The Little Prisoner_ A Memoir - Jane Elliott [42]
‘I ain’t sleeping next to him,’ Richard joked. ‘You swap over.’
Not being able to tell Joe why I didn’t want to swap, I had to do as he said. Once Joe was asleep, Richard’s hand crept under the covers and started fiddling with me. I just wanted to die of shame.
Despite all his apparent friendliness, Richard took great pleasure in humiliating Joe in the most childish ways possible, like putting laxatives in his drink or sending him over to the shop and then making me get into the Cortina and drive off with him before Joe got back, leaving him alone for hours while Richard made me masturbate him in the car somewhere. When we eventually got back I had to lie about where we’d been. Joe put up with all of it with really good humour and patience, but then I guess his home life wasn’t that great either, and being so young, he wasn’t in a position to make a fuss. He was an easygoing chap anyway and Richard wasn’t someone you would argue with if you didn’t have to.
Joe had said he liked the idea of getting a tattoo. ‘Time for you to get this tattoo, young man,’ Silly Git said one day and took us both down to the coast for a day out. While we were in the tattoo parlour he made me pay for him to have some swallows put on his hands. He already had Mum’s name written on his neck. It was considered quite normal in our family. Mum had quite a few tattoos on her arms. Joe chose to have an eagle on his back.
Now Richard kept asking me if Joe and I had had sex. He made it sound as if he was teasing me, but I suspected a trap so admitted nothing. And anyway, I didn’t want to talk about personal things like that with him. I didn’t want him to think that I might have done something like that and actually enjoyed it.
In the end, however, he got me down on the kitchen floor with his hand around my throat, slapping me round the face while somehow managing to convince my mum that it was all just a bit of a laugh, and I couldn’t hold out any more. Part of me was still grasping at straws, hoping that he would stop making demands on me himself if he thought I was having sex with someone, while another part of me just didn’t have the energy to lie about it any more.
‘Yes, alright,’ I admitted, ‘we’ve had sex.’
I couldn’t tell what effect my confession was having. Was I going to get a beating for being a slag? Would he be jealous or would he just make a joke of it? Would it mean that he would finally leave me alone? Would he use it as an excuse to beat up Joe?
I braced myself for a blow, but it never came. My confession didn’t send him into one of his rages after all, but it did have a dramatic effect on his attitude to me.
In all the years that my stepfather had been abusing me, he had always been careful not to actually penetrate me. I didn’t question this, or wonder why it might be, it was just the way it was and I was grateful for it. It had never occurred to me that if I had told anyone about what he did it would have been very hard for them to prove anything, but if he had been inside me while I was still a virgin, then it would have been much easier. I suppose I assumed that he got his kicks from all the other stuff and that he was happy to save the penetration for Mum. I’d walked in on them in the bedroom once by mistake. She had her back to him and looked to me as if she was asleep, or at least pretending to be, as he humped away. It had made me feel sick. Every Sunday afternoon when I was younger they would go upstairs together, leaving me to look after my brothers until they came down. Sometimes they would be up there for hours, but it would be impossible to keep four boys quiet for that long and Richard would eventually come storming downstairs to punish me for failing in my task.
Now, as soon as he knew that I had had penetrative sex with Joe, he told me that the next time he got me on my own he and I would be doing it as well. ‘Now you’ve already done it,’ he said, ‘it won’t be any different from doing it with him.’
I just