Читать книгу Running From The Devil - How I Survived a Stolen Childhood - Sara Davies - Страница 13

5

My Father the Monster

Even though we were all living in fear of my father, Carl, little Louise, our baby sister, and I played together a lot while Dad was out at the pub or, more often, at other women’s houses. We played as though we were normal, happy children, often forgetting the price we would later pay for our actions. One incident I recall was when Carl and I decided it would be a good idea to play with Mum’s tubes of Avon cream. Squirting them at each other and pretending they were our light sabres, we were convinced we were in Star Wars. Carl would always play Darth Vader. I ran around the house, trying my hardest to squirt him, hoping I would win the battle. But I was clumsy and kept missing him, ending up leaving greasy marks on my father’s precious newly applied blown-vinyl wallpaper.

As soon as we saw the stains, we knew what was to come next. Mum frantically tried to remove them, all the while screaming at us, ‘What have you done? He’s going to kill me.’

She sent us to bed and we raced upstairs. I lay there with my fingers crossed for hours, praying he wouldn’t notice the marks when he came in from drinking. That night, I begged the Lord to make my father blind drunk. I’d heard that phrase many times as a little child and now I hoped it would happen to him. I was desperately hoping to be spared the severe beating that I knew would come if he saw it.

But again my prayers weren’t answered, as I heard him shouting, ‘Who the fuck put shit ’pon my wall?’

My heart raced so much that I could hear it thumping away inside my chest. I tore across the landing and nudged my brother, whispering, ‘Carl, Carl. He’s back. Quick, hide.’ But we were too late; he was coming up the stairs. Although he weighed only about 12 stone, his footsteps sounded like he was at least 30 stone. He was angry – I could tell by the bang on each and every step. Stupidly, we ducked and tried to run for cover, which always made our fate more severe. We knew that was the worst possible thing we could have done, but it’s just a normal reaction when you know that someone is going to beat the living daylights out of you.

He raced across the room towards us – we were crying and shaking with fear by then – grabbed us by the hair and screamed in our faces, ‘Which one of you did put cream ’pon my wall?’

We tried to answer, but with each word he tugged our Afros just that little bit harder. I then said, ‘Daddy, we were playing.’

What a mistake that was!

He dragged us both downstairs, towards his precious speakers, and asked, ‘Which one do you want me to use? The speaker wire? Or my thick leather belt?’ He said this while rubbing his hands across his belt with a slight grin on his face. He knew he had won.

He had found yet another excuse to beat us. Not that he needed any. He’d beaten us many times before that night after waking us up in the same manner; often at three o’clock in the morning, because he’d lost his passport. He’d never used it since he left his home country, and he never will. Still, it was an excuse and he used it to full advantage. None of us had ever touched his passport, because he had beaten us so many times over it. But still he would wake us and beat us. I believe he knew where it was, because he always found it the following day, in the same place that he’d left it.

Later, when everyone else had left the house and it was just the two of us alone, he would apologise to me. But he never apologised to Carl; he would pick on him every day for the most trivial of things. He even used the fact that I was better at spelling than Carl, setting up spelling competitions for us. I’d always win and then Carl would get kicked around the room and my father would say, ‘How the fuck can she spell better than you? She is one year younger than you, you stupid little fucker.’

I learned over about a year that maybe I should start losing the competitions, as it was too painful to watch my beloved brother get beaten. My father clocked on to what I was doing and then would beat us both. It got to the point where, if he suggested we do a spelling test, we knew what was to come next.

The night when we played with our ‘light sabres’, we received the most horrific beating we’d ever endured up until that point. He took off all our clothes and wet the speaker wire. He then whipped us three times for every mark that was on the wall. He lashed and thrashed us until one of us owned up to doing the deed. Once I’d confessed, he took his belt off and made Carl watch me take at least thirty lashes. The pain was unbearable, so I screamed my head off, but it didn’t faze him at all. He just kept on hitting me time after time, telling me that I was a ‘fucking lying little bitch’. My back felt red raw; not an inch of it was left untouched. By the time he stopped, I could hardly walk.

The only reason he stopped was because Louise, who was only a year old at the time, had woken up and started screaming. He raced across the landing to his and my mother’s room, where Louise slept. His hands dropped into the cot and he dragged her out by her nightclothes. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing when he started slapping her legs while screaming in her face, ‘If you don’t shut up, I’ll take my belt to you, you little shit.’

Naturally, she didn’t understand, so he carried out his threat. Although I was in severe pain and weeping because of it, I had suddenly stopped crying for myself and was hurting inside because he was hitting a tiny, defenceless baby. I was five years old and had endured plenty of his beatings, but even then I kept asking myself, how can a man hit a tiny child with little arms and legs?

Fortunately, he didn’t hit her for too long. He went to bed after sending Carl and me back upstairs to our rooms. I couldn’t walk properly, so Carl helped me back to my room. The entire time he was telling me that he hated him and wanted to go and live with Nana and Granddad. I dreamed of that possibility that night and many nights afterwards. I often wished that, when my mother and father went across to the pub and left the two of us babysitting, they’d get hit by a truck while crossing the dual carriageway, just as my best friend had recently been hit. I often asked myself why an innocent child, a lovely girl, had been taken from this earth. Why was God leaving people like my mother and father here, to torture their kids?

My prayers were never answered; my father kept on playing his games. Enjoying every second of his power trips, he often left us unable to walk properly or wear our clothes on our backs, because they were completely stripped of skin. As his sexual abuse of me became more frequent, he stopped hitting me as often as he used to. He started playing his little games more often with Carl. My brother suffered awfully and in time got to the point where he wouldn’t cry because he didn’t want to let my father think that he’d won. Eventually, my father lost and stopped hitting Carl, because he knew by the look in his eyes that it was only a matter of time before he would be big enough to fight back. One day, he would be taking a beating from the very person that he had been putting through hell all his life.

My mother started receiving more and more beatings from him, as he was obviously frustrated and needed to lash out at someone. It wasn’t until I asked him one day to stop hitting her that he stopped – for at least two years. He told me that, because we had our secret, he’d do anything for me and he was never going to hit her as long as I kept our secret. But not before warning me that, if I told anyone, he would go one step further and kill her. I agreed to keep our secret, not realising that by saying that I’d given him reason to believe that I had no problem with what he was doing to me. He kept on threatening to hit my mother every time I cried after he’d sexually abused me. After a while, I stopped crying and started to bottle it all up. By doing so, I was making it ten times harder for myself to find the courage to go out and get the help I needed from someone. Although I wanted so desperately for him to stop abusing me, I believed that I should carry on so that I could save my mother’s life. The ironic thing is, there was nobody there to protect me. On the very rare occasions when I was allowed to go to school, my father would be there at the fence that ran along the dual carriageway. He would watch me play with my friends throughout my entire break, often waving at me to let me know that he was there. None of the teachers thought anything of the fact that he was there during every break.

There were times when I hoped he was there watching me. Like the time when a teacher threw me over a chair for copying someone else’s work. When that happened, I tried to explain to him that I needed help as I was struggling with my work because of my lack of schooling, but he flipped and started calling me names. I knew that my dad would be there during my break, so I waited patiently. I smiled with absolute joy when I saw him, raced over and spilled it all out as fast as I could. He almost choked on his chocolate bar as he grabbed my arm, then rushed into the school, threatening to kill my teacher. After the longest apology I’ve ever heard to date, my father was satisfied that the teacher had grovelled enough for him to be able to walk out of the room with his chest stuck out and his head in the air.

He took me straight home and on the way he told me that he already knew what the teacher had done. Apparently, he was on his way in to have him. When he said that he knew my every move and that I couldn’t do anything without him knowing, because he could see me all the time, he confirmed my fear that he was some kind of a psychic. The following day, when he sent me to the shop for his cigarettes, I raced off feeling happy to be out of the house alone. I got his cigarettes and on the way back I saw a cute and cuddly cat sitting on a fence. She was so shy that when I tried to call her she kept hiding her face. I stood there for about an hour, forgetting about my father’s cigarettes – and my life at home. I cherished every second as the cat got more confident and came towards me. Then it hit me: I’d committed a crime. How dare I not get his precious cigarettes to him within minutes of him asking? I quickly put her down and ran home, my heart thumping in my chest.

When I got there, he was waiting on the doorstep with a grin on his face. I gave him his cigarettes and raced inside. Part of me knew that he was going to beat me but hoped that he wouldn’t. As he followed me up the stairs, it seemed that he was only one step behind me. He was loving it: he’d won. Giving out the craziest laugh, chuckling and squealing, he grabbed me by the hair and the games began. ‘Didn’t I tell you I could see your every move?’ My heart raced. I kept on thinking, How does he know what I’m doing? I then asked him and he said, ‘You should have left the cat alone and brought me my cigarettes.’

Because I was only a child, I believed him and didn’t grasp that he had been watching my every move for a long time. I didn’t realise that he was just trying to keep me under his watchful eye so that I couldn’t tell anyone about him. All I felt was paranoid that he could always see me. I convinced myself that the only place I was safe from his watchful eye was under my duvet.