by Louise Allen
‘What do you expect when you go out looking like a slut?’ she said. ‘It’s your own bloody fault.’ Then she picked up the blue laundry basket and walked away, back into the kitchen.
I went into the orchard with Blue, sat behind a tree and cried my heart out. I felt dirty, hideous, ugly. I couldn’t tell Sean either; it was far too shaming. It was clearly all my fault. Maybe I was a slut. Maybe that’s why everyone kept grabbing at me. Blue leant against me and I hugged her warm body and stroked her fur; she was all I had at that moment. She understood, as she’d been there. She’d saved my life. However, next morning, same as always, I had to do the early-morning walk with the dog. I took Blue out on the very same route. Even so, I was scared to death. When I got to the place where the wild man had pushed me in the bushes, I burst into tears and felt sick. But I got through it somehow and shook all the way home. I thought the worst was over, but I was wrong.
When I got back and had my little bit of breakfast, Barbara said, ‘You’d better go to school today, it’ll do you good.’
My heart lifted. I thought, Wow, she’s actually thinking about me. Barbara didn’t say anything about the incident with the man, and I did wonder why she didn’t call the police. She was ready to call the police if I did something wrong, so why not now, when someone did something really bad to me? I’d been taken to the police station to ‘teach me a lesson’ more than once, so why not report a man who actually attacked me in a public place?
The thing is, with Barbara there was never any logic or reason. She would do exactly what she wanted when she wanted and it was often one thing one day, and another the next. However, it was actually good to go to school even though I’d missed about another two weeks. I was way behind in everything and felt despair that I would never catch up. I didn’t tell anyone about the University Parks man. I tried to push it to the back of my mind where I put all the other horrible things that had happened.
I still felt sick and shaky but, as the day wore on, I realised that being at school had been a good idea. Maybe Barbara actually cared about me after all. When I got home I rushed in to find Blue. I wanted to tell her about my day. Oddly, she wasn’t to be seen. I ran around the garden, looked in the orchard; maybe she was locked in the shed. I couldn’t find her. Eventually I ran into the kitchen where Barbara was at the sink, rinsing soap off some mugs.
‘Where’s Blue?’ I asked breathlessly. Panic was rising. ‘I can’t find Blue,’ I said, tears starting. ‘Where is she?’
‘She’s gone,’ Barbara said coldly, ‘and that’s the end of it.’
‘What do you mean, gone?’ I nearly screamed. ‘Where is she?’ I was losing control.
‘I took her to the vet,’ said Barbara, still rinsing. ‘She’s dead.’
My knees gave way and I fell on the floor in a heap and howled.
‘Stop that,’ shouted Barbara. ‘Shut up, you little bitch. Go to your room.’
I was beside myself. I couldn’t compute what was going on. Or why. Why would she do this to my wonderful dog? Blue was fine, she was healthy and young. I trudged up the stairs and threw myself on the bed. I sobbed and sobbed and couldn’t stop. Whatever happened, there was always something worse just around the corner. I cried for days and spent time in bed, not getting up, staring at the ceiling, sobbing into my pillow. I didn’t want to get up or go to school and that suited Barbara fine. I was forced to do chores, which I did through clenched teeth. I wouldn’t look at her. I didn’t speak. There was a giant dog-shaped hole where Blue should have been.
A few days later Barbara had a couple of women from the village round for coffee. Numb and exhausted, I crept out of my room and sat at the top of the stairs listening to them. If Barbara caught me there’d be hell to pay, but today I didn’t care. I was totally heartbroken. I listened to the women talking, as the living room door was half-open, and I heard Barbara explaining I was home as I was getting over the shock of being attacked in the park. I heard her say, ‘Yes, we’ve all known about that man in the Parks for weeks now, and sadly he struck my poor Louise.’
I stopped breathing. So Barbara had known there was a man in the Parks who was a problem – and yet she let me wander about on my own with poor Blue. She never warned me, or came with me. I heard the other women say it had been in the paper for weeks that women shouldn’t go out in the area alone. Yet I’d been blamed for being a ‘slut’ and told it was my fault. Worse, my darling Blue had been destroyed in the process. Why? What had she done wrong? She had paid the ultimate price – but for what? Saving me? Maybe saving me is why she’d lost her life.
I knew then that I really wasn’t safe; my life was one long punishment. I didn’t know what it was I’d done that was so bad to make my life such a living hell. But I knew then that I would have to leave this house, to find a way out, to find some safety and care as soon as I was big enough to go, or I would end up being destroyed like Blue. One of Barbara’s favourite phrases was ‘I will kill you one day’, and I feared she would actually do this. What I didn’t know was that for years she had been working on a plan to get rid of me.
13
Nobody’s Child
As long as I could remember Barbara would say really rude things about my birth mother. She didn’t have a name for her, as such. I had no real information about her, or who my family actually was. It was all shrouded in mystery. All I knew for definite, because Barbara had told me so many times, was that she was a ‘whore’ and a ‘stupid bitch’. I would be swiped by her hand, or kicked by her foot, spat at and told I was a ‘stupid bitch, just like your mother.’ So the picture I had in my head was of a terrible person, like a witch, who I was just like. Or some awful floozy woman in terrible clothes – was I like that too? I simply had no proper, hard information about where on earth I came from or how I ended up living with Barbara and Ian (and the really horrible Kevin – who was a permanent fixture in our house now because he hated his dad).
As I grew older, Barbara began to change her tune about my mother, a bit. I didn’t believe this because I knew she had thrown me away. But when I was about nine years old, Barbara had begun to tell me that my mother missed me, or wanted me back. How did she know? Was it true? I had no letter from her telling me that it had broken her heart to give me away and that she was sorry. I had no picture of her, and no idea what colour her hair was or where she came from. I had no picture of her family, her town, her house. Did she have other children? Was she married? I couldn’t ask Barbara any of these questions. And then there was the confusing issue of me being painted with the ‘tar brush’ and being an ‘oily Jew’, as Barbara threw at me, over and over. How was that? If that was so, where were they? And where was my father? Why wasn’t he with my mother? Were they married? Had he died? Why didn’t he want me either? I had an endless list of questions and nobody to answer them for me.
When I was alone at night, or wandering round the garden, I wondered if Barbara had ever met my mother. What I did know was that Barbara was always late picking me up from school wherever I was, and I heard one day that she’d been off driving quite a distance. What I didn’t know then, and only found out later, was that from when I was really very small Barbara was on a personal mission to give me back to my birth family. She did a lot of hunting down of my real family members without talking to the social workers or going through the proper channels. She wanted to be rid of me. She had also done the same with William, I found out much later. She had actually gone and located his grandparents and tried to give him back. It didn’t work, and he ended up in care, as nobody wanted him.
During this time I wondered about Rene and Fred, the two old people she’d driven to when the male social worker tried to touch me and took me away to strange foster parents for a few days. I found out much later that these were actually my mother’s parents. So I’d met my grandparents without knowing it was them. But they didn’t want to know me either, so they sent me away. Yet another rejection. I didn’t know at the time what was going on, but
Barbara had developed a plan to find my birth mother so she could give me back.
It was Barbara who wanted to throw me away. Just as she had William. And our dogs. She often threatened me with: ‘I’ll send you back where you came from’ and I eventually realised she actually meant it. Naturally she had no idea whether my birth mother – when and if she found her – would have any real interest in taking me on. I had no idea about this until one Saturday morning when I was twelve, Barbara barked at me: ‘Go and get a dress on and get in the car. Your mother wants to meet you.’
I was feeding the chickens, pulling old straw out of the hen’s boxes, and what she said set my heart racing. I stopped and looked up at her, stunned.
‘Finish that now. Get ready and be quick about it.’
I threw clean straw around all my clucky hens, feeling sick. Was she coming here? Obviously not, as we were going somewhere. Why was she coming? Was she going to be alone or with my father? Chickens done, I raced upstairs and threw on my one and only ‘best’ dress, which was a horrible brown flowery affair, a Barbara cut-down. I put on my only Clarks bar shoes, brown ones with grubby white socks with my big toe poking out of a hole. I pulled a comb through my pageboy haircut. Looking in the mirror I could see that my eyebrows had been plucked to non-existence on the right side of my face and that my eyelashes were almost gone. I had blue eyes and a button nose and a very serious expression.
I had recently started my periods, and I had little bumps growing tightly under my dress, which I felt very self-conscious about. I hadn’t got a bra although all the girls at school were sporting cute little Berlei ones with pink roses and white bows. My little breasts were hovering under a frayed white vest. In fact the coming of my periods had brought with it even more humiliation from Barbara, who would openly discuss me being ‘on’, or would say, ‘It’s Louise’s time of the month,’ in front of Ian and Kevin.
There was no privacy or sensitivity coming my way. She also gave me a hideous contraption, a big piece of elastic that went around my waist, which had a huge sanitary towel clipped onto it, back and front. This was bulky, awkward and smelly. As washing and soap was still rationed as far as I was concerned, I often had spills of blood on my underpants and clothes, which then required soaking in soda and scrubbing with a brush (which I did, of course). Barbara would sniff at my garments and mumble ‘filthy little bitch’ when I produced them for the wash. It wasn’t my fault. The other girls at school had nice pads or even Tampax, but I wasn’t allowed any of that – ‘waste of money’ – so I had these huge old lady pads and had to deal with the embarrassing fallout (literally).
Luckily, on this day I was to meet my mother, I didn’t have my period. But I did have a migraine. I had started having killer headaches about a year earlier and now they came at regular intervals. It felt as if half my head had been chopped at with an axe. I was nauseous with black and white vision and swirling lights in my eyes. I often got the headaches around the time of my period, but also when Barbara was in a particularly shouty mood. I clenched my teeth, tensed up and would curl up in a ball and wait for the sickness and headache to go away. Now, today, I was going to meet my mother with my temples pounding and my stomach swirling with nausea. I knew better than to ask Barbara for anything, so I snuck to the bathroom cupboard and swallowed a couple of green pills, knowing they might make my head feel a bit more like cotton wool.
We drove for hours. Barbara had a new dog now, Mimi, a white poodle who was thrown in the back. I sat in the front feeling sick most of the way, and in fact I had to jump out the car and throw up outside of Oxford, before we got on the motorway.
‘Hurry up about it,’ snapped Barbara. ‘She won’t wait all day for you.’ And then she added, as a sweetener, ‘She really wants to meet you.’
How did she know that? Had my mother said anything? Did Barbara know her? All the way I stared fixedly out of the window. All my life I had wondered who my birth mother might be: was she a famous ballerina? Or had she been a glamorous pop singer and not allowed to keep her baby? I imagined someone like my old friend Maisie’s mum, who was warm and kind and wore long, floaty clothes.
There were many ‘hippy’ mums at my school, wearing gypsy print blouses and long swishing skirts. They always wore beads, bracelets and earrings and put henna on their hair. The thing I noticed was how much they loved colour. They were ‘rainbow’ mums, so different from the steely grey Barbara, who wore clothes like a prison warder: black or grey polyester skirt, grey jumper, grey anorak, sensible grey, black or brown shoes. She looked old, grizzled, plain.
I imagined my real mum to have flowing black hair, like mine, especially if she was Jewish, like me. Maybe she was like Mary in Peter, Paul and Mary, the singers, with nice long hair and a sweet face. Maybe she was like Joni Mitchell, singing ‘Both Sides Now’ with blonde locks and high cheekbones.
As the houses gave way to fields, then to endless roads, then to more houses, now mostly built in grey stone, I realised we had driven for nearly two hours. We were in a place called Swindon, which looked somewhat nondescript. I had heard the name, but had never been there. We drove through the town and out the other side.
The whole journey Barbara and I were silent. I just needed to keep myself quiet, with my thumping headache, looking out at the trees, the passing houses, the clouds, the other cars. Occasionally I would feel sick or nervous and I would put my dipper finger along my eyelid, find a little bit of stubble and pull. It hurt, but it was somehow satisfying. Then I would do it again, and again. And then I’d tell myself to stop – I didn’t want my real mother to think I had no eyelashes.
We eventually drew up to a house that had fields all around it. It was quite a flashy big house with a gravel drive in front, and two shiny new cars. Barbara got out and pulled poor Mimi roughly off the back seat.
‘Get out,’ she snapped at me.
I opened the door and unfolded myself on the gravel. I stood there feeling completely dazed. Barbara was already crunching up the drive, so I followed. She rang the doorbell and we stood for ages, my heart thumping. I was about to meet my real mother for the first time! Would she sweep me into her arms and give me the biggest hug ever? Would she kneel down and weep and say how sorry she was for abandoning me? What would she look like? Would she show me to my new bedroom and ask me to live with her for ever?
Then the door opened to reveal a small, round woman with platinum blonde hair.
‘Oh,’ she said in a high-pitched voice like a cartoon character, looking extremely uncomfortable. ‘Oh, it’s you!’
‘Hello,’ said Barbara, trying to be charming. ‘Yes, we got here in the end.’
‘Oh… oh, yes,’ the woman said awkwardly. Barbara turned to me and pushed me forward.
‘This is Louise,’ she said, as if handing over a parcel on the doorstep.
I saw a plump woman with a slightly blurred face and shocking pink lipstick. She went red and became flustered.
‘Oh dear, oh yes, well, oh, um, er, you’d better come in.’
We followed the woman round the side of the house and into a back garden. There was a long lawn surrounded by plants with big trees at the end. In front of the lawn, just at the back of the house, was a stone patio and on it a table around which sat many people eating, drinking and chatting loudly. When we came in they all stopped and looked up. I wanted to disappear.
My ‘real mother’ was very panicky. She clearly didn’t know what to say or how to introduce us and was flapping her arms in the air.
‘This is… er… this is… er… Louise,’ she said to the gathering, pointing to me. No mention of ‘daughter’. ‘And this is Barbara, her, her… mother.’
Barbara stood there looking grim, keeping a firm grip on Mimi. The people round the table looked confused, then nodded. Some said ‘Hello’, and then they all went back to eating and talking. I stood between the two women, looking up, feeling completely overwhelmed.
‘I’ll be back later then,’ Barbara was saying to thi
s strange woman, and I suddenly panicked. Was she going to dump me? Do one of her driving off and leaving me tricks that she had done so many times?
I felt panic rising. As much as I hated living with Barbara, it was all I knew. It was ‘home’ after all, even if it was horrible. Was I going to be dropped here and left with these complete strangers who clearly didn’t want me? And whom I didn’t know?
Barbara said nothing to me and just whisked Mimi up the steps and through the house and out. I stood on the patio and wanted to cry. I bit my lip. The strange, over-made-up woman stood next to me in her pink trousers and flouncy top with ruffles and loads of beads and looked very awkward. She then bent towards me.
‘Call me Julie,’ she whispered, trying to smile. I smelt a waft of sweet flowery perfume and looked at her, wide-eyed. It was a high-pitched giggle, like a little girl. I felt very uncomfortable, and still said nothing. Then she said, ‘Your mother told me you’ve been asking to meet me for months – but I didn’t know you were coming today.’
I tried to take this in. I hadn’t said a word to Barbara. I never said anything to her about my real mother – I was just told all the time she was a ‘slut’ and a ‘whore’. I looked at her hair: it was dyed so platinum it looked like dolls’ hair. No sign of the dark locks or shiny bluish black hair that I had. Julie looked at the people around the table and decided to do something – she took me by the hand and introduced me as ‘Louise’ and ‘a friend’. She told me all their names. They said ‘Hi’ one by one, and then went back to eating. So I was a ‘friend’, not her daughter?
She found me a chair, sat me down and put some things on a plate, like a sausage roll and some crisps, and left me to it. I wasn’t hungry – for once. I just sat tight-lipped and watched all these people chattering away to each other. I wanted to die. I felt totally out of place. I knew I looked grubby while all of them had nice trendy clothes on. They were laughing, smiling, happy. There were two younger people there, in cool clothes, and Julie moved over and chatted to them, putting her hands on their shoulders and touching their hair. I worked out after a while that they were connected to her – were they her children? Then I realised the big man at the party – tall with silver hair – must be her husband, as he kept touching her on the shoulder and asking her things.