Читать книгу No One Listened: Two children caught in a tragedy with no one else to trust except for each other - Alex Kerr - Страница 7

I don’t think Dad can ever have been committed to the idea of working for a living, even though he did have a job when he met Mum. We had no idea at the time but at his trial we discovered that as far back as the 1970s he was already having trouble getting on with other people at work, always picking fights, arguing and threatening to leave. He never seemed able to get on with anyone. It was as if he had been meant to be a recluse from the moment he was born.

I guess he had no choice but to join the world of work when he first left Newcastle because he had to support himself somehow, but once he was married and Mum was earning a steady living from teaching, it became possible for him to start withdrawing from life outside the house.

When Isobel was born Mum had every intention of continuing to work because she loved her job and because she already knew that she couldn’t rely on Dad to earn enough to keep a family. She had never been the sort of woman who would have been happy to stay at home, cooking and cleaning and waiting for her man and her children to return each evening. Maybe that was one of the reasons she had chosen to marry Dad, because she knew he would never ask that of her, that he would be happy for her to pursue a career, if only to get the house to himself for most of the day and to have money coming in without having to work for it himself.

Initially, when they were both working, Mum was prepared to pay for babysitters and childminders to take care of Isobel while they were out during the day, but it wasn’t long before Dad realised that he could use his baby daughter as an excuse to give up work and stay home all the time. Maybe he genuinely thought that he could be a full-time ‘house husband’.

Although Mum realised he had no interest whatsoever in looking after the baby, at least he would be there in the house with Isobel, so Mum thought she could go out first thing in the morning knowing that the baby had an adult in charge of her. Even then she must have suspected he wasn’t at all the right man for the job, but he was Isobel’s father so why shouldn’t he be given the chance to look after her? Perhaps at that stage they were still kidding themselves that they were a normal married couple with a family, making normal, rational decisions about how to organise their lives in the most efficient way. Or maybe Mum just didn’t think she had any option.

It wasn’t long before she realised her mistake. She would come home after a long day at work to discover that Isobel was still exactly where she had left her that morning. Nappies weren’t changed, she hadn’t been fed, and it was obvious to her that Dad had basically taken no notice of the baby at all. He might have told her that he had given up work with the intention of caring for his first child, but it soon began to dawn on her that he wasn’t capable of it. Within a few days Mum had to go back to hiring babysitters just as she had first intended. Dad, however, had got used to the idea of not working by that stage and made no effort to look for another job beyond the odd temporary one when he was in desperate need of cash for something. As Mum rushed around trying to earn enough to pay for his upkeep as well as Isobel’s, and then mine, Dad withdrew further and further into his own private world, most of which was contained behind the closed doors of his silent bedroom, unseen by anyone but him.

‘It’s like having a third child to look after,’ Mum would grumble on the rare occasions when she said anything about him at all. It certainly can’t have felt as though she had a partner to share her life and her children with.

His inner sanctum had been Mum’s bedroom as well when they first bought the house, but by the time Isobel and I were old enough to take in what was happening at night we realised that Mum always slept on the couch in the sitting room. During the day her pillow and duvet would be tucked away behind it, out of sight, and she would make up the bed last thing each night when she was ready to sleep. Her few clothes and possessions were kept in Isobel’s room, so that she never had to invade Dad’s privacy or risk waking him while he slept the days away.

‘It’s because I snore, and because I have to get up early,’ she would explain if either of us questioned her about it. ‘I don’t want to disturb your father.’

We didn’t question this logic; we just took it as normal. She made no complaint about the situation so we assumed it was okay and she was happy about it. Dad’s bedroom became a mysterious world hidden behind a permanently closed door. Half the time when we came back from school we didn’t even know if he was inside or not. Because he led such a nocturnal life there would often be no sounds emitting from behind the door during the day at all. He came down to the kitchen to make meals while we were out at school and never ate with the three of us. We knew he had a television in his room but we could never hear it, so I don’t know if he ever actually watched it. Not knowing if he was in the house at any given moment made living under the same roof as him all the more scary.

We tried to carry on with our lives as if he didn’t live there at all but sometimes he would suddenly appear on the landing or in the kitchen, usually saying nothing and staring straight through us. He had a habit of coming out of the bathroom stark naked and standing at the toilet with the door wide open, as if he didn’t know anyone else was there. If we heard him coming in time we would dodge out of his way so we didn’t risk incurring his wrath, but unless he deliberately wanted to pick a fight he wouldn’t give any indication that he had seen us or that he even knew we existed. Isobel and I would have our showers before leaving for school in the morning, when we could be pretty certain he was fast asleep and wouldn’t be disturbed by any noise we might make.

If he did speak to Isobel it was only to tell her how much he hated her. When she was little she didn’t reply, but she grew bolder in later years and would sometimes even insult him as long as there were other people around to protect her if necessary. I remember she once told him he was ‘gay’, just to wind him up. It sometimes seemed as if she was deliberately courting danger, wanting to goad him into doing something terrible. If she had known just how deeply disturbed and dangerous he must have been through all those years, she would probably have been more careful. We all would have acted differently if we had had any idea we were living with a ticking time bomb. But you don’t realise these things when you are too close to them, too used to them.

Our main babysitter in the early years was a kind hippyish lady called Rita, who had long grey hair. Once we were both enrolled at school, Rita would take us in after Mum had left for work and get us to school on time, then pick us up in the afternoon at the end of lessons. We would go back to her house to play until Mum got back from work in Wolverhampton and collected us. Rita was perfectly nice and it didn’t bother me that Mum wasn’t there because I always had my big sister with me. I didn’t want to go back to our house when Dad was the only grown-up there. There was no way of predicting what sort of mood he would be in, even though he always favoured me over Mum and Isobel.

He really hated them and it was as if he was trying to recruit me onto his side in the psychological war he insisted on waging against them. As a small boy I liked the attention when he was being nice to me, but I could never be confident he wouldn’t shout at me or do something crazy like opening all the doors and windows in the middle of winter, or egging me on to do something wrong then telling Mum it was all my fault. Life was altogether safer and more predictable round at Rita’s house, so I didn’t complain. I wasn’t the sort of child to complain about things anyway. There was no doubting how dedicated Mum was to Isobel and me.

As we got older and harder to entertain, Rita used to take us back to our own house after school rather than her own. Most days Dad’s bedroom door would be closed when we came in and we would have no idea if he was in the house or not. It didn’t worry us as long as the door remained closed, because we were used to living our lives without him. Isobel was still at lower school, so she would have been about seven when Rita stopped escorting us to school in the mornings and Mum told us we were old enough to go back and forth alone as long as we were together. I suppose she needed to save as much money as possible since she was supporting the family on one teaching salary. It wasn’t that far to walk but we did have to cross the main road, which was pretty scary, and I would hold on tightly to Isobel’s hand. From then on, my sister looked after me pretty much all the time that Mum was at work. Even though she was only two years older than me it seemed to come very naturally to her. She hardly ever complained about it because we got on so easily together. I was pretty stubborn about things I felt strongly about, but I wasn’t one to argue or throw tantrums or make her life difficult unnecessarily. We didn’t have much time for anything like that anyway, because there was always so much to do from the moment we woke up to the moment we fell back to sleep.

Isobel and I would usually be woken up by the sound of Mum going out the front door at seven-thirty in the morning. It would then be our job to take our mongrel, Alfie, out for a walk before we left, so that he would be able to hold on till we got back. We all knew Dad wouldn’t be willing to get up and take him out during the day. If anything made Alfie bark, it would drive Dad completely mad.

Sometimes when we got up Isobel and I would come downstairs and find that Mum had overslept and was still curled up on the sofa, completely laid out with exhaustion and we would have to wake her so she could dash out to work.

We have quite a lot of photographs from our childhood, but hardly any of Mum – probably because she was the one holding the camera. Dad would never have agreed to take photographs of her. There are one or two pictures in the old family albums of Dad playing with us when we were young. He looks quite happy and normal in them, but it can’t have happened that often because I have no memory of him doing anything nice with us. I think there used to be more pictures of him but he ripped them up during one of his rampages, when he was thumping around shouting: ‘I don’t want to have anything to do with any of you!’

He destroyed a lot of the pictures of Isobel, too, because he hated her so much. ‘She looks too much like your mother,’ he told me, as if that was explanation enough.

There are still a lot of snaps that have survived despite his worst efforts, so Mum must have been very handy with the camera. It’s more evidence of how proud she was of us and how important we were to her, which was probably why we were able to put up with Dad’s lack of love relatively stoically. He wasn’t able to undermine our feelings of self-worth because Mum had done such a good job of building them up in the first place.

There’s one snap of us all on a beach together, like a normal family, but we don’t know where that could be because neither Isobel or I can remember him ever coming on holiday with us. He built a climbing frame for us in the garden too, so there must have been moments when he did the right thing, but such moments became rarer as time passed and life made him more angry.

I was about seven when Granddad died, meaning that we couldn’t go to Torquay on holiday any more. Mum still took us to Devon or Cornwall in the summer holidays, but there was never any question of Dad coming along. We certainly wouldn’t have wanted him to. We used to spend our time bike riding, swimming in the sea and trying every activity we could find. All of us liked to be busy and stimulated; we were never ones for sitting around and relaxing, whereas Dad did nothing else. When it was just the three of us together we always got on well, all interested in doing the same sorts of things. I nearly always got sunburned because I’m pale-skinned and we were spending virtually all the daylight hours outdoors.

Granddad didn’t leave any money to Mum in his will, which she was very hurt about at the time. I expect he wanted to keep his money out of Dad’s clutches, so he put it in a trust set up so that Isobel and I and Nan’s grandchildren would each receive a few thousand pounds when we turned eighteen. All Mum inherited was his old car, which I think she thought was a bit unfair. It was probably very wise of Granddad considering what happened in the end.

When Dad eventually took against me as well, he would often deny that I was his son, accusing Mum of having had an affair. It was a ridiculous accusation because Mum was the least likely person ever to do such a thing and because I looked just like him. In fact, by then I would have been quite pleased to have found out that I wasn’t anything to do with him. He had an unlimited appetite for unpleasantness. He would make things up just to provoke a fight and to give himself an excuse to be vile to Mum or Isobel, and later on to me as well. In the early days he wanted me to join in with him in everything, even his drinking. I can remember the first time he made me drink whisky when I was about eight or nine, but I hated the taste so much I wouldn’t take more than a few sips. It was as if he was trying to mould me into being more like him and less like Mum and Isobel, goading me on to be a bit of a rebel.

When I was little he liked to take me out into the garage with him while he was fiddling with the cars, making out that we were doing it together although in reality I was just sitting there watching him most of the time. I think he was more interested in separating me from Mum in order to annoy her than in actually trying to teach me anything useful.

I was on my own with him in the house the day he had a stroke. I was just six years old and Mum had taken Isobel to her karate lesson. Dad and I had been messing about with the car in the garage. We came back into the house and as he started to walk upstairs he suddenly collapsed and crashed back down onto the hall floor. I don’t think I panicked; I just went over to shake him and call to him, thinking he had fallen asleep. When I found I couldn’t rouse him, I sat down on top of him to wait until Mum and Isobel got back. I wasn’t particularly scared. I was confident that Mum would know what to do. She always did.