Please, Daddy, No: A Boy Betrayed. Stuart Howarth

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СКАЧАТЬ he would do it while Christina was trying to wash up, doing it all over the pots and all over her hands. She used to make a huge effort to be cleaner and tidier than the rest of us, scrubbing her trainers and socks every night. She was mature for her age.

      At other times he would make me eat some of the swill he had made for the pigs, or he would make me come downstairs in just my underpants.

      ‘Sit there.’ He would indicate the floor. Then he would feed the dogs next to me and ask if it smelt nice. I didn’t know what to say because I knew he would hit me whatever I said. I would try to nod and shake my head at the same time, so it wasn’t a yes or a no. Then he would rap his knuckles on top of my head over and over and say, ‘You’re a naughty little bastard. Nobody likes you.’

      Sometimes I would just be sitting at the table and he would ram my face into my dinner with no warning. ‘You’re a naughty little bastard, aren’t you?’ he would say as I sat there with food all over my face.

      ‘Yes, yes I am. Sorry, Daddy.’

      If Christina had angered him he might punish us together, like the times when he would feed the dogs and then make us eat bread and milk out of the same bowls. ‘This is what you would be eating if you were in prison,’ he’d tell us. ‘Make sure you eat it all up. Lick the bowl clean.’

      He didn’t seem to punish Shirley in the same way he punished us. I would see her crying sometimes and would wonder why, but I would never ask; we all knew better than to talk about personal things like that. Besides, I wouldn’t have known how to start.

      At night I used to make Christina tell me stories before I went to sleep. She had always been a bit of a reader when she could get hold of books, particularly at school. ‘Tell me a story, Christina,’ I would wheedle. ‘Tell me about Goldilocks.’

      If she didn’t tell the story exactly the same way each time, forgetting some tiny detail, I would pick her up on it. If she tried to get out of her storytelling duties I would threaten to tell Mum and Dad that she’d been swearing, because she always was. ‘I’ll go downstairs and tell them,’ I would threaten, although she must have known I would never have dared. She was always there for me, Christina, at home and at school, and I will always be grateful to her for that.

      She was becoming like the mother of the house, especially when Mum was out at work, but she still cried a lot, like a little girl. She would try to cook my tea while I was out playing, heating up beans and stuff even though she couldn’t really reach the stove properly. It always tasted pretty bad but I was happy to eat it; all the food in our house tasted bad so it made no difference. If you are hungry enough and you know there is nothing else coming, you’ll eat whatever you’re given. We used to pick chewing gum up off the streets and pop it into our mouths, chewing and spitting out the stones and dirt until it was clean and we could walk around feeling posh, like we were able to afford gum of our own.

      The council gave us the money to build an extension in order for Shirley to have a room of her own with a lift, so she didn’t have to share a bedroom with Mum and Dad, giving them more privacy as a couple. Shirley had had an operation and had a bag fitted so she didn’t pee everywhere any more. The bag would fill up and we would have to empty it for her every few hours. We also had to try to keep her clean so she didn’t get an infection where the tube went into her. It was an improvement to her life, but it hurt her sometimes because her skin would become sore where the bag was attached to her with stickers and we would have to clean her with surgical spirit and friar’s balsam. The little stickers looked like silver smiles and Christina and I used to stick them over our mouths to make it look like we were smiling.

      One afternoon I came in at the usual time, hot and tired from school and playing. Dad didn’t attack me and seemed in quite a good mood for once, so I asked if there was any pop. He gave me a bottle of what looked like lemonade. Thirsty, I took a swig and immediately gagged, realizing he had tricked me with some of Shirley’s urine. Not content with having executed his practical joke, he then forced me to keep drinking it. Seeing how much I hated it he added it to his list of regular tortures for me.

       Chapter Six OUR CLARE

      When Mum discovered she was pregnant again, Dad told me that this time he was going to have a proper son, one who would be good. His words hurt, but I still looked forward to having a brother. The day Mum went into hospital, Dad came back home alone.

      ‘Your mum died in childbirth,’ he told us, collapsing down into a chair with his head in his hands.

      The news was so terrible I could hardly take it in. How would we manage without her? If Mum were dead, we would be left totally at his mercy. Life would be unliveable without her. All three of us burst into tears of inconsolable grief and shock.

      ‘I’m only kidding,’ he said, apparently contemptuous of us for taking the joke so badly. ‘She’s had a girl. But it was a difficult birth; she could’ve died.’

      We loved Clare to bits the moment Mum brought her home, even though she had some problems. She had borderline Down’s syndrome, and hydrochephalus like Shirley. For a while Dad acted differently, a bit more like a proud father, but as it became more obvious Clare had problems, his frustrations took hold again. He told Mum it was her fault that she had had two children with problems, that it showed she wasn’t a fit mother. The doctors said it was just bad luck, as if our family needed any more of that, but he didn’t believe them. He said Mum was useless because she couldn’t even give him a son. I didn’t understand why he would say that. She’d given him me, hadn’t she? Was I really so naughty that I didn’t even count as a proper son?

      It was a relief to have Mum home from hospital, providing at least a bit of care and nurturing for us all, but at night we could hear her screaming downstairs and I knew that he was hurting her, just like he hurt me. None of us ever dared to go down to see what was happening. I didn’t even dare to go to the bathroom in the night in case I came across Dad and he would be angry, so if I knew I couldn’t hold on till morning I used to get up quietly and pee in a drawer or kneeling down on the carpet so it wouldn’t make any noise and attract attention. No one noticed the smell because the whole house stank of urine anyway. Only years later did I discover that Christina was doing exactly the same in her room on the other side of the landing.

      One night I did pluck up the courage to come out of my room for some reason in the middle of the night. I got as far as the top of the stairs and noticed that Shirley’s door was open. Peering down through the banisters I saw that Dad was lying on top of her and she was stretching out her hand, as if trying to reach me. I scurried back to my bed, not wanting to believe what I had seen. In the morning I told myself to forget the scene, convinced myself that I must have been mistaken. I had too much to think about already, I couldn’t cope with any more.

      Mum was as scared of him as we were, with all his shouting and violence. He would quite often throw his dinner at her for no good reason. She had given up work to have Clare but it wasn’t long before he was telling her she had to get another job, and she went to work at the bakery on a shift from two till ten, leaving him alone with us again every afternoon and evening. Clare would cry a lot and Dad’s answer was always to stuff some chocolate in her mouth. Her grown-up teeth turned black and had rotted away before they even had a chance to come through.

      One night, when Clare was about six months old, she was crying so loud and so long I plucked up the courage to come out of my room again and tiptoed down to the next landing to see what was wrong, my heart thumping with fear at what I might find. I saw Dad bringing her out of their room, where her cot was, and I froze, terrified he would see me, unable even СКАЧАТЬ