Beautiful

by Anita Waller

  Brenda sighed. ‘We just don’t know what to do. I’m afraid of approaching her. She closes down if she suspects we’re prying. Surely she shouldn’t be like that at eight years old?’

  ‘She’s not the same as most eight year olds, is she? How many have been through what she’s been through? But having said that, I think you’ve got to pry. In fact I think someone with expertise in the field should do the prying. I don’t know what else to suggest.’ She shrugged her shoulders miserably.

  ‘What’s her behaviour like at school? Is there anything you’re keeping from us?’

  Claudia smiled. ‘She’s too good. Never have anything to complain about, she sticks by all the rules, answers when she’s spoken to but never actually volunteers anything. Sometimes I want to shake her, to bring back Amelia and tell Amy to bugger off!’

  ‘I know exactly what you mean. I’m going to do something about it. I’m going to see our doctor and tell him he’s got to refer me somewhere. We can’t go on without help.’

  The paediatric psychiatrist saw them as a family, as individual parents and then Amy on her own. The little girl puzzled him and he talked at length with her about the pinches, the bruises, asked her why everything had to be in such neat, orderly rows. He didn’t really receive adequate answers but he knew she understood what he was saying; she was a good little girl, very sweet. His notes confirmed that opinion and he felt sure given time, Amy would put the rape to the back of her mind and her original personality would resurface. Given time.

  Eight visits later he pronounced Amy cured.

  ‘I don’t think you have much to worry about, Mr. and Mrs Andrews,’ he said. ‘Amy has just had to adjust to the turmoil in her life and she’s now coping very well. Aren’t you, Amy?’

  Amy said nothing.

  ‘Now, I don’t think I’ll need to see you again unless any new problems crop up, so…’ and he stood, extending his hand. Jack shook it and they moved towards the door.

  ‘And I might just say that Amy is a very beautiful little girl, a credit to both of you.’

  Amy’s spine visibly stiffened and she turned to face the man.

  ‘It’s Amelia,’ she snarled and ran from the room.

  The sun was still high overhead when Amy and her parents returned from the psychiatrist. Brenda felt happier but, if questioned, Jack would have admitted to feeling no easier than before they had taken Amy for counselling.

  ‘Can I go outside, Mummy?’

  Brenda nodded and smiled at her daughter. She gave an automatic reaction. ‘Don’t go too far, sweetheart,’

  Amy went into the utility room and looked at the dolls pram that hadn’t been out of the house for two years. She walked slowly over to it and pushed down the hood. Her doll, her Patty, was asleep, the tiny eyes closed because of its horizontal position. She picked it up and the eyes opened, bright blue eyes that stared into hers. She held Patty for a moment and then slammed her back down into the pram. Pulling it along by the handle she backed out of the utility room and manoeuvred it through the front door. Leaving it standing on the path she returned to the room to collect the rest of the stuff that she needed.

  The sun beat on the back of her head as she walked down the lane nonchalantly pushing the pram with one hand; the other hand was tucked into the pocket of her dungarees, her fingers stroking the box of matches. It was only a five-minute walk to the playing field and she could see across to the playground area where two children sat on the swings. She nodded her head, happy that she was alone. She had known she would be.

  She wheeled the pram across the grass retracing her walk of two years earlier and stopped at the spot where he had caught her. She had thought he was nice. He had seemed friendly enough whenever he had spoken to her but that day she sensed he was different. She stood quietly letting the heat of the sun warm her although her body, her mind, felt icily cold as the memories the psychiatrist had regurgitated flooded back.

  She felt his presence and fear hurtled over her for a second.

  ‘But he’s dead,’ she whispered. ‘Dead, dead, dead.’ And slowly some of the fear left her.

  She removed the pile of newspapers from underneath Patty and began to roll each individual sheet into loose balls placing them carefully in the bottom of the pram.

  When all of them were neatly lined up in straight rows she took out a match and struck it. Her movements were stilted, her mind blanked out to everything but what she was doing. The paper caught immediately and within seconds the pram was fully alight.

  She picked Patty up from the ground, stared at her with pure hatred for a moment and threw the tiny doll on to the burning pram.

  ‘You did it, Patty.’ She spoke in a low voice, the words directed at the doll. ‘If you hadn’t wanted me to bring you for a walk he couldn’t have done it. You did it! You did it!’

  The flames grew higher as the soft-bodied doll ignited and somewhere, a long, long way off she thought she could hear children screaming.

  And then there were arms thrown around her, dragging her away from the searing heat.

  ‘Amy, oh Amy, love. What are you doing?’

  The child continued to stare into the flames that were starting to die down.

  ‘Leave me alone, Aunty Freda, leave me alone. I’m killing Patty. She’s got to die, just like him.’

  Freda looked at the conflagration with horror. ‘Patty? You mean your little doll? Oh Amy, how could you? Do your mum and dad know you’re here?’

  ‘No. Please leave me, Aunty Freda.’ Amy’s voice was low, speaking with a maturity that far surpassed her years.

  ‘I will not leave you, young lady,’ Freda countered, trying to decide what she ought to do next. Amy was obviously a million miles away and intent on revenge in some form or another. She wondered what on earth had happened at that morning’s session to provoke such a reaction in her young niece and she flinched at once more being the bearer of bad news for Jack and Brenda.

  Taking the child’s arm she pulled her away from the flames. ‘And I say you’re coming with me. Come on, you’re frightening those little ones on the swings.’

  Suddenly Amy deflated. It was almost a physical action and when Freda attempted to explain it to Brenda and Jack later that night she said it was just as if she had stuck a pin in her and the air had escaped.

  ‘Alright, I’ll go home now. She’s dead. That’s all I wanted.’ Amy lowered her head and began the walk back across the playing fields, the face of him locked into her mind. And in that moment she somehow knew that it would always be like that – his face there, lurking in a corner of her brain.

  Amy’s ashen face told Brenda that she was exhausted.

  ‘Come on,’ she said gently. ‘Let’s have you in bed for an hour. It won’t hurt.’

  She obeyed, all the fight seemingly knocked out of her. Freda was able to tell the worried parents exactly what had happened.

  ‘I saw her light the match,’ she said. ‘Even then I didn’t really click what was happening. And all the time I was running across that damn field I was shouting her name but she never once turned round. I don’t think she even heard me; she was absolutely locked into that fire. She just wanted to kill Patty. That was all I could get out of her.’

  ‘That psychiatrist chap upset her,’ Jack said slowly.

  ‘Huh?’ Freda looked puzzled.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong when I say upset her. I’m blessed if I know how. He actually complimented her, said something about us having a beautiful daughter but she was livid. Snapped his head off, she did. She said she was Amelia, not Amy, so he must really have said the wrong thing. She stormed out of his office and we had to really run to catch up with her. And she never said a word on the way home – must have been planning this, I suppose.’

  Brenda, refusing to allow her optimism to be squashed flat, shook her head. ‘No, I think she’s just tired. We’ll see how long she sleeps. You’ll see, when she wakes up, she’ll be a different girl.’

  She didn�
��t wake until long after her parents had gone to bed; Brenda told Jack she knew it was just because of tiredness.

  The child certainly wasn’t tired at two AM when her eyelids finally fluttered and stayed open. She climbed from her bed and then, in the velvety blackness of the early hours, Amy carefully arranged all her dolls in a neat and tidy line along her windowsill. She crept downstairs, not wanting to wake her parents, and returned holding the sharp little knife her mother used for peeling potatoes.

  Picking each doll up in turn, she hacked at it until all of them were only just recognizable as dolls.

  ‘Beautiful, ugly, beautiful, ugly, beautiful, ugly,’ she said, keeping time with each slash of the knife. As the last doll was completely dismembered she sat back, resting on her heels and looking at the damage she had inflicted. Plastic limbs were everywhere, soft-bodied dolls torn apart, their white interiors spewing out like cotton wool entrails; the heads were neatly gathered together and lined up on the windowsill.

  ‘There,’ a note of satisfaction crept back into her voice, ‘now I’m Amy again.’

  The following day Brenda Andrews gathered all the dolls into a pile and burnt them on the bonfire. She could think of nothing to say to Amy and Jack had shrugged his shoulders, afraid to admit his only child, this most precious human being, could be so flawed.

  Brenda spoke only one sentence. ‘He said she was fine, Jack, he said she was fine.’

  5

  Two days of continuous rain had left the ground with a boggy, springy feel to it. Jack didn’t mind in the least – he knew that the weeds grew faster than the plants after summer rain and the damp ground made it easy to uproot them.

  His tanned, weathered face smiled in appreciation of what he had. Stonebrook Cottage was enclosed by a large area of land which they had turned into a thriving market garden business. The ground was flat surrounding the cottage and a couple of outbuildings, gradually climbing towards a field owned by a neighbour at the top end of their property. Jack wasn’t rich but being comfortable was all that mattered to him – and Brenda and Amy. He made a good, honest living from the land but what Jack regarded as the biggest bonus was that he enjoyed his work and never really thought of it as that; more a paying hobby than employment.

  Great Uncle Arnold had left the property and land to Brenda. Their first reaction had been to sell it – Jack had had a good job on the railways and they had just started paying a mortgage on their own little house down in Wadebridge.

  Brenda had known nothing of the property until the actual reading of the will because although Uncle Arnold had always said he ‘would see her alright’ she had assumed she would receive a small behest. The large cottage was a big surprise and immediately they had fallen in love with it, seeing its potential as a family home for the three or four children they planned to have.

  Uninhabited for a long time, the cottage had smelt strongly of damp but after opening all the windows, they had made the plans to put their own tiny home on the market. Situated about two miles outside Padstow they knew it was their idyll. They could see through the damp, through the old fashioned wallpapers and dark brown paint, through the antiquated kitchen. It was close enough to the coast for easy outings yet far enough away from the salt spray that was so troublesome to plants; they said yes to Padstow and no to Wadebridge.

  The roses and wisteria climbing around the door and wall hid a multitude of faults but it didn’t matter. Jack had taken one look at the land that came with it and decided that this was what he wanted to do; he would grow market produce.

  Brenda hadn’t taken him seriously at first but then when the jokes about washing mud instead of soot out of his clothes had become more serious, he had known she was giving the idea her full consideration.

  Initially, he had tried to hold down his job and work the land in his spare time but when Brenda had become pregnant he had decided to throw in the towel. He had left his job and devoted himself full time to his newly opened business. He loved every minute of it and worked long days constantly planting, replanting, harvesting and delivering. With the advent of the stall at the end of the lane Brenda too was tied up for long stretches at a time during the daylight hours. Their days were busy, full and happy, especially after the birth of Amelia.

  Now, Jack looked across at his ten-year-old daughter and sighed. He knew that the psychiatrist had been wrong when he said there was nothing to be concerned about with Amy. She was a constant worry to him.

  He kept his thoughts to himself. Brenda had enough to concern herself with without having the burden of his fears. One of the considerations when deciding what to do about the cottage had been the fact that it would be safe for their children, tucked away as it was down a lane – no cars to run up and down, plenty of space for them to play, a playing field at the bottom of the lane… his anger rose like bile in his throat as he thought of the playing field.

  And of course there had been no more children. They had reached a point in their lives when a second child was on the cards until that afternoon when their world changed forever. Then, they had both known Amy would always be the only one.

  Amy had only ventured back into the garden this year. Right from the start she had been allocated her own little piece of land, about twelve feet square in which, as a three year old child she had grown carrots, beetroot and many flowers. She had loved the speed with which Virginia stock had appeared, the dainty colours of their flowers and the glorious splash of colour created by the calendulas.

  She was an enthusiastic little gardener, meticulously cleaning the miniature tools that Jack had fashioned for her, repeating everything her daddy did. She loved working with him and had learnt the names of most of the flowers. They talked, they laughed and the hours he spent with his small daughter passed all too quickly.

  Jack gritted his teeth at the thought of what Ronald Treverick had taken from him. He watched the new, more mature Amy bend over and remove a weed. That weed had no place in the well-ordered routine of her little garden. He was almost able to read her mind. She no longer scattered seeds – everything now was in neat orderly rows, each plant having an equal distance between them, the soil crumbled to a fine tilth. Her brain allowed for no disorder and sometimes he could almost hear her tut of disapproval if he planted something where it really shouldn’t go. He noticed how she was growing, her own tools now too small in her hand and he resolved to have a look at them.

  It was good to see her with the gardening equipment instead of pen and paper and he wondered, not for the first time, why she always refused to let them see her stories and poems, particularly in view of her excellent school reports that praised her creativity in English. He suspected that the darkness in her showed in her writing and sometimes he felt tempted to go into her room and take a look. But he knew if he did that he wouldn’t be able to face her – her privacy was sacrosanct.

  If only she would talk to him as she had done in times that seemed so long ago. He moved over towards the thick hawthorn hedge and stared in disgust at the invasive bindweed. The flowers were pretty; the stems and roots lethal as they tried to strangle his plants. Amidst muttered curses he began to once more pull out as much of the root as possible, a chore he did regularly with no lasting effect.

  Amy turned and looked over towards her father. She could hear the vague grumbles as he talked to himself and she smiled. Sometimes she felt she could almost begin to love him like she used to when they were working like this, but she sensed it was silly to risk letting him know that. He was a man.

  Her glance swept around the acre of land, taking in the vegetables, the rose garden her mother tended and the flower garden. The flowers sold really well on her mother’s stall positioned at the bottom of the lane leading to the cottage and she wondered if she should ask her dad if she could cut some herself. He didn’t usually let anyone touch them but himself, but maybe, just this once…

  ‘Dad?’

  Jack almost lost control of the pipe protruding from the left side
of his mouth. Intent on vanquishing the bindweed, he was lost in his own world and Amy’s voice startled him.

  ‘Sweetheart?’

  ‘Can I cut some flowers to take down to the stall?’

  He almost said no, better not, you might not get the lengths right and then stopped himself. What was he thinking? It was the first time she had made any sort of approach to him with regard to the garden and he was not about to refuse her.

  ‘You surely can, pet. That’ll save me a job. Want me to show you what to cut?’

  She nodded. He walked to the end of the field where the many different kinds of flowers grew and began to point out the ones she could cut.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘take care to cut the stems as close to the base of the plant as you can, don’t cut any that are too small – give them the chance to grow – and make them into bunches of twelve flowers if you think you can do that. If not, just take the whole lot down to mum and she’ll bunch them. Give her something to do,’ he joked, ‘sitting on her backside all day at that stall.’

  She didn’t smile and Jack groaned inside. He couldn’t get through to her at all. ‘Okay, sweetheart, think you can manage?’

  She nodded, taking the flower cutters from him. Jack didn’t make the mistake of staying to watch if she did it correctly; he never doubted for a minute that they would be cut in the proper way, each flower an exact length to match the others.

  He picked up his spade and viciously rammed it into the ground. Perhaps a spot of double digging would help cure the rage he felt inside.

  He knew it wouldn’t displace it, but it would give him temporary release.

  ‘How’s Amy?’

  Freda’s abrupt tone brought Brenda to her feet. She had been nearly asleep in her deckchair behind the stall, the warm sun working its charm on her and she hadn’t heard Freda approach.

  She rubbed her eyes.

  ‘Oh, hello, Freda. Sorry, didn’t hear you. To be perfectly honest, I was just about asleep,’ she added with a grin. ‘Amy’s fine… well, sort of, anyway.’