grandparents’ house stopped when I was five or six years old, I must have gone out with them sometimes after that, because I remember being with them and my little brother one day when Michael fell over. Granddad said he’d take him in to the toilet to clean him up, but I insisted on doing it myself, because I had a horrible feeling that if he went with Granddad, something bad might happen to him, although I couldn’t have said what.
For me, the flashbacks were the straw that broke the camel’s back – the final extra burden that made the weight of everything I was carrying too much to bear. So I did what my parents had always done and started trying to drown my sorrows in drink.
Although I was very scared of Jake, the first alcohol I ever drank was one of his cans of lager, which I stole from my brothers’ bedroom. It didn’t taste very nice, but the purpose of drinking it wasn’t to enjoy it, and it did stop the flashbacks for a while. So then I started stealing whisky from the bottles Mum always had in the house. I knew I was taking a huge risk and that she’d be really angry with me if she found out what I was doing. But, in fact, I was wrong, because when she did find out, she just laughed, poured out two glasses and handed one to me.
I was 12 years old, in my second year at high school, and happy to drink a glass of whisky with my mum because I thought it meant I had finally found some common ground between us that might enable me to start building the relationship with her I had always longed to have.
She gave me cola and whisky quite regularly after that, and would often bring a glass up to my room when I was sitting there alone in the evenings. By the time I was 13, she was giving me a 500-ml cola bottle full of equal measures of cola and whisky to take to school every morning, telling me cheerily as she handed it to me, ‘Remember, if you get caught, don’t tell them you got it from me!’ Which I took to be further proof that we were bonding, because it was the first time she had ever given me something I wanted, rather than doing everything in her power to make sure I didn’t get it.
Sometimes, after she started giving me whisky, she’d give me money to buy lager too. Then I’d hang around outside a local shop after school, waiting for some likely-looking person to come along who I could ask to go in and buy me a couple of cans, which someone always did.
Then, one day, Mum told me Dad had raped her while I was at school. ‘It’s your fault,’ she said. ‘He wouldn’t have done it if you’d been here.’ So I started skipping school sometimes, and because she was still encouraging me to stay in my room, particularly at weekends and during the school holidays, I would sit up there on my own drinking my bottle of cola and whisky and listening, in case my mother needed me.
Since my first day at nursery, school had been the one place I could escape to, and I’d always done quite well – until I started getting into trouble sometimes for being drunk, which I almost always was by the end of the day. Even then, nobody really did anything. And after a while taking whisky to school stopped being funny, like a teenage prank or a dare, and became something that isolated me from my friends and made me incapable of doing my work properly. Before long, I was drinking about 250 ml of whisky and cola every school day, plus strong lager in the evenings, or whatever else I could get someone to buy for me when I’d saved up enough money from the couple of pounds Dad sometimes gave me. He didn’t know I was spending it on drink because he was in his own world by that time, and having rarely smiled before his breakdown, never did so now.
Eventually, I was having to drink more and more alcohol to find the dead space inside my head where nothing mattered, and I would sometimes steal from Mum’s stash of whisky. But again, instead of being angry with me when she found out, she started buying me two bottles a week and occasionally, if she was in a really good mood, she’d let me have one of her cans of strong lager too. We didn’t ever sit and drink it together – the desire to bond was mine, not Mum’s – but she used to tell me it would help me not to feel so anxious about what I thought my dad might be going to do to me. So although she always laughed when he said lewd things to me, I told myself that she really