Helpless (5 page)

B
y the time I reached seven I knew that it was not nice to be dirty. At school I was told to wash my neck, remove the dirt out from under my nails and brush my hair. I tried to scrub myself clean but the mirror that my father used for shaving was too high for me to see into. I knew my clothes were not washed often enough and that my hair was greasy. It was Dora who helped me then.

‘Your mother’s so busy with the little ones,’ was all she said when I complained that the tin bath rarely made an appearance and I was getting into trouble at school. ‘You can bath here.’

And once a week that is what I did. She gave me nice-smelling soap and talcum powder, and when I told her I hated changing for PE because my knickers were so grey she bought me new underwear.

‘It’s just a present,’ she told my mother when she protested. ‘She’s so good at helping with the children that I owe her something.’

I loved the feeling of being clean all over and liked the fact that my skin smelt of flowers. Dora showed me how to put my hair into rags.’ Just brush it out in the morning,’ she told me, ‘and you will look a different little girl.’

So each morning after that I went to school with curly hair, a face scrubbed clean and a hopeful smile that someone there would like me now. The teachers stopped complaining about my grubby appearance, but the children still saw my faded second-hand clothes and Wellington boots; they continued to ignore me.

The Easter holidays came and my sister was born, and once again I saw my parents showering another member of the family with love. This time my mother’s energy seemed sapped by the demands of a new baby. It seemed that nearly every time she spoke to me it was to ask me to do something for her.

There were rare occasions treasured by me when my mother seemed less tired, and then she would smile and run her fingers through my hair. ‘You’re a good girl, Marianne, aren’t you?’ and just that tiny slice of praise was enough to put a smile on my face.

But mostly after I helped as much as I could she barely paused in what she was doing to mutter thanks.

More and more it fell onto me to baby-sit my brother who had reached the age when fingers went in electrical sockets and the contents of unlocked cupboards were scattered onto the floor and put into his waiting mouth.

‘Bring him round to play with mine,’ Dora told me when she saw me watching the pram.

‘You’re such a little mother,’ Dora would tell me as I sat by the playpen watching my baby brother and her two playing happily together.

I would beam at her praise, drink the orange squash she gave me and eat the shop-bought biscuits, but all the time I listened for
his
footsteps, willing
him
to arrive before I left.

Suddenly the neighbours were the parents I would have liked to have. But for all Dora’s kindness to me it was
he
who in my imagination became the father figure I could turn to, and I became a daddy’s girl who followed him around like a small puppy that had only just found someone to give it attention.

It was he who always had time to answer my little girl questions.

‘Why are there no mice in the skirting boards? Where have they gone? Mum says they will be back soon enough.’

‘Well, little lady,’ he would answer patiently, ‘in winter when it’s very cold they can’t find food so they creep into our homes and hide. When we are in bed asleep they run around looking for crumbs. But before we wake up they hide themselves away again.’

‘In the skirting boards?’ and I imagined the families of mice peeping through the holes just waiting for us to go to bed so they could have their midnight feast.

‘Yes, in the skirting boards,’ he would reply, laughing at my inquisitiveness.

‘Why does my mum get angry when she sees them?’

‘Women don’t like them’ was his only answer to that.

Other times he would make shadow pictures of rabbits, dogs and even a horse on his walls. Then when I begged for more he took off his brightly coloured neckerchief which, apart from Sundays when it was exchanged for a tie, he always wore knotted around his neck. Once off he somehow twisted it so that it cast shadows of birds against the wall.

Peter and Paul, he called them, as they flew up and down the walls. And before they disappeared out of sight a wing would gently caress my cheek. Those days I smiled happily back at him as I felt a glow spread through me at his attentions.

From my bedroom window I could see the man next door’s workshop. Sometimes he had a car he was repairing sitting outside it. I would wait for him to appear, then clatter down the stairs.

‘Shall I take Stevie out, Mum?’ I would ask, pointing to my brother.

‘Yes, you do that, Marianne. Keep him from getting under my feet,’ was her standard reply, so grabbing the toddler’s podgy little hand I would take him into the garden and wait hopefully to be noticed.

I never had to wait long. As though he could sense my presence his head would turn in my direction and a wide smile would light up his face.

‘Marianne,’ he would call, ‘come and give me a hand with this car, will you?’ and, delighted to feel needed, I would drag my unprotesting brother along as I flew to his side where I would importantly hold a spanner, pass a tool or even help polish the chrome.

Luckily my little brother was a sunny-natured child whose good behaviour could be bought with a biscuit or sweet.

‘Give the back seat a good wipe, will you, Marianne?’ he would often ask and, intent on my task, I would obediently crawl over the front seat.

‘Good girl,’ he would breathe in my ear as his hand patted my bottom.

‘You’ve got a little marvel there,’ he told my mother each time she appeared to see what I was up to. Ignoring the fact that he had taken up time when I could have been helping her, she gave him an answering smile.

‘Yes, she’s always been a good child, has Marianne. Never given me any trouble.’ And her naive complicity in his attentions was what sealed my fate. Maybe a worldlier woman might have questioned his motives. But he was our neighbour, the one who had helped my father find his job, while Dora had given my mother something she had craved: friendship, and with it the end of lonely days. So if there were any beginnings of doubts my mother did as so many mothers have before her and will do in the future: she doused them firmly down.

And finally I had someone in my life who thought I was special. He told me I was pretty, gave me sweets and endlessly listened to my chatter, and that was all it took to capture my seven-year-old heart.

T
he tiniest thing can often change the course of our lives, and mine was changed the day the little white cat found her way to our house. It was after that that the fear I felt of my father turned to mistrust and my love for my mother faltered as I saw her weakness.

I had reached that age when I wanted a pet of my own; something I could hold and cuddle, something that I could look after, take into my bedroom for company and tell my childhood fears to. Somehow my doll was no longer enough.

‘No,’ my mother said when, with all memory of the one that had killed the bird forgotten, I asked her for a kitten. I knew better than to ask my father. There might have been a whole colony of cats at the farm where he worked but they were only tolerated because they kept the population of rats and mice at bay. But still I looked wistfully at them. It was them, not the big black and white dogs who jumped up and frightened me, that I wanted as my friends, even though they seemed to view the human world with lofty disdain.

I first saw the little white cat when my mother and I had gone to the farm to buy fresh eggs. She was sitting in the shadows of the farmyard fastidiously cleaning her fur. My eyes met her bright-green ones and I knew she was not the same as the feral cats that lived there. I went to her side and gently stroked her, and to my delight, instead of spurning my affection, she purred with contentment as I ran my hand over her silky fur.

Maybe it was knowing that she was different that made her search for another home to give birth to her kittens, and she found it at the back of our house. Outside there was a lean-to where we stored logs and a small shed for coal. As logs came free from the farm and coal cost money, that shed had become my playroom, and it was there that the little cat decided was a suitable place for her to make her home. I smuggled food out to her and told her she had found a safe place to stay and made a nest out of papers and sacking for her.

I begged my mother for saucers of milk. ‘Don’t let your father see you,’ she told me time and again. ‘She belongs to the farm – she’s not a pet, Marianne. She has to go back there. If you keep feeding her she won’t go.’

‘But she’s hungry,’ I protested.

My mother sighed. ‘Her job is to catch mice and if she’s not hungry she won’t do it.’ But she still pretended not to notice when I smuggled scraps out.

I would place the saucer down and watch with delight as her little pink tongue lapped at the milk. I loved the dainty way she cleaned herself, even the way she stretched, and best of all I loved the feeling of her fur under my hand and the sound of her loud purring.

I christened her Snowy and it seemed in no time at all she recognized her name and came when I called it.

‘She’s an outside cat,’ my mother said sternly, ignoring the fact that Snowy slept in the small shed.

Snowy grew plumper. ‘She’s having kittens,’ my mother told me. She shook her head at my plea to let the little cat come into the warmth of our kitchen to give birth.

The kittens were born in the middle of the night. I found them when, as I did every morning, I waited for my father to leave for work, then slipped out of the house and made my way to the little shed. Snowy lay on her side, with the four tiny kittens, two tabby, one ginger and one, like her, pure white, suckling on her teats. Every day for the next week I watched the tiny bundles of fluff with growing delight.

‘When will their eyes open?’ I wondered. I never found out. I had grown careless in my haste to watch the small family. I had forgotten that on Saturdays, although my father left for work early, he returned for his breakfast. I was not in sight playing in the garden nor was I in the house and he, seeing my mother’s nervousness when he inquired if I was still in bed, went in search of me.

I was crouching by the white cat stroking her, blissfully unaware of him approaching until I heard his voice and looked up into his furious face.

‘What do you think you’re playing at?’ he shouted.

Without waiting for a response, he continuned. ‘Well, they’re not staying.’

Tears rained down my cheeks as I pleaded for him to leave them alone.

This just enraged him more. His hand raised and came down with a thump on my back and sent me sprawling.

‘Are you telling me what to do, eh? You need a lesson, you do, Marianne.’

He stomped off into the house and for a moment I thought I had won.

But when I saw him return with a sack in his hand I realized what he had in mind.

His large hand scooped the kittens up and threw them mewing pitifully into it.

‘This is your fault, Marianne,’ he said as he grabbed my arm and propelled me into the lane, across a field and to where a pond was.

Reaching it, his arm swung back then forward and he released the sack. It spun out across the water then fell, and as I watched it sink my ears filled with the pitiful wail of the kittens’ cries; a sound that rang in my ears hours after they had drowned.

I put my hands over my ears, trying to block out the sound. My mouth opened as a desperate howl of disbelief and grief left it. Tears rained down my face, blinding me, and snot trickled from my nose as I screamed ‘No’.

‘You can stop that noise right now,’ he said angrily to me, giving me a quick swipe across the top of my legs. I ran from him, then back to where the white cat had been. I wanted to tell her how sorry I was, how I had loved her babies, but as she saw me approach her green eyes glittered before she turned and slunk away.

She never visited me again.

My mother just looked helplessly at me when we returned, and I blamed her almost as much as him. Why had she not stood up for me just once? I asked myself.

That night as I lay in my bed with tears coursing down my cheeks, all I could see was Snowy’s little face staring unblinkingly at me before she disappeared. I felt something akin to hatred for my parents then. I was never praised, never made to feel special no matter how good I was. All I had asked for was to feed the cat. I thought of that one day, the day I had felt so happy and leant over my bed to pull out the cherished dress from the paper it was wrapped in. Holding it to my face I smelt the lingering scent of happiness. But that night its magic failed to work. Instead I felt sadness, almost a foreboding of what was to come.

Still crying, I fell asleep with the thought running through my head that there had only been one person since the wedding who had said I was special.

The next morning I went in search of the man next door.

He listened patiently to my tale of woe but said very little of how he felt about my father’s actions. Instead he knelt down so that his eyes were on a level with mine, rested his hand gently on my waist and told me all about the fairies that lived near the pond. They watched over tiny creatures like the frogs and baby ducks and they would not have let the kittens suffer.

He explained that they would have been carried on fairy wings to cat heaven where the streams run with milk, the mice were their friends and the sun always shone.

His words and the pictures he drew with them comforted me but I did not forgive my father and the man next door never suggested that I should.

He already had my affection; now the way was clear for him to gain control. His acquiring of power over me was a gradual thing, an insidious dominance that eventually sapped my will power, until pleasing him became of paramount importance.

Once he knew that, he also knew that I would never talk, and once confident in my submissiveness he would change towards me. But I was not to know that then.