Wake Up, Mummy by Anna Lowe

Author:Anna Lowe
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Ebury Press
Published: 2012-01-05T13:31:07+00:00

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8

Worse becomes wretched

ALMOST EVERY NIGHT, Carl would watch me while I got undressed. Then he’d hang around on the landing until Chris had gone to bed, before coming into my bedroom to abuse me.

He’d be holding a towel in one hand and a flannel rinsed out in hot water in the other, and he’d pull the covers back from my bed, lift up my nightdress, part my legs with his short, stumpy tattooed fingers and wash me. Then, as he dried me with the towel, he’d tell me how important it was for that part of my body to be washed particularly well, and I’d notice how his face grew older and uglier as he spoke. He’d ask me questions, too, about whether my friends ever discussed their fathers touching them. And when I told him they didn’t, he called me a liar, assuring me that all fathers did exactly the same thing to their daughters.

At that time, and for a long time afterwards, when Carl did things to me that I hated, I had no idea I had the right to say ‘No’ – although perhaps that was just as well, because it would only have made him angry and violent towards me. I was too young and naive for it even to have crossed my mind that what he was doing might not be normal, and I used to wonder if my mother had asked him to wash me like that. It had never happened at my grandparents’ house, but I just accepted it, as I accepted so many other unacceptable things, including being attacked and screamed at by my own mother.

Another thing I came to dread was Carl giving us our nightly bath. First, he’d run scalding hot water into the bathtub and then he’d watch impassively while we squirmed and cried out in pain as we tried to do what he told us and ‘get into the fucking bath’. According to Carl, bathing in boiling hot water was the only way to make sure we were really clean, and once again I accepted what he said without question. I’ve never understood why he did it to us – whether it was just because he enjoyed feeling he had the power to make us do whatever he liked, or whether it was because he hated us so much he liked seeing us suffer. But whatever warped, perverted reasoning lay behind it, by the time we got out of the bath we’d feel sick and faint, and our skin would be so red and sore that Carl had to cover us in talcum powder so that our mother didn’t notice and realise what he’d done.

Sometimes, he’d fill the bath with hot rather than scalding water, and then he’d take off his clothes and climb in with us. He acted as though it was fun, but I hated it. I hated knowing that he was sitting behind me where I couldn’t see him, laughing at my brother over the top of my head and making fun of me.

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