The day my dad died changed my life forever. You’d expect that with anyone, right? I know that. But my story is a little different to ‘anyone’s’.

I was eight when they killed him when a mugging went wrong – or, so I had thought at the time. My mum left us when I was four. I never knew the reason why. Dad never told me why, when the morning after my fourth birthday I woke and she just wasn’t there anymore. I asked. I asked him many times, but he would just shake his head and say, “She just isn’t anymore, jelly bean.” After around four months I simply stopped asking.

My father was a very complicated man. He wasn’t a good person, then again, he wasn’t an evil man either. He was just him, diseased by circumstance and the toll life took on him. He wasn’t a terrible father either, merely that he wasn’t very good at being a dad.

I was always a nuisance to him, with my long, gangly legs and the mass of unruly black curls that would send him into a rage every morning when he tried to tame each wild spiral. My tongue always seemed a little too big for my mouth and caught on my front canines, giving me a slight lisp and driving him to distraction every time I held a conversation with him – not that we had many of those.

I was always bullied at school because of how I looked and spoke, and, I think, in a way, my father resented that he was stuck with an unpopular girl that never left the house. He’d shout at me whenever I had followed him around and talked incessantly for a little too long. “Go out and play, Elsie! You’re grating my brain!” he’d bellow. “Go find some friends your own age and leave me in peace, girl!” So, I’d put on my shoes, pick up Dotty, my dolly, and I would go out. I’d walk down our drive, around the corner and hide out in the long wheat field behind our house for a while, just so my father thought I had friends, and that he got the peace he loved.

I’m not sure whether Daddy loved me the day that he died, I am still unsure, even now, nearly twenty years later. Well, maybe in his own little way he had done. I was just ‘the nuisance who clung on like an irksome little leech.’ I knew our relationship was a strange one after listening to all the girls at school talk about their daddies.  

Before Mum left, he always woke me with the biggest smile and with super hard tickles. He’d carry me on his shoulders all the way to nursery, and he’d sit for hours, brushing my dollies’ hair and having teddy bears picnics with cold lemon tea and jam sandwiches. I’d been his Jelly Bean, his Princess. I guess my mother took my tiara with her the day she left, and he couldn’t ever see me as his princess again.

I still see his blood on my hands in the midst of my dreams. I still hear that last breath he took in the echo of my nightmares, and I can still smell the piss that soaked his trousers when he fell to his knees and begged for his life.

They had laughed at him. They had mocked him when he had taken my small hand and pulled me into him. I didn’t realise at the time, I was too young, but I know now he was using me as a shield. Sick, huh? Cruel? Look at that how you will, but to me, he was still my daddy, the man who fed and clothed me, the man who, when I cried at being left alone, would huff but give in and take me to the pub with him. He would sit me in the corner, night after night, with a small packet of peanuts and a Pepsi, while he got raging drunk, fall over, and pick fights with the other regulars.

It was after one of these particular nights when walking home that the three men stopped us as we stumbled across the park. It was dark. It had never been a well-lit park. Many of the residents had complained, but, of course, no one had ever taken note, and no lighting was ever fitted. I remember how the light of the moon reflected off my father’s tears as he knelt and pleaded with them, how his stuttered appeals sounded squeaky and desperate. I remember how hot his body felt pressed against my small, cold one. I remember the steam of my terrified breaths in the icy December night air, swirling around in front of me like fear had its own physical structure. I remember how one of the men called my father a ‘gutter rat’, how he wasn’t deserving of such a strong and beautiful daughter. How had they known I was strong? How could they make such a judgement on a man they didn’t know? I remember those thoughts crossing my mind as I sat there, next to my dad, silently praying to a God I wasn’t sure existed. I remember them now as if I had only thought them seconds ago, each silent question going unanswered.

However, after each of the three men drove a blade through my daddy’s heart, the tallest of the men took my tiny, trembling hand, and he answered each of my unspoken questions….

I remember how white I thought his teeth were against the blackness of his skin when he smiled at me, and how his wide eyes shone brighter than the moon itself. But it was his voice, soft and encouraging, that had me curling my little fingers around the bulk of his hand and allowing him to scoop me up into the strength of his broad chest.

“It’s okay now, little one. You’ll never be alone again.”

I remember blinking up at him, and for some reason I couldn’t understand, believing him more than I had believed anyone before.

“It’s time,” he said softly as he took a step forward, the very first step in my new life. “It’s time to be the strong girl I know you are. It’s time to have a family.”

And, even twenty years later, after every exhausting day, every agonising night, every ounce of blood they shed from me, and every scorching tear that fell from me, I thank God for the three blades that finally ended mine and my father’s relationship.