Savage Atonement

It was ten times larger than her small private school and she felt lost in the huge classes and anonymity of the place. They were on a different syllabus and she was completely out of step. To make matters worse, Bill had started drinking, and she frequently heard him shouting at her mother and her mother crying.

One afternoon she came home from school to find Bill slumped in front of the television and her mother in bed.

‘Sulking because she doesn’t want me to go out tonight,’ Bill pronounced, slurring his words the way he always did when he’d been drinking. ‘Perhaps if she was a bit more fun to be with I wouldn’t need to go out. Two of a kind, aren’t you, you and your mother; neither of you know how to give a man a good time. Perhaps I ought to do some man a favour and teach you before it’s too late.’

Laurel fled, seeking sanctuary in her mother’s room. Her mother looked pale and tired, and Laurel couldn’t bring herself to add to her worries by telling her what Bill had said.

Going to the larger school had opened her eyes a little, and she knew now that Bill shouldn’t talk to her or touch her in the way that he did, but she knew that to complain to her mother would bring Bill’s wrath down on her head. Her mother was too loyal to complain, but Laurel knew that she wasn’t happy.

She had learned to become adroit about keeping out of Bill’s way. Unknown to anyone else she had bought and fixed a simple bolt to her bedroom door.

She knew from listening to the giggled confidences of the other girls about their boy-friends that there was more to sex than the basic animal coupling she had first thought, but remembering the revulsion she felt whenever Bill touched her she couldn’t understand how anyone was able to enjoy it.

As far as Laurel was able to see, Bill was making no attempt to find another job, and they were all three having to live off the small capital her mother had been left by her parents.

Bill’s drinking had increased too, coupled with a violence which could manifest itself in broken crockery and on one occasion a livid bruise to Laurel’s arm when she had been too slow to obey his command for a second cup of tea. Increasingly Laurel was finding her mother in bed when she got home from school, her eyes strained and her face pale, but she never allowed Laurel to speak a word against her husband.

Laurel’s fourteenth birthday came and went. Her mother suggested a small party at home, but Laurel had no desire for the other girls at school to be exposed to her stepfather. Unknown to herself she was drifting apart from her peers into a world of her own, where her stepfather stalked through her nightmares, and she went to school listless and drained.

It was the games mistress who noticed the bruise on her arm, and who questioned her about it. The school was a large one and Laurel wouldn’t be the first case they had had of child abuse. Mrs Kellaway had trained at a large Northern school where she had learned quickly to see the telltale signs of beatings.

‘I… I banged it on a door,’ Laurel told her quickly, unable to prevent the deep flush staining her skin. ‘It doesn’t hurt.’

As Mrs Kellaway confided in the headmistress a little later, it could quite easily have been an accident, and Laurel was beyond the age for child battering.

‘On the other hand,’ she added, ‘she’s too withdrawn; living in a world of her own half the time. It might be as well to pay a visit to her home.’

The headmistress sighed and agreed. Mrs Kellaway was something of a new broom, and middle-class parents were apt to be vociferous in their complaints about teachers’ interference in their pupils’ private lives.

There was a week to go before the start of the summer holidays. Laurel had been studying hard for her exams, hating the thundery, stifling atmosphere pervading the Heath. The heat seemed to sap her strength, leaving her drained and tired, and she longed for a proper thunderstorm to clear the air. Her school books weighed heavily on her arm, and the closer she got to home the more her footsteps lagged. There had been a brooding menace about Bill these last few days that sharpened her fear; a look in his eyes that flooded her with an instinctive knowledge she fought against accepting. He wanted her physically. She could see it in his eyes, read it in his touch, and she shrank from the knowledge, deliberately keeping out of his way.

The kitchen was empty when she got home, and she heaved a sigh of relief at crossing this first hurdle safely. Sometimes he was there waiting for her, drunk and truculent, pinning her against the wall while he criticised her mother, his eyes roaming hotly over her body as though he could see the slender feminine shape beneath the school uniform.

She tiptoed past the living room, but it was so quiet she risked a glance inside. There was no sign of him. Perhaps he was out?

Her spirits lifting, she hurried upstairs. Her mother was in bed. She seemed to be shrinking daily, and Laurel had pleaded with her to send for a doctor. She had refused, and since she had no friends in the neighbourhood who called, Laurel had no one in whom to confide her fears concerning her mother.

‘Bill’s gone out,’ her mother told her, in answer to Laurel’s question, but Laurel noticed that she avoided her eyes, as though she too knew of her daughter’s fear and the reason for it.

‘How was school?’

Obediently, Laurel told her about her day, suggesting that she shower and then bring her mother a tray of tea. ‘We could share it,’ she suggested eagerly, ‘just like we used to before.…’ She bit her lip, knowing her mother allowed no criticism of Bill, but for once there was no soft reprimand from the bloodless lips.

‘A tray of tea would be lovely,’ was all her mother said.

A modern shower had been installed in the bathroom, at Bill’s insistence, and during the work the old lock had come loose from the door. Bill had promised to fit it, but Laurel noticed as she walked into the bathroom that it had come free altogether. Closing the door, she stripped off and stepped into the shower, closing the curtain.

These last few months her body had changed dramatically. She was tall and slender with small high breasts and a narrow waist and hips. Her legs were long, tapering to fine ankles, her body almost that of a woman.

She showered quickly, enjoying the cool spray of the water on her heated skin. She was just showering off the last of the soap when the bathroom door opened.

‘Well, well!’

She stood transfixed as her stepfather’s eyes searched greedily over her body. He closed the door softly behind him and leaned against it. He had been drinking, Laurel could tell. She reached hurriedly for a towel, but he snatched it away, slurring this words as he said slowly, ‘Not wanting to hide yourself away from your dear old dad, are you, Laurel? You know, the trouble with you, my girl, you’re too repressed, frigid, like that mother of yours.…’

‘You’re not my father!’

Laurel said the first words that came into her head, her stomach crawling with sickness and shame for the way he was looking at her body. It was like the worst of her nightmares, when she was exposed and ridiculed, and she shrank back in horror as Bill reached out a hand and touched her still damp skin. A shudder rippled over her, and too late she saw the rage burning in his eyes.

‘Think yourself too good for me, do you? Just like that mother of yours! Well, we’ll soon see about that. You won’t be so proud when I’m pleasuring that body of yours, my girl, you’ll soon see.…’

‘Get away from me!’

‘Oh, come on, now, don’t give me that innocent act. I know all about you girls. You’re dying to know what it’s all about really, aren’t you? I’ve seen the way you look at me.…’

‘Like I hate you!’ Laurel spat at him, screaming instinctively as he grasped hold of her naked body and lifted her out of the shower, his face livid and mottled as he bent over her.

‘I’m your father, my girl,’ he told her furiously, ‘and you have to do everything I tell you. In my day a father took a strap to his kids if they didn’t obey him. Is that what you want, Laurel?’

Still grasping her arm with one hand, his free hand went to his belt, and Laurel knew with sick certainty that he wanted to beat her nearly as much as he wanted her body. Her thoughts ran in terrified circles, her body tensing against him.

‘Come on, you want it as much as I do. I’ve seen the way you look at me. I’m all man, Laurel,’ he told her slowly, his eyes glittering with feverish excitement, ‘and I’m going to prove it to you.…’

She screamed as his fingers kneaded her breast, his mouth hotly sour on her skin, and kept on screaming even when he shook her like a rag doll, almost throwing her to the floor in his rage.

‘Don’t make me angry, Laurel,’ he warned her as he flung himself down on top of her. ‘You’ve teased and tormented me enough, and I’m going to have you!’

Her body felt heavy and lethargic, crushed by the oppressive weight of his, but some instinct for survival lent her the strength to scream once more, the sound stilled by the sudden pressure of his mouth, making her gag sickly. He was going to rape her and there was nothing she could do to stop him. Tears ran from her eyes, terror making it impossible for her to move, and then outside the bathroom door she heard her mother’s voice calling to her, saw her turning the door handle; saw the look on her face as she looked down on Laurel’s sprawled naked body pinned to the floor by the heavy weight of Bill’s.

Like a surly bear Bill clambered to his feet, but Laurel couldn’t move. She felt frozen with fear and self-shame. She had seen the look in her mother’s eyes as she stood in the doorway; a look that said quite plainly that whatever had happened Laurel was to blame.

‘She drove me to it, Elaine,’ she heard Bill mutter defensively, ‘Always parading about in front of me with next to nothing on—oh, she’s always careful to make sure she doesn’t do it when you’re around, but she’s always been jealous—always wanted me herself. You know what teenage girls are like… sex-mad, the lot of them. I couldn’t help myself… she was begging for it.…’

Laurel wanted to deny his accusations, to plead with her mother for understanding, but somehow the words would not come. She knew she had not encouraged Bill—she loathed him, neither had she flaunted herself in front of him, but her pride would not allow her to beg her mother to believe her.

As Bill followed her mother out of the bathroom, he turned once, giving Laurel a look that warned her that it wasn’t over, not by a long, long way.

Even with the lock on her bedroom door she refused to sleep that night, starting at every sound. She dressed for school in the privacy of her room, leaving early so that she could use the showers there instead of washing at home. Her body was bruised where Bill had touched her, and the sight of the finger marks against her breast made her retch dryly in shivering horror.

She found it hard to concentrate on her lessons. The last two of the day were gym. Half way though them the headmistress arrived, accompanied by a man—a school inspector, Laurel had later learned, but at the time all she had known was that he was a man and that for some reason he wanted to see her vaulting over the ‘horse’. The mere fact that someone was watching her was enough to destroy her shaky confidence. She mistimed her leap and half fell over the horse, and might have injured herself quite badly if he hadn’t leaped forward to catch her. But all she was aware of as his hands grasped her was that this was how Bill had held her last night, forcing her to the floor, touching her intimately, and as the world swirled and darkened around her, she was dimly aware of herself screaming, no, no, don’t touch me!

When she came round she was in the headmistress’s office. Miss Kellaway was there, but there was no sign of the man. Matron was also there and another young woman whom the headmistress introduced as Rachel from the Social Services Department, the significance of which didn’t dawn on her until much later.

‘Now, Laurel,’ the headmistress began kindly, ‘don’t be frightened. We’re here to help you, you know, my dear.…’ She paused, coughed and looked a little embarrassed.

‘Laurel, Miss Kellaway tells me that some time ago you came to school with a bad bruise on your arm. And now today, when you fainted… your body is very badly bruised, my dear, and.…’

The social worker interrupted gently, ‘What Miss Laker is trying to say, Laurel, is that we believe you may have been sexually abused.… Yes, I know you don’t want to talk about it, don’t want to admit it even to yourself, but you aren’t the first girl it’s happened to, Laurel, and you won’t be the last. We only want to help you, and there’s nothing to be frightened of. You do know, don’t you, that it’s illegal for someone to have sexual relations with a girl under sixteen? And it’s silly to get involved with such a rough boy-friend. Have you got a boy-friend, Laurel?’