The Little Prisoner_ A Memoir - Jane Elliott [46]
Every Sunday Paul would go off to play football and I would have to stay at home to do the ironing for eight people and whatever else Silly Git could dream up for me, when all I wanted to do was go and watch him, like any normal girlfriend. I would beg him not to go, but I couldn’t explain to him the true reason so he didn’t take my pleas seriously. ‘Don’t worry,’ he would say when I seemed despondent, ‘we’ll soon be out of here and then you’ll be able to do whatever you want whenever you want.’ But then he thought it was just housework that was getting me down and I could never tell him the terrible truth.
When I was nine months pregnant and exhausted, both by the pregnancy and by the emotional strains of the family, I was alone in the house with Richard one afternoon and he became cross with me for ‘looking miserable’ while I swept the stairs with a hand brush. He ordered me to scrub the kitchen floor with my toothbrush as a penance for being a ‘sulky cow’. Frightened of angering him any further, in case he hit me and damaged the baby, I sank miserably to my knees and starting scrubbing.
Mum came home in the middle of it all. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
‘Scrubbing the floor,’ I said wearily.
‘What are you using?’ She was looking at me as if I was mad.
‘My toothbrush.’
‘Why?’
‘He told me to,’ I said as Richard came into the room behind her.
He immediately pretended to be amazed to find that I was actually doing it, insisting that he had been joking but that I was too much of a ‘silly bitch’ to realize it.
At that moment something inside my head snapped and I knew I couldn’t take it any more. I didn’t know what new games he was planning for me and my baby, but I couldn’t cope with them. I just wanted to end it for both of us. I didn’t want my baby to have to come into this awful life.
I went up to my bedroom and looked around for something that I could use to cut my wrists. I found a Bic razor and tried to snap the blade away from the handle.
Mum came in and stopped me. ‘Don’t be such a stupid little fucking bitch,’ she told me.
‘But he just never stops,’ I sobbed.
‘If you kill yourself then you’ve given him what he fucking wants,’ she said.
I could see she was right, but I felt so tired of it all I wasn’t sure if I cared any more. Still I gave up on my feeble suicide attempt and went back to struggling on, hoping for the best.
When Emma was born she was beautiful and I was so proud of her. Knowing that I now had a baby who was dependent on me to protect her made me doubly determined to get out of the house, just as soon as I could arrange alternative accommodation with the council. Surely now it would only be a matter of a few weeks before we were free.
Richard and Mum came into the hospital to visit me and bought flowers and a card. It sounds such a normal thing for parents to do when their daughter has a baby, but they had never done anything like that for me before in my life, or for anyone else for that matter. It was the most alien thing imaginable. On one hand it made me think that perhaps we really had turned a corner and now that I was a mother everything would be different, but on the other hand it made me wonder what Richard was up to now. It seemed that he was genuinely thrilled by the arrival of his first grandchild, especially as she was a girl, but how many times had he lulled me into a false sense of security before, only to dash my hopes with some new horror?
Mum and Richard might have been sweet to me, but something had gone very wrong between