The Little Prisoner_ A Memoir - Jane Elliott [9]
I could tell the door was opening beside my head and I could feel Richard moving me about to wake me up. I opened my eyes and looked at him.
‘Come out here,’ he whispered, ‘quietly.’
I climbed out of the warm bed, leaving Pete sleeping peacefully, and Richard closed the door behind me. I stood on the landing, waiting as he shut the other doors on the landing and knelt down in front of me.
‘We’re going to play a little game,’ he said. ‘Shut your eyes and don’t you dare open them.’
I obeyed him without question and heard him unzipping his trousers.
‘Don’t open your eyes,’ he repeated. ‘We’re going to play the game now.’
I nodded, not wanting to make him angry.
‘I want you to play with my thumb. You hold it, and stroke it and move it up and down, and something magic will happen.’
I knew it wasn’t his thumb that he put into my hand, which also makes me think something must have happened before that, but I played along and pretended, just as he had told me. The more co-operative I was, I thought, the sooner I could get back to bed and the more likely I was to avoid a beating.
‘What is it you’re holding?’ he asked every so often as I worked away.
‘Your thumb,’ I replied obediently and then the magic happened and he told me to go to the bathroom to wash my hands. Some of his mess had spilled on the carpet and he rubbed at it with his foot, making the scratching noise that I would hear so many times over the coming years.
As I came back out of the bathroom I looked at the patch of disturbed pile on the carpet and couldn’t believe that Mum wouldn’t notice it when she got home. As the years went by more and more of these patches would appear, reminding me every time I walked past of the things I’d had to do.
‘Do you want something to eat then?’ Richard asked, and I nodded. ‘Come downstairs and I’ll make you some toast and tea.’
He was really nice to me that time, just as if we had been playing a game that we’d both enjoyed, but he wasn’t always so pleasant after he’d had his way. One night he took me into the kitchen and grabbed the long wooden-handled carving knife from the drawer, pinned me against the wall and pressed the razor-sharp blade against my neck.
‘If you ever tell anybody what we’ve done I’ll kill you,’ he snarled in my face, ‘and then I’ll kill your mum and no one will ever know because I’ll just tell them you both ran away.’
I believed he was capable of it because I’d seen how hard he beat Mum when she made him angry, slamming her head against the floor or the walls and smashing chairs down on her while I sat on the sofa watching and hugging my little brothers as they screamed. He would always tell me that it was my fault, and I believed him. I felt so guilty, and I was terrified he would kill Mum and then I would have no one to protect me from him at all.
Almost as soon as I got back home I was old enough to go to infant school. I loved everything about it, but most of all I loved the fact that it allowed me to get out of the house and be with people who appeared to like me. All through my school years there were several people who seemed to go out of their way to talk to me and ask me how I was. Only later did I discover that they were friends of my dad’s and that they were trying to find out if I was alright for him. Right from the beginning one of my friends’ mothers was reporting back to him. Because I was always so happy at school, and because I didn’t carry any visible signs of abuse, they were able to report back that all was well. If only I had known that, I could have communicated with my dad through them and maybe he would have found a way to get me out of that house.
I think there must have been some people who had an idea about some of the things going on in