The Little Prisoner_ A Memoir - Jane Elliott [40]
Sometimes I would try to use my period as an excuse for why we couldn’t do something he wanted, occasionally lying about the dates, but he even found a way of turning that against me.
‘You dirty little bitch,’ he shouted at me as he came downstairs from the bathroom one day. ‘You left your fucking jam rags in the toilet and I had to flush them away.’
I knew he’d made it up because I wasn’t on my period, even though I’d told him I was, and I knew for a fact it was nothing to do with Mum, but I couldn’t say anything or I would have given myself away. I think he just got a kick out of talking to me in a degrading way. But if I actually had a boyfriend, I told myself, things were bound to be different. He wasn’t going to want to share me, was he?
As soon as I realized Richard was going to allow it, I spent as much time as I could at Nick’s house. His family were so nice. His mum really seemed to approve of me for her boy. She would buy me gold jewellery and even had a picture of Nick and I together up on her wall.
‘I always hoped you would go out with my Nick,’ she told me over and over again, making me feel really special and wanted.
One day Nick took me up to London for a trip on one of the tour buses. I fell completely in love and believed that I had finally found a way out of my terrible life.
Although Silly Git was encouraging us to be together all the time, he was also warning Nick off doing anything he would regret in the half-jokey sort of voice that he used most of the time. ‘You mess with her,’ he’d warn, ‘and I’ll be cutting your fucking dick off!’ As usual it was impossible to tell from his tone whether he was joking or serious. It was confusing, but I was so happy. For the first time in my life I felt truly loved and part of a kind family. I knew that Nick would never ever do anything to hurt me and he never pressured me about sex.
The only bad part was that Silly Git demanded that I do him a lot more favours in exchange for all the times he let me go round to Nick’s house, making me feel dirty before I even started. He would tell Mum he was paying me to cut the lawn or clean the car, but then tell me that it was really to do him a favour. It was beginning to dawn on me that he was actually paying me to do him favours in exchange for my freedom. He had turned me into something close to a prostitute as well as a slave, and I hated him for it. But at least while I had Nick there was hope that I would eventually be free, that I would soon be leaving home and spending my life with a man who loved me and was kind to me. I was falling in love for the first time and it felt very good.
I should have known better. It wasn’t long before Silly Git changed the rules of the game again and started to become jealous of the amount of time I spent at Nick’s. He would make up reasons why I couldn’t go round and then he would make up other reasons why Nick couldn’t come round to our house.
‘That boy’s taking you for a fucking idiot,’ he told me one day. ‘You have to dump him. Go and do it now and come straight back.’
I could tell from his tone of voice that he’d made up his mind. And once he’d made up his mind, that was it. I had to end the best relationship that had ever happened to me there and then, and I wouldn’t be able to explain why because then Nick would want to go round and talk to Richard about it, which would make him furious and I would get a beating. Since Nick had left school and our paths never crossed during the day, I would never even have a chance to get him on his own in order to give him a proper explanation.
I was gutted, but I knew that I wouldn’t be able to fight it. Richard had just been teasing me with a glimpse of what a life of freedom might be like and now he was going to snatch it away from me again, just to show that he could.
‘Go on, go round and fucking tell him,’ he snapped.