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and beat me with the wire from his precious speakers! The only time he would touch them was when he wanted to beat us, but if we touched them we got a beating. He was whipping me because of his love of women and money, just as he had done so many times in the past. He had hit my brother and me quite often for telling Mum about his other women. I always thought that I was doing the right thing by telling her about Dad sleeping with other women. He used to take us to many places and make us sit at the end of the bed while he went to sleep with his girlfriends. That’s what he used to call it, but even at our age we knew that he was doing more than sleeping.

      Only a few weeks before, he had taken the two of us to Emma’s flat, where we had to sit on a deckchair at the end of the bed while it was bouncing up and down and making loads of noise. Then some mice came out of the floorboards and, of course, Carl and I started screaming. Dad jumped out of bed naked and kicked us both in the face. We were silenced straight away, so scared that we cuddled each other and went to sleep. It was the only way we could make the wretched feeling go away: a definite case of mind over matter.

      We told Mum what had happened that night and she went crazy at Dad, which resulted in him being very annoyed with us. When she’d gone to work, he made us both stay off school that day. He told us to strip off every single item of clothing and scrub the kitchen floor with a scouring pad and bleach. My knees were sore from the bleach for days afterwards, which is why I wouldn’t have told my mother about what had happened with Emma and her client. And, if she hadn’t been on the other side of the road on her lunch break at that precise moment, she would never have known what happened. I had certainly learned my lesson! But she was there and she saw me running out of the shop, so I had no choice but to tell her.

      She tried to stop my father from beating me for telling her about Emma and that creep, but she got punched in her face and fell to the floor. She quickly gave in as she was in enough pain from the beatings she had received earlier on that day and probably couldn’t have taken much more. Mum was very petite, a stunning tiny blonde with beautiful sapphire-blue eyes that were always surrounded by blue and purple eye shadow to cover up her bruises from my father’s beatings. Dad was a very large black man who was very intimidating. His eyes were dark and what should have been their whites were yellow, so he looked very evil and very scary.

      After he had finished whipping me with the speaker wire, he sent me back to bed. I ran as fast as I could. I knew that, if I hesitated, or cried too loud, he would call me back and hit me again, so I raced to my room and went straight to sleep, hoping and praying that he would leave me alone for the rest of the night. That time he did and at last I got to sleep, tucked up in my duvet.

      When I woke up the following morning, Dad told me that I wasn’t going to school. Mum kissed me goodbye and went off to work. It was strange: they were both acting as though nothing had happened and the fact that my birthday had been ruined didn’t seem to bother them at all. I was surprised at my mother’s strength. She’d received a very severe beating the day before but somehow she had managed to use her make-up to hide the results. The previous day, she had looked as if she had been run over by a truck, but now she’d managed to pull it off once more and make herself look beautiful again. That morning, she was gliding around as though she wasn’t in any pain, but she must have been. She was obviously doing it for his benefit, to make him feel normal and less guilty.

      As soon as she left the house, Dad called out to me to come into the room and lie next to him on the sofa – the sofa he slept on all day every day between drinking his super-strength lagers and smoking his marijuana. My brother had gone to school and I was wishing that my father had let me go too, because he was acting stranger than ever. I thought I knew what to expect from him when he called me to the sofa. But this time it was different.

      ‘Sara, I’m going to show you what that man was going to do to you yesterday,’ he said. ‘I promise you it won’t hurt. Just take off your clothes and lie down.’

      I knew that he was going to hurt me. Whether I resisted or not, either way he would hurt me. And whether it was to be a beating or whatever else, he would get his own way, as he had all the power. After all that time of touching me, he had decided that this was the day to cross the line; a time when the word ‘father’ would go out of the window and the word ‘lover’ would come into play.

      That day was the first time he truly hurt me. Regardless of how many beatings I’d received from him before, he hurt me deeply, which is why I knew at the time that it was wrong. But I also knew that I couldn’t do a thing to stop him. I remember thinking, He does this to Mummy, I’ve seen him. I wonder if it hurts her too. He is scary. I think he wants to kill me. The pain is unbelievable! I held in my screams, fearful that he might kill me, and I almost chewed my lip off. Then I couldn’t hold it in any longer. ‘Aaah! Mummy, help me, it hurts.’

      He looked at me with his evil, cold eyes. ‘Go and get dressed and go sit under the stairs.’With a big sigh of relief, I ran to the stairs. If he really believed that sitting there was punishment compared with what he was doing to me, he must have been crazier than I thought! I sat quietly and waited all day for my mother to come home from work. I was sick a few times, yet, showing no sympathy, all he gave me was a bowl to throw up in. I sat and played quietly with the phone, which wasn’t connected, but I could hear the radio on it playing. That phone gave me a little bit of comfort, but I still panicked that he might hear me playing with it and come and beat me.

      It seemed like days rather than hours before Mum arrived home from work. I was so pleased to see her I could have cried, but I knew not to, as he would have got very angry with me for showing her any emotions. He hated to see us cry is what he used to say. I never understood that at all. I used to ask myself why he tried so hard to make us cry if he hated it so much. The way he put it, if you didn’t know him, you’d think that he meant it from a loving father’s point of view. But no, he didn’t like to see us cry because he knew he was causing the pain that we were suffering. In hindsight, I suppose it was the only time he showed any remorse for his actions.

      As soon as my mother walked through the door, he started shouting, ‘That girl has been so naughty. Make her eat her dinner and put her straight to bed. I’m going out, I’ll see you all later.’

      Mum never asked him what I’d done; she never did. She knew that I wasn’t a naughty child as a rule, but she would never question his authority. She says now that she was petrified of him. So she wouldn’t simply pretend that she’d sent me to bed, just in case he snuck back home to check on us. He’d done that many times before, which is why she knew not to pretend. She’d learned that lesson.

      I bolted my dinner and ran off to bed, where I lay thinking about the events of that day, hoping and praying to God that he wouldn’t come home that night and do those things to me again. I believed that I would die from the pain if he did. I soon started to wish that I hadn’t rushed my dinner, as I couldn’t stop throwing up again. I know now it was definitely due to fear, but at the time I thought I had a tummy bug. My hypochondria again!

      Mum kept popping in and out to change my bowl and clean me up, but it seemed so pointless because I was so ill that no sooner had she cleaned me up than I was making a mess of myself again. What made it worse was the fact that I felt so ill that I kept on thinking that, if he came home, Mum would tell him how ill I’d been and he would come up to my room to check on me. The fear that he would start touching me and doing again the things that he’d done earlier that day was so immense that, as much as I wanted to stop for that reason, I would throw up time after time.

       4

       No Way Out

      Dad never came to my room that night. It left me wondering if he was angry with me for being ill. I’m not sure what time he came back, but Mum seemed to be in a good mood when she came into my room to wake me in the morning. The only time she would be in a good mood was if he had come back and slept in their bed with her.

      Making my way downstairs to get my breakfast, I could smell porridge.

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