Escaping Daddy. Maria Landon

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       Chapter Four Rodney and Me

      Rodney was a brilliant family man. His commitment to his children was total and from the first moment we got together he included Brendan in that. Whenever the kids were with us he would be coming up with ideas for things to do with them, like driving off into the countryside, all of us piled into the cab of one of his trucks together, and having a picnic. Or we would go for a barbecue on the beach. He would always include Mum in these outings as well, arranging to pick up her and my young half-brother Adam who had been born in 1981, when I was fifteen.

      Rodney might have been a bit stricter with discipline sometimes than I thought was absolutely necessary, but the kids all appeared to forgive him the odd smack and had grown used to being shouted at when they didn’t obey him immediately. He insisted on instant obedience from all of us, but I was more than used to that. I had spent endless hours locked in the coal shed at home when I was small for some petty or imagined misdemeanour: sitting shivering in the dark, terrified by every sound but too frightened to call out to be released because it would result in a terrible beating, and desperate to win back Dad’s approval. I knew all about the tyrannical ways in which some fathers chose to rule over their families. Although Rodney’s kids were always respectful of him, and cautious about upsetting him, I could see they weren’t actually frightened of him in the way Terry and I had been of our father. They could have a laugh and a joke with him in a way I could never have dreamed of with mine.

      There are always people in any extended family or group of friends who are keen to stir up trouble for a newcomer to their social circle, as much for their own entertainment as anything I guess, and malicious voices were quick to tell me that Rodney’s ex-wife Sue and I were bound to end up clashing. They told me, with mock concern for my welfare, that Rodney was still in love with her and that Sue was certain to resent me having anything to do with her children. I didn’t like having this threat hanging over my head and I couldn’t get a straight answer out of Rodney about any of it, so I decided to take matters into my own hands.

      Plucking up all my courage I went round to her house to see her, wanting to set the record straight, to clear the air and make sure she didn’t think she could take any liberties with me just because I was young. If there was one thing I had learned during my years of going in and out of care homes, it was that you had to stick up for yourself from the first moment you arrived in a new environment if you didn’t want to end up being walked all over. In the past it had led to me getting a bit of a reputation for being hard in some of the institutions I had been in, when inside I had been no more than a scared, confused and insecure child.

      The moment Sue opened her front door to me with a beaming smile on her beautiful face I knew we were going to get on. She invited me in as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as if she had been looking forward to getting to know me ever since she first heard I was on the scene. The moment I voiced my worries she assured me there was no way she would ever consider going back to Rodney, however much he might want it, and it was easy to believe her.

      ‘To be honest,’ she told me, ‘I’m really glad that he’s found someone else. Now perhaps he’ll leave me alone and stop pestering me to go back to him.’

      She introduced me to her new boyfriend, Kevin, who was only sixteen–a good few years younger than her. He was a gorgeous-looking lad and I could immediately see why she wouldn’t be bothered about losing Rodney to me. At the time a lot of other people believed that Sue and Kevin’s relationship couldn’t last because of the age gap, but they were obviously totally in love.

      The gossips and mischief-makers were just as wrong about Sue and me clashing because we never had so much as a cross word about the kids or anything else. From that day onwards we became best friends and got on so well that sometimes she and I would actually go together to the kids’ parent/teacher meetings at the school. It made other people laugh to see us side by side but we didn’t care and, more importantly, neither did the kids. I guess she must have been about the same age I was when she first met Rodney, so she understood very well a lot of how I felt and what I was going through as the years went on. Maybe she felt sorry for me because she knew what lay in store and because she had managed to escape to a relationship that was so much better.

      During that first winter when Rodney and I were together, I went to work with him at the scrapyard. That was the way with all the wives in his family and I was always ready to do what he asked, even on the days when we were working in snow and ice and I thought my fingers were going to fall off every time I had to grip some freezing cold piece of metal and lug it onto a van. Rodney was a hard task-masker, expecting everyone else to work as hard as he did himself. He got the kids working for him too as soon as they were old enough and strong enough to lift things around. If he got home late from a job he would immediately send them out to load or unload the lorry for him. He would not tolerate any arguing or complaining. It was tough for them but it seemed acceptable because he worked so hard himself. It wasn’t like Dad putting me to work on the streets and then disappearing into the nearest pub with his mates, only popping out occasionally to make sure that I was pulling in the punters and not hanging back in the shadows. Rodney managed to make it seem as though we were all working in the same family business, pulling together towards a common СКАЧАТЬ