Don't You Love Your Daddy? (23 page)

It was a Friday afternoon and I was in the kitchen, transfixed by Sue’s fast-moving hand as it expertly held a small sharp knife and chopped an assortment of vegetables into tiny regularly sized squares. It was then that I noticed the bracelet she was wearing on her arm: a wide silver band trimmed with copper and, in the centre, an engraving of a long-legged bird. There was something familiar about it, and the more I looked, the more convinced I became that I had seen it before. As I searched my mind for when that could have been, a picture gradually came to me. It was of another kitchen, where a blonde woman stood at a kitchen table and a small child was watching her. I saw a mischievous smile, sparking green eyes, then heard a familiar voice that held a hint of laughter: ‘I’m cooking something special for tonight’s dinner, Sally,’ and as her arm stretched out for the knife, the child’s eyes fixed on the pretty bracelet worn around a slender wrist.

‘Where did you get that bracelet?’ I asked.

Surprised that I had asked her a question about anything to do with her appearance, Sue glanced up at me. ‘Your father gave it to me for my birthday. Pretty, isn’t it?’

I felt a white-hot anger send a rising heat through my body and it pinked my cheeks. How could my mother’s bracelet be on Sue’s arm?

‘It was my mother’s,’ I yelled indignantly.

Sue’s face went dark with anger and she snapped, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Sally – how could it have been? Your father bought it at the local jeweller’s.’

But I saw doubt cross her face as she said it. ‘I should have it, not you!’ I spat furiously.

‘That’s enough of this ridiculous nonsense, Sally!’ Sue screamed. ‘Now go to your room!’

Furious at seeing something that had once belonged to my mother on Sue, I slammed the door behind me on the way out of the kitchen. When my father returned from work I crept to the top of the stairs and heard Sue telling my father about my accusation. ‘If it was hers I don’t want it, David,’ I heard her say, and then came the deeper tones of my father’s voice as he fervently denied it.

By the end of their argument both of them were angry with me, my father because I’d caused trouble and Sue because I’d made her doubt him, and for the rest of the evening I was ordered to remain in my room. My supper was put on a tray, which Sue gave to me with instructions that I was to stay where I was. Hurt and angry I retreated into another fantasy, which had already started to germinate in my head.

In the morning I sat sullenly at the table, pushing my breakfast around my plate. ‘It was Mummy’s,’ I said defiantly, when my father told me he never wanted to hear me mention the bracelet again.

‘That’s quite enough, Sally,’ he roared, echoing Sue’s words from the night before. ‘Now get yourself off to school.’

Still angry, I snatched up my satchel and, with Billy trailing miserably behind me, left the house. I hated both of them more with every step I took. I wanted my father to leave me alone and for Sue to disappear from my life. I wondered if they were angry enough to send me back to my grandmother’s or even to let me live with Aunt Janet. But I knew that was never going to happen: although I was convinced Sue would like to see the back of me, I was only too aware that my father wouldn’t let me go.

Billy, not understanding what was happening, was upset by the shouting and thick atmosphere in the house and walked quietly by my side. Once we got to school, he was pleased to escape my self-absorbed company and disappeared into a group of small children the moment we walked through the gates.

All day I brooded on what I could do to hurt them and then an idea came into my head. Sue, with her passion for detective books, had a collection that was scattered around the house. Without her knowing I had smuggled them up to my room and devoured the bloodthirsty stories. I read wide-eyed about dead bodies found in woods, others discovered floating in dank rivers or buried in out-of-the-way places. The murder weapons were mainly guns, knives or ropes, but there had been a couple I had read in which the cause of death had been poison, always given in tiny doses over a lengthy period of time. The motive for the murders seldom varied: they were for financial gain or love and in some cases both.

The one I recalled most clearly was where a man wanted his wife’s life-insurance money and the freedom to marry his mistress so he had gradually poisoned his wife. He had thought that the small doses he had administered over several months would be undetectable, but he had not taken into consideration the cleverness of the detective who finally unmasked him. I decided that was exactly what had happened to my mother. My imagination was in full flight as I remembered Pete telling me that my father had known Sue long before my mother had died. And hadn’t my mother’s death benefited him? I compared the home we had now to the shabby council house we had lived in before.

Over the next few days, fuelled by rage, hurt and the desire to make it true, I embroidered my fantasy until it took shape and grew and I began to believe it. That was why I had been sent away to Aunt Janet’s, I decided, ignoring the fact that it was my mother not my father who had arranged for me to go there. Neither did I take into account that I had been only six, too young to notice very much. It was Pete who had stayed in the house and, as a teenager, would have known what was wrong with my mother. But there was no logic to my reasoning, just a growing desire for it to be true.

For nearly a week I kept my thoughts to myself. But I hugged that fantasy and embellished it. I was waiting for the right moment to share it with others.

The day after I’d talked about the bracelet to my father was Saturday and I wondered if, as a punishment, Sue would stop me going to Jennifer’s. To my relief, she said nothing about it when she saw me in the morning. I took that to mean that the subject was closed, if not forgotten. And I saw with a burst of satisfaction that the bracelet was not on her arm. After I had eaten my breakfast I put on Dolly’s lead and walked the mile to where Jennifer lived. It was just over a week before school was due to break up for the summer holidays, and we had been talking about things we wanted to do during those six weeks.

For the first time I met Jennifer’s brothers. Like her, they were at boarding-school but theirs had already broken up for the summer. They were in the orchard when we found them. Two tow-headed boys, they were standing side by side holding miniatures of my father’s hard thing. At our arrival, instead of making an effort to cover themselves up, they turned their heads to look at us.

‘What are they doing?’ I asked, before a red-faced Jennifer could drag me away.

Hearing my question, the older one nudged his brother and laughed. ‘We’re having a peeing competition,’ he yelled. ‘Do you want to join in? Let’s see if a girl can hit that tree.’

‘Come on, Sally, please don’t take any notice of them. They’re rude,’ said Jennifer, trying to grab my hand to pull me away.

‘Scaredy cats,’ yelled the younger boy.

But I was no scaredy cat and I wasn’t having two boys telling me I was.

‘Sally, please don’t,’ Jennifer started to say, but I was determined to rise to their challenge. I wanted to wipe the smirks off their faces and see them replaced with admiration.

I walked over to them, taking no notice of those miniature hard things. Off came my knickers, and I confidently lifted my skirt just high enough to take aim – but not so high that they would see my private place. I leant back and forced out a trickle of fluid. But far from hitting the tree, it splashed on to my socks. Mocking jeers rang out as the two boys convulsed with laughter and pointed at my damp legs. ‘See! Girls can’t do it,’ they hooted in unison.

‘Sally, put your knickers on,’ whispered Jennifer, shocked.

Her face was red with embarrassment. I suddenly felt ashamed and did as she said.

If I was embarrassed then, I was even more so when the two boys joined us in the garden at lunchtime. Sideways looks and knowing smiles were thrown in my direction and I wanted the earth to swallow me up. Why had I done that? I kept asking myself. Jennifer, noticing my discomfort, took me away from the table as soon as she could. ‘Let’s go to my room,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you my new doll.’

She led me up the stairs to a large bedroom that, with its predominantly pink-and-white furniture and bedcover, was not dissimilar to the one I slept in. She showed me her collection of dolls and I spotted a row of Barbies in an assortment of different outfits on a shelf, but it was to another one, seated on a wicker chair, that she pointed. I thought she was a little old to be so enthusiastic about dolls but I pretended to be as interested in them as she obviously was.

‘This is my absolute favourite,’ she said. I had to admit it was a beautiful doll, the size of a small baby with golden curls, blue eyes that opened and shut, and a long white dress. ‘Her name is Penelope,’ Jennifer continued proudly, and showed me that underneath the dress were lacy knickers and a tiny vest.

‘Let’s change her clothes,’ Jennifer said, as she pulled the white dress off the doll. ‘Find something you think she would like to wear.’ She pointed at a box filled with small dresses, nightclothes, miniature shoes, handbags and even swimwear for the assortment of dolls that adorned her room.

It was then that I asked Jennifer the question that had been burning inside me; the one I desperately wanted an answer to. She’s my friend, I thought. She’ll tell me the truth.

‘Does your daddy ever touch you there?’ I asked, and placed my finger on the part of the doll that was between its legs. I wanted to tell her that mine did and confess that I didn’t like it. He had told me that was what daddies did to little girls and I wanted to know, if Jennifer’s answer was yes, if it hurt and frightened her as well. I needed to know if it was all lies, and if it was, then it must be my fault that it was happening to me. All those other questions spun in my head but I just waited for her answer.

Her eyes went very round, a look of disgust replaced the smile she had worn and she slowly shook her head, as though she couldn’t believe the words that had come out of my mouth.

‘You’re talking dirty,’ she said at last. ‘You’re not my friend any more.’

That was when I knew without any doubt that my father had lied. She turned away from me and, unhappily, I left her, still staring down at the undressed doll.

I called softly to Dolly and crept out of the house – I didn’t want her mother to ask me why I was leaving so early. Neither did I want her to see the tears that were forming in my eyes.

Jennifer had been my only friend and now I knew she no longer was.

Jennifer’s mother rang Sue to say that her daughter no longer wanted to play with me. She didn’t tell Sue what I had said for evidently Jennifer had refused to tell her, but she had told her mother about me taking my knickers off.

It was also unfortunate that her telephone call was the second that Sue had received that day concerning my behaviour.

By Monday morning I could no longer keep the story of my mother’s murder to myself. After I had left Jennifer’s house so abruptly I had brooded and brooded, and over that weekend, fuelled by a combination of rage, hurt and wishful thinking, my embryonic fantasy was embroidered into something I had come to believe was true. Now I was bursting to tell someone and watch their reaction.

I waited for morning break to tell my story to the girls in my class. Gathering a group of my classmates around me, I told them I needed to take them into my confidence. ‘We had to move away and come here,’ I told them, ‘because my father poisoned my mother.’

‘I thought you said she’d left him,’ one girl said, while the others gasped with pretend horror – in that community of girls, divorce and separation, let alone murder, were still rare.

‘That’s what I thought! That’s what they told me anyway,’ I replied, quickly improvising, ‘but it wasn’t true. They lied to me.’

Within seconds, whether they believed my story or not, the girls were clinging to my every word. I heard a collective intake of breath as, like so many sponges, they soaked up all the gory details. Questions were fired at me and that day I became adept at explaining and embellishing my creation.

I told them all about Sue, my wicked stepmother; how my father had ‘carried on’ with her even before my mother became ill. She had been his ‘mistress’, I told them, having learnt that expression from one of those clandestinely read detective books. That remark received more gasps, for even though the girls might not know what the word meant, they knew it was something shocking. I went on to describe how I had been sent away during the weeks when my mother’s food was being laced with poison, omitting to mention that it was her, not my father, who had wanted me to go to my aunt Janet.

‘There was a great deal of insurance money paid out to my father on my mother’s death,’ I told the circle of enthralled girls. I was, of course, completely unaware of whether there was any foundation of truth in this statement, but I loved the attention that my apparently informed words were creating. Carried away by the excitement of being the centre of attention, I issued accusation after accusation, each one worse and more far-fetched than the last.

It was only when the bell informed us that our break was over and we all trooped back into the classroom that the enormity of what I had done hit me. I began to feel a cold fear of the consequences. I asked myself what would happen if the girls talked and if the story got back to Sue or, even worse, my father.