Читать книгу I Remember, Daddy: The harrowing true story of a daughter haunted by memories too terrible to forget - Katie Matthews - Страница 6

Chapter Three

Although I’d had little contact with my father for several years by the time I discovered I was pregnant with Sam, and he didn’t play much of a role in my life, it had been a few weeks before I’d plucked up the courage to tell him. I knew he thought Tom wasn’t ‘good enough’ for me – which was particularly ironic considering the fact that his own background had been even more humble than Tom’s. But, whereas Tom was perfectly comfortable in his own skin, my father had spent years climbing the social ladder, and he was proud that he’d ‘risen above’ his early life on a council estate and become a wealthy, successful and powerful businessman. Status, money and appearances were all that mattered to him, which was why, when I did finally tell him I was pregnant, I was surprised that he declared himself to be pleased and said he was looking forward to becoming a grandfather for the first time. Clearly, though, any grandfatherly feelings he might have had had evaporated that day he came to the hospital, when he decided that the name of my child mattered more than the child himself.

Tom and I had taken out a mortgage and bought a house together when I was four months’ pregnant. Although I’d been happy living with Tom’s parents, having a place of my own was really important to me. I’d bought my first flat when I was just 21 and was working as the manageress of a shop. It was a financial stretch on the salary I was earning, but it was worth it. I’d furnished it with bits of furniture my dad had been going to throw out, and I’d painted the walls, put curtains up at the windows and kept it spotlessly clean. I was really proud of that flat, partly, I think, because it seemed like a visible representation of the fact that I’d overcome the problems I’d had as a teenager and had proved my teachers – and my father – wrong by actually achieving something. It was the first place I’d ever lived where I felt safe, because I knew that I could close my own front door and choose who I invited into my home, and into my life. I’d had a horrible childhood and, until I bought that flat, nothing I’d ever done had felt as though it was my choice.

As a child, every aspect of my life had been entirely controlled by my father, and even as an adult I still felt the effect of his influence in many ways. My father’s parents had had very little money when he was growing up, but he’d worked hard to become a well-off, successful businessman and he was so determined to be someone that he didn’t care what it took for him to achieve that goal.

He had two sides to his character. To his friends he was eccentric, fun-loving and flamboyant, an amusing raconteur who had a way with the ladies and was the generous host of countless extravagant parties. To his family, however, he was a frightening, self-centred, violent alcoholic, a strict disciplinarian who despised women, hated foreigners, Catholics, poor people, homeless people, people who showed weakness or inadequacy in any way, people who smoked … The list was almost endless.

He regularly abused my mother, both mentally and physically, bullied and beat my brother and me, and cast a shadow over my childhood from which I never truly emerged. By the time he and my mother divorced, when I was seven, the damage he had done to me seemed irreversible: I was a nervous, bewildered, insecure little girl without one scrap of self-confidence, who became a deeply depressed and confused teenager.

My mother was a shy, pretty young woman who’d had a sheltered upbringing in an affluent family, and who’d grown up to be both naïve and unsure of herself. When she met my extrovert, confident, flamboyant father, she was swept off her feet, overwhelmed by him, and she fell madly in love. She was devastated when she found him in bed with another woman on the night before their wedding. But he could talk his way out of any situation, however incriminating it might seem, and she really did love him. So she forgave him and married him anyway. And it was only after they were married that she began to realise that the man who had seemed so loving and caring was, in reality, a self-centred, violent bully with an almost inexhaustible and perverted sexual appetite.

My father had always been a heavy drinker who progressed through various stages of drunkenness. During the first stage, he’d be charming and affectionate and he’d tell exaggerated stories that made everyone laugh and say to each other what a great bloke he was. But the final stage – which usually didn’t start until he was alone at home with my mother – was at completely the other end of the spectrum, and he’d be vicious, aggressive and frightening.

It was the early 1960s when my parents got married and, even had my mother been able to pluck up the courage to leave my father when she began to discover what he was really like, her parents – as well as everyone else who knew her – would have been totally horrified by the idea of a divorce. And, unfortunately, unlike my father – who was ruthlessly determined to do and to have whatever he wanted, and apparently completely indifferent to what other people might think – my mother was timidly anxious to do the right thing, and she would never have considered bringing such shame on herself or on her family.

After my parents were married, my mother worked to support my father through university. She didn’t earn very much, but just four years after my father graduated, they were able to move with their newborn son into a five-storey house in one of the most prestigious addresses in town. And that’s where they were living when I was born, a couple of years later.

The house was huge. It had a large, old-fashioned kitchen in the semi-basement, with a range cooker, an enormous pantry and an adjoining laundry room. Above it, on the ground floor, were the family living rooms, although it was the dining and drawing rooms on the first floor that were most impressive. They were furnished with beautiful, polished antique furniture and oil paintings in elaborately carved and moulded frames, and their high ceilings and tall, elegantly proportioned windows looked out on to the leafy square across the road.

My father loved paintings, and there were two in particular that I remember. One of them was of him as a child, aged seven years old, and the other was of his mother. The painting of my father was in a heavy gilt frame, with his name, age and the date engraved on a plaque at the bottom. It hung on the wall above the Georgian fireplace in the drawing room – and in equally prominent positions in every other house he ever lived in. I don’t know whether it was actually painted when he was a child. Apart from the fact that his parents had very little money, they didn’t really seem to be the sort of people who would commission an oil painting of their son – however much his mother might have adored him. Perhaps my father had had it painted himself, from a photograph, when he was an adult. Having a portrait in oils of himself as a child would have fitted in with his aspirations to become someone of substance and with his idea of who he really was – or who he felt he should have been.

My father was very strict with me and my brother Ian, and I don’t remember him ever playing with us or taking us out anywhere when we were children. When he wasn’t at work, out playing tennis or socialising, he was sleeping, and he had no time and certainly no inclination to bother much with us. In any case, he believed that children should be seen as little as possible and never heard. So he rarely spoke to us, although he shouted at us constantly, particularly at my brother, who he called a wimp and a cry-baby.

My mother used to try to hustle us out of the way as soon as she heard him coming home from work. Then he’d vent his bad temper on her instead – and it did seem as though he was almost always in a bad temper when there was no one else in the house except us. He’d criticise my mother and sneer at her until he reduced her to tears, and as soon as she was crying, he’d be more annoyed than ever.

He was totally different with other people, though. He had a loud, infectious laugh and could be charming when he wanted to be; and he loved giving parties. So, while my brother and I were looked after by the au pair of the moment, my mother would shop, cook and clean and then fix her hair and make-up, put on a pretty dress and smile as she handed round food to my father’s friends and colleagues, their wives and girlfriends.

Despite his love of parties, however, my father didn’t believe in celebrating our birthdays or even Christmas – I can’t remember one single Christmas Day of my childhood – and he didn’t believe in presents. On the one occasion when I did have a birthday party, all the gifts that had been bought for me were collected into black bin bags as soon as the guests had gone home, and then they were given away.

The only time my father showed any interest in me and my brother was when he made us perform for the entertainment and amusement of his guests. We were like little puppets, only really coming to life in my father’s eyes when he decided to tug at our strings and show us off. From the time I was three years old, he used to teach me fables in French, which I had to recite on demand to his friends. They’d all stand around me in a circle, sipping their whisky from crystal glasses and smiling benevolently as I spouted words I didn’t understand, which my father had taught me, parrot-fashion.

I can’t remember the fables now, although I can still remember clearly how afraid I used to be of my father’s sudden impatient anger whenever I made a mistake while he was teaching them to me. I can remember how my whole body used to shake and how I’d clench my little fists until my hands were damp with sweat and my fingernails were digging into my palms, and how my father towered over me like the embodiment of a threat as the strange, incomprehensible sounds tumbled from my lips. The fear I felt was well founded, because if I made just one mistake, my father would tell me to pull down my pants and lie across my bed and then he’d beat me with his belt, shouting at me that I was useless, before sending me to bed without any supper.

One of my earliest memories is of something that happened just before I turned three. My brother and I weren’t allowed in the rooms on the first floor of the house. We had a playroom on the floor above, which was the only place we were supposed to play. But, when my father was at work, my mother used to let us do more or less what we wanted, and one day we decided to play trains in the drawing room. Ian was leading the way, making a very satisfactory steam-train noise, and I was holding on to his waist, following behind him and singing out ‘Oooh-Oooh’ every few minutes, in a not quite so realistic imitation of a train’s whistle.

Suddenly, Ian tripped and fell headlong against one of the huge windows. There was an ear-splitting roar as the glass cracked and then dropped, in a massive sheet, to the ground, only just missing decapitating him. I screamed, but Ian just stood there in silence, too shocked to react. After a few seconds, he touched his hand to his forehead and looked at the blood on his fingers as though he couldn’t understand what it was.

I was still screaming when I heard my father shout and, at the same moment, the drawing-room door flew open and he burst into the room, followed closely by my mother.

We found out later that he’d been walking home along the edge of the leafy square when he’d seen my brother fall against the window and had watched as the glass splintered and smashed. But, instead of being concerned about the long, deep gash on my brother’s head, which was now spurting forth what looked like pints of blood, or about the fact that Ian had come very close to being killed, my father was almost ballistic with fury because we’d been playing in the drawing room.

Ian was still standing, dazed and completely still, near the empty window frame when my father came into the room. Finally, though, as the initial numbness of the shock began to wear off, his whole body started to shake violently. And it was at that moment that my father almost ran across the room and grabbed him by the shoulders.

‘What the fuck are you doing in here?’ he bellowed into my brother’s blood-covered face. ‘You are not allowed to play in the drawing room!’ With each shouted word, he punched Ian on the arm and then he screamed, ‘How many times do you have to be told something as simple as that?’

My brother flinched and leaned away from him.

‘Please, Harry,’ my mother said, touching my father’s shoulder and then quickly pulling her hand away again. ‘We need to get Ian to the hospital. It’s a really serious cut.’

‘The hospital?’ My father’s face was a deep-red colour and I knew he was on the verge of losing control completely. ‘The fucking hospital?’ he shrieked again. ‘Get to your room! Both of you!’ He swung round, took a step towards where I was cowering on the floor at the side of the chintz-covered sofa and shouted, ‘Now!’

As I fled from the room, I heard my mother pleading with him again, ‘Please, Harry.’ Then she gave a sharp cry, and I knew my father had punched her.

I sat on my bed, sobbing with shocked distress because of what had happened and because I was terrified of what was to come. A few minutes later, my father walked into my bedroom and slowly undid the buckle of his belt. Without having to be told, I pulled my pants down to my knees and lay on my stomach across my bed while he gave me ‘ten of the best’. Then I struggled to my feet and tried to pull my pants back up over the bleeding rawness of my buttocks.

‘Go to your brother’s room.’ My father spat the words at me, his face a contorted mask of hatred and fury.

I limped along the corridor and stood helplessly beside Ian, who was sitting on his bed crying, his tears diluting the blood that was still seeping from the cut on his head.

When I looked up, my father was standing in the doorway, surveying us both with an expression of disgust. ‘You will stay there without food or water until Monday morning,’ he said coldly, and then he turned and left the room, locking the door behind him.

It was a Friday evening. But I was just two years old and Ian was five, and we had no concept of how long it was until Monday.

A little while later, my mother came into the room carrying a tray of sandwiches and two glasses of water. As soon as she opened the door, my father appeared behind her, as if by magic.

‘I thought I had made it clear that you are not to give them anything to eat or drink,’ he said, in a slow, menacing voice.

My mother was startled by his silent, abrupt appearance and as she spun round to face him, one of the glasses tipped over, sending water cascading on to the sandwiches. She righted the glass and blinked rapidly as she pleaded with my father, ‘Please, Harry. They’re only children. They’ve got to eat. At least let them drink something. They can’t stay locked in here without food or water for two whole days.’

Suddenly, without any warning, my father lashed out and hit her across the face, and she dropped the tray at his feet.

‘Pick it up!’ he hissed at her.

He kicked her as she fell to her knees and began to scoop up soggy pieces of sandwich and the two empty glasses. Then she stumbled out of the room and my father followed her, locking the door behind him, while we sat and listened to the sound of his footsteps fading away along the corridor.

Over the next two days and three nights, my brother and I played games together, cried when the pain of hunger and thirst grew too urgent to ignore, and slept for increasingly long periods of time. My mother came to check on us at irregular intervals, looking anxiously at the cut on my brother’s head each time, before letting us out of the room to go to the toilet. Then she hugged us quickly, glancing over her shoulder with fearful eyes, and told us not to cry because it wouldn’t be long before we could have something to eat.

During that weekend, we learned the price to be paid for disobeying my father. It was a lesson I always remembered every time I noticed the scar on my brother’s head, although, in reality, it had been the cause of far worse scars for both of us that no one could see.

The kitchen in our house was overrun with mice, and as my father hated animals of all species, particularly anything small and scurrying, he used to make my brother or me go down to get ice-cream for him when he came home drunk at night or at the weekends. I’d have hated going down there in the dark even without the mice to contend with, but they terrified me.

I’d edge my way down the stairs and then grope frantically in the darkness for the switch that would light up the corridor leading to the kitchen. My heart would be thumping against my ribs and I’d have to cross my legs to stop the pee escaping as I forced myself to stand my ground and fumble for the light switch. Sometimes, I’d have to make several attempts, running back up the stairs and waiting in the light of the hallway each time while I summoned the courage to try again.

As I finally approached the kitchen door, I’d hear little feet scuttling on the flagstones and I’d stamp my own feet and bang my hands on the walls of the corridor. Then I’d stand still for a few moments to give the mice time to scamper back to their hiding places. But I didn’t dare delay too long, because I knew my father would be waiting with increasingly impatient irritation for his ice-cream, and I was even more afraid of my father than I was of the mice.

Eventually, with one final thump on the kitchen door, I’d push it open and shudder at the sight of the thin, hairless tails of the last few mice as they shot behind the dresser or through the ragged-edged holes in the skirting board. Then I’d open the door of the freezer compartment in the fridge and scoop ice-cream into a bowl, singing or talking loudly to myself all the time so that the watching, waiting mice wouldn’t think I’d gone and come darting back out again from their hiding places.

I dreaded those forays down to the kitchen, and I’ve been frightened of mice ever since. But I longed to have a hamster and, much to amazement, when I was five years old, my father agreed to let my mother buy one for me.

I adored Daisy from the moment I set eyes on her. She had to be kept in the laundry room next to the kitchen, although sometimes, when my father was at work, my brother and I would take her out of her little cage and carry her into the living room. We’d hold her and stroke her and let her run along the coffee table beside the couch and then I’d scoop her up again and try to kiss her pink, twitching, inquisitive little nose.

One day, when we’d taken Daisy into the living room, she escaped and, with our hearts racing, Ian and I were still searching for her when my father came home from work unexpectedly. As soon as we heard his tread on the stairs, we rushed to take our places on the sofa, and when the living-room door flew open, we were sitting the way our father always insisted we should sit – hands in our laps, backs ramrod straight. Except that, on this occasion, my hands were clasped together so tightly I could feel the blood pulsing painfully in my wrists.

I prayed a silent prayer, although I had little hope of it being heard by the unforgiving God whose terrible wrath my grandmother had described to me so often and in such frightening detail.

‘Please,’ I kept repeating over and over in my head. ‘Please don’t let Daddy see Daisy. Please keep her hidden, just till he’s left the room. I’ll be good for ever and ever. I promise.’

I knew we’d broken the rules by taking the hamster into the living room. But I’d felt sorry for her, all alone and cold in the laundry room, and I’d been certain we’d hear my father’s key turn in the lock of the front door and would have plenty of time to slip down the back stairs and return Daisy to her cage before he’d even crossed the hallway.

Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a flash of white as the hamster ran along the arm of the chair beside me. I glanced up quickly at my father, hoping he hadn’t noticed. But, although the expression on his face barely changed, I knew that he had.

I held my breath, closing my eyes and sending tears spilling out on to my cheeks as I waited for the outburst of anger I knew was coming. To my astonishment, however, my father remained silent, and after a few seconds I dared to look up at him again. He was standing with his back to the window, his mouth twisted into a tight line of distaste as he surveyed my brother and me coldly.

Then, spitting out the words with staccato finality, he spoke directly to me as he said, ‘Take that thing back to where it belongs.’

I scooped the warm, furry body into my hands and ran from the room before he had time to change his mind. I could hardly believe what had happened. Had we really escaped the agonising lashings that were our usual punishment for any act of disobedience or sign of inadequacy? As the evening wore on and my father stayed locked in his study, it seemed that we had.

The next morning, when I crept into the kitchen for breakfast, my father didn’t look up from his newspaper. I slid silently on to a chair, taking more than usual care to prevent it scraping noisily on the flagstone floor. Then I reached out my hand towards the silver toast rack – and screamed. Squashed into a milk bottle, just a few inches from my plate, was the twisted, suffocated little body of my hamster.

My father lowered his newspaper and leaned across the table towards me. His face was contorted into an ugly expression of vengeful satisfaction as he said, in a slow, even drawl, ‘And that’s what happens when you don’t do what you’re told.’

I was heartbroken. My whole body was shaking and I felt sick with shock and with the knowledge that the horrible death my little hamster had suffered had been my fault. If I hadn’t broken the rules, Daisy would still be scuttling around happily in her cage. And, in that moment, I knew that my father was right: I was worthless and bad, because by not doing what I’d been told, I’d killed her.