The Little Prisoner_ A Memoir - Jane Elliott [37]
Despite all the things that he did to me physically, Richard still seemed to have a fantasy life about me as well. When I was about sixteen I came home one evening from work while it was still light. Mum had taken the boys to their boxing lesson, as she always did now, and when I walked in Richard told me to have a bath immediately so the water would be hot again for the others later.
I went upstairs with a heavy heart, assuming he was going to be using it as an excuse to come into the bathroom and abuse me. There was nothing I could do to keep him out because he’d taken the lock off the door, saying that he didn’t want any locked doors in his house, which was a bit ironic given the state of his shed and all the outside doors. I guess an internal locked door would have limited his power to go wherever he wanted in the house whenever he wanted. If any one of the inside doors had had a lock we would have been able to escape him, if only for a few minutes at a time, and he wouldn’t have been able to tolerate that.
As I undressed I had a strange feeling that something creepy was about to happen. I got into the bath quickly. trying to cover myself, feeling that I was being watched. I couldn’t work out if there was a hole in the door where the lock had been or not. I rushed my bath, climbed out and swung the door open quickly, wondering if it was all in my mind, and wasn’t able to stop myself from screaming as I almost tripped over Richard kneeling on the floor with his jeans and pants around his ankles and his penis in his hand. I slammed the door shut and heard him scuffling around outside, gathering himself together. When I was sure he’d gone to his bedroom I dried myself as fast as I could and went to my bedroom to dress. The incident was never mentioned again, which was odd since Richard was never usually embarrassed when it came to talking about his urges and what he was going to be doing to me.
Usually he would try to make out that everything he did was a joke. Sometimes when I was in the kitchen washing up he would creep up behind me and stick a plastic carrier bag over my head or wrap my face in cling film. He would be laughing and I wouldn’t be able to fight back or say it was hurting or frightening me because then I would be in trouble for being ‘moody’. The first few times I instinctively fought to get the bags off, just as I had tried to fight my way out from underneath the pillows he put over my face, or I would try to push a hole through the plastic to my mouth so that I could get some air, but it only made him angry so I changed my tactics, as I had with the pillows, and just stood there, trying to carry on with the washing up as if nothing was happening, fighting to overcome the urge to panic. I hoped it would make the game too boring for him, but it just angered him because he thought I wasn’t playing along in the right spirit. I don’t know what reaction I could have come up with that would have pleased him. I doubt there was one actually.
His mum had moved away from the area by then and lived a seven-hour drive away. Every so often he used to announce out of the blue that he was taking me to stay with her for a few days. I had to go to help him ‘because of his bad leg’. I dreaded the thought of being more or less alone with him for several days in a row, knowing that my nan and granddad would never suspect a thing and wouldn’t be able to do anything to protect me even if they’d wanted to.
The reason Nan had moved was in order to live next to her sister in one of those bungalows for old people, which meant she was next door drinking tea most of the time we were there. Granddad was past noticing anything, having reached the stage of putting his shoes in the fridge and making himself teabag sandwiches. He was a nice old boy who had worked all his life as a cabinetmaker, never taking a day off and always beavering away in his shed. I never heard him swear once, which made him very different from the rest of the family. The day he retired