Street Kid (11 page)

I watched two little boys covering their dad with sand. He lay there patiently, even when they sprinkled it on his face and made him snort. I kept thinking he was going to jump up with a bellow of rage, but when he did move at last, he rose slowly, pretending to be a sea monster from
the deep, and grabbed his little boys by the ankle. Their screams soon turned to giggles. I couldn’t imagine anyone daring to bury my father with sand.

The sun was dipping in the sky now and the deckchairs were throwing huge shadows across the sand. Most of the families had left and the last stragglers were gathering up their belongings, their sunburned skin looking a darker pink than before. Even as the last family walked past me to go up the stone steps, no one paused to wonder what I was doing there all alone. Not until the deckchair man came up to me.

He was a middle-aged man in vest and shorts and I watched him as he folded and stacked the chairs. By now, he was the only other person on the beach. Just him and me.

It was only when he’d finished his job and had turned to leave that he saw me. He hesitated for a moment, standing there staring at me; then he came over.

‘All alone, are we?’ he asked. I didn’t like the way he was looking at me. I felt like a beetle in a jam jar. ‘What are you doing here on your own?’

‘Waiting for my father,’ I said, my words coming out in a rasp. I couldn’t look him in the eyes.

‘Well, well. You’re a lucky girl that I found you,’ he said then. ‘You see, your father’s a friend of mine and he’s asked me to come and get you. He’s waiting at home with your tea.’

None of the deckchair man’s words rang true and the worm of doubt that had been turning in the pit of my stomach now changed into a great big snake. I knew this man wasn’t a friend of my dad’s, and I knew my father wouldn’t ever dream of giving me tea.

I wanted to run then, but I didn’t. The big, empty beach, and the thought of being left there alone at night, was more frightening to me than this sweaty old man with
greasy strands of hair pasted over his bald head. I didn’t know then what he might do to me, but knew instinctively that it wasn’t safe to be with him.

The deckchair man grabbed my hand, not tightly at first, and started pulling me along with him. When I tried to wriggle free, he moved his grip to my wrist. He was walking briskly now, with a strange sort of intensity. The tide had left puddles in the rippled sand and every so often the man lifted me over them.

‘We don’t want your shoes to get wet, do we?’ he said. I could feel his fingers worming their way under my knickers and touching me there. I started to struggle now but he was gripping me hard.

When we reached a more sheltered spot, the deckchair man stopped walking and pushed me down onto the sand behind some rocks. I fought as hard as I could, but he was too big. It hurt and I cried, but he just carried on, not saying anything but making a horrid grunting noise. At some point he collapsed on my body, still now, and his hoarse breathing and the pounding of my heart drowned out the sound of the gulls and the waves on the shore.

Afterwards, he tried to do up the buttons of my dress, but he did them all wrong. He wasn’t looking at me now.

‘That wasn’t too bad now, was it?’ he said. ‘You be a good girl and go back and wait for your father. He’ll be along soon.’ He handed me a bar of Cadbury’s chocolate.

I stumbled back up the beach, my dress all torn and wet. As I reached the steps, I saw two girls coming down and I shoved the bar of chocolate into one of their hands. I pushed past them, feeling a desperate need to hide. Ahead of me, I saw a bus shelter and ran to it. I crouched there on the wooden bench, shivering with cold and shock, until Freda and my dad found me.

They didn’t ask me what had happened, but simply tore me off a strip for messing my dress.

The rest of the week was hell for me. I couldn’t tell anyone what had happened, but shook with fear every time I was taken down to the beach. Being left there again over the next three days was deeply traumatic. When it wasn’t possible to melt into a crowd, I’d hide away in the bus shelter, trying to look as small and insignificant as I could, all the time sensing greedy, brutal eyes watching me, waiting to catch me on my own.

I never told anyone what had happened that day on the beach. When we got home, I buried my face in Gyp’s fur and with every lick she gave me I felt a little less bruised inside. But the trauma of my rape would haunt me that long summer, and for years afterwards. Often, for no reason, I would find myself shaking uncontrollably. On my way to the library, or to the wash house, I’d feel watchful eyes on my back, and it was all I could do not to run. I didn’t like being outside without Gyp at my side. At times, I thought I saw the deckchair man in a group of people on the street or in a shop, taking sneaky sideways looks at me, and then I’d want to run away and hide.

Whenever I caught a glimpse of myself in shop windows, I used to be really surprised that a normal kid looked back at me. I thought that I must be something so hideous for people to have treated me the way they had, like a piece of plasticine that’s been pulled and twisted into an ugly blob; but here I was, an ordinary-looking child with brown hair in a clip. I couldn’t recognize myself. So I would think,
There must be two of me, an outside person and an inside person.
And that got me thinking,
They don’t know who I am. They have no idea.
And I realized then that I had
to protect the inside person. They could beat the outside person as much as they liked. I knew me and I knew how I felt, and they didn’t.
I’m going to have to look after the me in here.

Chapter Eleven

I
grew very fast that summer. It was almost as if the warm days had made me shoot up like a sunflower. I was still as thin as a whippet, but the backflips and head-stands I’d been practising had made me supple and strong. When I returned to Duke Street school in September, Mrs Jones made me move to a desk at the back as I was now one of the tallest in my form.

Being at the back of the class is usually the most coveted place, especially if you’re a kid who’s often picked on. However, for me it was a disaster. My eyes had been growing increasingly short-sighted over the past year, and now it was difficult to pick out the words and sums on the blackboard. I copied down what I thought I could see, but I often made mistakes.

By this time, we were old enough to use ink pens. All the kids in my class felt much more grown up now they had their own pen, but I found that I missed my pencil. The nib on my pen was old and splayed and sputtered ink all over my exercise book as I worked. Mrs Jones was fanatical about neatness. She used to walk up and down our rows of desks, watching what we were doing like some huge bird of prey. It was hard enough to work while
her eyes were boring down on you; but when your pen nib just wouldn’t behave, it was torture. My knuckles were constantly red from where she’d rapped them with her ruler.

Although I made many mistakes in class, my work was progressing well, largely due to with Miss Williams’s lessons at Sunday School. I was so willing to learn, so keen to impress her, that my writing and drawing came on in leaps and bounds.

I was ten and a bit when my mother and sisters came back into my life. I had sensed that there was something wrong and that Freda and my dad were rowing more than usual. Usually, they sat in frigid silence in the evening after Dad had come in from work. She’d darn his socks while he read the paper, and it seemed like rarely a word ever passed between them. For the past few months, though, my father’s fuse had been especially short, and Freda was as jumpy as a cat. I realized that the rows had something to do with his divorce and that Mum’s solicitor had managed to track him down; but I didn’t glean much because I hid in my room most of the time, keeping out of harm’s way.

The full reason for my dad’s behaviour became clear to me one day when he called me downstairs.

‘You’re going to your mother’s tomorrow,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to go every Sunday and you’d better not put a foot out of line, my girl, or I’ll give you such a hiding.’

My heart gave a great jump in my chest and for a minute I couldn’t breathe.
She’s found me. She wants me back!

Dad turned then to Freda. ‘Dress her in her Sunday best, and make sure she’s tidy. I don’t want that bitch saying we’re not looking after her properly.’

It took me ages to get to sleep that night. It had been seven years since I’d last seen my mother and sisters. I wondered what it would be like when I saw them again. Would they hug me? Had they missed me at all? Might they even fight to keep me?

The next day, my father took me down to Victoria Bus Station. When we got there, a tall fair-haired girl was waiting for us. I instantly recognized Dora, but was shocked that she wasn’t the four-year-old sister I remembered. I sensed there was little recognition on her part. She looked tense and I realized that seeing Dad after all these years must be a big shock to her. He greeted her tersely, showing no warmth at all. As far as he was concerned she was part of the enemy camp, one of my mother’s spies.

‘Get her back on the five o’clock bus. I don’t want to be hanging round here waiting.’ With that, Dad turned and left and we got on the bus together without a word.

Sitting on the top deck of the bus with Dora was excruciatingly awkward. She didn’t say a single word to me, and I certainly wasn’t able to start any sort of conversation with her. I wouldn’t have had a clue what to say. Every minute of the journey was painful, and it was obvious we were both relieved when it was over.

Mum and Paddy had been given a bigger house than ours by the council. It was semi-detached and I knew if Freda could see it she’d have been spitting with envy. Dora led me down the side passage and through the back door into the kitchen. Mum was standing at the sink and wiped her hands on her pinny when she saw me. She was much older-looking than I remembered, and the lines around her mouth and eyes weren’t happy ones; her face was scored with the marks of discontent and worry.

‘Hello Judy,’ she said. ‘I see Dora found you then.’

Her movements looked somehow leaden, and forced. She came over and held me for a moment, but it was a strange, stiff sort of hug. I sensed that she was determined to play the motherly role as well as she could but that she’d never really known how, so it felt very uncomfortable to her. And if Mum felt awkward, I felt doubly so. She seemed like a stranger but it was as though something, some loving bond, was expected of us both and neither of us knew how to create it. I didn’t know how to be chatty and outgoing; I was too used to hiding away. I must have seemed a charmless, wooden sort of girl to them.

I could see Mum had made an effort as the kitchen table had been laid with a cloth and plates of sandwiches and cake. But everything about that day had a strange formality that didn’t make it comfortable for any of us. She took me through to the front room, where my three other sisters were sitting on the settee. The scene looked almost staged, and I sensed that the whole thing had been set up for my benefit. Mum introduced me to Mary and to my two half-sisters, Lily and Rose, and they said hello quietly and politely. It felt horribly awkward to have such a stilted first meeting with Mary. I wanted to say,
Don’t you remember me? Your little sister, who you used to hold in your arms, wash and feed? Have you forgotten that?

As the day wore on, I realized that Mum was desperate to create a perfect family picture that I could take home with me to taunt my father with. And I knew that he wanted to rile her too. He had drummed into me on our way to the bus station that I must paint a rosy picture of my life in Wood Street. It was obvious that, although my parents were now divorced, they were still obsessively locked in their own private dance, full of anger, revenge
and competitiveness. And, as usual, I was just a pawn in their own selfish game. That was the reason Dad had taken me in the first place, retrieved me from the orphanage and continued to keep me. He just couldn’t let Mum win.

My sisters had obviously been told that they couldn’t go out with their friends, or disappear to play their usual games, and I sensed their feeling of resentment as we all sat in the front room.

‘You’d better go and play in the garden with Judy,’ Mum said after a few minutes. ‘I’ll call you in when it’s tea.’

The girls sullenly trooped off, with me following. As soon as we got outside, however, they relaxed a bit and after a while they began to play a game. I stood back, watching from the sidelines. Mary hadn’t come with us into the garden. At sixteen, she wanted to be off doing her own thing and it was clear that she wasn’t interested in getting to know me.

I saw my mother and sisters once a month through the winter. I’d hoped that the more they got to know me the more they’d want me to be with them as part of the family. Things certainly began to get easier; I still found it impossible to join in the chit-chat around the table, but at least my sisters became more relaxed around me. Occasionally, though, if one of them got a bit mouthy, my mother would shoot a warning look and I’d know that they were still walking on eggshells in case I reported back that my sisters were being badly brought up.

As I got more familiar with the family, I started to see everything wasn’t all that rosy at Malvern Grove. I noticed that Mum was usually careful around Paddy, and I sensed that the charming, brawny Irishman she’d fallen for had turned out feckless and difficult to manage,
especially when he’d been drinking. When he came home after we’d had our tea, it was plain from his behaviour that he didn’t want me in the house. He never spoke to me or looked my way. He simply acted as if I wasn’t there, and gave everyone else grief by stomping about the house and slamming doors. He was never very nice to Mary and Dora, and I saw he treated Lily and Rose very differently to them.

You can’t have had an easy time of it,
I thought.
But at least you had each other.