The Little Prisoner_ A Memoir - Jane Elliott [44]
‘Lie your chair back,’ he instructed. ‘Pull your skirt up and take off your knickers.’
He climbed over to my side of the car. Pulling his trousers and pants down, he put on the condom and had full sex with me for the first time. Even after all the years of abuse and humiliation, this still seemed much worse. I couldn’t stop myself from crying, even when he ordered me to shut up. The smell of his breath on my face made me feel sick and the fact that he kept kissing me as he was doing it made me want to throw up. I wasn’t sure if it was technically a rape, since I’d known he was going to do it and hadn’t tried to stop him, but I felt as if I’d been raped. It was almost as if he had spent the previous twelve years preparing me for this.
That year Mum got a job helping out as a secretary at the boxing club my brothers went to. That meant it was just Richard and me in the house three nights a week. When I got home from work at seven the lights would all be out, so I couldn’t see where he was, but he would always be there, waiting in the dark, calling me into the living room for sex. I tried to put him off me by not washing properly, but it never made any difference to him. If I was even one minute late home he would throw my dinner in the bin and I would have to go to bed hungry, but I would still have to perform whatever tricks he had been dreaming up for me all day. It seemed the older I got, the more he was going to treat me as his sex slave. I couldn’t imagine how I was ever going to escape him now.
Chapter Seven
After Joe came Paul. I met him at a party when I was about to turn seventeen and he walked me home, but I wouldn’t let him kiss me goodnight, even though I was very keen to see him again. He must have been keen as well, because he didn’t allow my initial reluctance to put him off. He was four years older than me and, as with Joe, I started sleeping with him after we had been going out for about three months.
Richard, no doubt relishing the opportunity for another game of cat and mouse, encouraged the match, even allowing Paul to stay in my room when he was round at our house. Paul was one of those easygoing types that Richard particularly liked because he could make them do pretty much whatever he wanted.
As always, though, it was impossible to know where we were with Richard. One day he would be welcoming Paul into the house and treating him like a friend, the next he would be telling me to get rid of him and becoming angry that he was even daring to knock on the door. I would get into trouble with Richard if Paul came knocking when he didn’t feel like seeing him, and I’d also get into trouble with Paul, who never knew whether I was going to invite him in with open arms or send him packing with no explanation. The fact that Richard let us sleep together quite openly, however, seemed like a move forward. I was beginning to be awarded some of the privileges of being an adult.
One morning Paul and I were still asleep in my bed when Silly Git came crashing into the room. He seemed to be looking for something as we struggled to wake up and work out what was going on.
‘Where are they?’ he wanted to know.
‘Where are what?’ I asked sleepily
‘Where are your fucking pills?’
‘What pills?’
‘You know, the pill.’
‘Over there,’ I nodded towards my dressing table. ‘Why?’
‘Because they’re going down the fucking toilet,’ he said, taking them out of the drawer and walking out to the bathroom. ‘It’s time you made me a granddad.’
We could hear him going into the bathroom and then there was the sound of the toilet flushing. My mind was racing, trying to work out what this might mean and whether it was a trick or a potential way out for us. Richard never did anything without a reason and if he wanted us to have a baby it wasn’t because he thought it would make us happy. He would be doing it for himself in some way, but I couldn’t work out what his angle was. For a while I pretended that I didn’t want to have a baby. knowing that if Richard thought he was pleasing me he might change