‘Are you really me dad?’ I asked.
‘Of course I’m yer dad.’
‘No, but are you really me dad?’
“Course he’s yer dad,’ Doris said, obviously impatient with my nonsense. ‘Now go an’ get back in bed.’
I did as she instructed, not wanting to risk another outburst from either of them. The next day I left, having had none of my questions answered, and not having heard any of the things that I longed to hear.
I went back again a few weeks later, and ended up spending all my time playing with John again. I was determined not to give up and tried once more a few weeks later. By this time Dad had moved out of Doris’s house into a flat above a shop, sharing with a big bearded guy called Peter. Dad had started working for the council again on cleansing. It didn’t seem to bother him that I was coming to visit, but it didn’t seem to interest him much either.
On the second evening I was there Dad was in the shower and Peter suggested he and I went to the pub to play some pool.
‘I don’t want to go out,’ I said. ‘I want to spend some time with my dad.’
‘Your dad’s got someone coming round,’ Peter said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘We’ll just have a game of pool and then come back after.’
There was a knock at the door before I could ask any more and a girl came in. She looked about fifteen, dark haired with glasses. Confused, I went out with Peter and once we were clear of the house I asked who she was. ‘She’s a prostitute,’ he said, matter-of-factly.
I was shocked and disgusted, but I couldn’t think what to say I went along with Peter and by the time we got back to the flat the girl had gone and Dad was in the kitchen having a cup of tea and a roll-up. I wanted to ask him all the questions that were building up in my mind about what he thought of me, but he just kept talking about how he’d been stabbed in prison and I lost my nerve. I was still too terrified of him to say anything that might make him angry.
Eventually, with a surge of courage, I managed to interrupt. ‘Why did you hurt Shirley and Christina and do those things to them?’
He immediately started shouting and denying everything, saying it was all a ‘pack of lies’. There was no reasoning with him, and there was no chance I would get up the courage to ask why he had done the things he’d inflicted on me. That night I went home again on the train, realizing it was hopeless, that he was never going to be the dad I craved and there was no point hoping for it any longer. I decided I wasn’t going to see him any more.
Mum did get a boyfriend for a bit, but I was not happy about it. He was a perfectly nice man, but I was jealous, feeling it was my place to be the man of the family, and I didn’t trust any man. When he came round I would sit between them, saying things like, ‘What do you want?’ all aggressively. I was so scared that if any man got his feet under the table he would start behaving like Dad and would hurt Mum and the girls. I’d become very controlling, always needing to know everything that was going on with everyone in the family, terrified of any strangers who tried to get into our little world. I didn’t like uncertainty because I felt that could lead to danger. The man tried hard but I sensed there was something dodgy about him, and it turned out he was seeing another woman at the same time. Women like my mum never seem to have any luck with the men they attract.
By this time the house was completely knackered. The roof was leaking, the kitchen units were falling off the walls, the carpets were rotting, the walls were damp, even the beds were collapsing. There was rubbish everywhere, including a pile of old papers, which we used to chuck beside the stairs.
‘Sometimes I wish the whole place would catch on fire,’ Mum used to say, ‘then the insurance would sort us out.’
I brooded on her words. The upstairs was the worst, with no lights or heating apart from one lamp on the stairs, and it occurred to me that if there was a fire we would be able to get it all rewired, mended and decorated. I started to lay plans as to how I might make it convincing. On the morning that I finally decided to act I was the last to leave the house. Mum had gone to work, Shirley and Clare were at their special schools and Christina had already gone out. I put a match to the pile of papers, shocked by how quickly and ferociously they started to burn, and ran out of the house. I got to school, found the register sitting on a trolley and signed myself in, then went to class as normal.
In my head I rehearsed how I would explain what had happened. There was a dodgy light switch on the wall that could have blown out and sent sparks on to the newspapers below. There was also the lamp on the landing, on a long lead, and the towel that we would hang over the banister to dry, both of which could have played their part. All these stories were spinning round and round in my head as I waited for something to happen. It seemed odd that life was just carrying on as normal in the classroom when I knew what was happening just a couple of streets away. Finally someone called the teacher out and she came back in looking grave.
‘Stuart,’ she said, ‘have you got a minute?’
In the corridor outside was a social worker, whom I had recently been assigned.
‘There’s been a fire in your house,’ he said, and to my horror I started laughing out of sheer nerves. I went back into the classroom.
‘Gotta go,’ I said cheerily. ‘Me house has just burned down.’ They all laughed, because I was known as the class clown and they thought I was joking.
As soon as I saw Mum outside the house I realized one thing I had overlooked — the dog! Luckily, it had escaped the moment the fire brigade had gone in, but the thought that I might have cooked Mum’s beloved pet made me feel sick. I told the social worker that I wanted to see what had happened, because the fire brigade had made it safe by then. I was shocked by the amount of damage I had done. As well as the wood panelling on the stairs, there were polystyrene tiles on the ceilings and they had carried the fire everywhere. Our bedrooms on the top floor were gutted. Everything was blackened by the smoke and the windows were all cracked and broken — it was like walking through an alien landscape. For some reason I hadn’t expected such devastation.
The family of one of my friends from one door down the road agreed to take us in until we were able to find somewhere new for ourselves. The problem was what to do with Shirley because she needed so much help and attention and there just wasn’t room for her in another family’s house. The council suggested moving her into a home called Catherine House, where she could have her own little self-contained flat.
Our neighbours were great, but there was a limit to how long we could impose on them, and the council soon moved us to a battered wives’ refuge, The Twelve Apostles, where we had our own third-floor flat, with a great view out over the city skyline. It was a very basic place, but clean and warm. The worst thing about it was the men who would come hammering on the doors late at night, shouting for their wives and kids, their voices ugly and frightening from a mixture of anger and drink, and reminding us of all the rows we’d overheard in our childhoods.
The fire officer came to see Mum about Cranbrook Street. ‘I can’t understand how the fire started,’ he said. ‘Would you mind coming up to the house with me?’
‘Can I come, Mum?’ I jumped in, eager to make sure he saw all the possible ways it could have started.
The moment we got there I immediately started babbling on with all the possible theories I had devised in my head. I could see them both looking at me a bit oddly but I couldn’t help myself from waffling on about light switches and sparks.
‘Will you just be quiet for one minute, Stuart,’ Mum said, obviously exasperated by my hyperactivity. I don’t know if the fire brigade ever solved the mystery; I never heard any more about it.
After about three months the council found us a house of our own in an area called Platting Grove. It was semi-detached, built with sheets of grey concrete, in an estate of identical houses. They all belonged to the council at that stage so there was no individuality, no gardens or fenc
es or gates, just the bare necessities. I don’t know what happened with the insurance in the end, but I know we never got enough money together to move back into the house. We stayed put in our new council home and I dare say Mum was relieved to be free of the mortgage repayments.
Shirley decided she didn’t want to come back and live with us. She was seventeen and it seemed like a good time for her to start being a bit more independent of the family, not that she would ever have been able to live on her own without helpers to lift her around. Catherine House was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, just until we were set up to take her back, but once she got there, and started meeting boys, and particularly one boy, Wayne, who also had spina bifida, she decided she wanted to stay.
It was just the opportunity she needed to escape from her terrible childhood. When you are as poor as we were, it is impossible to give someone as handicapped as Shirley a decent life, no matter how much the government might try to make it possible. Add to that all the horrors she had had inflicted on her, or had had to witness, at the hands of our dad and you could see why Catherine House was able to offer her so much more, with their outings and all the other people there, and her trips to college. She had her own little kitchen where she could brew up for herself, and no stairs she could fall down. She finally got to do some amazing things like canoeing, pot-holing, gliding and going abroad, instead of just sitting in our front room year after year, watching us all fighting to survive and hardly ever going outside.
Our whole family was struggling with insecurities. Christina, who was sixteen by then, found it hard to build relationships with boys, always being jealous and possessive. In many ways she had taken on the role of mother in the house, even though she was still at school. She also seemed to have developed a terrible hatred for Mum, blaming her for everything that had gone wrong in our lives and accusing her of never wanting to have Shirley there. They were always rowing, with Christina crying, hitting herself and locking herself away in her room. ‘I was the one who brought her up, not you,’ she would rant. ‘You never cared about any of us.’ She was also unable to refer to Dad as anything other than ‘it’.
I was drinking more and starting to use magic mushrooms, anything to dull the pain of being me for a few hours at a time, distracting myself from the reality of my life. Mum had got herself a job behind a bar in the local pub, which meant Clare was left alone a lot of the time, just sitting and rocking and listening to Don Williams, or going upstairs and walking endlessly back and forth in her bedroom for hours at a time. She comforted herself continually with chocolate. Any suggestions on things she might do to help herself were rejected. ‘Leave me alone,’ was all she would say, and so we did. She seemed unable to tell us what she wanted, existing in a world of her own. Each day a taxi would come to transport her to a special school, just like Shirley, but whenever she was at home she just did the same things, over and over again.
I began to get interested in girls at school, but I was uncomfortable about sex. I wanted to give them pleasure, but I didn’t think I should receive any. If any girl tried to touch me I would push her away, accusing her of being a ‘filthy slag’. My feelings and urges and memories and fears had all become so entangled it was impossible to work out what I really felt or wanted. As a result the girls thought I was a really nice guy, but they also knew I was totally different to the other boys. They liked the way that I had a soft side, wanting just to hug and cuddle and be close, things we had never been able to do as a family. Once I was going out with them I wanted to be with them every second of the day. Just like Christina I became jealous and possessive. I started smoking weed for a while, trying to chill out a bit.
There was a handyman working up at Catherine House, driving the minibus and taking the residents swimming, whom Mum started going out with. Then he left his job and was replaced by another guy called Tim, whom I quite liked because he was good with Shirley. He also took over going out with Mum. One day I came walking home from school towards the house in Platting Grove and I heard some noises. It took me a moment to realize they were emanating from Mum’s open bedroom window, and that they were the sounds of two people having very vocal sex. I felt a surge of disgust, remembering all the vile things I’d been made to do and had had done to me over the years.
‘You fucking, dirty slag,’ I screamed up at the window. ‘The whole fucking street can hear you!’
I went in through the front door, slamming it shut behind me, but the noises carried on upstairs, echoing round the house, taunting me. I just wanted the noises to stop and I screamed, overcome with panic and hysteria, ‘Pack it in! Stop it, you dirty bastards!’
Tim suddenly came crashing down the stairs towards me, grabbed me by the throat, threw me against the wall and started strangling me. We struggled for a few moments before breaking apart and I stormed out of the house, desperate to get away from the whole scene, which reminded me so vividly of my childhood and my father. The sex and the violence and the anger all mixed together, leaving me frightened and disgusted. I didn’t go home that night, or the next, preferring to sleep rough on some nearby waste ground, too terrified and repulsed to be able to go back.
After a while that relationship petered out as well, and a couple of years later we discovered that Tim had had a relationship with an ex-patient from Catherine House, in a flat a few streets away from us. There was an item on the news one night, with a body being carried out of the flat. Tim was arrested and charged with murdering the woman. He was accused of strangling her and was convicted of ‘unlawful killing’. I realized I’d had a narrow escape that afternoon.
Chapter Ten
MY ROCK
Iin 1984 Dad met a woman called Barbara Hayward, I which was a pretty amazing coincidence considering Mum’s name was Heywood when he met her. He met Barbara on his bin round, when he used to stop and chat to her. She had three children from her previous marriage, two boys aged fourteen and four and a girl of ten. A few weeks after they started seeing each other he moved into their council house. So far the pattern could hardly have been more similar. They married two years later and Dad tried to persuade the kids to allow him to adopt them, but they refused. He did, however, persuade Barbara to become pregnant and she later said that their marriage started to break down from that moment onwards.
Their son, Alex, was born in the summer of 1988, twenty years after me. In 1994 Dad was charged with causing actual bodily harm to Alex, who was five by then, and to his older brother, Daniel, who was thirteen.
I hate to think what he may have been putting them through before he was stopped. The marriage split up at that point, having lasted ten years, which was the same length as his relationship with Mum. Dad immediately lost interest in them; no maintenance, no birthday cards, no Christmas presents.
When I came out of school at sixteen, with some decent exam results, I was being a pretty good lad. I smoked a bit of pot, but that was about as bad as it got. I would visit Shirley regularly in her new home. The business with her boyfriend Wayne hadn’t worked out because his family had moved him away. They were quite well-to-do and I think they thought he could do better than Shirley, but she was still very happy there, much happier than she had ever been at home. Whenever I felt a bit down, she was my rock. We knew we loved each other, although we never said it, because none of us would ever have said such a thing, and we certainly would never have touched one another affectionately. But we did know how we felt. We could laugh and joke and I would tell her off sometimes if she was being miserable because she would listen to me. I called her ‘Shirl the Whirl’.
Even though it was better than home, I felt sorry for her sometimes at Catherine House because many of the other inhabitants were mentally handicapped and she often seemed bored. There were a number of accidents around the home, one of which resulted in Shirley burning herself on an iron because the ironing board was too high; another left her badly scalded when water from a boiling kettle fell in her lap and just lay there because she
couldn’t feel anything. She was getting very irate and vocal about it all, threatening to sue them for negligence.
‘An architect came round to look at the place,’ she told me on one visit. ‘He said the place had been designed for a “standard disabled person”. I asked him what a standard disabled person looked like and he didn’t have any answer to that.’
Even though she was starting to fall out with them and believed they were picking on her, she got a lot of good out of Catherine House. The home was involved in a lot of charity work and whenever they needed a spokesperson to accept a cheque or have a picture taken for the papers, they nearly always asked Shirley to do it. All she wanted was to have a job.
‘I want to be a receptionist somewhere,’ she would tell me. ‘Answering the phone, doing some typing. That would do for me.’
I would encourage her to get down the job centre and just sit there till they gave her something, but it wasn’t really that easy. I knew how people would look at her and talk to her in public because I’d seen it myself when we all used to go out together as children. Even well-meaning people would talk to her as if she was an imbecile, just because she was in a wheelchair.
‘Are you all right, dear?’ they would enquire.
‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ she would reply. ‘It’s my legs that are damaged, not my head.’
Sometimes as a child I would see people staring at her and I would stick my tongue out and tell them to ‘fuck off’.
In a way she knew more about my past than anyone because she had always been there, sitting quietly in the corner of the room in her wheelchair, just taking in everything that went on around her, and she knew what Dad was like. Mum and Christina knew as well, of course, but they were busy getting out and about and on with their lives. Whenever I needed to find an anchor in life it was Shirley I went back to, knowing she would always be there, always the same, always pleased to see me. She was my rock, although I’m sure she never realized it. Seeing how stoical she was about her life would always give me the kick up the arse that I needed, a reminder that any troubles I might have were nothing compared with what she had to go through.
Please, Daddy, No: A Boy Betrayed Page 8
