Don't You Love Your Daddy? (11 page)

‘Sally, don’t you love your Daddy? Because I love you,’ and I opened my eyes with a start.

I knew I didn’t want to go home.

‘Can’t I stay here with you, Aunt Janet?’ I pleaded in the morning.

‘No, Sally. He’s your daddy and he misses you.’

If only I had told her then about my father and the things he made me do – how different my life would have been. I would have grown up in a loving home where his acts would merely have become a stain on my memory; one that in time I would have pushed deep into the recesses of my mind.

Later, when I reached school-leaving age, I would have talked to career advisers and my teachers and trained for work I would have been happy in. Having known caring family love I would have looked for it in the man I would choose to marry. But my silence over the next few days ensured that, for more than three decades, this would not be my fate.

A few days later, my aunt and uncle returned me to a house that, without my mother, was no longer a home.

I arrived to find a cold, distant father and an older brother who, in the few months since I had been sent away, had become grim-faced and aloof. Billy, still only a toddler, sat big-eyed and mute with a look of bafflement on his face as he watched us. Too young to understand what had happened, he was old enough to feel bewilderment and unhappiness at the permanent absence of his mother. The first few days after I had returned he stared at me as though he no longer knew who I was. He no longer played with his toys; instead he hurled them around the room. Fractious with confusion, this once happy little boy screamed in misery and anger at his mother’s disappearance.

When I tried putting my arm around him his small body was sticky and hot. Needing comfort, I tried to draw it from him by burying my face in his damp hair. But it was not my thin child’s arms that he wanted; his face crumpled and he let out bellows so loud it was almost impossible to believe that they could come from one so small.

But if he missed his mother I felt I missed her even more, and every time my father’s back was turned I searched the house for traces of her. I stood in the bedroom she had shared with my father and remembered the times I had found her lying there with the covers drawn up over her face. The pillows on her side of the bed had been removed and his were placed firmly in the centre, which was no longer covered with the crocheted spread she had taken so long to make; it had been replaced with a drab brown blanket. Wanting to touch something that had been hers I had opened the wardrobe but it was only to find that her long floaty skirts and brightly coloured tops and scarves had all disappeared. Only my father’s shirts, jackets and suits hung there.

The dressing-table was bare of her makeup and little pieces of jewellery. Not even her silver-backed hairbrush remained.

In the sitting room there were pale marks on the walls where photographs had been removed, and on the mantelpiece where my parents’ wedding photographs had stood, there was a square wooden clock. Where were the scrapbooks in which she had written those stories just for me, her watercolour paintings that she had hung in the kitchen, the pictures of dogs, cats and horses she had stuck on the fridge? The house was empty of her.

At first I refused to believe that my mother was never coming back and I hated the changes in the house that seemed to deny her very existence.

‘Where has she gone to?’ I asked Pete, on one of the rare times he was home.

Unexpectedly he sat down beside me on the sofa and put his arm around my shoulders. ‘She’s dead, Sally. You know what that is, don’t you? There was a funeral. They buried her, and she’s not coming back, ever.’ And suddenly grief poured off him in waves and I felt his chest heave and his tears as they fell. He gave deep, noisy sobs and hid his face in his hands. When finally he lifted it, I saw he was no longer a surly teenager but an unhappy lost boy with red-rimmed eyes.

‘But where is everything?’ I wailed.

He rubbed the sleeve of his jumper across his face before he spoke again. ‘Our bloody father threw everything out,’ he answered bitterly. ‘He said he didn’t want to look at it. He took all her clothes to the charity shop. I can’t even pass it in case I see them.’ Miserably he kept shaking his head as he talked, almost in disbelief. ‘He took away all her things so that even the smell of her had gone. You know that smell? The one from before she was ill? I tried to find something that still had it, so I could remember it for ever. One day I got into her wardrobe and shut the door. Even though nothing of hers was there any more, you could still get a tiny hint of her. I will never forget her, and nor must you, Sally. But he won’t even talk about her. It’s as though she was never here. I hate him.’ He wept then, and the tears ran down his face. Silently he wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, only for them to fill and overflow again as, lost in his own deep sorrow, he appeared to have forgotten I was there.

It was me then who comforted and held my big brother, and it was our shared grief that for the first time made me feel truly close to him.

The next day I went back to my old school. The children left me alone and peered out of the corners of their eyes at me curiously. Not only had I gone away for a whole term but they all knew my mother was dead. Maybe they imagined what it would be like to wake up one morning and find their own mother had disappeared. Perhaps it was just too uncomfortable for them. Too young to feel pity, an adult emotion, the children felt fear instead. They must have been told not to tease or bully me so instead they averted their eyes when I walked past them and ignored me.

At playtime it was the teacher I stood next to and she was concerned and protective of me when she realized that, no matter what was said, the children were not going to ask me to join in their games. I ached and longed for my mother every morning when I awoke and, for a few seconds, expected to hear her voice telling me it was time to get up before the realization of her permanent absence hit me. I dressed myself and went down for breakfast, which Pete now made for me. My brother and I walked to school together each morning but few words passed between us, and with every step we took my mind was full of memories of my mother.

My father, too, had changed. He seemed angry and told me that he didn’t want me talking about my mother all the time. ‘It was God’s will to take her,’ he said self-righteously.

Vainly I looked for the father who had said I was his special little girl. Not only was my mother no longer there but the father who had told me he loved me had also disappeared. In front of my grandparents or well-meaning visitors he seemed the same, but when they vanished so did his loving-father act.

It was I then who sought him out. I wanted to hear him tell me I was special and I wanted him to fill the void my mother had left. I was a small child and unaware of the game he was playing; the game to make me feel it was him I needed. Day by day he fed my insecurities by withdrawing his affection and making me doubt my mother’s love for me.

‘Your mother drank to escape from us all,’ my father told me, when I asked why she had died. ‘It proves how little she loved you, doesn’t it? Because if she’d loved you she wouldn’t have done it, and you would still have a mummy.’

He also told me something else that really frightened me. He said the social workers wanted to put Billy and me in a home – so I must be very good and look happy when they visited. ‘And whose fault is that?’ he asked. ‘Why, your mother’s, of course. If she hadn’t cried all the time, got drunk and gone into that hospital, they would never have come here checking up on us. Just you remember that, Sally.’

Those were the last words he spoke about her, and for a long time I believed him. Maybe he was right, I thought, as, for the first time since my return, he put his arms around me and held me close. Forgetting the horrid things he had made me do before I had gone to my aunt’s, I snuggled up to him. It seemed he was all I had left in a world that had become so unhappy. My grandmother did her best, but nothing could fill the emptiness my mother had left.

Within a few weeks of my return my grandmother had started babysitting on Friday nights. ‘Your father works so hard,’ she said proudly, ‘and he needs to get out.’

The first time she was to arrive after I had gone to bed. ‘Time for you to have your bath, Sally,’ my father told me, and although it was earlier than normal, I went obediently upstairs. At nearly seven I considered I was old enough to wash myself. I was in the bath when, without any warning, he walked in.

‘You’re growing up, Sally,’ he said, ‘becoming quite the little lady.’

I had reached the age when I had become shy at being looked at and tried to cover the parts of me that I thought private with my flannel.

He laughed at my efforts and prised it from my fingers. ‘What’s the matter, Sally? You love your daddy, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I whispered.

‘And you want me to love you too, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I whispered again, unable to look at him.

He bent down and ran a finger over my body. ‘Well, then, you’ll be a good girl and do what I ask, won’t you?’

And for the third time I whispered, ‘Yes.’

He lifted me out of the water, and I tensed as I remembered what had happened before. His hands ran up and down my damp body. ‘Stand still,’ he said, as I reached for the towel. Again his hand ran up my legs – and stopped when he heard the back door opening and my grandmother calling out to him.

His hand dropped from my body and, quickly wrapping the towel around my shoulders, he told me to get my nightdress on and go to bed. ‘I’ll see you later,’ he said, as he bent his head for me to kiss his cheek.

It was my grandmother who came upstairs to me and read me a story before tucking me into bed. Clutching my gonk, I drifted off to sleep.

It was the sound of her voice saying goodbye to my father as she left that woke me. I heard him moving about downstairs and then there was the sound of the stairs creaking as he came up. Fluttering tendrils of apprehension crawled up my spine when I heard his footsteps stop outside my room. My neck prickled with fear and my stomach clenched. I closed my eyes tightly: if I was asleep, wouldn’t he go away? He didn’t. ‘Sally, are you awake?’ he asked, in a voice that sounded different: it was thicker and slurred, and the tone frightened me.

Without waiting for an answer he lifted the bedclothes and the bed sagged with his weight as he climbed in beside me. ‘You’re going to be a good girl, Sally, aren’t you?’ he said. Before I could wriggle away from him he flipped me over on to my stomach and the pressure of the pillow against my face muffled any cries of protest that I could make. He pushed up my nightdress and, as he had done earlier, stroked my bare flesh. A finger slid between my legs and stroked the soft place there. Then the hard thing rubbed against me. I tried to cry out, tried to say, ‘No, don’t,’ and ‘Please stop, Daddy,’ but the pressure of his hand against my neck pushed my face harder against the pillow and silenced me.

‘Lie still, I won’t hurt you,’ he told me. His knee forced my legs apart, one hand went under my body, raising it so my bottom was high in the air, and then he pushed the hard thing between my splayed legs. In and out of them it went, and up and down he rubbed. He was careful not to let it enter me as he rubbed it in and out of the gap between the top of my legs. I tried to struggle but his grip was too strong and my arms were powerless.

His body shuddered above me and I felt wet, sticky liquid spurting over my legs and bottom. He gave a groan of pleasure. Then, lying beside me on his back, he turned me over to face him. I opened my mouth to cry out and his hand came over it.

‘I thought you were going to be a good little girl,’ he muttered, but I couldn’t answer him. ‘I do this because I love you, Sally. That’s what love is,’ he whispered in my ear.

That was when I started to be afraid and, seeing it, he tried to reassure me that what he had done was normal. ‘It’s what daddies do with their little girls,’ he explained. ‘Every little girl does it. But it’s a secret and you mustn’t talk about it. It means you love me and you are my own special little girl. You want me to love you, don’t you?’

I was too shocked and too young to reason with him and never thought to ask why, if every little girl did it, I must never talk about it. Confused by the way he had frightened me and by the warmth of his voice, I remained silent.

‘Night, night. Go to sleep now, Sally,’ he said, as he kissed my cheek, before climbing out of my bed and going to his own bedroom.

I listened to make sure he wasn’t coming back, and when I heard his contented snores, I crawled under the bedclothes and, as my mother had done, pulled them over my head.

I cried silently; tears for the lost innocence of my childhood.

Lying in bed night after night I dreaded my father’s return. Sleep eluded me and the pictures of what he had forced me to do flickered like a television newsreel behind my tightly shut eyelids. The sounds he had made rang constantly in my ears and my bedclothes still seemed to carry his smell.

I tried to conjure up a mental picture of my mother to replace those thoughts, but however much I tried there was nothing; just a blank space where once her image had been. I whispered her name over and over to myself until the word was just a meaningless sound. I no longer knew what she’d looked or she’d smelt like. Even the memory of her voice when she told me stories or laughed had disappeared. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t find her at all.