Escape From Evil - Cathy Wilson [92]
I was a nervous wreck for hours after. I tried to hide it from Daniel, but I was scared. I hadn’t seen that side of Peter – that violent tendency – since Daniel was born. I thought it had passed. I was wrong. It was back and, based on past experience, now that he’d done it once, he would do it again. It was about to get worse.
But it’s all right, I stupidly told myself, as long as he only threatens me – and not my son.
For a while afterwards, just seeing him reminded me of his contorted face during that last burst of anger and I felt sick just being in the same room. But then he shocked me.
‘I’ve been thinking about what you said.’
‘About getting a job?’
‘Fuck that. No, this place, you’re right. It’s too small. I’ve registered us on the council exchange scheme. We’ll be out of here in no time.’
I never gave a second thought to what he spent all day doing, but obviously a minute or two had gone into researching the rights of council-house tenants. I shouldn’t have been surprised. He could have written a book about benefit claims. Apparently you could advertise your council property to other tenants and, if both parties agreed, just swap homes.
‘Who’s going to want to swap a bigger place for this?’ I said. ‘You’d have to be desperate.’
I was right.
Obviously there was no one in Brighton mad enough to trade with us. Nor Kent, London, any of the Home Counties in fact. The nearest council with anything like a potential swap was in Corby. I didn’t have a clue where Corby was.
‘It’s in the middle of the country,’ Peter explained.
I thought anything further than London was the North, so the middle sounded close.
‘Okay then,’ I agreed, ‘let’s take a look.’
Corby turned out to be a lot further away than I’d realized. The further we travelled in the second-hand Metro Peter had come home with one day, the more I wondered what sort of person would consider giving up a three-bedroom house for a one-bed flat. Maybe they were downsizing and wanted to be near the coast?
Or maybe, as it turned out, they’d destroyed one home and were desperate for anywhere else.
Where we were living in Brighton wasn’t anything like five-star, but it had fresh air and a sea view from the end of the street. This was like driving into hell. We parked on the outskirts of this grim-looking housing estate and I didn’t want to get out of the car.
‘Come on, it’ll be nice inside,’ Peter insisted, so out we got and set off down a warren of gloomy, narrow paths. I’m sure the whole place had been designed originally to provide green space for children to play in without cars. What they’d actually ended up with was pavements full of hypodermic needles, bottles, fag butts and graffiti, stinking of urine, dirty nappies and leftover rubbish. The idea of pushing my baby’s buggy round there every day made me feel sick, so my mind was made up even before we reached the house.
Let’s just say, I don’t think it was a hasty decision. We couldn’t knock on the door because it was hanging off its hinges. Two panes of glass were broken in the lounge window and there was graffiti all over the walls – and inside was even worse. There was a threadbare carpet, a mattress on the floor in one room, rubbish everywhere and, most revolting of all, piles of dog mess dotted around. I’d never seen anything like it. Even in Mum’s worst days, she wouldn’t have lived like this. Somehow, among all the crap, a family of four was living there. It would have been a squeeze, but I could see how they thought our tiny flat would have been an improvement.
We looked at other places: one in Lincoln and another in Portsmouth, both horrible, although nothing like Corby. I’d pretty much given up on the idea and was making tentative noises once more about working. That must have scared Peter because, out of the blue one day, he announced, ‘I’ve found it. The perfect house.’
‘Really?’
‘Really,’ he said, and handed me a sheaf of photographs. They were of a nice, neat three-bedroom house. The décor wasn’t to my taste, but it seemed well-presented, lovingly so, in fact,