I don’t know how I manage it, but I steer the car up past the Ardler multi-storey block and up towards Clatto Park. It’s a thousand metres and all the time I’m screaming at the top of my lungs, ‘Dad, wake up you’re in your car, Dad! Dad! Wake up!’
I even muster the courage to elbow him in the side of the head – and that seems to do the trick.
‘Oh hello!’ he shouts as he wakes up, and looks at me all confused. ‘What the fuck’s going on!’
‘Look at the road, Dad, you fell asleep, you’re driving.’
He looks at my hand on the wheel then looks forward and puts his hands on the wheel.
‘Fuck me, I’m pissed,’ he says, turning right down into St Kilda Road and back towards St Fillans to the house, clipping wing mirrors all the way home.
Brilliant, I think, the fiasco’s over. My heart’s still pounding, and now he’s trying to squeeze the car into an eight foot gap. It takes him twenty minutes and he keeps nudging one car and then the other until he creates enough space for himself. He keeps saying, ‘Tell me when I’m close to the other car.’
He pushes the cars out of the way and there’s now exhaust smoke everywhere, and the noise of him revving is deafening.
We’ve spent fifty minutes doing a four-minute car journey and the cold air has sobered him up from being paralytic to that horrible cock-eyed stare he gives me when he’s pissed off. To make matters worse, Bonnie has pissed on the carpet, as she hasn’t been out all day or night and it’s now nearly four in the morning.
Dad walks into the kitchen and I go into the bedroom to check on Bonnie. She has her head squeezed under a six-inch gap under my bed with her body sticking out. I can hear Dad getting his vodka out of the cupboard and closing the fridge door where he keeps his Coke.
‘Charlie, get in here.’ His voice has changed to that horrible, familiar tone I dread. ‘Bring that fucking fleabag in here as well.’
‘Stay there girl,’ I say to Bonnie and close the bedroom door behind me and walk up the hall into the living room.
‘Sit over there.’
I walk over and sit on the couch.
‘Turn the TV on.’
I grab the remote and take it off standby and then sit back down.
He doesn’t say anything for five long minutes. He just keeps swaying and sipping his voddy.
‘What’s this shite you’ve put on?’ he hisses.
‘I don’t know, Dad, I’ll change it.’ I reach for the remote.
‘Leave it.’
Here we go, I think. But Bonnie’s safe – he’s forgotten about her.
‘Do yi ken something, yi’re no even my son, you live here but your Uncle Danny is your real dad. Yir mum thinks she’s got one over on me.’
He’s slurring his words and pouring more vodka from his half-empty litre bottle.
‘What are yi fucking looking at me for? It’s not my fault.’
I’m thinking, I hope that’s true, you evil bastard.
‘What are yi doing here anyway? You don’t live here. Nobody ever wanted yi, that’s how I got palmed off with yi. Jock the mug, he’ll look after somebody’s runt.’
Tears are running down my face. I feel like nothing, less than nothing, worse than I’ve ever felt. Like I’ve been shoved into the bottom of a deep well, and mud and dirt and filth and excrement have been shovelled on top of me. I can’t get any lower.
There’s a seething, burning rage in me, a mixture of anger and hurt, and I’ll never forget this moment. But I can’t challenge him to a scrap, even though I want to smash that vodka bottle and cut his throat with it. Dad sits forward in his chair and I know what’s about to happen. He starts by picking things up off the table and throwing them at me, the usual stuff like remote controls, lighters, ashtrays, ketchup bottles or salt containers that have been left from tea three days before.
Then he stands up and staggers towards me with a fag in one hand and his right hand clenched. I lie back on the couch and cover myself up, cringing from him, as the fag he’s smoking is getting closer and closer. He punches me in the thighs and ribs with his right hand, and all I can do is cover my face, and take the blows on the rest of my body. Then I feel this sting on my thumb, this horrible pain. He has tried to shove his fag into my eyes through my hands but he only catches my thumb, and all the sparks and the head of the fag go down my top and burn my chest.
I’m screaming in agony but that seems to make him worse. He definitely gets off on people cowering and screaming. I know for a fact he enjoys it. He keeps on going, smashing plants on my head, kicking me, punching me and dragging me around the room by the hair, kneeing me in the side of the head. There’s blood everywhere. I’m trying to drag myself behind the couch while he’s stamping on the back of my legs.
Then it stops. He’s having a breather and getting another drink of vodka.
I lie there in agony, trying to squeeze my smashed-up head between the couch and wall, a bit like Bonnie earlier. I feel his hand on my hair again, yanking me upwards. He is so pissed he falls backwards over the coffee table with me; I land on top of him looking up at the ceiling as if I’m lying on an operating table. I scramble up and stagger towards the door, pull it closed behind me, and then run into my room.
I close the bedroom door and try to drag the bed beside it to jam it shut, but my arms are aching and I can hardly stand from the stamps on my calves. I just managed to drag an old brown chest of drawers across the room and wedge it between the end of the bed and the wall. He’ll have to get a chainsaw to cut the door in half to get in here now.
I lie on the floor beside Bonnie in the corner of the room and she starts licking all the blood off my face and her ears stand up pointed at every sound Dad makes as he walks to the toilet past my door.
He’s back in the living room, bouncing off the walls, mumbling and singing to himself, playing ‘You Really Got Me’ by the Kinks on the record player – you got me so I can’t sleep at night. It’s really loud and he’s trying to sing along to Ray Davies, and it’s horrible. Sometimes it’s Sinatra, sometimes Lionel Richie, but it’s always horrible. How nobody ever comes to my rescue even one night I will never know. Somebody must have heard at least one of the times.
Maybe people just get used to the sound of a dog barking at the moon in the middle of the night.
The next day around 9 a.m. I hear a movement in the living room. I can also hear a record needle skipping – you know when the arm and needle go to the middle when you don’t change the record. I can hear the floorboards creak as he comes up the hall.
Then I see the handle on the door go down but he doesn’t shout at me as he normally would. The handle just slowly goes back up. He must think I’m sleeping, but I didn’t sleep a wink last night, I just watched the door for hours and every time he got up to go for a pee I could feel my heart pounding through my blood-soaked top.
At the age of nine I’ve already more or less lost the will to live. Dad’s out of control and has stopped saying sorry the next day. I’ll wake up in the morning and he’ll still have a drink in his hand, with the music playing full blast. I think he’s turned into an alcoholic to block out all the bad things he’s done, as he can’t face reality. Drinking is never going to solve anything, but his plan is to drown his worries in a sea of vodka.
Occasionally there are moments of respite with Dad, times when I can even laugh with him, even though they are few and far between. Dad is a full-blown alcoholic by now, but he always manages to get up the roofs the next day, as he’s still sweeping chimneys. Sometimes he takes me with him, and makes me hold the covers against the fireplace inside while he goes on the roof and sweeps it from the top. I chat away to all the old people about back in the day. Old ladies tell me stories of when they were young.
‘We had to climb up the chimney years ago.’
‘How did yi manage ti fit up there, misses?’
‘Not this chimney, we had bigger ones back then.’
I just stand there, biting my
lip, trying to stop myself asking her – how it would be possible for a fourteen-stone woman to fit up an eight-inch gap.
Then Dad’s voice comes down the chimney: ‘OK!’
That means he has finished, and I can take the covers out to clean the soot. But one time, when I take them out and look in the fireplace, there’s nothing there! Not a bit of soot in sight.
Dad has come down from the roof and walks into the room where I’m standing.
‘It’s empty, Dad.’
‘What di yi mean, it’s empty?’
‘There’s nae soot in it, Dad.’
Suddenly there’s a knock at the front door and the woman who owns the house goes to get it. Dad’s looking at me with a smirk on his face, as he has now realised what he’s done. I can hear a shout from down the hall, as the woman opens the door.
‘Jesus Christ Mary, what happened to you?’
I walk over to the living-room door to have a look at what’s going on. Then I see it. This four foot woman’s standing there, with a black Scottish terrier dog in her arms, that obviously used to be white. The woman has two white circles on her eyes where her glasses must have been and she’s covered from head to toe in black soot.
I walk back behind the door into the living room and nearly collapse. The tears are running down my face, and my body is shaking uncontrollably as I try to hold my laughter in. She looks like a panda, and the dog is sneezing like mad.
‘What’s happened, Mary?’
‘I was sitting at the fire knitting a jumper, and the next minute a massive cloud of smoke hit me in the face. It’s ruined my room.’
Well, that’s it. Even Dad has a smile on his face and I’m now in a heap on the floor, trying not to think of her big panda eyes while Dad walks up the hallway to explain why he has swept the wrong chimney.
It takes us four hours to clean that old lady’s house but it’s worth every minute.
I wake up the next morning still laughing, as it’s the funniest thing I have ever seen.
Dad has started taking me to a few jobs with him now and is also giving me new missions to go on. They range from spying in his girlfriend’s house window at three in the morning with a ladder to see if she has a man there, to climbing on roofs to steal gas caps and Chinese hats from the chimney pots.
He’s now getting some use out of me and I’d rather be out at three in the morning stealing than at home with him drunk. It’s great now, I’m actually getting some brownie points for breaking the law. I am feeling as if I have a purpose in life, scaling the rooftops like a cat and climbing up tall chimney stacks like a chimp, hugging it like a member of Greenpeace with an old oak tree.
Dad also takes me out in the car while he’s drunk, picking up sets of ladders or timber that he’s spotted while out on his travels earlier in the day. Dad seems like an alien being to me – he seems to have his own rules from his own planet. It’s a planet where people breathe Dundee smog instead of oxygen, their blood is made from vodka and they beat their kids up for sport.
And there’s no way off this planet.
Chapter Twelve
The Swag Factory
I’m now ten years old and in the years that I’ve been apart from Mum and my brothers, there have been a couple of times when Dad has tried to get rid of me by giving me away.
Once he tries to give me to his mum – my Gran – because he can’t cope, or so he says, although he’s beating me up at the time as usual, so as far as I’m concerned he’s coping in the way he’s always coped – by using me as a punch bag. I feel relieved to get away, excited, and at the same time anxious at the thought of leaving Dad and going to live with my grandparents. It would be such a huge change in my life.
Of course I should feel unwanted and unloved and rejected, but by this time nothing surprises me about Dad’s behaviour towards me and I mainly think it’s just another of his games to torment me. But at the same time I’m also wondering how am I going to cope with being stuck with two old people who I hardly really know, and am sad about not being able to see my friends at school, which up to now has been my only escape from the hell I’ve been going through.
But as it turns out, Gran doesn’t take me because she’s an old woman by now and it would just be too much for her. When Dad tells me that I’m not going to live with Gran and Granddad I experience an odd feeling of disappointment mixed with relief. I think it’s a case of better the devil you know than the one you don’t. Dad’s world is scary enough – who knows what lies beyond it? – or maybe that’s what I think at the time. Then when I’m eight he suddenly tells me he’s going to give me to my mum.
I don’t know what to think or how to feel about this. It’s so long since I last saw my mum – I was only four years old – and I’ve almost forgotten what she looks like. Besides, even though I live in constant fear of what Dad will do to me next, I’m used to being with him.
I’m also frightened of going to see my mum again as in the back of my mind I still believe what Dad told me when I was four – that if my mum gets her hands on me again she’ll try to kill me. Since that time I’ve almost forgotten her – out of sight is out of mind for me – and the only feeling I’ve had about her is that I should stay away from her. If my dad’s a monster, I’ve told myself, she must be even worse.
But I don’t dare disobey Dad and he keeps saying, ‘Yi’ll be alright, son, don’t you worry.’
So there I am, eight years old, and I go and spend a weekend with my mum. Dad drops me off on Friday evening without waiting to speak to Mum and when she opens the front door, I can see she’s overwhelmed to see me again and is finding it difficult not to cry. She reaches down to hug me and I instinctively flinch away. I don’t mean to, I can’t help it, but I have no way of dealing with this show of affection from someone who’s more or less a stranger to me. Besides, I’m not used to experiencing any kind of physical contact from an adult that isn’t a beating. It’s all too much for me.
I can see that she’s a little hurt by this, although she tries to hide it as she takes me into the house. I recognise her face but it’s like I’ve dreamt about her. She still has those blue eyes and blonde hair. But I can see that her eyes are sad – maybe I was too young to remember those sad eyes when I was not yet four years old, or maybe her sadness has grown over the years.
On the whole though she’s bright, funny and full of life and wants to make up for all those years with lots of questions. She keeps asking me about Dad and whether he’s looking after me and what he gives me to eat and in no time at all I’m finding it very hard to cope with all these questions. It’s all too different and strange, and I don’t know which way to act.
Besides, I think I’m still a little confused. Who is this person and what does she really want of me? Is she suddenly going to turn, like Dad does, and beat me? And are all these questions just the start of an interrogation session that will make Dad’s Gestapo nights seem like a tea party? Also I don’t quite know how to answer her questions as I’m scared that if I don’t answer them correctly the consequences will be even more dire than with Dad.
There are also other things about being in this strange house that have thrown me. For one thing, apart from Tommy, who I hardly remember, there’s my six-year-old younger brother Bobby who I don’t know at all, and there’s a new man – not Blake, her second husband, who I never really knew in any case, but a man called Dale. I’m not used to him and I’m not ready for any of this. I’m too used to living in captivity with Dad, too used to my prison.
The contrast between life in Mum’s house and life in Dad’s couldn’t be greater. Mum’s house is spotless and smells like flowers. There’s never a dish in the sink or a cup on the side as she’s a very clean and tidy woman. I suppose I notice this particularly as it’s so different to the filth and squalor I’m used to with Dad. And there are all these people, Mum, Dale, Tommy, Bobby. They all talk to each other in ways I’m not used to at home. What is it that seems so different? It’s all so low k
ey, for a start, quiet and friendly, a lot of bantering but it’s easy bantering, too easy for me. There must be something wrong. Something I don’t understand and no one’s explaining to me. They must be up to something.
Another thing I can’t cope with is eating with my mum and her family. We all sit down together to eat at a table and that also unnerves me. It hardly ever happens at home with Dad. The plates and knives and forks are all sparkling clean, and she’s made this special meal for me with all these vegetables I’ve never eaten at home with Dad, though we do get greens at school. And there’s tomatoes. I hate tomatoes but I daren’t tell her that; I just concentrate on the rest of the food, the lamb chops and new potatoes and roast potatoes and peas and rice and cauli and carrots and gravy which are all actually delicious and suddenly I’m wolfing it all down.
She keeps stopping me and saying, ‘It’s like you’ve never eaten before.’
What she doesn’t realise is what my eating regime is like with Dad. When I’m at home I don’t even eat some nights. I’m as thin as a sprat so I can’t defend myself against him. I’m never allowed to eat until he says and if he falls asleep I don’t dare move. So I just conk out and wake up in the morning and then I’ll be off school if he’s battered me and he’ll give me one piece of toast and then I’ll just be starving all day until I get my free dinner ticket next lunch time – I even love the lukewarm, lumpy semolina you get for pudding. Then he’ll be drunk again and I won’t eat until lunch the next day or two days if I’m off school and Dad has totally lost it on me.
By that time I’ve started to see things that aren’t there. I later find out the word is ‘hallucinating’ and when you’re getting beaten up and go without any food your brain starts to hallucinate. You just don’t know what’s going on. I sometimes put cushions over my stomach to stop the rumbling – that’s how loud my stomach can be.
When she puts me to bed – I’m sleeping in Tommy’s bed as he’s agreed to sleep in a camp bed next to it for the night – Mum asks me if I would like her to read me a bedtime story. I don’t know what to say as I’ve never had one of those before, so I just shake my head and mutter no thanks and she reads a story to Bobby instead.
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