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it in. How would we manage without her? If Mum were dead, we would be left totally at his mercy. Life would be unliveable without her. All three of us burst into tears of inconsolable grief and shock.
‘I’m only kidding,’ he said, apparently contemptuous of us for taking the joke so badly. ‘She’s had a girl. But it was a difficult birth; she could’ve died.’
We loved Clare to bits the moment Mum brought her home, even though she had some problems. She had borderline Down’s syndrome, and hydrochephalus like Shirley. For a while Dad acted differently, a bit more like a proud father, but as it became more obvious Clare had problems, his frustrations took hold again. He told Mum it was her fault that she had had two children with problems, that it showed she wasn’t a fit mother. The doctors said it was just bad luck, as if our family needed any more of that, but he didn’t believe them. He said Mum was useless because she couldn’t even give him a son. I didn’t understand why he would say that. She’d given him me, hadn’t she? Was I really so naughty that I didn’t even count as a proper son?
It was a relief to have Mum home from hospital, providing at least a bit of care and nurturing for us all, but at night we could hear her screaming downstairs and I knew that he was hurting her, just like he hurt me. None of us ever dared to go down to see what was happening. I didn’t even dare to go to the bathroom in the night in case I came across Dad and he would be angry, so if I knew I couldn’t hold on till morning I used to get up quietly and pee in a drawer or kneeling down on the carpet so it wouldn’t make any noise and attract attention. No one noticed the smell because the whole house stank of urine anyway. Only years later did I discover that Christina was doing exactly the same in her room on the other side of the landing.
One night I did pluck up the courage to come out of my room for some reason in the middle of the night. I got as far as the top of the stairs and noticed that Shirley’s door was open. Peering down through the banisters I saw that Dad was lying on top of her and she was stretching out her hand, as if trying to reach me. I scurried back to my bed, not wanting to believe what I had seen. In the morning I told myself to forget the scene, convinced myself that I must have been mistaken. I had too much to think about already, I couldn’t cope with any more.
Mum was as scared of him as we were, with all his shouting and violence. He would quite often throw his dinner at her for no good reason. She had given up work to have Clare but it wasn’t long before he was telling her she had to get another job, and she went to work at the bakery on a shift from two till ten, leaving him alone with us again every afternoon and evening. Clare would cry a lot and Dad’s answer was always to stuff some chocolate in her mouth. Her grown-up teeth turned black and had rotted away before they even had a chance to come through.
One night, when Clare was about six months old, she was crying so loud and so long I plucked up the courage to come out of my room again and tiptoed down to the next landing to see what was wrong, my heart thumping with fear at what I might find. I saw Dad bringing her out of their room, where her cot was, and I froze, terrified he would see me, unable even to run back to the safety of my room. As I watched he deliberately dropped her down the stairs. As she bounced from step to step, I wasn’t able to stop my screams from escaping, making him look straight up at me. As she came to rest at the bottom, her screams echoing mine, Dad suddenly started acting as if it had been an accident. He ran down just as Christina came out of the sitting room and scooped up poor, crumpled baby Clare. All three of us were crying and Dad was insisting he had slipped and she’d fallen out of his arms. It was the first time for sure I knew he was lying about something. I’d seen exactly what he’d done. I couldn’t understand it; she was only a baby, she couldn’t have done anything naughty enough to deserve that, could she?
Left to his own devices for longer each day he became even nastier and I heard him shouting more and more at Christina and Shirley, which I knew wasn’t fair. I could understand why he was always angry with me because I was such a naughty boy, but I knew the girls were never naughty, so I didn’t think it was right for him to punish them. Christina spent her whole time trying to do things for us, and Shirley couldn’t move far enough to do anything bad. They were complete innocents, so why was he so angry with them?
When Clare was three or four years old he used to tell me he was going to kill her while I was away at school. ‘I’ll burn her fingers in the fire,’ he’d say, and laugh when I cried out at the thought. I had no doubt he was capable of doing such a thing, and each day during our morning break at school I would sneak out through some bent railings at the back of the playground, run all the way round the back of the houses, let myself into our back garden and creep towards the house, squeezing myself behind the shed, terrified he would look out of the window and see me. When I reached the house I would turn over the mop bucket, which always stood by the back door, and raise myself up just high enough to peer in through the downstairs window, holding my breath in case I gave myself away, desperate to see Clare moving around and to check he hadn’t hurt her. Sometimes, if the windows were open, I would be able to hear him upstairs with Mum in the bedroom and the sounds would make me feel sick, but I would still hang on, my heart thumping with fear, until I had seen Clare and put my mind to rest enough to go back to school.
He would always draw the curtains when he was watching the television in the early evening, so we were cut off from the outside world completely. We would all be in the room together and he would fetch his filthy magazines out and get us to look at the pictures. Sometimes they were just women in poses, sometimes couples doing things, sometimes they were pictures of men and close-up shots of erect penises. I didn’t want to look at any of them.
‘Look at her,’ he’d say to me, pointing to some pouting, naked girl. ‘Do you think she’s a virgin? Look at her fanny.’
‘What do you think of that?’ he’d ask Christina, showing her another picture. ‘Look at the tits on that.’ Then he would grab Shirley’s breasts in front of us and laugh.
Sometimes he would show us dirty films on the wall with an old cinematic projector. We hated them but he wouldn’t let us leave the room while they were on. He said we needed to learn what life was about. ‘Please, Daddy, no,’ we would plead. ‘We don’t want to watch these films.’ He would take films of us as well, although we never knew what he did with them.
He would make us go upstairs and put on Mum’s little shorty nighties, dressing us up like dolls and then just making us sit there in the lounge with him. (Much later, I found out that he used to enjoy wearing Mum’s clothes himself sometimes, telling her he liked the feel of the material on his skin.) He had complete power over all of us, able to make us do whatever he wanted. We were all so traumatized we never found a way to talk to one another about the things that were happening and how we felt about them. All three of us just did as we were told, until he eventually left us alone and we could get on with our own lives together for a few hours.
He would put the chain on the front door whenever he was messing about with us, in case Mum came home early, which she did once or twice.
‘Why’s the chain on the door?’ she wanted to know, when she finally managed to attract his attention and was let in.
‘Because I was upstairs in the bathroom,’ he said quickly, ‘and I forgot to take it off again.’
Now that I was eight or nine years old, I would see other boys at school sometimes who had managed to get hold of dirty magazines like Dad’s. They would huddle in corners giggling over the pictures and want me to look at them too, but I was terrified, thinking they were all going to turn out to be like him. Everything was so frightening and confusing. On my way home from the school yard each day I used to hug the wall and cry, trying to get some comfort out of the cold stones.
However often experience taught me that nothing good would ever happen in our family, I always remained hopeful, especially as Christmas approached and all the other kids at school started to talk about the presents they hoped they would get. One Christmas morning, even before I opened my eyes, I was aware Dad was in my room. He was leaning over the bed, staring at me. I smiled at him hopefully, feeling excited at the prospect of at least one day of love and attention.
‘What are you fucking smiling at?’ he wanted