1:25 p.m.
/
07 January, 2004

There are not enough computers in this place... there are people queued up at the door, someone is leaning on my chair... I'm going to sit here and do frivolous things just to piss them off as they breathe into my neck and unconsciously push me to stab them in the throat with a pen.

What can I say, I'm a little claustrophobic and when I get cornered, I lash out. I'm like a dog in that way.

Well, Saturday was perhaps the most amazing, most painful, just plain most night of my life. My mum and stepdad went out for the night and came back around 3 in the morning. I'd stayed in to watch over the little brother, because he'd not been well and that sort of thing stops me from having a good time.

Anyway, my mother and the nazi return, merry and chatty. My stepdad starts in 'joking' about how he can't wait to drive me back to uni and get rid of me. I play along as usual, pretending that I think he's joking. Anyway, also as usual, he likes to build up and build up, so then he's talking about how he'd like to run me over with his car and hilarious things like that. Then, the shit hits. I ask him some questions, like why he always says that 'we don't get on'. That's what he always says when people ask, like it's an ever-present, unchangeable fact. A law of physics.

I think, because he's got away with his behaviour for so long, he feels kind of invincible, and he admits more than he should. He says that he has never liked me, will never like me, because I am close to my mother. Because he doesn't want my mother to have anyone but him to care about. When I ask if he cares that his 9 year old son gets upset about the tension between us, he says no.

My mum starts to cry. She has never cried openly in all the time I've known her. Never. And it finally hits her that I have been telling the truth for the last 14 years. It wasn't my fault.

It. Wasn't. My. Fault.

At first, I break down, because suddenly I was allowed to. All this pain and all this anger that I had held in. All the things he had said to me, done to me, were about him and his self-obsession.

My mother turns on him. She starts to scream, she starts to wail about what a terrible mother she's been because she kept telling my brother and I to be 'understanding' when we were growing up. She told us that we were being punished because we'd been bad and that we had to try harder. She had kept us in a house with a man who wanted nothing more than to destroy us just for simply existing. Particularly me, because, he informed me, I am 'pseudo'.

Yes, a pseudo intellectual. Because on Sheppey, you are not allowed to deviate from the norm. He told me I was a fake because I didn't get stoned and go shag someone in the car park. He told me I was a fake because I'm gay. He told me I was a fake because I was at uni. He told me I was a fake because I didn't eat meat.

I told him that he was a close-minded, arrogant, self-obsessed shit, and that I wanted to be there when he died in agony. When he tried to retaliate, my mother told him that he would have to endure my anger. That he would have to accept that this was the way it was now.

I told him that I never wanted to hear him bad mouth my father again, particularly now while he's grieving for my grandad. I said that he had no right to say anything about him, to make him feel uncomfortable when he visits, to judge him in any way, because he was just as bad. Because he was worse. My dad had never done anything to anyone purely out of hate. My father would never premeditate the emotional abuse of a seven year old girl simply because she couldn't help but exist.

I told him that he was an awful father himself, that he was a terrible husband and that my mother deserved better. My mother agreed. She's decided to go back to college.

He didn't apologise. He tried to justify it all by going on about his awful childhood. I simply cut him off curtly by remarking that everyone had a fucking awful childhood, particularly people who had grown up around him. It's not an excuse, it's never an excuse.

My mum seemed completely crippled by it all though. I heard them talking later and she was still crying, she told him that he wasn't the person she'd thought he was. He was the person I'd told her he was. She said that she was sickened by the way I must have seen her all these years, doing all the things she told me never to do.

Never subordinate yourself, never serve a man, never sacrifice your needs for theirs. Never lose your identity. And all the while, she'd been doing the exact same thing.

She seemed really worried about me, because, after all, I'm the crazy one, right. But, to tell you the truth, I feel incredibly strong now. Because, all these years, maybe all my life with the bastards that she's brought to live with us, I've tried so hard to be good and worth loving. I kept thinking that if only I tried harder to be perfect, then they wouldn't have any reason to hate me and treat me the way they did. But it wasn't me, it was NEVER me, and that helps me to deal with it all. That helps me to stop trying so hard. I could have killed myself trying to be perfect, but even then I was just committing the most heinous Sheppey sin, I was trying to better myself. They never forgive you for it. A swampy like my stepfather would never forgive you for it.

Anyway, his admissions, the way he even said that he would purposely try and make me leave a room if I was in there with my mum, or he would step in front of me if I was trying to walk past, they've freed me. And it's not just at home I've noticed it. I'm not afraid to be mean anymore.

I got to the house and Lou, my thief of a housemate, had stolen all my textbooks, videos, food and even the blanket from my bed. I asked for them back quite politely, but didn't do that victim thing, where I say that I don't really mind. I do mind, so I said so.

That night, her stoner friends came back at four am and started playing music so loud that my bed, on the floor below, vibrated with it. That is actually, not a problem. But then, one of them tried to sneak into my room.

The next day, I told her to tell her friend that no guy comes into my room uninvited. And that next time I even hear him touch the doorhandle, I will break his nose and cut off his balls.

I pay my share of the rent, I have no problem with loud music, I'll even share my things if people ask to borrow them. But I'm not a mug, not anymore.