Abandoned (7 page)

Chapter 15

M
ostly it happened in the evenings, while Mummy was at her job, but also during the day if she was at the shops or had gone to the hairdresser’s or the laundrette. He would call me into whatever room he was in and I would have to do whatever he said.

If she had only gone out locally, and might come back at any time, he took me into the kitchen, turned the light off and sat me up on the draining board, him in front of me, standing up so that he could keep watch out of the window down over the square.

There was no gentleness or coaxing, there was no petting or confusion of feeling, there was just force and aggression and anger and speed. I was just a ‘whore’s child’ and he could do what he liked to me, and if they were going to leave me there, this was how he was going to get his own back. He’d always make me open his belt, pull down the zip and take it out. I’d close my eyes and my whole body would recoil from it; my fists wouldn’t uncurl and the feel of it in my fingers gave me the same shock each time, the same jumping out of my skin.

Sometimes my fingers wouldn’t work. I would wrestle with the cold metal of his belt buckle, having to push my fingers in under the waistband against his hairy stomach as he breathed in to help me undo it.

‘I can’t do it,’ I would say each time, as if that would stop things.

He would simply breathe in more and tell me to hurry up. I would hear the clank of the buckle falling down against the front of his brown trousers, hoping someone would come in to make it stop, half-hoping one of the neighbours would walk past and see us, half-dreading it, already ashamed, as if it was my fault. But nobody ever caught him. The tearing sound as he made me pull his zipper down was like a rip right through my brain. I was still only six or seven years old, too young to even guess at why he was forcing me to do this, why Mummy was testing me, why I was so repelled by it all.

His rough, heavy, calloused hand would be pressed firmly over my small soft one, forcing me to hold it. I would close my eyes, hearing other children playing down in the square, the thump of a ball against the wall outside, the slap of a skipping rope, sing-song voices.

‘Like this…’ he had to tell me angrily each time, ‘go easy with it.’

But my brain wouldn’t keep the information and my fingers always forgot how.

‘Pretend it’s an ice-lolly, use your tongue on it like that,’ he would say, imitating how you’d lick an ice cream. ‘Watch your teeth, you bitch. Suck it, don’t scrape your teeth on it. Open your mouth wider.’ But I couldn’t; my mouth was too small, my jaw locked, I was heaving. I didn’t want to breathe in the smell or taste of it. At the first taste I would instinctively jerk my head away but he would push it back, forcing me to stay.

‘Keep going until I tell you to stop.’

I couldn’t breathe. My mind tried to shut off until it was over, to float out of my body, up and away through the window, over the trees and into the sky. But I was always doing it wrong, and he jolted me back with some instruction or warning or slap, and I had to keep squeezing and pulling until it got bigger in my hand, like something waking from sleep, something dirty and stinking and repulsive and alive. Despite having brothers and seeing them naked I hadn’t known this thing even existed that changed size and shape and was covered in hair.

When it was finished, or we saw or heard Mummy coming back, he would knock me out of the way, and since I was already crying he would punch or hit me so Mummy wouldn’t wonder what my tears were about. Flaring up into rages that I was always too stunned to see coming, he would tell me he’d give me ‘something to really cry about’ if I didn’t stop.

Mummy was used to seeing me cry, so she never had to ask what it was for. He’d hit me for anything and nothing, he always had. But she would still defend me and a new fight would erupt. She would never have guessed the real reason for my tears.

Afterwards, if he didn’t want me for anything else and I was allowed out, I would run off as fast as I could across the square so that nobody could see me crying. Sliding in under the corrugated iron fence at the back I’d climb up the railway embankment and roll down the spiky grass, over and over and over until I was sore and dizzy and all his bad had spilled out of me. I’d go to the corrugated iron shelter after, pushing away the weeds that grew all over the entrance, and crouching down inside, trying to sit on the dry bits, to avoid the puddles of brown rainwater, I’d wait for my head to empty.

Nobody came to this bit of the embankment; it was too far. I didn’t tell anyone about the shelter or that at the back of it were some of the biggest, juiciest blackberries and tiny wild strawberries. It was my hiding place; the one place my uncle couldn’t get me. In the summer I stepped over all the tall stinging nettles, holding my sleeves down over my hands like gloves to push them out of the way, hunting for the juiciest fruit, pushing them around my mouth to take away the taste of him.

When I fell into the nettles I wouldn’t tell anyone because Mummy had warned us never to go there on our own, always to go with the bigger children. Once, when I went back with my legs and arms covered in big flaming white spots I tried to hide them but everyone knew where I’d been. I tried not to scratch them or to cry but I got into trouble, and Mummy shouted at me to teach me a lesson, as all the others laughed behind their hands.

That was the day she told us to look for the big dock leaves if ever we got stung and to rub our stings with those.

‘They’re always there growing by the nettles somewhere,’ she said. ’Wherever there’s bad, there’s always good nearby, that’s nature’s way.’

‘Is nature God?’

‘I don’t know. Now that’s enough of your questions. Don’t be smart with me, ask your teachers those kind of things, I’ve got enough to do. Now scram, before he gets in.’

He’d go mad if he saw her paying attention to me. He’d tell her to leave me alone. ‘Don’t put any of that on her,’ he’d said the last time I got stung and she got out the calamine lotion. ‘You’ve got better things to do than take care of her. She’s not your responsibility.’

Sometimes, after he’d finished with me, he would give me money. Coins taken from wobbly silver and copper piles on the mantelpiece in their bedroom. I didn’t want it. I wish I’d never taken it, but sometimes I did. He would tell me beforehand how much I could have after I’d finished doing what he was asking.

‘I don’t want to,’ I’d say each time, but it made no difference; he made me do it anyway.

‘Here, you greedy bitch,’ he’d say afterwards, ‘take it and get out of my sight.’ I’d try to get out of the room quickly. But usually he’d say, ‘Where do you think you’re going? Clean this.’

I’d have to go down to get toilet paper to wipe him and the sheets with; wiping the gunk from my hands and mouth, trying not to breathe in the smell.

I could never tell anyone else where I’d got the money from. I’d use it to buy an ice-lolly or sweets from the sweet shop, or if there was enough a bag of ‘broken biscuits’ from the corner shop. I’d run back with them hidden in my pocket or under my clothes so that nobody saw them or my tears, and across to the corrugated iron shelter on the embankment to eat them out of sight of anyone else.

Once, I bought a comic with the money. It was raining and I snuck back to read it in the bedroom while my uncle snored in his armchair with his feet up on the pouf and the paper over his belly. I read it sitting on the big pile of clothes and blankets at the bottom of the wardrobe, the door ajar to let in some light. But the boys caught me and when Mummy came in they said it wasn’t fair that I’d got a comic and asked her where I’d got the money.

I couldn’t think of an excuse quickly enough. I told her I’d stolen the comic from the sweet shop. I just heard myself say it, almost as shocked as Mummy was. She slapped me across the face, put her coat back on and marched me straight down to the shop. It was the first time she had ever hit me.

‘Don’t you think I’ve got enough to do without you playing up as well?’

She made me give it back, forcing me to tell the shopkeeper that I’d stolen it and to apologise. I was burning with shame. I could hear Liam and Michael laughing behind me. I’d counted the pennies out into the man’s hand less than twenty minutes before and I knew he remembered me, this pale, timid little girl with her overgrown pageboy haircut and swollen, red-rimmed eyes. I saw him frown in confusion and hung my head so I didn’t have to look him in the eye, hoping he wouldn’t recognise me. If he did remember, he said nothing. Afterwards, Mummy seemed sorry for what she’d done and sent me and Liam down to the allotments to get an armful of rhubarb from the woman down there and she made my favourite crumble for our tea. I sat there eating it with the others, wanting to tell her with every mouthful where I’d really got the money from, and what he was making me do.

But I knew that she would do worse if I told her. She would send me away, just like he always threatened.

Chapter 16

‘
C
lose that door,’ Mummy says, and I guess this is going to be another secret.

She tells me Brendan has asked if I want to go to Ireland. My chest tightens.

‘I don’t want to,’ I say, my eyes already filled with tears, ‘I want to stay with you.’

‘Shhh, it’s okay, you’ll be able to come back. It’s only a holiday.’

‘How do you know?’

I mean how does she know about it being just a holiday, but she misunderstands and says she got a letter from Brendan that morning, pulling it out of her cardigan pocket.

‘Don’t let any of the others see you reading it,’ she says, handing it to me, ‘I don’t want all of them moaning.’

It’s only me that’s going, none of the others. They aren’t to know until the last minute, just like when Brendan comes over to visit. My body is bursting with secrets. Back in the front room the girls are lying side by side on the brown rug in front of the electric fire, watching TV. I sit on the corner of the settee hugging one of the cushions, wondering what another country will be like, excited about seeing all the places Mummy talks about.

Then I start to worry, wondering if I’ll really be allowed to come back to England, not knowing who to trust. I feel myself being ripped away from my brothers and sisters layer by layer.

’Don’t show me up, will you?’ Mummy warns when the day of the holiday arrives.

I shake my head.

‘I know you won’t…you’re as good as gold, you are. I wish the rest of them were more like you. Don’t tell them about anything that goes on in our house, it’s none of their business, is it?’

I shake my head again. ‘No!’

‘I’m not having my sister and Brendan looking down their noses at me, thinking they’re better than us. They’re not better than us, are they?’

‘You’re better than anyone,’ I reply, meaning it.

‘Nosy parkers,’ she says and smiles, making a game of the complicated relationship she has with her much-loved sister, and we both giggle together. ‘If they ask you any questions about what goes on here, just say you don’t know.’

We both knew that when she told my uncle he’d say I wasn’t wanted back, and he did.

‘This time I mean it. I’m not letting them make a fool out of me any longer,’ he says, ripping open another beer. ‘She can go back to where she belongs…sneaky little bitch…She’s not wanted here.’

He wouldn’t let her take me to the airport either, saying she had more important things to do, that she had her own children to run around for, not me, and that if they were that interested they would come over and get me themselves.

I concentrated on doing up the zip of my anorak, pretending not to hear him, staring down at my new case with our home address written out neatly on the tag.

‘That’s what you do in case it gets lost and someone has to send it back,’ Mummy told the girls, writing it out in red capital letters.

‘Is she coming back?’ Jennifer asked, frowning, knowing what my uncle had been saying. ‘Daddy said…’

‘I know what he said. Don’t mind him, of course she’s coming back. This is her home too.’

I was feeling very grown-up in my white ribbed polo neck and my first pair of jeans, turned up inches at the bottom because Mummy hadn’t had time to take them up.

The night before, when he started drinking, Mummy put up a fight again, saying she was taking me to the airport herself and that was that. But in the end she’d had to back down; there was only so much she could do. Sandra had to come back to take me. She’d made friends with the minicab driver on the way there and wanted to drive back with him. At the Aer Lingus check-in desk she handed my case and my ticket over to the woman in the green uniform and hat who said she would get someone to look after me. Being a minor I had to wear a big tag around my neck with my name on. I was nervous at anyone seeing my surname because I knew that in Ireland it had to be a secret, that nobody was allowed to know it.

The flight was delayed and I sat where they told me, feeling too grown-up for the children’s activity pack they’d given me. I didn’t open mine. I stared at a small child joining the dots in the colouring book from the pack. She was sitting beside an air hostess, who looked a bit like Kathy, and I wondered what her hands felt like on the little girl’s bare arm—wanting and not wanting to know.

Kathy was wearing green velvet trousers and a white silk blouse with frills down the front when she met me at the airport, her long red curls falling over her shoulders, dramatic against her ivory skin and big, soft, slow-blinking, navy-blue eyes. She held my hand as we walked through the airport but her anxiety showed as she looked around her to see if there was anyone there who might know her. She always seemed to know someone.

Going through my case in the car, Kathy put aside most of the clothes Mummy had bought me for the trip, as if they weren’t good enough. I told her they were mostly new, but still she took me into a children’s clothes shop in the busy part of Dublin where she had already picked out bags of stuff. She dressed me like a doll in a green velvet dress which she told me I was going to be wearing to a medieval banquet at Bunratty Castle. It was a big event and Brendan knew someone who played the harp at it.

I was going to a hotel with Brendan for the first part of the holiday, she told me, and I would be with her for the second part. She drove off the main road to a lay-by and we sat watching traffic speed by, waiting for Brendan. Soon another car pulled up behind us and Brendan got out and came to sit in the back seat for a chat. Then he lifted my suitcase out of the boot and I had to swap into his car. Kathy was nervous in case anyone saw us and guessed I was her daughter. She wanted Brendan to hurry up and leave.

‘Calm down,’ Brendan said, pressing his hand over hers. ‘What am I doing but saying hello?’

But it felt like we were all doing something wrong, like criminals swapping cars in a lay-by, and although Brendan made it seem like fun, and made me giggle, I was already embarrassed by it.

Mummy had wanted to be sure I would say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, and these were almost the only things I did say when other people were around. ’Thank you,’ I’d say shyly, sipping black tea like Kathy from thin china cups and saucers as they took me to visit different places and people.

I was introduced as a friend of a friend’s daughter over from England, or as one of Kathy’s sister’s children, depending on who we were visiting. I had to remember to give them a different surname if anyone asked. Over the years I was always a different person’s daughter or relative as different people asked. I kept smiling shyly, not speaking, wondering what was happening at home, how Mummy was, and if my uncle was going to let me back, but always keeping my thoughts to myself. Every question was a potential trap. My thoughts slid about and I struggled not to lie while trying not to tell the truth either, answering most questions with a shrug or a smile or an ‘I don’t know’.

One day while I was there I got to meet my grandmother. Kathy had left her purse at home and we had to drive back to get it. She insisted I stay in the car while she ran in, but I begged to be able to come in just to see what she looked like, and to see the house that both Kathy and Mummy had grown up in, which I’d heard so much about over the years.

She told me my grandmother was very old and ill, and that she looked and acted strangely sometimes; that it would upset me too much. But I promised that it wouldn’t and she eventually agreed, slipping her leather-gloved hand into mine as we walked in through the gate. We were just going to ‘run in and run out again’, she said, and again I had to promise not to say anything to give away my English accent, except for hello and goodbye. I promised and we went in.

‘Don’t say a word,’ she said, squeezing my hand, as we walked into the hall.

‘Okay.’

The house was tall and grey and covered in red ivy, and inside it smelt of the sea and cats. Her mother was very ill by then, not bedridden, but frail, tiny and childlike. She became very excited by our unexpected arrival. And when she saw me she stared at me for a long time. I stared back at the almost unlined face with its wet-lipped, toothless grin and eyes that Mummy always said were the same green as mine. And though I kept it to myself, I felt some recognition transmitted in her look. I felt it too by the slow way she reached out her hand and ran her cold, bent fingers along my cheek as she stood there barefoot in a grey-blue silk nightdress which reached down almost to her ankles. She had the same tiny hands as Kathy. She tugged at the combs in her silver hair and it unrolled in waves down her back. I smiled almost idiotically at her as Kathy ran off to get her purse. She stepped forwards, smiling, and asked me my name.

I pressed my lips together, keeping my side of the bargain, so she wouldn’t hear my English accent. Grinning back at her, I shuffled from foot to foot, pulling myself up to my full height, trying to be someone she would be proud to have as a granddaughter. Still smiling, she reached over and lifted a handful of my dark hair, bouncing it up and down on her palm while Kathy continued running from room to room, searching for the purse and calling down to us were we ‘alright down there’. Finally, finding it, she kissed her mother and told her to kiss me and rushed me back out to her shiny red car.

As we drove off it was raining hard, splashing noisily against the road and streaming down the windows. And when we turned I twisted around and stared at my grandmother still waving goodbye from the window, looking like a mermaid with her long silver hair unrolled in waves down her back and the long, dark-grey rectangle of sea bubbling up behind the house.

Kathy fired nervous questions at me.

‘What did she say? What did you say? Did she ask you where you were from?’

My grandmother died the following year, but I’m convinced she died knowing about me. My tenacity that day in insisting I be allowed to go in to see her is one of the things I’m most proud of.

When I got back to England, my uncle’s violence got worse. Maybe he was worried that I had said something while I was away about what he had been doing to me, or maybe he just wanted to ensure I was still as petrified of him as I had been before I went.

He never let up, even on my birthday. The night before there was a huge argument. It was about me again. My uncle said I wasn’t allowed to have a birthday, that there’d better not be a single present or card in the place when he got home. We lay in bed listening to them battle it out, Mummy sobbing like a girl, telling him again that he was an ‘evil bastard’, that she was not standing by and watching what he was doing to me, that she was leaving and taking me with her.

Next morning I told her not to be upset, that I didn’t care. His job must have been cancelled because he got home early that afternoon and I could hear them screaming before we even reached the front door. He grabbed me when I went into the front room and started hitting me. ‘Get her out of here,’ he screamed. ‘I don’t want her kind in here. I’m sick of the sight of her, get her out.’

It all happened so quickly, but as he kicked me towards the bedroom I saw a white iced cake in an opened box on the sideboard with little pink twisted candles and a big ‘8’ in pink icing, and birthday cards strewn across the carpet. I knew Kathy had sent money for a cake. I wasn’t supposed to have it, he’d warned the previous night, but Mummy had bought it anyway. Mummy pulled me from his grip and pushed me into the bedroom, blocking the door with her body so he couldn’t come in while I slumped in a daze, sore and bruised and trembling all over.

She came back in later when he was sleeping off his dinner. She was dragging a big blue hamper of presents and told me Kathy had sent them over for my birthday, putting a finger to her lips. That’s what he was angry about.

‘They’re yours,’ she said, ‘but don’t tell the others. Share them out with everyone, okay?’

Her face was red and sore-looking, and she had a black eye, the white all bloodshot. I hated that it was me they’d been fighting about again, Kathy making more trouble for us. She lifted my pillow to show me a hardback children’s Bible.

‘Shhh, don’t let him or the others see this one, this one is just for you,’ she said, going quiet and biting her lip as she flipped quickly through its pages.

‘Are they true stories?’ I asked and she shrugged and nodded at the same time. ‘Who told them?’

She smiled and said she didn’t know. Making Mummy smile was the best feeling in the world, the way her whole face lit up, and knowing it was just for me. ‘Don’t let him see it though, okay?’

I nodded and put it back under my pillow, used to God being a secret in our house.