The Little Prisoner_ A Memoir - Jane Elliott [24]
When I got to the bedroom he was standing waiting for me.
‘Shut the door,’ he said.
I obeyed.
‘You’ve been bad,’ he went on.
My heart sank. I knew I was in trouble.
‘You’re in my little black book.’
I’d never heard of this little black book before.
‘You know what for, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I lied, knowing that if I protested my innocence or ignorance he’d hit me for being cheeky or for lying.
‘You’ll have to be punished for being in the black book.’
I nodded, having no idea what he was planning but certain it would be unpleasant.
He made me kneel down in front of him and unzipped his trousers. Even though I’d never done it before, I suddenly knew what was coming next.
‘Put it in your mouth,’ he said, ‘and suck it nicely.’
The window was still open, the net curtains blowing in the breeze, and I could hear Mum outside telling the boys to keep cleaning the car and not to go inside the house. Maybe it was because they were wet and would make a mess on the carpets, or maybe it was because she didn’t want them stumbling across something they shouldn’t see. I was terrified they would come in and find us and Richard would be sent into a rage and would attack Mum and it would all be my fault. It was making me feel sick and I started crying, which made him angry.
‘Do it properly,’ he ordered, pushing my head towards him, making me gag but giving me no chance to disengage.
When I’d done it enough he took it out of my mouth and masturbated himself in front of me. We then went back downstairs to rejoin the others and continue cleaning the car as if we were one big happy family.
The sexual abuse itself was never enough for him, he always had to wrap it up in some sort of psychological torture which he would pretend was a game that we were both enjoying.
One day, for instance, when everyone else was out, he called me to the top of the stairs.
‘You owe me a favour,’ he told me. ‘So you can have a choice of how to repay me.’
The choice, it seemed, was him giving me oral sex, me doing it for him or me kissing him on the lips. I’d never had to kiss him before and I thought that would be the least disgusting of the three options. At least he wouldn’t be touching me anywhere private.
Once I had chosen the kiss he told me that I was going to have to put my tongue in his mouth. I thought I was going to die. I tried to do it so he wouldn’t become angry, but it just made me gag. Because it was so disgusting, even worse than the oral sex, I couldn’t do it properly and he became furious, making me do all three things as a punishment for doing it badly.
Thinking about it afterwards, I realized it had been a trick all along and that he had always intended to make me do everything. Any ‘games’ involving ‘choices’ were just that, games. I would always be the loser, so in the future I might as well choose the worst option first in the hope of getting it over and done with as quickly as possible.
When you’re a small child you sort of assume that your life is normal, that everyone else is going through much the same experiences as you are. The first indication I had that perhaps this wasn’t so was when I was out playing with one of my friends and she said she was going to go home.
‘But your mum’s out,’ I said, genuinely surprised by her decision.
‘It’s okay, my dad’s there,’ she replied, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and I realized that she wasn’t actually frightened of being in the house on her own with her father. Was it possible that her dad never hurt her? Was I the only