thought he was doing it to punish her because she wouldn’t accept him as her father, and to placate him and stop him from continuing to touch her she started to call him ‘Dad’. But it didn’t seem to have any effect, and she was always glad when his job took him away—sometimes for days at a time.
Then he lost his job. He had been married to her mother for six months when it happened, and she seemed to grow pale and worried overnight.
There wasn’t enough money now for her to stay on at the convent school, she explained gently at half term, and when school re-started Laurel would be attending the local girls’ school.
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
