Escaping

Escaping

My mother married twice. The first time was to my Dad, the accountant. In those days he wore a grey v-neck jersey with his jeans and sneakers. Sometimes it was a scratchy brown jumper. He was (is) olive skinned, with blue eyes and had a thick moustache to match his wavy black hair. He loved the races, and watching TV sport.

Husband number two resembled my father in eye colour only. I will call him "Rob". Rob had a brown afro, a ruddy complexion and was thin, short and wiry. He was an artist, on the sickness benefit, who worked in oil, acrylic and collage on board. The scenes he created were post-apocalyptic explosions of colour and chaos. There was something very dark going on in his mind, but his art had a certain fascination to my 14 year old self.

It seemed as if Rob moved in the night he met my mother. I think he had been living in a halfway house, but this was according to Rae (I mentioned before it is hard to extract truth from the fiction in her stories.) When things later went pear-shaped, my mother said that he was a recovering heroin addict, who would soak methylated spirits through a loaf of bread when he couldn't find a fix. Whether that was true...I really don't know. What I did know was that she had found a drinking buddy, and I think that is why she let him stay.

Quite soon after his arrival, and following a big drinking session where Rae had been winding Rob up with sob stories about her past with my "terrible" father, he started laying into me. Not in a physical way, but with his words. This became a regular thing. He would stand over me, jabbing his finger a few centimetres from my face, and spit out the most horrific things. He mostly described in vivid detail, his fantasies of how he would dispose of my father. He was like a barking, vicious dog. I could feel his spittle and hot breath.

In the many scenarios Rob played out to me, his favourite themes were sodomy and the torturous death of my father, preferably combined. He once yelled to my face that he was going to hire a band of "fags" to gang rape my father, the finale of which saw him sodomised off the top of a tall building. Rob used to go into all sorts of explicit and stomach churning detail, and I think I have blanked a lot of it out. I couldn't bear to remember it. The most enduring memories are visual. The fire in his eyes, his face red like the devil, and the vein that pulsed near his temple. I don't know that a person can appreciate how terrifying it is to be screeched at like that at close range by a deranged and drunken and relatively powerful person, until it is experienced. Rob's power over me was the support he had from my mother. She would stand behind him, egg him on, and fuel his poisonous words. That was the most crushing part of it.

To a tiny 14 year old girl, these episodes were dark and horrifying. One way I coped was to become remote when it happened. I would create a mental wall between his jabbing finger and myself. I would look on from above like a third eye. But this strategy didn't change the fact that I used to dread the end of the school day. I used to dread the hours after 9pm. I never knew whether it was going to be a good night or bad. It is such a cliche, but I felt alone and helpless. In my head I was rattling the bars of the prison that I lived in, but no-one noticed, and I was too terrified of what my mother would do to tell someone about what was happening.

It all reached a climax in October 1990. My father had recently returned from Honolulu, and came bearing a gift of white Reeboks. These shoes were too good to actually wear, at least not for a couple of weeks. I left them in their box, and after school I would race to the wardrobe, and carefully fold back the tissue to look at them. One afternoon they weren't there. My mother got home later, wearing them. They were scuffed. She had worn them down to the beach and used them for climbing about the rocks. Finally, I saw red - straw, camel, back - tantrum time. It was partly because my shoes were scuffed and I had not yet worn them, and partly because of the disrespect my mother had shown me. She had taken my most treasured object (at the time!) and trashed it. "Oh God, she really doesn't care", I thought. I grabbed a pair of scissors, and a bunch of my mother's clothing. "How would you like it if I damaged your things!" I screeched. I ran into the lounge and made "snip, snip" sounds. I never cut the clothes - I wouldn't have dared, but I was being rather provocative. It was my mother's turn to see red. This is as much as I can recall of what came next. She grabbed me and pushed me down the stairs. She then tried to push me over the bannister of the second flight. She then threw me to the ground, grabbed a wad of my hair, and pulled me along by it. She finished by kicking me in the stomach with her pointy shoes. All the while she screamed obscenities at me. Rob, of course, joined in.

My siblings screamed at her to stop. Someone called the police. Someone called my father. In the interim, I overheard Rob telling my mother that one day he would like to kill me. She didn't utter one word of protest. The police came and as per usual, put it down to being a domestic and left. My father arrived with his flatmate. Finally, the big showdown. Here was Rob's chance to have it out. Rae threw rocks at the car, and dented its bonnet. Rob hid behind her, peering out to occasionally rant. My mother went back inside and threw all of my clothes out of the bedroom window into the garden below. From that night on I lived with my father.

Weeks later Rae and Rob wed. A year later, they had a child. A few years after that they acrimoniously split. Soon after the break-up, she had her house exorcised by a priest organised by the Anglican church across the road. She felt that too many bad things had happened in that house. She wasn't wrong. The priest fell to his knees in front of Rob's artworks and declared them the work of pure evil. She burnt them.