The Little Prisoner_ A Memoir - Jane Elliott [38]
Their bungalow was in a little hamlet of about ten houses and one shop. I remember the house opposite kept a huge seal in a pond in their garden. They’d rescued it after it was washed ashore in a storm as a baby and had looked after it ever since. It snowed one year when my stepdad and I were up there and I was trapped in the house with him for a week, with him acting like we were a couple or something.
Although Nan was never nice to me when I was a child, she did relent when I was about sixteen. She had just been told she had cancer and she called me over to her chair to tell me that she was sorry for everything and that she did love me really. It made me cry my eyes out, especially as she died not long after that.
Richard had a sister, too, who was as aggressive as he was. I remember Mum telling me she walked into a pub with her once and my aunt plonked one of her feet on the bar and asked a complete stranger if he liked her ‘fucking boots’. She was one of the few people who would fight Richard back, hitting as hard as he did. Once she went for him with her stiletto heel.
The night before we were due to leave on one of our trips to Nan’s, Richard and I were in the kitchen at home together. Mum had gone next door with Les to borrow the phone and the other boys were in the front room watching television. Richard started telling me all the things he and I would be doing on the way there and back, as well as while we were there. It was as if he thought I would be as pleased and excited as he was at the prospect. I was becoming angrier and angrier and I kept hearing a song in my head that had been featured on the television series Grange Hill, ‘Just say no’. I’d been thinking about those lyrics for years and for some reason, when Richard asked me if I wanted to do all these things, I just said, ‘No.’
I immediately knew I’d made a huge mistake. He pressed his forehead against mine, his eyes drilling into my eyes, cold and angry, his breath on my face.
‘What?’
I don’t know why, but I said ‘No’ again. It was as if some tiny spark of courage had finally been kindled into a flame deep inside my head.
His fist came up from nowhere and punched my head back against the tiles of the wall behind me. I started crying and tried to say sorry, but I’d made him too angry to be able to calm down now. Lost in a black fog of anger, he punched me over and over again, then grabbed my hair, dragging me away from the wall and literally kicking me into the air and out into the hallway, past the open door to the front room where my brothers were sitting. When I landed he chased after me, still kicking and shouting and telling me I was ‘an ungrateful cunt’. My brothers were screaming from the sofa for him to stop, frightened he was going to kill me, but none of them daring to move, knowing that he would turn his fury on them if they tried to interfere.
We all heard Mum’s key in the door.
‘Get up and sort yourself out,’ Richard ordered.
I stood up and tried to tidy myself as he yelled at the boys to shut up. There were clumps of my hair on the pristine red carpet and my face was blotchy from the blows. As Mum walked in I straightened myself up. The boys were silent, white-faced and shaky.
Mum must have been able to hear the screams from next door and from outside, but she was as anxious as the boys not to have Richard turn on her next.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ she asked me, sounding mildly irritated to find that I was making a fuss about something yet again.
‘Something in my eye,’ I replied, a line I often used to explain why it might look as if my eyes were watering.
As always, Mum accepted what I said at face value and didn’t ask anything else.
Considering how controlling Richard was about everything I did and everywhere I went, he was surprisingly keen for me to get a boyfriend and start having sex, and he put me on the pill as soon as he could, even before I had left school. The fact that my periods