Abandoned (8 page)

Chapter 17

W
hen I was nine we moved out of the flat and into our first house. It had big leaded windows like all the other houses in the street and huge pink rhododendron bushes in the front garden. There were three bedrooms and a cellar, and a lean-to at the back that opened out to an overgrown garden. It was full of weeds as high as my shoulders, and it was our job to pull them out. My uncle tore off the stiff wallpaper in the kitchen, which he said had mice crawling behind it, feasting on the flour-glue the previous owners had used to paste sections of it back down. He put down traps in the corners with tiny bits of cheese, and went out in the dark with a piece of wood, screaming, trying to batter or scare them to death.

I loved all the space in the new house. I thought it would give me more opportunities to get out of his way, but extra space also meant there were more places he could do things to me, away from the others. The abuse just got worse. No matter where I was he always found me.

Their bedroom was above the front room, and if he was up there and wanted something he banged on the floor with a shoe and one of us had to go up. Usually what he wanted when he knocked down was me.

The day I walked over the footbridge with the others to visit the house for the first time I was carrying my new Petite typewriter in its little turquoise plastic case. Kathy had bought it for me in Ireland for my ninth birthday. ‘You can type whatever you like in it,’ she’d said, encouraging me to roll my first sheet of paper into it. But I never could, especially not that day.

I swung it as I walked, listening to a drawing pin stuck to the bottom of my shoe tapping across the concrete, trying not to think about the pain between my legs which was making it difficult to walk. I didn’t want anyone to see me wince from the hurt of the day before, when he’d tried to force himself inside me for the first time. It had felt like he was splitting me open. The pain rammed through my whole body, even though he tried to do it bit by bit until I ‘got used to it’. Agonising pains that filled my body with screams I could never let out.

I always dreaded being in the house alone with him. One Saturday only a few weekends after we had moved I begged to go with Mummy to the market. He was in a bad mood and there was no one else at home, so I knew he would definitely get me once she was gone and I was terrified.

He’d already said he wanted me there to help with the jobs. ‘Please, Mum,’ I begged. ‘Say you need me to carry things, that you can’t manage on your own, please.’

She knew I was terrified of him, I always had been, but I couldn’t tell her the real reason I was terrified of being alone with him now.

She looked pale and tired and got annoyed. ‘He’s in a bad enough mood as it is,’ she said. ‘I can’t keep asking. And anyway I haven’t got spare money for your bus fare.’ She needed every penny she had.

He was putting up a curtain rail in our bedroom and I waited on the stairs, hearing him throw tools down into his box.

‘No, I need someone here to help,’ I heard him say. ‘I’m not doing it all like a fool myself while everyone else swans off.’

I was never allowed to ‘swan off ‘. Since we had moved I hadn’t been allowed to play out like the others. I had to help indoors with the housework all the time now.

‘I tried,’ Mummy said quietly when she came down. ‘I won’t be long. I’ll be there and back.’

But she could see how upset I was. ‘All right, get your coat, don’t mind what he says.’

‘Am I coming?’

‘Be ready to walk off fast. He’ll kill us when we get back though.’

We both stood at the front door ready to go through, my hand on the latch.

‘She’s coming with me and that’s that. I can’t carry it all myself,’ Mummy shouted up, trying to sound angry. ‘Come on, Anya.’

We could hear him shouting, thumping across the uncarpeted room.

‘Get back here!’

Mummy pushed me out of the front door, shouting back, ‘I won’t be long. I know exactly what I want.’

I knew exactly what he wanted too. He was going to try to force it inside me again.

’Please don’t, Dad,’ I beg, ‘it hurts too much. Please don’t…’

‘Keep still and it’ll hurt less.’

He tries to get me into position on his and Mummy’s bed, moving me about, trying to get me to sit down onto him. But my whole body has tensed and he can’t move me. His big, dry hand spreads over my mouth and nose and I can’t breathe through the pain, my fists grabbing the pillow as he lifts me off and crawls over me, his weight dropping down on me, almost crushing me, suffocating me. His bare, dry flesh everywhere, wriggling about, trying to inch himself into me. My insides not stretching, feeling like I will be ripped apart, as my whole body goes into spasm and my nine-year-old mind slams to a stop.

‘Please Dad, I’ll do anything…’

He tells me angrily to put it in my mouth then. That’s the other worse thing. ‘Not that though,’ I say, testing his mood.

‘What do you mean? What then? You have to do one or the other.’

I have no answer. I just don’t want to do either.

‘You’ll have to do it next time,’ he says. ‘It won’t hurt after a while; it’s only at the start. After that you’ll get used to it.’

Chapter 18

T
he second time I went over to Ireland I stayed with Brendan and his family in their big white house outside Dublin, surrounded by fields which sloped down to the sea. His wife and daughters were just told that I was the daughter of a friend of a friend from work, visiting from England.

Like the last time, I wasn’t allowed to let anyone know my surname because it was the same as Kathy’s. She cut the luggage tag with my name on it from my suitcase and I memorised the surname they told me to say was mine as we drove in from the airport.

‘Will you remember it?’ Kathy asked with a worried look on her face. I nodded, certain that I would, practising it in my head all the way there. ‘It’s very important you don’t tell them what your real surname is, okay?’

I knew she and Mummy would get into a lot of trouble if anyone found out who I was. They made up some kind of story about me. I think they must have said someone in my family had died, because all Brendan’s family held their smiles for ages when they talked to me, and kept asking if I wanted more when we sat at meals, or went to the shops to buy sweets.

‘You can have anything,’ they’d say. ‘Don’t be shy, have what you want.’

I remembered Mummy and my manners and not to show her up and I said, ’No thank you, I’m not hungry,’ even when I was.

I was supposed to be going to stay with Kathy in a hotel somewhere for the last few days but she was busy, so I stayed on at Brendan’s house. His daughters had two horses and a little black pony they’d almost grown out of, which they taught me to ride. During those rainy days, one of them told me I was staying with them a few more days because Kathy’s mother had died during the week and she was too busy to take me.

I wanted to tell her that that was my grandmother, but I knew I wasn’t allowed to say anything because then she would know that Kathy was my mother. I laughed nervously and wished I could ask Brendan about it, but he’d gone away to meet some clients the day before. I knew I should have been sad about my grandmother dying but we never knew each other. All day I kept seeing the watery image of her like a mermaid standing at the window waving goodbye, with her silvery hair rippling down her back, and the rain streaming down outside.

As we brushed the horses, and Brendan’s middle daughter, Caitlin, showed me how to stand with my back to the pony and lift his leg to use the hoof pick gently on him, I panicked. If Kathy’s mother was dead, maybe now she would want to keep me there with her? Maybe that was why I was in Ireland. Maybe they had planned it all, tricked me.

As soon as Brendan came back I got him on his own and told him I wanted to go home. He was worried I might have said something about my grandmother and I felt proud to say I hadn’t.

‘Good girl,’ he said, and told me that Mummy was there in Ireland too.

‘Can we go and see her?’

‘They’re both busy with all the relatives and looking after their father. They’re both of them very upset.’

But a few days later he told me that we were meeting Mummy that afternoon in Bray. It felt funny seeing her there in Ireland with none of the others around. She looked different, like a stranger, and I felt shivery looking at her in the distance. Her face was all shiny and her short, permed hair was blowing flat in the wind. She was holding it down with one hand and holding the fur collar of her jacket over with the other. They didn’t look like her clothes. She was wearing black leather gloves like Kathy’s and the same black patent shoes, and her tights were getting splashed with mud as she and Kathy walked over to us.

I wanted to get her on her own to ask her not to go back to London, to stay there, just her and me, just like she always promised me as a little girl.

We walked along the seafront and they gave me money, telling me to go into the amusement arcade as they stood and smoked and talked in whispers. I felt foolish on my own, wandering about the cold dark room from machine to machine with my red cup of tokens, not knowing what to do. I sensed them watching me, saw the strain on Mummy’s face and the set look she had when she was lying. I wanted to go and ask her what happened when I left, to find out how bad my uncle’s mood was, and if he was going to let me come back again.

Brendan waved and I smiled and walked between the bright machines, listening to all the loud noises and pushing tokens in the slots, trying to spend them quickly. It was no fun on my own. My brothers and sisters would have known what to do, all skidding about the place breathlessly, shouting and laughing. I was lost without them—didn’t know what to do on my own, didn’t know how to be Anya without them. I always felt like I was disappointing everyone. I could do everything in my head, but didn’t know what to say or think or do out loud. I didn’t know what I was supposed to feel either, or what I was allowed to feel.

A big, cold feeling swept up inside me. I missed my brothers and sisters and wanted to be amongst them all again, squished up on the settee, eating pick ‘n’ mix and laughing at cartoons, one of them again.

The wind had died down and we sat at a table outside a cafÉ under a big green umbrella. I had a cheeseburger with onions and Coke with ice, and the others had big sugary triangles of apple pie and cups of tea. Mummy asked me if I’d enjoyed my holiday. I wanted to lie and tell her that I hadn’t, that I only liked being with her, because I knew that would make her smile. But the other two were watching me and I felt shy, so I nodded. When she asked me what I’d done I told her about the horses and Brendan’s children, and how Caitlin was teaching me to ride.

‘Are we flying back together?’ I asked, excited to be going on a plane with Mummy. She lit a cigarette and told me she couldn’t come over with me, that she had to stay a few days more, and I’d have to go back on my own.

The cheeseburger stuck in my throat. I washed it down with some Coke and tried to keep my face blank so the other two didn’t know what I was thinking. The light disappeared from Mummy’s face. I could tell she knew what I was thinking, that I couldn’t go back there to my uncle on his own. But of course even she didn’t know the real reason I didn’t want to be on my own with him.

‘It’ll only be for a few days,’ she said, crushing her cigarette out in the ashtray Brendan pushed over to her, ‘then I’ll be back.’

I had pineapple fritters after my burger and ate them slowly, trying to hide my fear and not to ‘let her down’ or ‘show her up’.

‘Can’t I stay here until you go back?’ I asked later, following her to the toilets, but she said they were all going to be too busy with the funeral arrangements.

I still had some tokens left and when I went back I tried to get the pennies to fall off the cascading machines, my eyes welling with tears as I stared hard through the scratched glass, seeing all the coins hanging off the edge, about to fall with the slightest nudge. I could see the reflection of the grown-ups huddled together behind me, playing shove-a-penny with my nerves.
I can’t go back there on my own
. When I finished my tokens and went back to them, Mummy said Brendan had a surprise for me.

‘How would you like to come over to Italy with me for a couple of weeks?’ he asked. ‘I can get the time off and I could do with a holiday. There’s a lady who lives there I’d like you to meet. She’s a niece of mine, you’d like her. She’s always got her nose in a book like you too. I’m just a show-off really, I want to show you I know someone with brains.’

‘Italy?’ I said, looking at Mummy, trying to read what she was thinking from her face, and trying to remember how far Italy was. Then I remembered the long boot shape of it on the map on the classroom wall.

We were meant to be in Italy for two weeks, just while Mummy helped Kathy with things after the funeral. But at breakfast near the end of the second week Brendan asked his niece Caroline, who we were staying with, if she would look after me there for the rest of the summer. I couldn’t breathe. I knew it was all a trick; that they weren’t going to let me go back to Mummy. I stared up at Brendan helplessly, too shy to say anything in front of Caroline.

Brendan somehow persuaded her, without consulting anyone in England when he went back to Ireland. I stayed there for the entire summer. Mummy didn’t have a phone so I couldn’t speak to her. Nobody seemed to think about how being away from my brothers and sisters and Mummy for all those weeks, not knowing if I could go back, would affect me.

It was a hot summer and Caroline had to drag me around with her everywhere she went, constantly grumbling, ‘I wish this summer would roll on.’ She wasn’t used to children, especially frightened, mistrustful ones, and kept saying she wanted me to go home, in a way that hurt behind my ribs.

When Brendan eventually came back we met him at the airport, standing at the glass watching him coming down the steps of the plane like a movie star, his jacket looped with one finger over his shoulder and his tie loosened in the heat, which rippled silver across the runway. It reminded me of watching him coming across our landing at the flats on hot days in summer. And how much I wanted to go back home.

Although it was hot Caroline said I could wear the new, green, Italian coat she’d bought me, with the pleat down the back, to show off in front of him. She’d taken me to my first proper hairdressers too. When he saw me his eyes widened and he asked me for a spin. I did as he asked, knowing the back was swinging from side to side, the way it did in the mirror, and I tried not to let them know how pretty I felt, and how much like all the other girls.

‘You look like a different child altogether,’ he exclaimed. ‘Are you sure you are the same one?’

On the last day I had my portrait drawn in my new coat by a small oriental man on the Spanish Steps in Rome. Brendan was taken aback when he saw it, unrolling it onto the cafÉ table, weighting the ends down with the salt and pepper pots and his hands.

‘Do I look like that?’ I asked.

‘He’s made you look far too old,’ Brendan said. ‘It’s the way you’ll look when you’re about eighteen…it’s the look your mother had.’

I didn’t know which mother he was talking about.