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       My Father

      I dare not, I cannot sleep. He may enter my room. What if he’s drunk? Surely he will be. He always is, and the pungent smell of alcohol is in the air whenever he’s around. I hope he doesn’t hurt me too much.

      Those are thoughts that ran through my mind again and again from a very young age. I had many sleepless nights, never knowing if I’d be safe in my own bed. Terrified of the one man that I should have been able to feel safe with. My father.

      I was raised on a characterless estate – not a very nice place to live, but we got by. My father was the local drug dealer, my mother worked in a local factory. Father was a well-respected member of the community, with a number of friends from different racial backgrounds and lifestyles. My mother and father held all-night blues parties most weekends. I’d often help out behind the breakfast bar. We’d serve up spicy, salty food cooked by my mum. She believed that by giving them enough to make their throats burn they’d keep on coming back to me for the booze. Father’s friends weren’t fazed at all by the fact that a child was selling them alcohol, but they would occasionally call me over and give me the odd fiver. I suppose, when I think about it now, it was their conscience biting back at them.

      My parents must have made a packet, what with the blues parties, selling drugs, her job, Dad’s dole money and his income from the other women. Instead of using the money to attain their goal, which was to make a better life for themselves, they would buy the other children on the estate. Every day at least two of them were in our home, quite often eating our food and sleeping in our beds, drunk. Father would make us sleep on the floor after palming us off with a bit of porridge, while they got the special treat of a curry and a cosy bed. He looked after them in such a way that it became unbelievable he could be anything other than a good man.

      The fathers of those children began to kiss his backside after he started hiding guns around the house and in the back garden for them. They’d go off and do their armed robberies, and afterwards he’d help them cover their tracks, putting his own kids at risk in the process. Until my brother and his friend dug up a handgun in our garden, they were just being typical little boys, digging around for worms. They took it straight into the house to my dad. He quickly brushed it off, saying it was probably a soldier’s gun from the war, and assured them that he’d take it to the police station. We all believed him at the time – even my mother seemed convinced – but it’s obvious now that he was lying, because the estate was newly built. I’m sure the council workmen would have noticed a gun while they were creating the garden. The estate was full of similar tales, with many people covering up for each other and the biggest rule being ‘no grasses’. Going to the police about anyone was the biggest crime you could commit.

      There were many single-parent families struggling to get by financially. A lot of them were still living with their parents, some with just the grandmother. Mostly big families, they were crammed into small two- or three-bedroom maisonettes. Young mums had sons who were committing crimes by the age of ten and daughters who were getting pregnant, sometimes as young as 13, and were totally out of control. The girls were simply following in their mothers’ footsteps and the result was a high rate of teenage pregnancy. The boys, wanting to be just like their fathers, put themselves at great risk of going to prison, or even of dying in violent and terrible circumstances at an early age.

      Most of the young girls getting pregnant were bored as there was nothing much to do on the estate. A very high percentage of them turned to drugs, with many quickly becoming addicts and ensuring their unborn babies got a terrible start in life. In almost all cases, as soon as a child was born he or she was doomed to failure, never getting the chance to see a different and better way of life.

      Almost everyone on the estate had been there all their life. With no opportunity to get out, they didn’t know any better – although not many wanted to leave in any case, because they were so used to the lifestyle they had. From what Mum has told me, even back in the second half of the 1970s and the 1980s, the place was so violent that it was a no-go area for the police. Lacking any choice, most residents stayed put and simply fought for survival. Some became desperate and there were many suicide attempts, some of them successful. Suicide became such a regular occurrence that the train line that ran across the back of our home started to feel like a graveyard. Even young children would stand in front of a train out of desperation.

      With no real idea of an alternative, people took drugs out of sheer boredom and fought among themselves. Most of them were struggling to feed their children and afford drugs at the same time. This left the kids not only starving but also heading in the same direction as their parents – towards a life of crime and self-destruction. By contrast, my father started making a packet out of the estate’s deprived and vulnerable by selling them drugs at a price that was high financially as well as physically and mentally.

      To this day, I still hear rumours about how he ‘loaned’ drugs to tenants, making them think he was doing them a big favour. In fact, he truly believed that he was bringing something to their lives. Apparently, if any of the females couldn’t pay him for their drugs at the end of the week, they’d sleep with him instead. From what I hear, getting his leg over every fool that would take him suited him fine. Most of them had his little sprogs running around the estate, and having those kids gave him a different woman he could go to every night of the week.

      By the time my mother knew about my father’s terrible ways, she was too involved to question his behaviour. His party lifestyle and newfound fortune came to an abrupt end when he became paranoid and convinced himself that the council were bugging us; he decided it was safer to stop the blues parties. He insisted that they were around, and would go into a great panic if he heard so much as a pin drop on the estate late at night. Clearly, the burden of being Mr Big was getting to him.

      It felt fantastic that summer to see him on his knees, by moonlight, digging up his marijuana plants from the garden. He put the plants in some big dustbins in my bedroom and bought some heavy-duty net curtains for my window. His paranoia had kicked in and he would stroll across the road to make sure that nobody could see the plants from the other buildings. The way he was acting, if I’d lived across the road I would have been very suspicious of his actions. Somehow, he got away with it. Again, my mother never questioned him as to why he would want to grow drugs in his kid’s bedroom. She feared him too much.

      I remember once pulling a leaf off one of his precious plants. He caught me and made me eat it. For hours afterwards, I didn’t feel very well, but he wouldn’t give me as much as a glass of water to take away the bitter taste. It was horrible, it made my head go all fuzzy and I felt terrible for days. I never touched the stuff again. I remember him saying to me, ‘Don’t touch my shit. I hope it fucking kills you next time.’

      Even without bringing in the abuse that I endured from my father, I can see now that both my parents had strange ideas on how to punish their children. From time to time, I’d try to grasp my mother’s attention, often wishing that she could see my pain and suffering, but most of the time she seemed quite angry and full of pain herself. She often cried herself to sleep at night, then the following day would scream at us for the simplest little things, like if we hadn’t put the sugar back in the exact spot where it should be. Or maybe when it was something that called for a motherly hug, say if one of us had fallen over and was crying, she’d scream, ‘Shut up, shut up,’ and start foaming at the mouth. Many times, she would threaten us, ‘You wait until your dad gets home.’ At those words, we’d quake in our boots and behave for the rest of the day. Even though she knew that he would beat us, depending on her mood she might tell him that we’d misbehaved. In fact, often she sat back and watched us get beaten. Then they’d put us to bed early and sit on the sofa snuggling up to each other.

      But my mother wasn’t always that way. Sometimes she would protect us from Dad’s beatings, often lying to him to stop him from hurting us. The other times, I suppose, she’d got fed up with having to spend a fortune on eye shadow to cover up her black eyes and had found a way to distract him from hitting her. Maybe she thought it was easier to watch her kids get a beating

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