Rag Doll Ch. 07 - Ricky's Family 01

I slumped back, stomach full and body fully relaxed for the first time in I don't know how long. Tension I wasn't even aware of, that had been a part of me for so long it had become normal, had finally been sponged away. Yasmin patted my knee and took the tray away.

"Get some rest, Richard, mummy will want to talk to you in the morning, it's late...or really, really early; either way, you're tired, we'll all talk in the morning. Goodnight...big brother!"

"...Ricky... " I murmured, and she stopped and looked back at me. "What say...?" she grinned, and I repeated myself, a little louder.

"Ricky, please, call me Ricky... " and she nodded. "Ricky it is, gotcha; don't go 'way now!"

*

Daylight in my eyes woke me, a moment spent wondering where I was, then memory and realisation put me straight. I stretched luxuriously, feeling marvellously rested and at peace, considering the day was going to get worse, because hadn't Ayesha warned me? So I luxuriated in my one moment of complete peace, letting the apprehension wait until I was ready to deal with it.

"Good morning, how are you feeling?" said a soft voice, and I looked around to see Ayesha smiling at me.

"How old are you, Richard? Because when you're sleeping, you look so young, but you have to be, what, nearly twenty, am I right?"

"Almost nineteen," I replied, "and Bobby's nearly twenty; there's only a year between us. And please, call me Rick, or Ricky, or Ritchie; no-one ever called me Richard."

Ayesha came to her feet, leaning on her cane, and indicated a bathrobe and towels and my clothes folded neatly on the other armchair.

"Go and get a shower, you know where the bathroom is, there are some disposable razors and toothbrushes in the cabinet, then come down and we'll have some breakfast together, just like family... " She grinned when she said it, to defuse any sting I might have felt at her words.

"Yasmin's not here, she had to go to school and finish up a few odds and ends after her finals, and Shari's down at the office, taking care of some things for me, so it's just you and me this morning, so we'll have that talk when you're done. Go on now; I'll be here when you come back down."

*

After the best, hottest, most luxurious shower I'd ever had, properly shaved, brushed, and combed, and dressed in my freshly laundered and pressed, clean-smelling clothes, I made my way back down to the sitting room.

"In here, Ricky," I heard her call, and I followed her voice into the dining room, where something smelled delicious. Ayesha was busy laying the table and she stopped dead, dropping the napkin she was holding as she stared at me.

"My God, you look just like, just like your... just like... " she stammered, while I stared at her in puzzlement; what had I done now, and what the hell was she talking about?

"I'm sorry...?" I began, and she flushed, her face reddening.

"It's nothing, I'm sorry, Rich... sorry, Ricky, for one second there you looked just like... never mind, breakfast is ready, please, sit, eat, don't let it get cold."

Hot food, hot, tasty food, food like I'd never had before was a dazzling experience; from my perspective now, when I look back on how my life turned, it was simple food, the kind of breakfast millions of people probably have every day of their lives, but for me, it was a revelation; grilled bacon, fried eggs, sausage, grilled tomatoes, hot toast with butter running through it, nothing special or gourmet, but to me, compared to how I'd been living, it was a magical feast, the best, most wonderful things I'd ever eaten.

"Eat as much as you want, Ricky, then we'll talk, while Yasmin and Shereen are away; right now, I don't need Shari's interruptions, and I don't want Yasmin hearing what I have to say. Eat up and we'll get this over with, then you can decide what you want to do next, OK?"

I didn't need telling twice, and I pitched in with a will, and no matter how much I ate, there was always more. When I finally pushed my plate away I was stuffed full, happy and satisfied in a way I'd never been before; there's a world of difference between getting-by on mediocre grub you eat just to keep yourself alive, and filling up with simple, tasty food that satisfies like nothing ever did before, and I felt strong, together, fit, and ready to fight lions, which something told me I was about to do.

*

Breakfast over and cleared away, Ayesha told me to go wait for her in the sitting room. When she joined me, her mood had changed; during breakfast she'd been friendly, helpful, polite, chatty, even, and had gone to great pains to put me at my ease. Now she looked stern, grim, almost.

"Ricky," she began, "I want you to understand that none of this reflects on you, do you understand? Your family and mine have a lot of history together, none of it good, and I still feel anger, so much anger, but you must remember, none of this is your fault; if you didn't need to know this I wouldn't tell you, but you need to know the truth, and that... creature, your father, will never be able to tell you, or even admit to any of it. I want you to know that I won't enjoy any of this, do you understand? I hardly know you, but what I've seen makes me hope that things will change, that maybe you will make the difference; remember, that Richard Davies, remember that and hold on to it!"

My throat was dry; suddenly I didn't want to be here, but I knew I had to be; too many secrets and lies had surrounded me for too long, I needed to clear it all away so I could be normal, perhaps with my new family to be there for me. I nodded at her, telling her I was ready to do this.

"Do you remember yesterday, when I showed you my back? That I told you your father did that to me?" I nodded, and she kept going.

"He did that to me because he could; he did it to your brother, he did it to Nicky's mother, and he did it to Barbara, your poor mother. Robert Davis stole everything I had, he took every last thing I owned, he beat me, he raped me countless times, and he destroyed everything I had, my place in my family, my business everything. And why? Because he wanted what I had, that was the only reason he needed. Your father was a sadistic criminal, a true psychopath, why should he work when he could just take, so he took, and he took, and he took!"

Her eyes were hard and bitter, glistening rocks that stared into my soul, and I couldn't look away.

"If all he wanted were just things, well and good; but that wasn't enough; he wanted to own me, for me to know I was his slave, his little chilli-cracker plaything to use and mistreat whenever he pleased, and that's all I was to him. When he found out I was pregnant with Shereen he beat me so badly he nearly killed me; children with me wasn't part of his plan, I was just there to be used while he took my business, stole my money, gambled and lost my property, everything I'd worked and saved for. He bankrupted my parents and made them disown me, he destroyed my name in our community and any chance for marriage and a family of my own. He took all that away."

Something she'd just said struck a chord and I went back, looked at it, and shook my head; that couldn't be right!

"I...I'm sorry, could you back up a second, please? You just called Barbara my mother, you're wrong, she was Nicky's mother, not mine..."

Ayesha shook her head.

"No, Richard, Barbara wasn't Nicky's mother, she was yours, you and Robert; your father abducted Nicky from his mother, his first wife, when he was a toddler; Barbara brought him up, but she was your mother, not his... "

My jaw dropped in shock; now it all made sense, why Nicky's "mother" was still hanging around our family; it was because she was my mother; we'd had our mother with us all along! That fucking bastard! As the thought rang through me, everything else clanged along with it; how we'd ignored and disrespected her, how we'd followed our father's lead and treated her like a servant, the way we'd grin when we heard dad abusing her, our smirks and snide comments listening to her begging dad to stop hurting her, the grossly disrespectful way we'd behaved at her funeral, it all came back home to roost, and then I felt the sick horror that came with knowing I'd been a willing part of all that, that I'd been a part of what he'd done, everything he'd done... to my own mother!

Ayesha looked at me levelly and murmured "You didn't know... " but we did; we knew decent people didn't behave like we did, we knew that was not how you treated people, and we didn't care, because we were better than her, so we did it anyway.

Ayesha handed me a glass of water and I drank mechanically, blankly, horrified almost beyond bearing at what I'd heard, knowing there was yet worse to come...

"Please... finish it... " I murmured, bracing myself to hear the rest. Ayesha stared at me for a few seconds, and nodded.

"Robert Davies was a monster, a racist pig who loved hurting people, me, anyone, it was what he got off on, he... took me, he beat me, he hurt me so many times, and why? Because he could, that's why; whenever he came to London he'd show up here, drag me into his bed, knock me around, and leave me bruised and bloody, and I had no-one to help me, and because I had no-one to help me, he kept coming back. When he was finished with me he'd slap me around, call me names like 'Paki whore' and 'chilli-cracker' and 'wog', he did it in front of his daughters, and tell me he was going to sell them too, because no white man was going to want a chilli-cracker, but he knew plenty of men who wanted to one to play with, and when the girls were old enough, and pretty enough, he was going to sell them, because they were little whores too; he had real children already, white children, what did he need half-breed chilli-crackers for?"

My stomach was heaving with disgust as the story unfolded; I couldn't believe my dad would do things like that, but a small voice inside me kept shouting that yes, of course he could, because I'd always known what he was really like.

"How..." I murmured, and she bit her lip, tears starting in her eyes.

"When I left university, I graduated with a first-class degree in business administration, with an honour in economics; I borrowed money from my father and began a property renovation and leasing business, buying up derelict residential and small industrial premises and remodelling them, renting and leasing them back out again, it was small-scale at first, but this is London, people need places to live, places to work, to do business, and my business grew. Your father and his cronies heard about me, they saw a woman alone turning a small business into a financial success and they wanted it, so they took it from me, they moved in on me, they grabbed everything I'd worked and planned so hard for, and your father was the worst of them; he was the ringleader, it was all his plan, his get-rich-quick scheme; why work a business when you can just hijack one?"

Tears were running down her cheeks, but she bored on relentlessly.

"He took everything, he emptied my bank accounts, he made me take out loans against the business and sign over all my properties to him, everything I'd worked for, and, when I tried to object, to fight back, he'd just hurt someone I loved; his friends beat my father so badly he's never recovered, and my family found out, because he told them, just to make sure they disowned me, to make sure they'd never lift a finger to help me, and when he got his hands on everything I owned he sold it all for whatever he could get for it because he didn't care, he hadn't paid anything for it, whatever he got for it, it was all profit for him. And then it was all gone; I had nothing left, and when I had nothing left, he started using me, because I had nothing else to for him to take, and he said rag-head whores were only good for one thing, so he and his friends used me until he decided I was his personal whore, and that's what I became, over and over again."

She paused to sip from her water glass, her hand trembling slightly as she looked past me at something I couldn't see, before taking a deep breath and putting her glass down and squaring her shoulders as she continued her story.

"When I fell pregnant with Shari he was so angry, he beat me so badly I was in hospital for three weeks, when I came home he told me I could keep the baby, as far as he was concerned it wasn't his, and he did the same thing with Yasmin; he paid nothing for them, not a penny, I had to scrape around finding whatever work I could just to feed my children, because he wouldn't, he had you and Robert; my children were nothing to him, my family wanted nothing to do with me and my half-caste, bastard children; we were alone, and I had no-one to help me, to keep that man away from me, to stop him doing whatever he wanted to me."

I sat in shock; I knew my father had a mean, vicious side, but this? This was monstrous, that a man could do things like that to a defenceless woman? It horrified and sickened me, because this was my father, part of me was part of him, and the thought of that disgusted me beyond all reason; all I could do was sit in silence while this horror rolled over me; my father was a demon, and I was his son...

Ayesha bowed her head, I could see the tears dripping from her chin as she cried silently, and I cursed myself for coming here and stirring all this up again inside her; I wanted to reach out to her but I didn't know how.

"Barbara...you said Barbara was...my mother?" I began, "how was that even possible, she lived with us, why didn't...?"

Ayesha cut me off.

"Because he was an evil, psychotic, rat-shit bastard, that's why!" she screamed, and I cowered down in my seat, suddenly afraid of this woman who'd suffered so much at the hands of my father.

"He took that poor woman away from wherever he found her, he gave her children to keep for himself, he terrorised and abused her, and he killed her, that fucking piece of shit killed her because she tried to help your brother! That fucker sat right where you're sitting, drunk as a skunk and told me all about it, how he killed her because she went through his papers, how he made it look like suicide, and he gloated about it, he was proud of what he did, everything, what he did to her, what he did to your brother, what he did to me, he thought he was the fucking King Shit of the Western World, like he was some kind of superstar...!"

She abruptly cut her tirade short and laid her head in her hands and cried, huge, gasping sobs as she let it all out, and me, I sat there like a moron, too shocked and disgusted to move, too ignorant to know what to say, just numbed and paralysed by the horror of what had happened to this woman and her life because of my father. One fact that kept clanging inside me, however, and would not be quieted; he'd killed Barbara. He'd killed her and boasted about it, she hadn't committed suicide, it was him, he'd killed her. She was my mother, Bobby's and mine, and that hadn't stopped him, it hadn't even slowed him down, he'd still tied that rope around her neck and watched her choke her life out and did nothing. He was a murderer, he murdered my mother...

I found myself stroking her shoulder, her back, trying uselessly to comfort her, unable to do anything else, because I didn't know how. I didn't know how to reach out and comfort a fellow human being. I didn't know how because he'd done that to me, he'd made me less than a human, just a shell with no understanding of how to be a real person, one with proper feelings, and empathy, and compassion. I truly didn't know how to express compassion or sorrow, because he didn't have those, so he'd never taught us.

In a sudden, stinging epiphany I realised I was even less human than the stray dogs I'd seen rooting in the dumpsters and squabbling in the streets. I had none of the gentler emotions, the only inheritance I had from that man was a lack of basic human emotions and connections so profound it passed all understanding. I was a golem, a walking shell, a vacuum, I knew nothing about anything, not even how to try and take someone's pain away, and that realisation stunned and horrified me.

Ayesha's hand squeezing mine woke me from my heartsick woolgathering. Her face was grey, but her features composed, tear tracks staining her cheeks but she was calm again, she'd said what she needed me to hear, and the crisis point had been passed. She took both my hands, looking into my eyes, concern and compassion in her eyes, and I realised she was concerned for me, for what she'd made me see.

"Richard, I'm... I don't know what to say to you, I thought you needed to know this stuff, but I'm sorry you had to hear it, if that makes sense. I know it's not your fault, or your brother's, I showed you my anger and it wasn't your fault, none of it was. Please forgive me, I hated you for what your father did, and I was wrong. It's gone now, it's all over, but now you know, and maybe we can, I don't know, move on together. Will you forgive me?"

I nodded, not knowing what else to say, and she cupped my face gently with her warm hands, a faint smile on her lips.

"So much like him, yet nothing like him at all... " she murmured, "maybe there's hope for you, so now we have to ask, "what are we going to do with you, Richard Davies?" Come, sit with me, we'll talk, and when your sisters come home, we'll talk like a family should, yes?"

I let her lead me back to the sitting room, going slowly because she needed to lean on her walking cane, into the less confrontational and homely atmosphere, but my mind was still churning with all I'd learned, the things I now knew about where I was from, and what I was. I think Ayesha divined some of what I was thinking, because she sat on the sofa next to me and took my hand while she gazed silently at me.

"Yasmin trusts you," she said out of nowhere, startling me out of my thoughts of Barbara, Nicky, what had been done to them. "What..? I blurted out and she smiled that faint, enigmatic smile of hers.

"Yasmin. She likes you. What's more, she trusts you; she thinks you're OK."

I must have looked puzzled, I certainly didn't understand her, but her hand on my arm was gentle, and she didn't seem mad at me anymore.

"Let me tell you something about my girls, Richard, about your sisters," she began. "They're scared; Yasmin is scared all the time, she's jumpy and nervy, and Shereen tries not to show it, but she's just as scared. They've been scared all their lives, but it's a funny thing; since you've been here, and they've been helping look after you, a lot of that has gone; it's like it's clicked down a couple of notches. Not all of it has gone, that's going to take time, but enough that it makes me wonder what they're seeing. Everything that happened, what they saw, what happened to them, Yasmin is finally getting past it all, and I know you don't understand this, neither do I, but I think it has a lot to do with you being here."

She sighed as she leaned back, her eyes looking off into the distance, seeing things I never could.

"Your father left some deep scars in her, and Shereen, well, you saw for yourself; they know he's been locked up forever, but they're both still very frightened. What he said and did left strong and lasting memories. Yesterday and last night, for the first time, I saw Yasmin starting to let that all go. She needs a positive male influence in her life, and I think that could be you, if that's what you want.

She grinned at me.

"I don't want to pressure you, but just you being here has made an incredible difference in her, because now she knows that not all the men in her family are like that man, and she likes you, she even trusts you. This morning, before she even thought of herself, she just had to look in on you and make sure you were alright, that you were still here, that her big brother was still here and hadn't slipped away during the night."