Abandoned (13 page)

The girls needed to get back to school and the boys needed their mum. I was outnumbered.

One morning she just left.

Chapter 26

T
he night before, when she told me she was going, I couldn’t look at her. I was upstairs on Marie’s bed watching TV with Stella and Jennifer. Mummy told the girls to go downstairs, that she wanted to talk to me on my own for a second. Stella took her time, picking playing cards up one by one and doubling the elastic band around the pack, saying she just wanted to watch the end of something. Someone opened the kitchen door downstairs and I heard the washing machine, suddenly realising it had been going all day. For some reason it made me glance up at the top of Marie’s wardrobe and I saw that the blue leather suitcases had gone.

‘It’s for the best,’ Mummy said.

She told me that Kathy and Brendan were looking for a boarding school for me to go to. She told me that I’d live at school and in the holidays I’d be able to come back to Marie and Peter’s to stay.

I could see our tiny reflections in the blank TV screen up on Marie’s dressing table.‘Please don’t leave me, Mum, please. You said you never would…’ I felt childish saying it, but it just came out, the way I used to say it as a little girl.‘You’ve always said I’d never have to leave you.’

‘Don’t cry,’ she said.‘You’re making me cry again. You don’t want that, do you?’

I shook my head.

‘Look at me,’ she said.

But I couldn’t. I was frightened of what she might see in my eyes—what accusations might be there. I couldn’t upset Mummy; I’d done enough already.

I said sorry over and over.‘What have I done?’ I asked, finally.

She wiped her eyes on her sleeve.‘Nothing…Don’t ever let me hear you say that, okay? You’re as good as gold.’ Saying it the way she used to always say it to me as a little girl.‘I don’t want you thinking that.’ She looked away, out at the trees at the back of the garden.‘It’s for the best,’ she said again. When her eyes swung back, they were dull and heavy, and something was missing from them.

‘Don’t let me down, will you? Let’s just forget all this now; we don’t need to talk about it again. Not to anyone…’

I knew she meant to Kathy and Brendan. I nodded, swallowing back tears.

‘It’s over now, okay?’ she said.‘I’ll always be your mum though, okay?’ She pulled me towards her. I felt her tears wet against my face, and bit the flesh on the inside of my cheek, trying to hold back the tears.‘Always,’ she said,‘no matter what happens, okay?’

All my life she had promised me no one would ever take me away from her, and now my whole family was being amputated overnight, just at a time when I needed them most.

The day Mummy left, something inside me snapped shut forever.

Kathy and Brendan stepped uneasily into the role of‘parents’ after that. Brendan was like a real uncle to us by then, not just a family friend. Both of them still lived in Ireland and could only get over five or six times a year so there was only so much they could do. But there was nobody else to do it. Everything that had happened was pushed under the carpet. Maybe Mummy told the authorities that I was taken back over to Ireland to live with my‘real’ mum; perhaps she told the police they just took me out of the country and she didn’t know where I was. Maybe that was why no social workers were involved.

Brendan and Kathy arranged for me to go to boarding school. To begin with I was so desolate without Mummy and the rest of my family that I didn’t care what happened to me. All I knew was that I had lost the one person I needed most. I didn’t have a family or a home any more. My worst fears had come true. It felt like I was being punished for what I’d done. But I soon found that boarding school was the perfect place to try to forget your past.

On the outside I adapted easily and rapidly: sleeping in dormitories was like being at home with all my brothers and sisters again, but with nobody to bully me or tell me I was different. Here everyone was different, and everyone had a different surname, not just me. And adapting to a new life in such a different environment, with all the strict rules and new ways of doing things, left me little time to think about the past. It was like brainwashing and I loved it.

On the inside everything was being gradually shrink-wrapped, stored out of sight. There was never a time I forgot my earlier life: the abuse and the violence, and how it all ended. It didn’t go away. It was all bound together in my mind with the separation from Mummy, and I couldn’t forget her. But the memories and the painful feelings soon pulled away from each other, like skin from bone. I would think of what had happened in the past sometimes, but without feeling. At other times, not thinking of anything at all, I would suddenly feel things for no reason, stopped in my tracks with emotions I didn’t understand.

I was surprised how quickly I adapted to boarding school and absorbed all the new ways of doing things. I had elocution lessons and riding lessons and started to do well in class, and gradually came out of my shell and settled in well. Everyone was surprised that I didn’t feel homesick, but then there was no home for me to be homesick for. Kathy was still living at home caring for her elderly father over in Ireland, who still didn’t know about me, and Brendan had his own family, so even on my many trips over there during the holidays I couldn’t be a part of their families or stay in their homes, as I had once stayed at Brendan’s house for a holiday as a child. I did phone Brendan on his home number sometimes, and they encouraged me to write letters to them, but I always had to send them to their business address.

It was Mummy’s letters I longed for. She was never much of a letter-writer and they only came occasionally. When they did arrive I soon found myself embarrassed at her spelling mistakes, and even at the cheap blue writing paper. I was ashamed of myself for noticing that, but I’d become accustomed to the expensive cream paper my friends’ letters were written on and the type I now used in the expensive leather writing case Brendan bought me. When the other girls got their letters and parcels from home handed out in the long, oak-panelled dining room during breakfast, memories of Mummy and my old home would come up and I would yawn them away, trying hard not to see the flashes of long blonde hair, just like Stella’s and Jennifer’s, amongst all the younger girls who were darting between the tables handing out the post. None of my friends knew I had any brothers and sisters.‘They’ll only ask you why they don’t go to boarding school too,’ Kathy and Brendan told me.‘Just say you don’t have any.’ So I did.

When Mummy’s letters did arrive I would never hand them around the table or read parts aloud in the dormitory as some of my friends did. I read them quickly, trying to conceal the thin, cheap envelopes they came in, and mention of the brothers and sisters I wasn’t supposed to have. As soon as I’d read them I’d stuff them into my pocket, later sliding them into one of Brendan’s shirt boxes that I kept at the bottom of my tuck box, until I was alone and could read them through again. I was always left longing for more news and for something I couldn’t have any more; and struggling with emotions I didn’t understand.

The hardest times were the holidays and half-term breaks. All my friends grew more and more excited as they approached, but I came to dread them. For the first week or so I would stay with Brendan or Kathy in one of the big London hotels—the ones in which I had visited Brendan so shyly as a child—and then be put on a train down to Marie and Peter’s for the rest of the holiday. Staying in all the best hotels sounded exotic to my friends at school, but to me it was soon boring and lonely. All I really wanted was to go back to a proper home and family life like them.

Chapter 27

N
othing had ever felt secure in my life and I found it hard to believe that I would ever be safe from my uncle. Nobody ever told me what happened to him, so I could only hope that he was in prison.

Although I was surrounded by people at school I felt very alone whenever the fear struck. When I woke at night from unsettling dreams or my one recurring nightmare, or when I doubled over with sudden stomach cramps during the day or woke in the mornings soaked to the armpits in warm urine, there was no one to talk to about it, no one to help me understand the emotions. So I shut them down more and more. I taught myself not to feel things.

The nightmare I had for years afterwards was always the same in every detail. It was me at a railway station, about to board a train. Mummy was with me on the platform, seeing me off, but just as I stepped up onto the train my uncle appeared and tried to pull me from the carriage. She tried to fight him off, screaming, just like she used to in real life, both of us crying, terrified. He dragged me out onto the platform and they pulled me in different directions, one by the arms, the other by my legs. They pulled so hard I was ripped apart, blood and guts spilling out, my intestines and organs left in a bloody pile on the platform. I was still not dead though. I was lying there watching it all, until finally the two of them just laughed and walked away together, arm in arm.

When my friends came up to my bunk and tried to comfort me, asking me what the nightmare was, I’d say I couldn’t remember, or make up other ones to tell them.

I spent most of my life covering up my background, shrugging it off, trying not to think about Mummy and my brothers and sisters and what happened back at home. The other girls in my dormitory Blu-Tacked their family photos beside their beds. When, at night, they drew their fingers across them, saying‘Love you’ and pressing finger-kisses down on smiling faces, I looked away, finding some distraction, blinking images of Mummy, Stella, Jennifer and the boys out of my head. They’d gone now; that life was over.

Chapter 28

A
lthough I saw Brendan only four or five times a year, he was the closest thing I had in my life to a family now. I still had no idea who my real father was, so my relationship with him was in many ways like that of father and daughter.

His visits gave me a taste of what it would be like to have a family, but never the real thing. When he left I always felt more alone than before. Sometimes, when he and Kathy turned up to collect me from school together, introducing themselves as my‘parents’, and we stayed in hotels in London, sleeping in a big triple room and going out to dinner and the theatre every evening, it felt like we were a proper family. But of course we weren’t; they both had their own lives and families over in Ireland. So as much as I enjoyed our time together, even if I pretended I didn’t, I always knew it would be over too quickly and never allowed myself, or them, to get too close.

It was particularly hard to accept Kathy’s new role in my life. I didn’t need another mum, and couldn’t let her in. I felt that they were just hiding me away in boarding school because I had to be kept a secret, in case the affair Kathy had had came out. Sometimes the loneliness I felt deep down would surface. And, as I grew more confident, I would challenge them on the decisions they had made about me, complaining that I didn’t fit in anywhere now.

‘What were we supposed to do, send you to a home?’

‘At least I’d belong to someone then. At least I’d be with other people who were the same as me. I’d learn to survive. They might not have families, but they’ve got each other; I’ve got no one. You’ve made me a freak. I don’t fit in anywhere.’

‘Of course you do.’

‘Where?’

‘You’ll find your place. Wait until you’re qualified then you’ll see,’ Brendan would always say.‘You’ll be one of them then, with your own people. No one will care where you come from then.’

‘I’ll care,’ I’d always snap before storming off to the bathroom or turning up the volume on my Walkman.

‘Qualified’ was Brendan’s magic word, as if my becoming qualified at something would some day make everything okay.

Only with Brendan was I nearly myself. I opened up to him in a way I didn’t with others. Some of the time he seemed to understand me but I still wasn’t used to the intensity of the attention he aimed at me for those few days, a few times a year. I could never allow myself to open up fully, or get too close, because at the end of those few days he would be gone, back to his own family in Ireland.

It was the same with Kathy. Just as I was starting to feel close to them they would leave, off on a plane over to their own lives. They were always leaving. So I never risked showing them I needed or liked them.

Apart from Peter, who I didn’t see that much of, Brendan was the only male role model in my life, the only one to show me that not all men were as bad as my uncle had been, that not all of them had to be feared, the way I still feared him. As his business did well over in Ireland, he tried to make up for what had happened and the family life I was missing out on by throwing money at me. I always had the best-quality things at school and more pocket money than most of my friends and they were all impressed at how much my uncle Brendan‘spoilt’ me. But expensive possessions could never replace the things I really needed.

I was often at the outer edges of truth when talking to other people about my family. I didn’t flesh out the lies, but I implied them:‘My Mum chose it,’ I’d say about some article of clothing or present I’d bought myself with the money Brendan or Kathy gave me.‘My Mum gave it to me.’ ‘It used to be my Mum’s…’

‘My Mum’, the best sound in the world, wrapping it around myself, like a big circle of love.

Chapter 29

I
t was almost a year before I saw Mummy again. But when she came through the revolving doors of the hotel to meet us that first time, and her face lit up in a smile when she saw us, it was as if nothing had changed. I was trying to be grown-up in my first pair of court shoes, but ran across the lobby to give her a big hug, crying into her hair when she told me how much they’d all missed me.

Once every school holiday after that she’d meet us somewhere for tea. Seeing her for just those couple of hours would rip me open afresh each time, but there was no way I could put those feelings into words to anyone.

Once, when she came to have tea with Kathy and me, I remember being struck by how strangely out of place and ill at ease she looked in the hotel dining room, pretending too hard that she wasn’t. She sat there chain-smoking, smelling the milk to see if it was off, fidgeting while we finished eating. She checked her watch against one of ours, saying,‘Is that the time already? That can’t be right,’ shaking her wrist and pressing her watch to her ear before gulping back the last of her tea and leaving us all with a smile as she complained, as usual, at the‘daylight robbery’ of the sandwiches. Reapplying orangey-pink lipstick and tying a quick, loose knot back into her neckscarf, she tutted loudly as Kathy piled money onto the silver dish and handed it up to the waiter.

Kathy and I had smiled, half-embarrassed, as Mummy pulled one of the sandwiches apart, not caring who saw or overheard her, shaking her head at the scrape of butter, the soggy slivers of cucumber clinging to the top slice, the‘mean little strips of pink ham’.

‘That wouldn’t have cost a fraction of the price to make. Don’t leave a tip, they’ve made enough money out of you already,’ she said, pressing the triangles of bread back together again and tossing it back onto the plate.‘They saw you coming.’

I laughed nervously, delighted at her outspokenness, but the loudness of my laughter made up for how suddenly embarrassed I was in case the waiter overheard her, and then for how ashamed I was of myself for seeing her differently in this setting. I hoped the waiter hadn’t noticed the chipped nail varnish or the yellow nicotine stains on her fingers, or the dull frizz of her outgrown perm, rusty at the ends, or the quality of her clothes—all of which I was seeing for the first time. I felt a blush splash across my face and lowered my eyes, feeling disloyal, hoping she hadn’t guessed what I was thinking.

Whenever Kathy and Brendan came over they were impressed with all the changes in me, but Mummy seemed uncomfortable with them. Although I couldn’t have put words to it then, I was beginning to see that what all this time away at school was teaching me most was the difference between Mummy and Kathy, and to be ashamed of the way I used to live. I was sitting between worlds, my elocution lessons and privileged schooling turning me into someone different.

I watched Kathy dab her lips with her napkin and the waiter smile flirtatiously with her as he passed. Mummy patted her double chins saying, ‘Well, when you get to my age…’ and Kathy and I smiled and exchanged a look which I wasn’t certain I understood, or meant.

‘I haven’t got time for all the lotions and potions like my sister,’ Mummy said, winking at me, and half-memories of the times she used to say that to me after all the arguments came up like slow air bubbles through mud. I forced a smile and told Mummy she looked great. I couldn’t look in Kathy’s direction, and suddenly her voice annoyed me. I looked down at their cigarette butts in the ashtray, reminding myself that I preferred Mummy’s, smeared with her orangey-pink lipstick. The pain, like a lump of ice, stuck in my chest.