caught fire in mysterious circumstances and the fire brigade had to be called to extinguish it. To my amazement Alex didn’t even wake up amidst the clamour of bells and shouting. The fire officers said the fire had definitely been started deliberately but there was no proof it was Dad so nobody had the nerve to accuse him to his face.
There was a family living opposite us whom Mum, Alex and I became very friendly with, despite Dad’s antics. Mum asked the couple, Helen and Steve, to be our godparents when we were baptised. They had four children ranging from our age upwards and were a normal happy family, so we always liked going over there to visit. For the first fifteen or so years of my life we all grew up together and I know Mum looked on them as the people she would have wanted us to go to if anything happened to her and Dad, since we had no close relatives. In fact, she told us so on several occasions. Their kids went to the same school as us, and did many of the same after-school activities, so Mum and Helen spent a lot of time together, often combining resources and driving one another’s children along with their own. I think Mum confided more to Helen than she did to anyone else in our neighbourhood, although I never overheard them talking about anything very personal.
I was friendly with one of their daughters, who was roughly the same age as me, and when we were young she came to our house for tea a few times. She even stayed to have a bath with me once, but Dad liked to bath us at that stage and my friend didn’t feel comfortable with that, which was hardly surprising. She didn’t come round much after that occasion, which was fine with me because it meant I got to go to her house instead or to play outside more. Any excuse to get out of the house and away from Dad’s silent, scowling presence was always welcome. Even when he was locked in his room we could sense his malevolence all over the house, all of us waiting nervously for him to emerge unexpectedly somewhere, shouting at us to get out of his sight.
I don’t think Dad can ever have been committed to the idea of working for a living, even though he did have a job when he met Mum. We had no idea at the time but at his trial we discovered that as far back as the 1970s he was already having trouble getting on with other people at work, always picking fights, arguing and threatening to leave. He never seemed able to get on with anyone. It was as if he had been meant to be a recluse from the moment he was born.
I guess he had no choice but to join the world of work when he first left Newcastle because he had to support himself somehow, but once he was married and Mum was earning a steady living from teaching, it became possible for him to start withdrawing from life outside the house.
When Isobel was born Mum had every intention of continuing to work because she loved her job and because she already knew that she couldn’t rely on Dad to earn enough to keep a family. She had never been the sort of woman who would have been happy to stay at home, cooking and cleaning and waiting for her man and her children to return each evening. Maybe that was one of the reasons she had chosen to marry Dad, because she knew he would never ask that of her, that he would be happy for her to pursue a career, if only to get the house to himself for most of the day and to have money coming in without having to work for it himself.
Initially, when they were both working, Mum was prepared to pay for babysitters and childminders to take care of Isobel while they were out during the day, but it wasn’t long before Dad realised that he could use his baby daughter as an excuse to give up work and stay home all the time. Maybe he genuinely thought that he could be a full-time ‘house husband’.
Although Mum realised he had no interest whatsoever in looking after the baby, at least he would be there in the house with Isobel, so Mum thought she could go out first thing in the morning knowing that the baby had an adult in charge of her. Even then she must have suspected he wasn’t at all the right man for the job, but he was Isobel’s father so why shouldn’t he be given the chance to look after her? Perhaps at that stage they were still kidding themselves that they were a normal married couple with a family, making normal, rational decisions about how to organise their lives in the most efficient way. Or maybe Mum just didn’t think she had any option.
It wasn’t long before she realised her mistake. She would come home after a long day at work to discover that Isobel was still exactly where she had left her that morning. Nappies weren’t changed, she hadn’t been fed, and it was obvious to her that Dad had basically taken no notice of the baby at all. He might have told her that he had given up work with the intention of caring for his first child, but it soon began to dawn on her that he wasn’t capable of it. Within a few days Mum had to go back to hiring babysitters just as she had first intended. Dad, however, had got used to the idea of not working by that stage and made no effort to look for another job beyond the odd temporary one when he was in desperate need of cash for something. As Mum rushed around trying to earn enough to pay for his upkeep as well as Isobel’s, and then mine, Dad withdrew further and further into his own private world, most of which was contained behind the closed doors of his silent bedroom, unseen by anyone but him.
‘It’s like having a third child to look after,’ Mum would grumble on the rare occasions when she said anything about him at all. It certainly can’t have felt as though she had a partner to share her life and her children with.
His inner sanctum had been Mum’s bedroom as well when they first bought the house, but by the time Isobel and I were old enough to take in what was happening at night we realised that Mum always slept on the couch in the sitting room. During the day her pillow and duvet would be tucked away behind it, out of sight, and she would make up the bed last thing each night when she was ready to sleep. Her few clothes and possessions were kept in Isobel’s room, so that she never had to invade Dad’s privacy or risk waking him while he slept the days away.
‘It’s because I snore, and because I have to get up early,’ she would explain if either of us questioned her about it. ‘I don’t want to disturb your father.’
We didn’t question this logic; we just took it as normal. She made no complaint about the situation so we assumed it was okay and she was happy about it. Dad’s bedroom became a mysterious world hidden behind a permanently closed door. Half the time when we came back from school we didn’t even know if he was inside or not. Because he led such a nocturnal life there would often be no sounds emitting from behind the door during the day at all. He came down to the kitchen to make meals while we were out at school and never ate with the three of us. We knew he had a television in his room but we could never hear it, so I don’t know if he ever actually watched it. Not knowing if he was in the house at any given moment made living under the same roof as him all the more scary.
We tried to carry on with our lives as if he didn’t live there at all but sometimes he would suddenly appear on the landing or in the kitchen, usually saying nothing and staring straight through us. He had a habit of coming out of the bathroom stark naked and standing at the toilet with the door wide open, as if he didn’t know anyone else was there. If we heard him coming in time we would dodge out of his way so we didn’t risk incurring his wrath, but unless he deliberately wanted to pick a fight he wouldn’t give any indication that he had seen us or that he even knew we existed. Isobel and I would have our showers before leaving for school in the morning, when we could be pretty certain he was fast asleep and wouldn’t be disturbed by any noise we might make.
If he did speak to Isobel it was only to tell her how much he hated her. When she was little she didn’t reply, but she grew bolder in later years and would sometimes even insult him as long as there were other people around to protect her if necessary. I remember she once told him he was ‘gay’, just to wind him up. It sometimes seemed as if she was deliberately
