The Little Prisoner_ A Memoir - Jane Elliott [59]
‘We’re gonna have to move from the area quick time,’ he said.
‘Whatever you need, we’ll help with,’ she told him, ‘anything we can do.’
I’d known that Steve would have to tell his parents about what had happened to me, because that was the sort of relationship he had with them. But even that was hard because although Steve’s dad was a tough man, neither of his parents were young and I knew what my stepfather was like with his threatening phone calls, his notes through the door and the hours he would spend sitting in the Cortina outside people’s houses flashing his lights onto the windows and beeping his horn over and over again. He knew how to make people aware that they weren’t safe anywhere, especially in their own homes. He was always a master at making people’s lives a misery.
I trusted Steve’s parents, but I was terrified by the thought of anyone else knowing about our plans. The more people who knew, the greater the danger that word would get back to my stepdad and the more certain it would be that he would take it out on me when he found me. It had always been his golden rule, right from the first moment when he pressed the carving knife against my throat, that no one must ever know what went on between us when we were alone or he would kill me and Mum. Nothing he’d done in the seventeen years since then had given me any reason to doubt him. If he found out that I had talked before we managed to get away from the area, the consequences were unthinkable.
I was particularly careful to keep everything from Cheryl, because for some time she had been the one who was most likely to get trouble from Richard because of the way in which she had protected me. Even though she was as scared of him as everyone else, she had always felt she had something over him because she knew what he was up to with me, and that had given her the courage to face him down.
Paul had been telling Steve he should take Emma and me away from the area for some time. Although he would miss seeing his daughter, he had realized that there was no other way out for us. I felt terrible at the thought of not keeping in contact with him, but I knew I couldn’t, because Richard and my brothers would be putting pressure on him to tell them where I was. I just hoped that he would understand why.
I would have to cut off all my friends in just the same way. I couldn’t take the chance of them being intimidated into giving us away. If any of them stored my new number in their mobile phones, for instance, and those phones fell into unfriendly hands, I would soon start receiving abusive calls and it wouldn’t be long before I was getting visits again. I had to cut myself off completely
Richard didn’t make direct contact with me for several weeks after I confronted him, which gave us a chance to lay our plans, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t still a presence in my life, hovering threateningly in the background, letting me know that he could reappear in my life whenever he decided. The Cortina would often be in the street outside the flat, the horn going and going and going, making me want to scream.
One evening Steve went out to buy a kebab and chips, since I was still too scared to even go into the kitchen to cook in case Richard barged in through the back door. He was ages coming back and I began to worry as I hid in the bedroom. When he did eventually reappear, he was shaking like a leaf. He climbed out of the car, dragging our supper after him, ripping the bag so that there were kebab and chips falling all over the place. He had taken to carrying a hammer under his seat in case Richard had ever got him cornered in the street, and he held it in his other hand. As he stumbled towards the flats he trod on some of the fallen