by Jo Brand
Jo Brand
To Bernie, Maisie and Eliza
My thanks to everyone who has helped me put together this novel… they know who they are. I am particularly grateful to my family for leaving me to get on with it and to my editor Martin Fletcher whose enthusiastic and friendly manner got far more out of me than any homicidal drama queen would have managed. Thanks to Vivienne for reading it all in one go and for making encouraging noises. Thanks to all the poor sods who had to drag through this, ferreting out inconsistencies and correcting my terrible punctuation. My progress from novel virgin to woman of limited experience wasn’t nearly as painful as I might have imagined. Cheers.
Martha could remember exactly when it was that she had first started hating her father. She was four years old. Before that, she had simply felt a sense of unease about the harshness of his voice, his unpleasantly smelling hands and the way her mother Pat spent most of the day looking like a rabbit that has been taken out of its cage by some schoolboys and is about to be tortured.
The Day of Hate should have been a very joyous occasion because it was her sister Mary’s seventh birthday, and in an uncharacteristically generous gesture, the Rev Brian had decided to throw a party for her. He had asked some friends and family round, but very few of either group had responded to the offer because his family didn’t like him and most of his friends were in the process of becoming unfriends.
As the Harris family so rarely entertained, the Rev Brian was in a state of advanced anxiety, manifested as a mixture of bad temper and mild hysteria. This worried Martha. Some children from Mary’s class in the small Suffolk village school had been roped in — under duress as none of them, despite the fact that they quite liked Mary, actually wanted to spend any time in the house of ‘Reverend Smelly Belly’ because he scared them. His nasal hair had been allowed to get out of control and as he always spoke to people —even small children — by shoving his face only a few inches away from theirs, it was enough to make a seven year old cry. Besides, he was a vicar.
So Rev Brian did his best to be an entertaining host, but after a couple of hours, the strain of marshalling ten grubby village children in what he considered to be his beautiful home and seeing dirty fingers travel up and down the curtains, pictures and wallpaper, his thin veneer of amiability was beginning to slip away.
Mary copped it first during a game of Pass the Parcel when she screamed a little too delightedly for the Reverend Brian’s fragile state. He hauled her into a room out of earshot and smacked her with the words, ‘Keep-the-noise-down-you-silly-girl-and-don’t-show-me-up.’ Mary had no idea what this last bit meant and was so shocked she almost forgot to cry.
Pat Harris, oblivious to the changing moods of her sulky husband, was in the kitchen humming and putting candles on the cake when the Rev Brian stamped in and said he had had enough of the little shits ruining the place, and that he was going to entertain the marauding gang of plebs in the garden, where they couldn’t do any damage.
‘Oh, come on, Brian,’ said Pat, ‘it’s only once in a blue moon and they’re having such fun. It’s nice to hear them laughing and see their little faces looking so happy. Please don’t ruin it, dear.’
This was too much for the Reverend, who had been bubbling under since that little Jim Baker from the village had cried when he discovered that the prize for winning Pass the Parcel was a Bible and since Kim Meades had wet her pants over the Persian rug in the hall when he shouted at her. He finally blew a gasket and marched Pat, holding her by the ear, through the party room, announcing as he passed that one thing he couldn’t abide was a cocky woman and the only way to deal with her was to discipline her.
Under the fixed gazes of Martha and Mary and to the confusion of the guests, he pushed Pat, who was desperately trying to make a joke out of the whole thing, into the cupboard under the stairs and locked it.
‘And stay there until you’ve learned some manners,’ he said.
Even at the age of four, Martha was mortified. Pat could be heard, pleading in her gentle voice to be let out, but Rev Brian wasn’t having any of it. He led everyone out into the garden, dismissing any protests and proving once again that people will pretty much do what they are told as long as someone is enough of a bully.
Martha could not contain her anger, and marching up to her father with all the sophistication and language control a four year old could manage, gave it to him right between the eyes. ‘I hate you, I hate you,’ she said. ‘You are a… she hesitated. ‘You are a wanker, Dad.’
Time stood still as the Rev Brian bore down upon her like a musty avalanche, scooped her up and carried her into the house. He took Martha to the bathroom where he pushed a lump of soap into her mouth. Then he hung her out of the bathroom window in as jokey a way as he could manage and shouted, ‘Here she is, we’re only having a bit of fun!’ His voice sounded as if his testicles had recently been removed and made the word ‘fun’ sound as if it meant murder.
This was too much for the ordinary village families, who filed out of the vicarage garden and as soon as they were out, quickened their pace, giggling and whispering, eager to tell whoever they could as fast as they could.
It was many months before the Rev Brian was given absolution by the village for his behaviour that day, and Mary, Pat and Martha were punished for all that period, as naturally it was their fault.
As time passed on, things didn’t get any better between Martha and her dad because Martha had decided to fight him at every opportunity. Mary, on the other hand, had decided she would submit and that would make life a lot easier. It was. The Reverend pretty much ignored her from then on, apart from the occasional scathing comment about her looks, domestic competence or choice of husband.
Both Martha and Mary had to be confirmed despite the fact that Martha had chosen, at around the age of six, to be an atheist, because she felt if God existed He wouldn’t ever allow the sort of behaviour the Rev indulged in. It was on this occasion that her father took the opportunity to give a little talk to the congregation about the nature of God, illustrating it with some stories from family life, the dénouement of which was the relating of an incident which had happened the week before.
‘Now my daughter Martha is a difficult little cuss at the best of times,’ said the Reverend Brian, ‘and not only that, she is quite greedy. Last week, for example, my wife Pat made some homemade lemonade which Martha loves and despite us urging moderation she drank gallons of the stuff. Consequently that night she wet her bed — can you believe it of a girl of eight?’
The children in the congregation sniggered and the parents looked embarrassed.
‘I am only telling you this because my wife and I kept warning Martha not to have so much lemonade or there’d be an accident,’ said the Reverend. ‘Now we adults are a bit like Martha as far as God is concerned: we don’t always heed His advice but He knows better.’
Martha felt as if all eyes were turned on her and wondered how she would survive school on Monday. Pat and Mary both burned with indignation and shame on her behalf, but neither would say anything, because Mary was now almost mute and Pat didn’t want to wind the Rev up.
After that incident, despite the number of times Martha prayed desperately in the little church, she couldn’t get God to admit that her dad was doing a crap PR job for Him or even give her a clue that He could see what she meant.
The Rev Brian haunted Martha’s nightmares for the rest of her childhood and popped into her adult dreams with alarming frequency as well. He was tolerated by the villagers who all knew he was a bit of a bastard to his family but they found him good at his job, efficient and businesslike, and therefore were prepared to accept the slightly Dickensian attitude he took towards the three women in his life.
; By the time she was a teenager, Martha’s relationship with her father was constantly stirred to boiling point by the added, ingredient of hormonal changes. Martha had thought the Rev Brian couldn’t get any worse but then he showed a side to his nature she wasn’t prepared for: he became a bit of a lech. After one evening when the Reverend, sweating and embarrassingly over-attentive, clingily waited hand and foot on Martha and her friend Joelle whose bosoms were enormous, Martha decided to size up friends on the basis of how much they would sexually arouse the Rev and hence a series of spotty, unattractive teenage girls could often be seen trudging in and out of the vicarage as if all beauty and animation had been banned. Boyfriends were recruited solely on the basis of their unsuitability, Martha bussing in drug-users and working-class boys to wind up her father and becoming sexually active at the age of fourteen.
She lost her virginity to a local farmworker who was nine-teen and she fantasized about a shotgun wedding ceremony conducted by her father, head in his cheesy hands.
Mary was neither help nor hindrance in the battle against the Reverend Brian and like a great sulking bat withdrew to her bedroom for most of her teenage years and surrounded herself with Gothic paraphernalia and dressed herself in the manner of a Victorian widow with a penchant for erotica.
Pat, who had been an innocent, cheerful farmer’s daughter attracted by the brooding bad temper of Brian as a young man, constantly berated herself for allowing her husband to treat her two daughters as if they were dangerous dogs that needed to be taught who was boss.
And despite the fact that she knew her husband was a pathetic bully, she could not quite bring herself to administer the coup-de-grace of a divorce because she wanted to feel that underneath the sulking, bad-tempered surface there was an intellectual and an idealist who still loved her very much. Unfortunately he had been replaced by this malodorous, labile old fart within a very short time of them having married, and it seemed unlikely that pre-marriage Brian would ever resurface. So Pat sat through many humiliations, both public and private, about which she was enormously ashamed and the little whispers she always seemed to hear behind her when she went to the village for some shopping or to borrow books from the library always seemed to say, ‘Pat you are pathetic, Pat you are weak, Pat you deserve what you get.’ Eventually she believed it.
The Reverend Brian did go through a period in Martha’s twenties of temporarily being struck by the teaching of Christianity as a true force for good and he thought he’d better try and win back the respect of his daughters.
Mary wasn’t too difficult. By that time she had married Derek the skull and anything which interrupted the tedium of their ordered life was welcome even if it was her irritable father attempting to slime his way back into her affections.
In contrast Martha stood firm and continued to notch up a series of coronary-inducing firsts for the Reverend Brian, including having a tattoo which said Jesus Sucks on her bum and flashing it on the odd occasion in the village when she was pissed, dropping out of college, becoming a Muslim for a while and getting a job as a waitress in a strip club in Soho.
Her three ambitions were to be a single mother, to see her mum happy, and to have her father on his knees begging for forgiveness. If he was naked and covered in the contents of a rubbish bin, all the better.
The telephone rang in Martha Harris’s twelfth-floor council flat in South London, interrupting the fantasy she was having about killing her father with a steel knitting needle thereby terminating one of his usual lectures on any subject about which he deemed himself knowledgeable, which was Everything-In-The-World-Ever-Written-Thought-Or-Said.
She picked up the phone and the image melted away. There was a silence at the other end of the line, punctuated by the occasional almost inaudible squeak, the sound you make when you are trying not to cry.
The squeak was replaced by a faltering voice. ‘It’s me … Sarah,’ it said.
‘What’s up, mate?’ said Martha.
‘I can’t tell you on the phone. Meet me in the pub in half an hour,’ said Sarah. ‘I’ll call Flower.’
Martha wanted to light up a fag, but looking down at her huge, alive tummy, she thought better of it. A potential crisis warranted a cigarette but this wasn’t a real emergency yet, although she had lost sight of what was: nowadays, getting a bad picture on Channel Four would merit at least two packs of Silk Cut. She wished she’d been brought up in a happy, hippy home which had left her serene and content, not addicted to anything and everything that staved off her anxiety, and she often thought about wreaking a terrible revenge for a lifetime of disinterest and humiliation on her father, the Reverend Brian Harris. For over thirty years now, Martha had carried around in her head a list which condemned her dad to death and it grew with almost every encounter they had.
Reasons To Kill My Dad
He is responsible for me being called ‘Martha’.
He smells like an old cheese sandwich.
He’s horrible to Mum and has made her believe she deserves it.
He’s cruel, despite the fact he’s supposed to be a representative of Jesus.
This is a random selection from hundreds of resentments nurtured during her childhood, adolescence and adult life. As soon as she could, Martha escaped from the disapproving gaze of the tiny village in Suffolk and took emotional pot-shots at the Rev from long distance, her latest involving living in this really grim council flat in South London and getting pregnant by someone she hardly knew.
Even though she relished the thought of being a single mother, Martha had genuinely made a mistake with contraception, something she was too ashamed even to tell her friends. She’d arranged a termination but hadn’t been able to go through with it — the curse of the Rev Brian’s moral values was too deeply instilled. And now ‘Lump’ was seven months old in her womb and really starting to make his or her presence felt. Nobody knew the identity of the father and Martha was determined not to tell them. Her friends thought it was because the father was someone hideous or right wing; her father thought it was because he was black; and her sister Mary thought it was because it was her husband Keith. Little did Mary know that if some enormous, bloated, syphilitic dictator and Mary’s husband Keith were the last two men left on earth, and Martha had to have sex with one of them to continue the human race, she would have tackled the north face of the Dictator, ignored the squirting, and got on with it.
Martha enjoyed telling her father about Lump and also took particular pleasure in revealing that she wasn’t sure who the father of the baby was. The news was delivered during tea one weekend at the vicarage.
‘You’re what?’ screamed the Rev Brian.
‘Pregnant,’ said Martha calmly.
‘Not married,’ spluttered the Rev Brian, disgorging biscuit crumbs onto the cat’s back. ‘What will the Parish think?’
‘That I’m an old slapper?’ suggested Martha.
At this point the Rev used some inappropriate language for a man of God and Martha left. The Reverend Brian would have liked to give his daughter a slap but as she was thirty-seven he realised this was not on, so instead he fumed to Pat, and bemoaned the fact that he hadn’t had a son who undoubtedly would have turned out more like him. Given that he had named his two daughters Martha and Mary, that meant he would, if he was being faithful to familial relationships in the Bible, have had to call his son Lazarus, and Lazarus loomed large as a figure of hate in Martha and Mary’s consciousness. Lazarus certainly would not have said ‘fuck’ to Mrs Avedon at the 1979 summer fete, Martha’s defence — that it was in response to a very boring story about the woman’s runner beans and that at least she didn’t say ‘Fuck off’ — did not impress the Rev and he went into one of his long, grim silences which really cheered Martha and her mum up, briefly.
Martha’s friends wanted to tell her that this lifelong battle against the Rev had something of the ‘cutting off her nose about it, and ask why she didn’t just relax and enjoy herself, but they never got round to it. T
here were quite enough drunken parties at which they could have told her. Flower had had a stab at it once, a couple of years ago, when they were all a bit pissed on New Year’s Eve, but Martha, who didn’t drink vodka very often, had turned nasty and threatened to punch Flower who, being of hippy stock, as evidenced by her name, withdrew swiftly and tried to persuade Sarah to tell her instead. Sarah, however, was too timid and even if she had attempted it, she possessed the subtlety of a smack in the gob, so she would just have made things worse.
Sarah was an enthusiastic consumer of modern life (except food) and all its demonic trappings, from her regular order in the newsagents for celebrity magazines to her frequent trips to Oxford Street in a tidal wave of purchasing reminiscent of the feeding frenzy of a lottery winner shortly before buying a helicopter. Flower often berated her about her rampant gobbling up of the capitalist ethos, but Sarah had no idea what capitalism was, and Flower’s frequent attempts to get Sarah on the odd protest march always elicited the sort of horrified face that Sarah reserved for someone who had borrowed her new top without asking. Sarah was the sort of person who made a cup of tea when a brilliant TV programme was on and lapped up the adverts. Along with her acceptance of the status quo, she, much more than the others, had been on a long-term pilgrimage to find a man to validate her existence in the starring role of husband and sperm provider for the future production of children. She had already worked out the kids’ names (Nathan and Emily), what they would wear at their Christenings and she wanted an elective Caesarean because this involved fewer unpleasant fluids cascading over her nightie. (No one had told Sarah yet that in the birthing process, a pretty nightie tends to metamorphose into a butcher’s apron.) Sarah found herself somewhat miffed when Martha announced her forthcoming event, in the pub, to her and Flower.
‘Are you sure you’re pregnant?’ she said.
