Making Beds in Brothels Read online

  They had children and grandchildren; whole dynasties that rose in my imagination. Sometimes their fortunes failed, their castles were invaded, palaces burned. Sometimes the evil people prevailed. And then, I would then choose a lowly unknown character as leader and, in my imagination, rebuild everything from scratch. This imagined world was sanctuary for years, my safe place, to which I withdrew for hours every day. I needed nowhere else. I would come home, as I called it, before I went to bed and I would sleep peacefully. For decades I could switch back into this world in a second, immediately removing myself from what was happening around me. It was an extremely good defence strategy against real events, but it was a long time before I understood the importance of that sanctuary, and of those who dwelt there.

  Chapter 3

  The reality of my life was drastically different to the world I imagined. The house I grew up in, on Derby Way, was on a council estate overlooking Battle Hill and Stagrave Church not far outside of Mobberley. It had been built in the nineteen-sixties to house families displaced during slum clearances of Manchester, the great industrial city twelve miles away where I had been born. It was a simple pebbled-dashed terrace, one of six, identical to hundreds of others. There were three bedrooms, two medium-sized rooms overlooking the rear garden, and a small one at the front over the kitchen. That was Deborah’s. Downstairs was a single living–dining area and a small kitchen overlooking the front garden and forest. The house was furnished sparsely, with odds and ends purchased from second-hand stores.

  Appropriately, considering the violent past of the landscape, Derby Way was often the scene of violence. My father was a brutal man, sadistic in his rages. If you were unfortunate enough to catch his eye when he was in the wrong mood, God help you. He wouldn’t immediately react; he allowed his anger to simmer for hours before it boiled over into terrifying rage.

  It’s 3am and the Beast has been pacing back and forth downstairs for hours. I call him ‘the Beast’ because when the mood takes him, that’s what he becomes. The Beast has a distinct personality from my father’s normal behaviour. He’s a separate entity. Something cruel possesses him, something hard and clawed, something that bristles and shakes. The Beast appears when father lets the façade slip. He clenches and unclenches his massive hands, pacing back and forth, back and forth, hands that are like leather from years of hard physical labour.

  Something has upset him today. He is regurgitating, reliving and analysing whatever fault he has noted, and he is furious. The Beast rarely snaps, his furies are thought out, premeditated. He notes faults and puts them away to be dealt with, at his pleasure, and at length, later.

  Upstairs, in the uncarpeted room I share with my two brothers, the light bulb that hangs unadorned from its cord, suddenly flashes on, a high wattage of white light illuminates the pitch black of the country night. I squeeze my eyes shut, pushing myself under the covers, futilely hoping that he will pass me over. He roars, “I bet you think you’re fucking clever!” A hand reaches under the covers grabbing me by a handful of hair and drags me out of the bed. I squeal instinctively. He resumes, “Fucking shut your mouth or this is going to get even worse for you – If you don’t shut your fucking mouth, I’m gonna knock your lights out!”

  He pulls me towards the stairs, dragging me across the floorboards by my hair. As we reach the top he yells, “The rest of you, get up and get downstairs!” Dragging me downstairs with him, my body is thudding against the uncarpeted wooden stairs, my skin scratching, catching on the floorboards.

  My father always rationalised that whatever he was doing would have some long-term positive impact on us, as if it was doing us some good, that this type of treatment was a requirement. We had done nothing to deserve it. I’m not sure we were capable of the type of wrong that warranted what was coming to us. Abuse isn’t a strong enough word for what we endured. He took pleasure in our suffering, because it satisfied some animalistic need, some dark urge to harm creatures more vulnerable than himself.

  We would be kept awake as the Beast harangued us with questions, usually a combination of religious babble and riddles. Bizarrely, what he asked was often so subjective as be impossible to answer. “Tell me Adam,” he would ask reasonably, sitting legs crossed and looking at me intently, “Why is the sky blue?” We would have needed to read his mind to understand his meaning. So, he dictated what the correct response was, and if our answer was deemed wrong, that was an excuse for further beatings. We were forced to read the bible, endlessly, and he particularly identified with Job. God only knows why. If my father was tormented, it wasn’t without reason, (unlike poor blighted righteous Job, the unwitting victim of cosmic experimentation). We read the same passage again and again as he tried to make us exegete meaning from words that were way beyond our comprehension.

  Interrogations went on for days, punctuated with beatings and punches. He would take us by our necks and throttle us till we were close to passing out. I still vividly recall sharp pinpricks of pressure, the light flashing blue and white behind my eyeballs as he tightened his hands around my throat.

  One of his preferred torments is pushing his face hard into mine. He comes close, with a low hiss, “Take that look off your face, boy!”. He doesn’t like us looking distressed so I learn to keep my face carefully blank. Then, he grinds his strong white teeth into my face, pushing my head hard against them. Cutting, the blood first congeals under my skin; bursting, it runs down my face in streams.

  Memorably, he once knocked my eldest brother unconscious with his fist. As he lay on the floor, a small unmoving bundle, that was the only briefest time, I saw a flicker of fear in the Beast’s eyes.

  We were not allowed to sleep for nights or weekends during those lengthy sessions of violence, recalls Deborah. I remember those times going on for three or four nights and days with no food or drink, so that our mouths became dry and eventually the tears stopped flowing. When we inevitably nodded off, heads drooping and eyelids becoming heavy, we were slapped awake, all the time with a continual barrage of insane questions. He would keep us off school, and days would pass in a terrifying haze, in silence, hunched on the sofa; time and silence only punctuated with his incessant questions and our muted, frightened replies, and with the thuds and slaps, our whimpers, sharp sudden screams and sobs.

  After interrogating us for so long, inevitably I trip up on occasion, become confused. Through the effects of hunger and lack of sleep, I become increasingly unsure of what he is asking me, I become less and less coherent, unable to provide him with anything but monosyllabic grunts. He asks the same questions again and again until my answers fail to correspond. This is the outcome he wants; he wants to feel justified that I am lying so he can move onto the next stage. He demands that I admit to being a liar and I comply immediately. There is no point in denying it, he will simply beat the desired response out of me. I just admitted anything he demanded and took the subsequent punishment.

  “The truth will set you free Adam,” he says. And somewhere else, in another time, Deborah laughs bitterly, Only if it doesn’t kill you first!

  The Beast reiterates, “If you tell the truth, you don’t need a good memory,” moving towards me.

  That’s when he brings out the dog chain. He forces one of my siblings to dictate how many beatings I deserve. And they do it. If they don’t, he will turn on them. They have to choose a high enough number to satisfy my father. Suggesting a low number is very dangerous; it doesn’t pay to be seen showing pity, even though we don’t want to hurt each other.

  It was terrifying, seeing him bring out that heavy metal chain with its worn-soft leather handle. I knew what was coming, and it makes me shudder now, remembering it. He wrapped the chain around his massive fist to give himself extra purchase, raising his arm as high as it would go. Then brought it down with full force. The pain felt hot–cold, searing, like the burning sensation of touching ice for too long. An intense sharp fire, radiating its heat through my hand, followed by aching numbness, slow throbbin
g like a heartbeat as the sensation briefly returned; then again… and again, eight or nine times, slashing the chain down hard on my hands. Even though I screamed out loud in agony, I didn’t move. If we pulled away, then his fury knew no bounds, so we learned to bear it. I would close my eyes to take myself somewhere else; anywhere but in this moment.

  Variation of this behaviour had occurred on a regular basis since we were small children. It’s all we had ever known. Perversely, he always ended by asking us to shake his hand, and would say the same thing every time, “You’ll thank me for this one day.”

  I lived in constant flux of confusion between how I should be feeling. I desperately wanted to love my father. I think it’s normal, to crave the affection of your parent, especially as there was no one else, mother having left and no family living close, but I lived in such fear of him at the same time. I could never understand the cruelty, nor the reason behind it. His behaviour overshadowed everything, to the point where our personalities became supressed, subordinated to his as a means of appeasement. Everything became focused on not triggering him. We didn’t learn the normal ways of regulating anger that children do. We didn’t throw tantrums or disobey in the normal way, everything was suppressed for fear of retribution.

  And we were never happy, because we always knew that becoming relaxed, letting our guard down, even momentarily, might be registered and used against us in the most horrific manner. So, we suppressed our feelings, We learned to feel nothing. Any ‘feelings’ expressed were those that experience had taught us were permitted. The tension we were living under, day in day out for years, was terrible. Lord knows what impact this was having on our developing brains.

  It was July 1986, and I was in the second year of primary school. The flame-haired Sarah Ferguson married the Duke of York, the Queen’s handsome second son. I remember entering a competition that my school had arranged as part of the celebrations, to design a wedding dress for the future duchess. I pasted bits of satin and lace, beads and glitter onto my drawing, and was very proud of the results. To my amazement, I was a runner up and won a prize. It was only a glossy programme for the event, but it was the first time I recall winning anything. Around this time, when I must have been around five, my father moved me out of the bedroom that I shared with my brothers, into his bedroom next door. I can’t remember how long I shared his bed.

  I have no memory of what occurred in that room, although perhaps my ignorance is a blessing, or perhaps not recalling those nights is what prevents me going mad. Many of my later behaviours are consistent with a child who was sexually abused, and my father had a string of convictions of a sexual nature, stretching back to his childhood, which he continued to commit throughout his adult life, making him well known to police and the authorities. How he managed to win custody of us after my mother left is a mystery. I have no idea what they were thinking, allowing him to be alone with children.

  Luckily for me, if you can call it luck, I could by this time retreat into my inner world, the one behind my eyes, as the real world and the Beast raged around me. I smelled summer flowers and the cut grass of the Home – it was always summer there. A girl waited for me at the gate and, taking my hand, led me to the castle keep. I was late and the Lady was expecting me. “I need to change…?” “No time,” she’d reply with a smile. “She will just have to receive you as you are.”

  Chapter 4

  Religion was my father’s obsession. Twice a week, Sunday and Thursday, we walked three or four miles to the service at the Kingdom Hall in town. Tuesday was held locally, in someone’s home, and a bible study session was fitted in at home during the week. The Jehovah’s Witnesses do not celebrate Christmas, birthdays or any festivals at all. Our lives were, therefore, bleak without anything really to look forward to. There was a holiday to Dorset, and a couple of camping holidays when we were very young, otherwise our lives were unimaginably bare of anything joyful.

  I hated the Kingdom Hall and sat there rigid, in the cheap plastic chairs, as one of the elders droned on and on for hours, poring over scripture that supported their eschatological beliefs that the world was soon going to end. You [too] can live on Paradise Earth! Wonderful concept. One problem: did this ‘paradise’ include you? Everyone else was ‘the World’; we were part of ‘the Truth’ and, therefore, among the saved.

  What was worse was that I didn’t buy into any of it. I knew that my father, presenting his best face for the congregation, was quite a different person once he was home. Deborah wrote of my father:

  It’s hard to express specific memories of the monster in human skin. He didn’t slither like a snake… he didn’t fly under moonlight, no… the monster in human skin looked good… radiating charm, warmth understanding. He blended in the right sort of crowd. He stood faceless, blameless, healthy and proud. Only God is good, [he would state], a real crowd pleaser. The monster in human skin simply fitted in. Oh, so handsome, blonde, bluest eyes… the monster in human skin was all ears, all smiles.

  We had to play along with my father as the long-suffering, hardworking single parent, which was the persona he wanted people to see. We had to be careful what we said, make sure bruises were hidden, present correct answers to any questions directed at us. But it was all an act, a façade.

  I grew up ambivalent towards God. I didn’t believe what I was being told. I can’t say I was atheist, that would imply more consideration than I gave it. God was simply an absence; I didn’t feel the presence of the Deity, of anything spiritual. And considering the important role of religion in our lives, that strikes me as peculiar. Thinking back, for all the religion in that house there was an absolute absence of God. I know this because I feel the presence of the divine with crystal clarity now, on occasion, the ineffable presence of God. I don’t recall much discussion of Jesus from my childhood, but my father disregarded compassion as a sign of weakness, and what is Christ if anything but compassion personified? At least, the impact of that absence of God meant that I didn’t blame what occurred on some great heavenly father who had overlooked us; not at that time anyway.

  I was an early reader, and by four I could read with the skill of someone more than twice my age. My father taught me to read using his old worn King James Bible in its black leather binding, figuring, possibly correctly, that if I could manage to read and understand the complexities within that book, nothing else would seem difficult in comparison. He brandished that bible like a weapon. The book and the belt were his chief means of torment.

  Father only learned to read in his twenties. Probably suffering from the dyslexia which many years later I found I had inherited. Dyslexia, with me, presented in the inability to write with a pen, my handwriting being illegible scrawl, which made school very difficult, but is something I overcome simply nowadays with a computer keyboard.

  I became a voracious reader, picking up and reading anything I saw. I loved books more than anything, and spent hours happily reading. Unfortunately, for my father books were another opportunity for what he called ‘demonic influence’ and so he vetted everything I read, searching my bags and room regularly for forbidden reading material. My father’s interpretation of what constituted demonic literature was long and comprehensive. Obviously, thrillers or supernatural storylines were forbidden. Incidentally, and in severe contravention of the rules, one of my favourite authors was Alan Garner whose wonderfully imaginative supernatural fables were set in and around Manchester, in the landscape I actually inhabited. Father’s fear that Enid Blyton, whose Famous Five books I adored, was a vector of Satan seemed less logical. The only ‘safe’ books were about nature or were factual, but thankfully I enjoyed reading them too.

  I suspect father’s fear of demonic influence stemmed from his childhood experiences with his paternal grandmother, Granny Brock. Granddad and Granny Brock lived in a large semi-detached Victorian house on Edge Lane, among the collieries and factories of North-East Manchester. Three generations of my family had worked down those pits and, had my father b
een born ten years earlier, it would have been four. The entire area was coated in black coal dust, the houses, churches, the few straggling trees and the ground itself were black.

  They owned their home. Home ownership was quite unusual in that area in the early twentieth century and it wasn’t Grandad Brock who paid the mortgage; he was a low-waged coalminer by trade, from a family so poor that his parents rested in the nearby cemetery in an unmarked grave. It was his wife, Granny Brock, who was the major breadwinner. She led a spiritualist church nearby and was a renowned medium and faith healer. People came from far and wide to consult her, to have her lay her hands on them. She would sit in her crowded darkened front parlour: “Focus please, the veil is thin and the presence of the dead will soon provide answers for the living…” “Praise the Lord!” muttered the assembled séance, in response.

  My father, had spent months living with his grandparents, while his mother died slowly at home of the then untreatable leukaemia. He would recall with distaste his mother’s shit being carried out of the sick room “by the bucket load”. He was furious with his mother for what he considered her betrayal by dying. I don’t think he ever forgave her; he never spoke of her with love. He claimed that during the time he spent at his grandparents, he was aware of the dead that his grandmother invoked and that they tormented him in the dark. They never ceased in their torment, (they still did now) and he was vigilant against ways they could access him.

  I got around father’s censorship simply by reading whatever I wanted in the library. For some reason, it never crossed his mind that I wouldn’t be following his carefully set rules when he was out of sight. I spent most of my spare time among the books of Mobberley’s large Victorian Public library. My Saturday afternoons, and many evenings after school, were spent in its old oak seats at the large reading tables. It is a love affair that has persisted. I’m still never happier than when I’m surrounded by books.