The Step Child by Ford Donna & Linda Watson-Brown

Author:Ford, Donna & Linda Watson-Brown [Ford, Donna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House UK
Published: 2011-08-30T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

THE BARBER

1968

THERE SEEMED TO BE no end to the situations Helen could contrive in her quest to make my life even more intolerable. And now the sexual abuse had started, life was darker than ever before. Until recently, the only way I could deal with what I endured was to bury huge parts of my past, but the trial forced me to confront things I had tried to forget. The abuse I suffered was so frequent and so much a part of my life that it can be quite difficult to disentangle specific incidents – how many parties there were or how many times I was beaten are questions I can never answer. But some events, some characters, are horrifically clear.

There would occasionally be times when Helen was ‘nice’ to me. Her version of niceness wasn’t quite what most people managed, or even aspired to. There would never be any hint of selflessness, any notion of kindness for its own sake. There was only one reason for her to be nice to the ‘little witch’ – when she wanted something. Everything that was given to me as a treat was done so as if it were a huge sacrifice on her part. At rare times, I would be allowed to get up from my bed, get out of my room and get dressed in what passed for my good clothes.

I knew it was always for a reason. There had never been a time when it hadn’t been, so my response was mixed. Of course I enjoyed the chance of moving out of my prison, but I also knew there would be a price. And I knew what that price was likely to be. I came to dread these special ‘kindnesses’, the times when I was fully aware that escaping from where I was left to rot also meant that hell was just around the corner.

Helen had a hierarchy of demands. At the lower end, she would want me to do fairly basic things for her. In a normal relationship, in a normal family, these activities wouldn’t be a problem, but nothing was free or meaningless when Helen was around. Sometimes I would only be sent to do the shopping, or ‘messages’ as we called it. This wasn’t particularly arduous, and neither was taking Andrew for a walk to get him to sleep. When she asked me to get some milk, or take the baby out for five minutes, there was such a bland normality to reconcile with what happened at other times that confusion threatened to overwhelm me.

As I did these mind-numbing, day-to-day tasks, I wanted to scream at people: ‘Look at me! Look at this little girl being sent out for a loaf of bread! Look at this child in your shop, walking past you, standing at your side in a queue!’ But no one ever really saw me. They didn’t see the emaciated frame, the bruises, the pain in my eyes. I was just another kid.

At other times, I would be sent out because a visit from the social workers was on the cards.

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