The Little Prisoner_ A Memoir - Jane Elliott [25]
Eventually I mustered the courage to confide what was happening to me to my friend Hayley, having absolutely sworn her to secrecy and extracted a secret from her first in order to secure her discretion.
At first she couldn’t understand what I was trying to tell her.
‘You know,’ I said when she looked puzzled, ‘he makes me do the sort of things that married couples do.’
She was horrified and immediately wanted to tell her mum so that he could be stopped. I reminded her of her vow and of the secret I was holding of hers. I warned her I would have to kill myself if she breathed a word and she saw that I was serious. She thought for a while.
‘As he’s not your real dad,’ she suggested eventually, ‘perhaps you could just pretend you’re having an affair.’
‘I don’t want to have an affair with him!’ I wailed and from the look on her face I think she was able to understand my pain, even if she wasn’t completely able to understand what was happening to me, and knew that she could never breathe a word until I was ready. She was the best friend I could possibly have asked for. But even though I knew I could trust her, I still had rushes of panic when I thought about what would happen if she ever let my secret slip out. The next time Silly Git asked me to do something horrible I plucked up all my courage and complained that Hayley didn’t have to do that sort of thing for her dad.
‘How do you know?’ he demanded, instantly suspicious.
‘I don’t know,’ I backtracked quickly, knowing how terrible the retribution would be if he thought I’d told anyone about what happened between us. ‘I can just tell she doesn’t.’
‘You ever tell her anything and I’ll kill you,’ he promised, and I had no reason to doubt it.
Hayley and I were as inseparable as we could be, considering how little I was allowed out of the house. Whenever I was given permission we used to play rounders or skate in the car park round the corner or sit playing cards in the tourer caravan that Granddad kept parked in his drive. Even then, however, my freedom had limits. When the other kids got tired of staying in the car park and wanted to go round the block, Hayley would always stay with me, knowing I wasn’t allowed to go any further from the house. Sometimes, if Richard was off mini-cabbing for a few hours and Hayley’s mum was in with my mum, she would plead, ‘Oh, let her go with the others,’ and Mum wouldn’t be able to think up any reason why I shouldn’t be treated just like them, so I was allowed to go, but this didn’t happen often.
Knowing that she couldn’t come knocking on my door and that most of the time I was forbidden to knock on hers, Hayley used to sit on a wall just out of sight of our windows, waiting for me to come past on one of my dozens of trips to the shop every day. She never had long to wait and we would chatter all the way there and back, with her peeling off at the last corner so that Mum and Richard wouldn’t see us together and think I’d disobeyed orders and knocked for her as I’d passed. We became ‘blood sisters’ on the grass outside a block of flats in our street, picking scabs off our knees and rubbing them together so our blood would mingle. She would eventually prove to be as true and faithful as any blood sister could be, putting herself and her family in considerable danger in order to speak up for me.
Hayley’s mum was pretty friendly with mine and one evening when my stepdad was off mini-cabbing, she came over to our house for a smoke and a chat and they sent me back to Hayley’s house to babysit her little brother and sister with her. Once the little children were in bed, we decided to raid the drinks cupboard and found her mum’s bottle of Malibu, plus a few others, and pretended to each other that we were getting roaring drunk as we took swigs from each bottle.
When Hayley’s mum returned unexpectedly and said I had to go back because my dad had come home