The Little Prisoner_ A Memoir - Jane Elliott [48]
The flat was up about eighty stairs, with views over the whole town. On our first night there Emma slept through the night for the first time ever, as if she instinctively knew that she could now relax. The neighbours were all very friendly, although God knows what they were up to. The smells coming through the walls from next door had me high most of the time. I was so innocent that when they came knocking on the door asking for scales I thought they were planning to do a bit of cooking, not weighing up ‘gear’ to sell. Eventually the police surrounded the block and told us all to stay in our flats. There was then a lot of shouting and banging before they drove off with my neighbours and life went back to normal. It might not have sounded like the ideal place to be bringing up a baby, but to me it seemed like paradise.
Was the nightmare finally over? Or did Richard have some vile new scheme up his sleeve? After fourteen years with him I should have known the answer to that.
Chapter Eíght
I should have known that Richard would never have given up that easily. If he was letting us move into our own flat it was because he had seen a way to work the situation to his advantage. How could I have been so naïve not to have realized? Knowing him as well as I did, why didn’t I see what was coming next?
The flat we were given was twenty minutes’ drive from Richard and Mum’s house and I truly thought I had got far enough away to be safe. I never stood a chance. Paul had a job which meant he left the flat at eight each morning, so every day at nine, after my brothers had gone to school, Richard would turn up at the front door. What could have been better for him? He had Emma and me all to himself with no chance of other family members turning up unannounced to disturb him. He had a flat with a double bed in it and knew Paul wouldn’t be back until the afternoon. His reign of terror over me could continue uninterrupted.
Paul knew that Richard dropped in all the time, although he didn’t know the half of it. If Richard was still there at a time when Paul might come home early I would slip the chain on the door so he wouldn’t walk in on us. When I heard his key in the door I would have time to stop Richard doing whatever he was doing and get to the door to unchain it. By being too terrified and ashamed to tell Paul what was going on, I’d given Richard another weapon with which to control me. Now I wasn’t just frightened of what he would do to me and Mum and Emma if I betrayed him, I had Paul to think about as well. It felt as if my head was going to explode with it all.
I tried inviting friends round at the time Richard would be there so that he wouldn’t be able to get me on my own, but he would just threaten and insult them and they weren’t willing to put up with his rudeness, so he was able to get rid of them within a few minutes.
I tried developing a few techniques of my own, like saving up Emma’s feeds until I knew Richard was due to come round, then making him hang about and wait while I made her comfortable, and taking as long as possible about it. The trouble was he always would wait, having nothing else to do, and in the end I would still have to give him what he wanted, so I would just have delayed the inevitable.
After he’d done whatever he wanted, he would sometimes make me go back with him to Mum’s house, bringing their beloved granddaughter with me. Later he would bring me back to the flat and make me do it all again before Paul got home. If I tried to hide from him, pretending I wasn’t in when he rang the intercom downstairs, he would just kick the main door open and come up anyway; the lock wasn’t strong enough to keep him out.
Sometimes I would go to other people’s houses, but he would bring my brothers round to help him root me out and to look