I Remember, Daddy by Katie Matthews

psychopathic hatred of anyone who crossed him and he had always had absolutely no interest in ‘doing the right thing’. All that ever concerned him was what he wanted – and he wanted money almost more than anything else. So he simply ignored the court order, assuming – rightly, as it turned out – that my mother wouldn’t have the mental energy to fight him and that if she ever did, he had enough powerful and influential friends in high places to find some way of discrediting any claim she might make.
    My father had been hiding money for some time and he’d bought several properties, most of them in the names of trusted friends. So he allowed my mother and me to move into a flat in a house he owned, for which, incongruously, my mother paid him rent. It was a horrible flat – just two rooms plus a tiny kitchen and an even tinier bathroom in a rundown house in one of the worst areas of town. I had never seen anything like it before, and in fact I didn’t have any idea that places like that even existed.
    My father was in the process of having the rest of the house divided up into dismal little bedsits, and for the first few weeks after we moved in, we were its only occupants. The whole building was grimly bleak. It was noisy during the day when the workmen were there and eerie at night while all the bedsits were empty. But, once our new neighbours started moving in – all of them drunks, drug addicts and prostitutes whose rents were being paid by social services – it was worse than anything I could ever have imagined.
    Our flat was on the top floor, and it was divided from the landing at the top of the staircase by a glass partition, which meant that our hallway – and the doors leading off it to the bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and living room – was clearly visible to anyone and everyone coming and going to the bedsits.
    I think my father derived some sort of satisfaction from knowing that my mother was living in such a miserable place – and I know that he was completely indifferent to what happened to me. Perhaps he felt that living surrounded by down-and-outs and criminals was suitable punishment for her for having thought she could just walk away from him. And perhaps he liked the irony of the fact that my mother had come from a respectable, comfortably well-off family whereas he had been poor as a child, and now she was living in squalid poverty while he remained in the family home, dined at the best restaurants and drank champagne with some of the town’s most prominent movers and shakers.
    Every corner of the flat was pervaded by a sour, musty smell, which no amount of scrubbing and cleaning could ever get rid of. There was no washing machine, no cooker and no furniture apart from the narrow single bed I slept in and the sofa in the living room, which at night became my mother’s bed. The bathroom was minute; it was too small for a bath, and there was just a grimy, leaking shower with no curtain rail, and therefore no curtain, a cracked basin and a stained toilet with a white plastic seat that jerked precariously to one side when you sat on it. There was no floor covering in the bathroom; in fact, there were no curtains or floor coverings anywhere in the flat, except for two large Persian rugs my mother had somehow managed to take from what was now my father’s house and which looked bizarrely out of place on the stained, splintered fl oorboards in the living room/bedroom.
    My mother’s mother bought us a cooker, but we still had no washing machine, so we washed our clothes in the basin in the bathroom and hung them to dry on a rack in the shower.
    My mother found a job in an upmarket clothes shop, where she earned just enough to pay the rent and bills, and I accepted things as they were, without ever thinking that there might be an alternative way for us to live. I realise now that my mother must have been depressed, and still completely under my father’s thumb. Why else would someone who wasn’t