Chapter two
My nightmares about “someone” as I alluded to are the more common out of the three types. This someone is a female relative, closely related by blood and genes… are you there yet? If you guessed mother, you are right.
My mother and I never got a long brilliantly. Even when I was little. She was erratic to say the least, she used to throw me out of the house a lot just for doing little things wrong which meant my dad had to pick me up which I didn’t mind and I know this is cliché but for me it was normal; something every family does. It wasn’t till my brother was born that I realized this was wrong. She used to leave us outside and call our dad to pick us up usually because she needed “space” but as I got older it was because I was better at arguing than her. My arguments were full of facts while hers was full of cursing and when I eventually bested her she called me “ungrateful” “selfish” and “controlling.” I was spoilt (especially by my father) but I wasn’t ungrateful. I used to share everything with my brother so I was hardly “selfish” and as for “controlling”, I wasn’t controlling I just had to learn how to be a mother at age 4. But that cycle continued for a long time and it probably would have continued until sixteen when I was legally allowed to move out (or be kicked out) unless the events of 2008-2009 hadn’t of happened and it was nightmare making stuff.
My mother got a boyfriend. I didn’t like him. You could argue he was caring because he worked in a Charity shop (a mental illness charity shop no less) but I didn’t like him from the beginning and whilst I wasn’t hesitant with expressing my views, I didn’t express them at every chance I got either. But her and I used to have arguments about him a lot because I didn’t want him around and since I wasn’t even there on weekend she could have at least granted me that courtesy. But he was abusive in all sense of the word; he used to hit me – open palm or fist whichever I suppose he thought I deserved the most. I don’t know why I didn’t say anything. I was anorexic at the time, I hardly ate and exercised a lot but I don’t think it was to “look better” I think I just had this fear of eating. I used to do press ups a lot and at my best I got to 50 press ups. I suppose, being that thin could make me look nice but I wasn’t even in my teens, I was hardly into double figures of age when he decided I was ready.
My mother, my brother, him and the two dogs were going to the park one afternoon and to me that was a family outing. He wasn’t part of my family as far as I concerned. We didn’t share genes, we were not even related by marriage and so I had no interest in joining them on some stupidly cliché outing. So like any ‘child’ I refused to go and when challenged, I threw a tantrum. Arguably that was not one of my better hours. My mother, my own mother refused to deal with the situation and instead of living me in the house alone like she had done time and time before she sent in her boyfriend to do her dirty work. I’ve been calling him ‘her boyfriend’ because his name makes my teeth itch. Objectively it’s not a bad name, my GCSE history teacher has the same name but I can’t stand it and I think for the purposes of this I will say his name. The name burned into my head for the rest of my life, the name I curse and if I were to meet someone of the same name I would not say but just so you know I’m being completely open and accessing the pain a writer is supposed to access when writing a heart breaking novel, I shall tell you: Steve. Just seeing it on my computer makes me want to tear my eyes out of their sockets.
But I digress; I was lying on my mother’s double bed because her bed, like most parents’ bed was big and comfortable unlike my single bunk bed. He came up stairs and demanded I come to the park with them and I said I wasn’t and he grabbed my ankles and pulled me and I kicked as hard as I could. My most favoured exercise was the trampoline so my legs were actually considerably strong so I managed to kick him off my ankle but by trying to hold onto me, my pyjamas which whilst they may have been 4 years under my actual age still didn’t fit me very well so they came down and as someone who ran around the house in their underwear till age 9, it wasn’t the oddity for me. Until he held my wrists and looked me square in the eye and began to pull down my knickers. I knew this was wrong, my father told me to dress in private rather than in front of him or my brother like toddlers could (not that I was a toddler) and the primary school I was at had began to separate the boys and the girls when changing for PE. As not to paint a very disturbing graphic picture in your head I will just put into one blatant sentence what he did. He touched me. Those three words I can’t say to anyone. He didn’t rape me, which is why I never said anything. I wasn’t naïve, I knew rape was wrong, illegal and I knew that if someone was raped they should report it. But I didn’t know what to class this as. I later learned you classed it as sexual assault. But by that time, by the time I realized I should have said something, I was 15 and it was too late to tell anyone. I don’t remember much of that day. I couldn’t tell you what I did later that day or earlier that day, the only thing I could remember was that and the fact the window was open and that was a soft breeze and the sun was out quite brightly and it was warm and the sun was on one side of the sky and if I knew how you classed compass points without a compass, I would tell you the direction it was in.
