The Little Prisoner_ A Memoir - Jane Elliott [29]
A few hours after Richard left for the hospital I heard the dreaded sounds of his Cortina returning, his key in the lock and his feet on the stairs. To my horror I realized he was coming into my room first. I lay very still dreading what might come next.
‘Janey,’ he whispered as I pretended to be asleep, ‘I’m really sorry.’
He’d never ever apologized to me for anything before, but maybe he was only doing it now because he believed I was asleep and couldn’t hear him. He went back out and closed the door quietly. A few moments later I could hear him and Mum talking in their bedroom.
‘I told them the can opener slipped and stabbed me,’ he told her.
‘You could have come up with something better than that,’ she laughed.
They carried on chatting and laughing as if they had just enjoyed a grand adventure together and eventually I fell asleep, disappointed that they had made up and that it didn’t sound as if Mum was going to be leaving him.
The next morning they allowed me to lie in, telling the boys to let me sleep. This was another first. I got up and washed when I felt ready and went downstairs, expecting them to be angry with me. When I walked into the front room the sight of my mother shocked me. Her whole face was swollen and bruised and seemed to have changed shape from the beating she’d received. In the drama of the night before I hadn’t noticed the damage, or maybe it had taken a few hours to come through. She was barely recognizable.
Richard smiled at me cheerfully, as if this was a normal morning in a normal family. ‘Do you want some breakfast?’ he asked.
I nodded, not sure how to react to all this. To be allowed to lie in and then to have Richard make me breakfast was unheard of. I kept thinking there must be a catch. All day I was allowed to sit around and not asked to do anything. I wonder now if perhaps I was as bruised as my mother, because Richard had often kept me off school in the past when he had gone too far and left physical marks. I had no way of checking my appearance. The only mirror in the house was in Mum’s room, so I only got to look in it if I was vacuuming or taking in some washing.
Although I didn’t go back to school for a week that time, Mum and Richard soon got bored with being nice to me and by the next day I was back to doing the household chores. I didn’t speak, apart from saying ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ for a few days, until Richard had had enough and shouted at me for being a ‘sulky cunt’ and it was back to business as usual.
We all lived in hope that Richard would leave us, and those hopes were fulfilled when he got himself a girlfriend.
The first I heard of it was when Mum refused to iron his shirt for him one day.
‘Get your black fucking whore to iron it for you!’ she screamed.
He must have been waiting for an excuse, because he left immediately. The boys and I were over the moon and begged Mum not to ask him back.
‘We don’t want him back, do we, Mum?’ we said. ‘It’s all nice now.’
‘Don’t you worry,’ she assured us. ‘He won’t be back.’
She must have believed that herself, because a few days later she accepted a friend’s invitation to go out to the pub, which was something she would never do without Richard’s permission. While she was out he arrived back, bearing a big gold necklace as a peace offering. When he realized she’d gone out and was having a good time, his mood changed immediately. He waited like a thunderstorm brewing on the horizon. I’ll never forget the look of terror on her face when she breezed back in and found him there.
I don’t know what happened with the other woman; she was never mentioned again.
Thinking back now, with all that I have found out, I begin to wonder how much Mum did know about what was going on. There was one occasion particularly which didn’t make sense.
Richard was always very proud of his sheds, which he would