Street Kid Fights On: She thought the nightmare was over. Judy Westwater

Чтение книги онлайн.

       Chapter Seven

      Within a few months I fell pregnant again. I was excited but also scared in case anything went wrong. At nine weeks I bled again and while I lay on the floor, filled with despair, Roger called an ambulance once more. This time I kept the pregnancy though I was told to stay in bed and rest as much as possible. As I lay under the sheets, I willed that baby to be fine with every fibre in my entire being. Thankfully, the bleeding stopped and the doctor gave me instructions to take better care of myself. Under these orders Roger’s regime slackened a little and although I still had to account for the housekeeping money, make meals to his instructions and prepare his clothes for him, I noticed that he flew off the handle considerably less frequently.

      Still, I was deeply unhappy. I desperately wanted to share my whole soul with my husband but however hard I tried he simply didn’t accept me. And though the beatings were less frequent, nothing I did was ever good enough. Roger constantly changed the goal posts so I never knew quite what he wanted and over the months his jealousy and possessiveness remained as powerful as ever.

      He repeatedly demanded to know all about my life before I arrived at Belle Vue. Anyone else would have seen how much it upset me to think about my past and left well alone, but Roger was a natural bully and in that house he had absolute power.

      ‘You’re hiding something seedy, aren’t you? Something sordid, you filthy bitch,’ he persisted. ‘You can’t have grown up without a family. Why did they chuck you out then? What did you do?’

      I couldn’t answer – I just wasn’t capable of talking about it, and I’m sure he wouldn’t have believed me anyway. My refusal to tell him about my past often led to yet another tirade about the evils of women. But how could I begin to tell him? How could I explain that my father was a monster, that he’d torn me away from my mother and sisters, that I’d endured years of violence and abuse? Roger would never understand what that felt like. He’d only ever use it as ammunition against me. At least, I thought to myself, if I can just show him I am not like all these women in his head, he’ll stop.

      So I stuck with it. I thought it was the right thing to do. I was not one to give up just because the going was rough. I had been severely conditioned all my life to be subservient and made to feel that everyone else was right. As Roger shouted at me, I could have been right back in Johannesburg with my father playing his sadistic power games, or even further back to the day when Freda beat me with a curtain rod after my shoe fell down a grating. I had no real sense of myself, but I was tough and determined to keep trying. Once we had a baby, maybe he would calm down. Surely he would?

      The labour, when the time came, was harsh, but pain never bothered me – I was inured to it. I was only afraid that something would go wrong for the baby. In the end, my beautiful daughter was a forceps delivery. I held her in my arms and enjoyed the proudest and happiest feelings of my whole life. In that moment it was impossible to understand how my own mother could ever have given me up. The love I felt for my baby burned deep inside me. I would have done anything for this tiny bundle. If she had been snatched away, I would have followed her to the ends of the earth, fighting tooth and nail to keep her.

      With this child in my arms, I remembered my own mother’s coldness. I thought about the day when I was ten and I had come to visit her, after years of no contact, and she didn’t give me a proper hug or ask how I was. It was as if even as she faced me, my mother had her back turned. I had never been wanted.

      ‘What will we call her?’ Roger asked, calling me back to the moment and my own, precious baby.

      I stared at the tiny bundle in my arms and felt the enchantment of her lovely, blue eyes. ‘Helen?’ I suggested.

      He nodded. ‘All right.’

      Even in that matter, though, Roger wanted to let me know that he was the boss and later, when he went to register the birth, he gave the baby the name Judith Helen. In his family it was traditional to give a baby a family name, but it hurt that he hadn’t discussed it with me. It was hardly the worst thing that Roger had ever done but still, it demonstrated his need to have complete control of everything.

      ‘Little Judith Helen,’ I tried it out.

      Just before my fifth birthday, I’d been sent to live in an orphanage for a couple of years and the nuns there believed in a harsh regime that would train us to be obedient. One nun in particular, Sister Bridget, had been very cruel to me and I remembered how she almost spat the ‘th’ sound at the end of my name. Every time I said the word ‘Judith’, it brought back that horrible memory of her voice and the way she used to hit me with her cane for tiny infractions like putting a spoon in the kitchen drawer the wrong way round. I didn’t want my daughter’s name to bring such nasty associations into my head, so I soon started calling her Jude.

      Back in Compass Street when I got home from the hospital, I hit my stride straightaway. When Jude smiled my heart melted. Somehow motherhood came naturally to me; it was almost feral. Instinctively I just wanted to gather her up in my arms and hold her close to me all day long. I loved looking after her and spent my days organizing feeds, bathing her, changing her, talking to her and taking her out for fresh air in the park. Roger only gave me permission to take the baby as far as the clinic but I would stretch the route to include a walk in the sunshine whenever I could. He was out a lot – sometimes I’d see him in the distance, playing the slot machines in the local café. Money was very tight. I know he earned a decent salary from his daredevil rides in the Globe but he didn’t increase the housekeeping money he gave me even when there was a baby in the house and in those days there was no child benefit from the government until you had your second child.

      Roger’s tirades about my incompetence continued in one long stream from the moment he opened the front door until the moment he left the house again. It was clear that he was disappointed that Jude was a girl. ‘Just some moronic shell,’ was how he described any female. I wanted to protect my baby from this and I tried even harder to keep out of Roger’s way and have everything set out the way he liked it.

      ‘Oh you’re too good to be true, you are! I mean is this baby even mine?’ he’d shout in a temper.

      Sometimes I really feared what he might do to her. I could take anything for myself, but I was worried sick that he’d lose it one day and not realize how small and vulnerable Jude was.

      When I got pregnant again quickly I was delighted on the one hand, but very worried about how Roger might react. After all, he was so determined that I was sleeping with every man in the district that to him another pregnancy was just an opportunity to let accusations fly. If the baby was another girl I knew that he’d be even more upset. These fears were well and truly brought home when I did eventually tell him.

      ‘This baby isn’t mine,’ he raged. ‘I’ll bet you’ve been with every man you’ve ever spoken to, you slut.’