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he could expect to be on the receiving end of beatings himself. It all seemed very simple to her; if you weren’t on her team then you were obviously with the enemy.
    Ellie and Thomas (then aged four and three) were still too little to play any part in my humiliation. I guess to their wide, innocent eyes it all seemed like normal family life because they had never known any different. In fact I was the only one who had lived with anyone else, the only one who realized that life didn’t have to be this terrifying and this painful all the time.
    ‘He’ll sleep on the floor in your room,’ Mum told Larry and Barry. ‘He’s not good enough for a room of his own. Take him up there and get him out of my sight.’
    They were happy to oblige, kicking and punching me all the way up the stairs before pushing me into their bedroom.
    The house was four storeys high, as tall as a tower to a small, frightened boy. It had a railway line running directly beside it, the trains making the sturdy walls tremble every time they rattled past. I crouched by the window, shaking, and gradually my fear was turning to anger. The only thing I wanted was to see my dad again and the frustration at not being able to do that was building inside my head like a volcano waiting to erupt. When Larry and Barry came to fetch me for dinner, I lashed out at them, biting, kicking and punching, earning myself a clout round the ear and, I suppose, fulfilling Mum’s description of me as a spoiled brat.
    The family dining table was made of glass, with steel legs attached to the underneath by what looked like giant suckers. I went to sit down at it that first evening and Mum sneered, ‘No, you’re not good enough to sit with us. Get down on the floor, under the table, and we’ll feed you scraps, like a dog.’
    Larry and Barry wrestled me to the floor, and thus began a new pattern in which this was how all my meals were fed to me. As I crouched under the table, they would kick out at me and drop scraps on the floor, grinding them into the tiles with the heels of their shoes and then ordering me to lick them up with my tongue. They would actually make me jump up and down and beg for my food like a dog.
    I might have fought back if it was just my brothers but with Mum I already knew I had to be more careful how I behaved because of the fearsomeness of her violence and the willingness with which she would dispense it. After a few more beatings for looking at her the wrong way, or answering her back, the message got home to me once and for all and I realized I was not going to get any preferential treatment just because I had lost my father – quite the opposite in fact. I quickly learned not to do anything to antagonize her any more than I did simply by being there. My very existence was a constant reminder of Dad and his treachery, but even doing nothing wasn’t going to save me from what was to come. To the outside world she seemed like a tragic grieving widow coping with a traumatized child; to those of us who lived with her she was a vindictive, vengeful, violent force of nature.
    ‘You’re nothing special,’ she kept reminding me, over and over again. ‘Don’t you fucking forget it.’
       
    The day after Mum brought me back to her house, I overheard a conversation on the phone between her and Marie. My ears pricked up when I heard her name, hoping that she was going to come and fetch me back to hers, but it wasn’t to be.
    ‘I tell you what,’ Mum said to her, unable to resist another round of gloating. ‘You can fucking have himnow. He’s no use to anyone any more, is he? I’ll let you take care of the funeral.’
    I didn’t understand what they were talking about but I found out later from Wally that Mum was refusing to pay for a funeral and insisting that Marie covered it. Marie had her own little market stall at the time selling perfumes and cosmetics so Mum knew she had a bit of money and she knew she wouldn’t want to refuse to do