Nipper (12 page)

‘
Jesus Christ Mary
, what happened to you?’

I walk over to the living-room door to have a look at what’s going on. Then I see it. This four foot woman’s standing there, with a black Scottish terrier dog in her arms, that obviously used to be white. The woman has two white circles on her eyes where her glasses must have been and she’s covered from head to toe in black soot.

I walk back behind the door into the living room and nearly collapse. The tears are running down my face, and my body is shaking uncontrollably as I try to hold my laughter in. She looks like a panda, and the dog is sneezing like mad.

‘What’s happened, Mary?’

‘I was sitting at the fire knitting a jumper, and the next minute a massive cloud of smoke hit me in the face. It’s ruined my room.’

Well, that’s it. Even Dad has a smile on his face and I’m now in a heap on the floor, trying not to think of her big panda eyes while Dad walks up the hallway to explain why he has swept the wrong chimney.

It takes us four hours to clean that old lady’s house but it’s worth every minute.

I wake up the next morning still laughing, as it’s the funniest thing I have ever seen.

Dad has started taking me to a few jobs with him now and is also giving me new missions to go on. They range from spying in his girlfriend’s house window at three in the morning
with a ladder to see if she has a man there, to climbing on roofs to steal gas caps and Chinese hats from the chimney pots.

He’s now getting some use out of me and I’d rather be out at three in the morning stealing than at home with him drunk. It’s great now, I’m actually getting some brownie points for breaking the law. I am feeling as if I have a purpose in life, scaling the rooftops like a cat and climbing up tall chimney stacks like a chimp, hugging it like a member of Greenpeace with an old oak tree.

Dad also takes me out in the car while he’s drunk, picking up sets of ladders or timber that he’s spotted while out on his travels earlier in the day. Dad seems like an alien being to me – he seems to have his own rules from his own planet. It’s a planet where people breathe Dundee smog instead of oxygen, their blood is made from vodka and they beat their kids up for sport.

And there’s no way off this planet.

I
’m now ten years old and in the years that I’ve been apart from Mum and my brothers, there have been a couple of times when Dad has tried to get rid of me by giving me away.

Once he tries to give me to his mum – my Gran – because he can’t cope, or so he says, although he’s beating me up at the time as usual, so as far as I’m concerned he’s coping in the way he’s always coped – by using me as a punch bag. I feel relieved to get away, excited, and at the same time anxious at the thought of leaving Dad and going to live with my grandparents. It would be such a huge change in my life.

Of course I should feel unwanted and unloved and rejected, but by this time nothing surprises me about Dad’s behaviour towards me and I mainly think it’s just another of his games to torment me. But at the same time I’m also wondering how am I going to cope with being stuck with
two old people who I hardly really know, and am sad about not being able to see my friends at school, which up to now has been my only escape from the hell I’ve been going through.

But as it turns out, Gran doesn’t take me because she’s an old woman by now and it would just be too much for her. When Dad tells me that I’m not going to live with Gran and Granddad I experience an odd feeling of disappointment mixed with relief. I think it’s a case of better the devil you know than the one you don’t. Dad’s world is scary enough – who knows what lies beyond it? – or maybe that’s what I think at the time. Then when I’m eight he suddenly tells me he’s going to give me to my mum.

I don’t know what to think or how to feel about this. It’s so long since I last saw my mum – I was only four years old – and I’ve almost forgotten what she looks like. Besides, even though I live in constant fear of what Dad will do to me next, I’m used to being with him.

I’m also frightened of going to see my mum again as in the back of my mind I still believe what Dad told me when I was four – that if my mum gets her hands on me again she’ll try to kill me. Since that time I’ve almost forgotten her – out of sight is out of mind for me – and the only feeling I’ve had about her is that I should stay away from her. If my dad’s a monster, I’ve told myself, she must be even worse.

But I don’t dare disobey Dad and he keeps saying, ‘Yi’ll be alright, son, don’t you worry.’

So there I am, eight years old, and I go and spend a weekend with my mum. Dad drops me off on Friday evening without waiting to speak to Mum and when she opens the front door, I can see she’s overwhelmed to see me again and is finding it difficult not to cry. She reaches down to hug me and I instinctively flinch away. I don’t mean to, I can’t help it, but I have no way of dealing with this show of affection from someone who’s more or less a stranger to me. Besides, I’m not used to experiencing any kind of physical contact from an adult that isn’t a beating. It’s all too much for me.

I can see that she’s a little hurt by this, although she tries to hide it as she takes me into the house. I recognise her face but it’s like I’ve dreamt about her. She still has those blue eyes and blonde hair. But I can see that her eyes are sad – maybe I was too young to remember those sad eyes when I was not yet four years old, or maybe her sadness has grown over the years.

On the whole though she’s bright, funny and full of life and wants to make up for all those years with lots of questions. She keeps asking me about Dad and whether he’s looking after me and what he gives me to eat and in no time at all I’m finding it very hard to cope with all these questions. It’s all too different and strange, and I don’t know which way to act.

Besides, I think I’m still a little confused. Who is this person and what does she really want of me? Is she suddenly going to turn, like Dad does, and beat me? And are all these
questions just the start of an interrogation session that will make Dad’s Gestapo nights seem like a tea party? Also I don’t quite know how to answer her questions as I’m scared that if I don’t answer them correctly the consequences will be even more dire than with Dad.

There are also other things about being in this strange house that have thrown me. For one thing, apart from Tommy, who I hardly remember, there’s my six-year-old younger brother Bobby who I don’t know at all, and there’s a new man – not Blake, her second husband, who I never really knew in any case, but a man called Dale. I’m not used to him and I’m not ready for any of this. I’m too used to living in captivity with Dad, too used to my prison.

The contrast between life in Mum’s house and life in Dad’s couldn’t be greater. Mum’s house is spotless and smells like flowers. There’s never a dish in the sink or a cup on the side as she’s a very clean and tidy woman. I suppose I notice this particularly as it’s so different to the filth and squalor I’m used to with Dad. And there are all these people, Mum, Dale, Tommy, Bobby. They all talk to each other in ways I’m not used to at home. What is it that seems so different? It’s all so low key, for a start, quiet and friendly, a lot of bantering but it’s easy bantering, too easy for me. There must be something wrong. Something I don’t understand and no one’s explaining to me. They must be up to something.

Another thing I can’t cope with is eating with my mum and her family. We all sit down together to eat at a table and
that also unnerves me. It hardly ever happens at home with Dad. The plates and knives and forks are all sparkling clean, and she’s made this special meal for me with all these vegetables I’ve never eaten at home with Dad, though we do get greens at school. And there’s tomatoes. I hate tomatoes but I daren’t tell her that; I just concentrate on the rest of the food, the lamb chops and new potatoes and roast potatoes and peas and rice and cauli and carrots and gravy which are all actually delicious and suddenly I’m wolfing it all down.

She keeps stopping me and saying, ‘It’s like you’ve never eaten before.’

What she doesn’t realise is what my eating regime is like with Dad. When I’m at home I don’t even eat some nights. I’m as thin as a sprat so I can’t defend myself against him. I’m never allowed to eat until he says and if he falls asleep I don’t dare move. So I just conk out and wake up in the morning and then I’ll be off school if he’s battered me and he’ll give me one piece of toast and then I’ll just be starving all day until I get my free dinner ticket next lunch time – I even love the lukewarm, lumpy semolina you get for pudding. Then he’ll be drunk again and I won’t eat until lunch the next day or two days if I’m off school and Dad has totally lost it on me.

By that time I’ve started to see things that aren’t there. I later find out the word is ‘hallucinating’ and when you’re getting beaten up and go without any food your brain starts to
hallucinate. You just don’t know what’s going on. I sometimes put cushions over my stomach to stop the rumbling – that’s how loud my stomach can be.

When she puts me to bed – I’m sleeping in Tommy’s bed as he’s agreed to sleep in a camp bed next to it for the night – Mum asks me if I would like her to read me a bedtime story. I don’t know what to say as I’ve never had one of those before, so I just shake my head and mutter no thanks and she reads a story to Bobby instead.

The next day, Saturday, I’m still feeling anxious and overwhelmed as I’m not used to living in a house with all these people. But I manage to get through it and in the afternoon Tommy and I play football in the local park, which is the best thing so far about the weekend. But the following day, Sunday, I suddenly panic. I’m thinking about what Dad might do to me if I’m not at home for all this time and I finally flip and run away from her house in Charleston, which is about four miles from Dundee, all the way back to St Fillans Road. For the first bit of the run my brother Tommy chases me but I manage to give him the slip. Then he finds me hiding behind a shed in a back garden. He asks me why I’ve run away and begs me to come back, but I can’t as I simply want to be back in captivity where things are familiar.

When I get back home to the filth and squalor and chaos that is Dad’s flat at St Fillans Road, it’s back to the Gestapo grilling with Dad asking me, hour after hour, about my mum and what I’ve said about him.

Dad keeps on, questioning and beating me, until I tell him what he wants to hear. Which is whatever twisted version of the truth he feels like getting me to say.

‘So did yir mum hit yi like I always told yi she would?’

‘No, Dad.’

‘So yi’re calling me a liar, eh?’

‘No Dad, I mean, you’re not a liar, but she didn’t hit me.’

‘Which is it?’

‘I don’t know, Dad.’

‘What d’yi mean, yi don’t know? Yi don’t know if she hit you like this—’

He hits me in the stomach and sends me flying across the floor.

‘Is she or is she not an evil fucking bitch?’

‘Yes Dad.’

‘Yes what?’

‘Yes Dad, she’s an evil fucking bitch.’

‘Are you swearing aboot yir own mother?’

‘No.’

‘Am I deaf then? Did my ears deceive me?’

After several hours of this I have no idea what I’m saying any more and he’s managed to beat a false confession out of me, which by now I’m even believing myself because by this time I don’t know what is the truth and what isn’t. I just have to remember not to swear as that will just be one more opportunity for him to keep on taunting me.

‘She’s a bitch, she’s a bitch, Dad, a horrible, nasty evil bitch, and I never want to see her again.’

Dad smirks. He’s got what he wanted. He’s like a policeman who’s managed to pin a crime on an innocent suspect. He’s got a result.

For months afterwards I put the whole experience of going to see Mum, what Dad forced me to say about her, and my mixed up confusion about the whole thing to the back of my mind, but now, two years later, I’m getting curious about my mum and brothers and I keep wishing I hadn’t run away that last time. Besides, my mum and dad have been speaking on the phone and have decided that it’s unfair to keep me and my brother apart because, apart from that weekend when I was eight, we haven’t seen each other for around six years. But Mum still remembers what Dad was like when they were together all those years ago and is very cautious about sending Tommy over to spend the night.

By this time I’m dying to tell someone what’s been going on with Dad – what he’s been doing to me. When I was eight it didn’t occur to me to do that – I was far too frightened to tell. But now I want someone to notice. It’s been brewing up in me for the last two years.

A few weeks after my last visit to my mum the penny finally dropped: I put two and two together and realised that Dad had blatantly lied to me when he’d told me that my mum had tried to kill me and that if she saw me again she’d
try to do the same thing. This had been sitting in the back of my mind ever since I was a nipper, not even five years old, when Dad had snatched me and I’d then chosen him to live with. It was probably the reason why I did choose him, because before I could even put words to it, he’d been telling me my mum was evil.

But after the visit when I was eight it was clear as daylight that Mum couldn’t hurt a fly, that she wasn’t that evil person, and that she had always loved me and cared about me and had wanted me all those years.

And this time, once I go and stay with her, I know almost instantly that Dad has been lying to me, and I’m filled with remorse and anger that I had allowed the wool to be pulled over my eyes all these years. I discover that all through those years she has always wanted me back. I didn’t know it at the time, but she was fighting for me every way she could. She tells me she’s written letters, tried to ring him – even my Aunt Molly, Dad’s sister – has tried to intercede on her behalf – but Dad has always stonewalled her, and of course Dad never mentioned any of this to me. When I realise this it breaks me up inside.

Why did I believe his lies? But he’s always been very clever at making me believe what he wants me to believe. I feel torn apart and upset at the deception and at what might have been. I feel like I’ve already wasted my life.