Chapter Three: god will punish you

When he was five, Phillip was left in the bath one day to play with his plastic toys. At the end of the tub, on a wooden tray, stood his mother’s bubble bath and sometimes she would spoil him by adding a capful to the water. It smelled of lavender and he loved the feel of the bubbles bursting against his skin.

Next to the bubble bath was a bottle of perfume. He’d often been told not to touch this. But that’s like leaving a Pandora’s Box unprotected with a sign reading ‘DO NOT OPEN’ and expecting to return and find it closed. Perfume bottles, like Pandora’s Boxes, are made to entice opening. This one was shiny glass twisted into an exquisite design and Phillip imagined its creator holding the base tightly in one hand and twisting the top with the other. He could hear his mother talking on the phone in the other room and carefully reached out and took the bottle from its place on the shelf, lifted the top and smelled the perfume. He’d done this before without being caught.

The fragrance reminded him of church. It was held in a garage in a Coloured area. He sat next to his mother on an uncomfortable hard chair and listened to his father preach. He was trying not to fidget, or curl up with his head on his mother’s lap and going to sleep, “You’re too big for that now”, she’d said. While his father droned on menacingly about salvation, punishment, damnation and hell, he would concentrate on the exotic fragrance that came from his mother and imagine the magical twisting being performed to create its beautiful container.

He sniffed at it as though it was a hypnotic drug and the dreamlike drowsiness that it induced masked the unexpected entrance of his mother. “What are you doing, how many times have I told you not to touch my things”, she screamed.

In his panicked haste to restore the bottle to its rightful place it slipped from his wet fingers and, in slow motion, hit the water and clunked to a stop on the enamel base of the bath. Tiny bubbles erupted on the water’s surface releasing little puffs of fragrance. The bathroom smelled like a w***e’s boudoir. His mother grabbed at it but couldn’t save it. She scooped it out of the water and set it down on the washing machine. She was crying and shaking with fury, “How many times have I told you not to touch my things” she shouted, “You’re a disobedient and wicked child.”

Phillip sat naked in the water that had suddenly gone cold, sobbing at his mother’s distress. He’d never seen her cry or heard her shout before. His teeth chattered through his sobs. He wished that he could somehow go back a few minutes and undo the past, but this was a first and indelibly lasting lesson that it seems he was never able to learn, that actions once performed could not be undone. “I’m sorry mommy, I won’t do it again,” he blubbered through his tears.

“God will punish you,” she yelled, “Wait until I tell your father.” She grabbed him under his arms and roughly pulled him out of the bath and set him down on the linoleum floor. She dried him with rough, hard strokes of the towel and marched him to his room to, “Wait for your father and think about what you’ve done.”

Phillip dressed in his pyjamas, warm flannel against cold skin and sat on his bed, shivering with fear and cold. The room grew dark as he waited for an agonizing eternity for his father to come home.

Eventually he heard the front door open and bang closed and the sound of his parent’s voices. After a long silence the door opened and his father stood there, in his hand he held the leather strap that he used on poor Wuffy. He closed the door gently behind him. This gentleness and the sight of the cruel strap made Phillip even more afraid. He felt chilled and through sobs and chattering teeth he begged, “Please don’t hit me daddy, I’ll be good, I’ll never do it again.”

His father took his quivering shoulders in his strong hands and leant down towards him, whispering in his ear, “Your mother wants me to punish you and won’t take no for an answer. I don’t think I need to, I think you’ve learnt your lesson but we’ll have to pretend. I’m going to hit the bed and I want you to scream. Okay?” Phillip nodded, but although he was relieved at this sudden unexpected reprieve, he was also confused and afraid. What if his mother found out, he thought, what then?

His father began to hit the bed, the strap whistling fearfully past Phillip’s ear and although he tried he could not bring any sound out of his mouth. One, two, his father stopped. “Cry,” he whispered urgently. Phillip began to whimper. Three, he cried out aloud. Four, he screamed. Five, six, now he was crying uncontrollably. He felt no pain on his unmarked skin but his little soul was stinging with each stroke of the whip; being scarred with the unbearable guilt of unpardoned and unpunished sin. For the first and last time Phillip’s father gently held and comforted him, as he cried himself to sleep, but his mother never came to kiss him or to say goodnight.

After that, when Phillip woke to Wuffy’s tortured cries he imagined his father whispering to the dog, “Scream, scream.”


Dorothea had stood at the bottom of the garden while Daniel was punishing Phillip. She didn’t want to hear the boy’s screams, even though she’d persuaded Daniel to punish him. Daniel hadn’t seemed too keen but he could hardly refuse. After all, he was the one who was always nagging about the boy, “You’re spoiling him, he needs to know the difference between right and wrong; he needs a stricter hand.” But even from this distance, she heard Phillip scream and a residual trace of tenderness and an unexpected pang of guilt rose in her heart so that she had to cover her ears to block out his cries.


The next time Phillip’s mother said the words, “Wait until your father gets home”, because of some naughtiness that he’d been caught at, there was to be no reprieve. When his father came into his room he wasn’t carrying the strap. Phillip sighed, but his relief was short lived, “Go and fetch the strap from the kitchen”, his father commanded him in a cold, unforgiving voice.

That journey in his pyjamas and barefoot through the lounge, over the cold tiles in the dining room to the kitchen door seemed, to Phillip, to be the walk of a condemned man to the gallows. He made the short trip slowly, hoping that the gathering darkness would swallow him up and save him from this inevitable punishment.

“What took you so long, boy? Take off your pants and bend over the bed.” When the first stroke landed it shocked Phillip like nothing had ever done in his life before. He hurtled onto the bed, scrambling desperately away from the strap, but his father didn’t stop and the next shot caught his legs and then his back. Those few interminable minutes of unbearable pain changed something inside him; he no longer trusted his mother or his father; he felt that he had been abandoned by them.

This time there was no reassuring hug and Phillip was left to cry himself to sleep.


After Daniel beat Phillip the second time, Dorothea went to her husband from her sanctuary in the garden and he ‘did it’ with her; there and then in the lounge while Phillip’s whimpering was still creeping under his closed bedroom door. This time it was almost tender, almost gentle and he continued long enough so that she almost reached orgasm but when she cried out, “Don’t stop, don’t stop”, he covered her mouth with his hand and pulled out of her. She’d wanted to finish with her own hand but was too afraid that God wouldn’t forgive her for what her mother had called an unforgivable sin.

This near satisfying sexual experience was not the only positive spin-off from her betrayal of Phillip. Daniel began to ease up on his restrictions of her movements. Up until then he’d acted insanely jealous of any man that she spoke to and wouldn’t allow her out of his sight. Now he allowed her to go to a woman’s meeting one evening a week. This was a huge boost to her confidence.

Gaining courage from these small strides, Dorothea began to speak to Daniel about the possibility of her working. Hesitantly at first and then with more confidence, pointing out that her income would help them run the home and he could perhaps use some of his money to improve the conditions at his church.

It took months of patient negotiation but eventually he agreed. At last she would be able to have some unsupervised contact with the outside world.