‘Didn’t anyone try to find out why you stopped speaking?’ I interrupted.
‘Of course they did,’ she replied, ‘especially his mother. But she gave up trying when she couldn’t get a word out of me. Then his horrible sister, Auntie Ruby, tried to beat the answer out of me.’
‘Oh my God, Pats, this is so awful,’ I said. ‘I just hope that wherever Grandma Melba is, she can’t hear any of this. It would kill her all over again.’
‘When I got to England,’ Patsy said, ‘it started again. He would give me sweets afterwards, and then it was money when I got older. I didn’t spend any of it, I just hid it under the carpet. “It’s our little secret,” he’d say. “You wouldn’t want to get your daddy into trouble now, would you? Especially when you’re my favourite!”’
It was almost too painful to hear. Patsy went on to tell me that when she was little, it hurt a lot. He would hold his hand over her mouth to stop her from crying, which made it hard for her to breathe, so she stopped crying.
By now Patsy was shaking so violently that I took the blanket and wrapped her in it and held her tight. Her bony shoulders felt sharp, even under the thick material.
‘Jesus Christ, Pats, I just want to grab the biggest, sharpest knife I can find and plunge it into the evil bastard’s heart the moment he walks back through that door! Now I understand why Grandma Melba named him the “ugly Satan devil man,” because he surely is the devil himself.’
‘The ugly Satan devil man?’ Patsy asked through her tears.
‘Don’t you remember, that’s what Grandma called him when he first turned up at our house and said he wanted to take you away? She never referred to him as anything else after that.’
‘The ugly Satan devil man?’ Patsy repeated. Then she started giggling, and soon we were both crying with laughter.
‘Thank goodness we can still laugh,’ I said. I looked at my sister, at her pretty, tear-stained face, and the obvious question dawned on me. ‘So, doesn’t Mum know what’s been happening?’ I said, wiping my eyes.
Patsy stopped laughing and stared at me. ‘Well, she pretends that she doesn’t, but she knows everything,’ she said. ‘Once she caught him trying to fix his clothes up while I was crying on the floor. She just scraped me up by my arm and gave me a slap across the face and told me to stop bringing my nastiness into her house.’
‘You’ve got to be kidding me, how the hell does that work?’ I cried. ‘I mean who is this woman? How on earth can she call herself a mother when that’s the way she reacts to her child?’
Patsy swore that our mother never said another word about the incident. It was as though she just put it out of her mind and continued to behave as if ours was a perfectly normal family. ‘It got better when you arrived,’ Patsy continued, ‘because I was never alone in the house with him any more. But then he started to beat me instead.’
‘No wonder he hates me,’ I said, ‘he couldn’t get away with it when I was here, and Mother couldn’t pretend that nothing was happening.’
‘Exactly,’ Patsy replied.
‘And that’s why you shouted out that you were going to tell, when he beat you. God, I wish I’d figured it out before,’ I said.
‘For a long time, I hated everyone. Even you,’ Patsy said quietly.
I felt a burning anger for my sister. If it was possible to hate my step-father any more, I did now. ‘I’m so glad you’ve told me,’ I said. ‘We should find a way of making the dirty bastard suffer for the rest of his life.’
‘Well, at least you believe me,’ Patsy replied, ‘but I’m still terrified he’ll kill me if he finds out I told you.’
‘He can’t just kill people, Pats. Anyway, he’s just a big coward. You know what Grandma Melba would say, “Im will get im comeuppance.”’
Patsy looked at me with a glimmer of hope in her eyes.
‘You need justice, Pats,’ I continued. ‘We’ve got to think of a way of dealing with this. Maybe we should go to the police.’
‘No!’ Patsy cried. ‘We can’t! Imagine the shame. I couldn’t face it.’ She reached up to the side of her head and picked at the already thinned patch. Then she fixed me with a determined look. ‘I think we should kill him, Erna,’ she said.
I started to laugh, until I realised that not only was she deadly serious, but that I agreed with her. ‘Maybe we could poison him, or do something to him when he’s asleep,’ I said.
‘You mean, like, suffocate him with a pillow?’ Patsy asked.
‘Yes, but we have to bide our time,’ I said, ‘let the dust settle. They mustn’t know that you’ve told me.’
Patsy nodded.
‘And in the meantime, you’re going to have to buck up your ideas at school. You can’t just let everything fall apart now. We have to act as if everything is normal, until we can work out what we’re going to do.’
Patsy laughed out loud at the mention of acting as if everything was normal. But even though part of me knew that the whole conversation was utterly mad, we carried on discussing the different ways we could kill the ugly Satan devil man until we got tired of talking and slipped into the sleep that we both so badly needed.
Chapter 33
Patsy and I became experts at avoiding all contact with our mother and the ugly Satan devil man. We slipped in and out of the house and even in and out of rooms like ghosts. We recognised every footstep and knew exactly when to remain in our room, or when to make a silent exit from the house. It was as though they both sensed that the secret was out, because the crazy rows that erupted between them got worse. If they were in the house together, they would be guaranteed to be having an argument, and the verbal insults got nastier, with little regard to what the younger children had to endure. Despite living in almost total chaos, Sonny and Clifton somehow remained immune to it, and were excelling in secondary school. Perhaps it was because school offered them the safety and routine that was absent from their home, in the same way that my work and my studies offered me a sense of stability.
Patsy had taken to watching murder mysteries on the telly, and after each episode, she would suggest a new idea. ‘I think poisoning him is the best option,’ she said one evening, when I returned from work. ‘Then we could melt his body in acid. That’s what this man who killed his wife did with her body in today’s episode. He put her body in a barrel of acid and in minutes all that was left of her was her fillings!’
I wanted to humour her, and my anger certainly hadn’t abated, but my natural island common sense had reasserted itself. ‘Pats, I totally understand what you’re thinking, but let’s be serious, we are not going to kill anyone. The most sensible thing would be for us to try and persuade our mother to chuck him out of the house.’
‘But you know that ain’t ever going to happen!’ Patsy protested, and I knew that she was right.
It was a relief to get a chirpy phone call from Jennifer one evening, a few weeks after Patsy’s revelations. She’d left her job and, true to her word, had started a law degree through an access course at South Bank Polytechnic in Elephant and Castle.
‘I’m really enjoying the course,’ she gushed, ‘all I’m reading now are these huge law books, there’s no room left in my brain for anything else!’
‘I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing,’ I laughed.
‘Oh, it’s a good thing! Anyway, how are you doing, how’s your course going?’
I hesitated for a moment, trying to decide if I should tell my best friend what had happened since I last spoke to her.
‘Is everything okay?’ she asked, noting the pause.
I decided it wouldn’t be fair on Patsy to tell Jennifer what had happened and so I put on a brave face and lied. ‘Oh, no, you know, just the usual craziness at home,’ I said, ‘nothing is easy in the circumstances. But the course is going really well. I’ve got a study week coming up at Sussex University in Brighton, which I’m really looking forward to. A whole week away from this house will be like a holiday.’
My week on the university campus took me out of the bubble in which I’d been living and placed me in an entirely different world. Nearly all of the university’s full-time students had left for the summer, freeing up their rooms to be rented by the summer school attendees. The buzz inside the main auditorium was ten times that which I had experienced that first day I arrived at the Open University building on the Finchley Road. Once we’d registered, we were encouraged to mill around and introduce ourselves to each other. It felt overwhelming, but I was fascinated to meet all these new people and discover their reasons for studying with the Open University and what they were studying.
I met Sean, a scrawny thirty-two-year-old white guy from Kilkenny in Ireland, at the start of the first lecture. He’d taken a good look around the lecture room before making his way over to the empty seat beside me. It was a warm day and he was dressed in a short-sleeved crumpled white shirt and khaki shorts that looked as if they were as old as he was. He had a small, neat face and a head of frizzy brown hair that made me wonder whether he had some African ancestry.
‘I’m Sean,’ he said as he sat down next to me, ‘nice to meet you.’
‘I’m Erna, nice to meet you back,’ I said, with a quick smile.
I was sweating profusely, despite being dressed in a simple Indian cotton dress. The lecture was soon underway and although I was concentrating very hard on what was being said, I was also aware that Sean kept stealing glances at me. I silently vowed that for my next lecture, I would be more strategic about choosing my seat. This week at the university campus was a big deal for me and I didn’t need the distraction. Once the lecture was over, I slipped outside and walked across the manicured lawns towards a giant oak tree. In the distance, beds of poppies and cornflowers lit up the green space. A barefoot young woman in a red t-shirt and denim shorts was doing a handstand on the grass. I sat down between the tree’s exposed roots and began flicking through my notes, not all of which were easy to decipher. I was so absorbed in my study that I didn’t notice him until he was right next to me.
‘There you are,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen anyone move so quickly. It’s almost as if you were trying to get away from me!’
‘Not at all,’ I lied. ‘I just needed to look over my notes to try and make sure things stay in my head.’
‘Good, I’m glad I didn’t scare you away, then,’ he said. ‘Can I join you? I mean I could go and sit on my own, but this is an opportunity to get to know new people, don’t you think?’
‘I guess so,’ I replied, putting my notes down.
‘So, where are you from?’ he said, sitting down next to me.
‘London.’
‘Whereabouts in London? I use to live in Gospel Oak a few years back myself.’
‘South-east. Catford. A strange place, full of people who don’t like people who look like me. But, hey, everyone’s got to live somewhere.’
He laughed at my description. ‘That sounds a bit like where I’m from,’ he said.
‘Well, judging from your accent that must be Ireland,’ I replied.
‘How on earth did you guess?’ He winked. ‘Is it because I look like a leprechaun?’
I couldn’t help laughing, despite my irritation at being interrupted. ‘How come you’re doing an English degree at the Open University then?’ I asked him.
‘What do you mean?’ he said.
‘I thought most white people just went straight from school to university.’
He frowned at me. ‘Now that’s a bit of a generalisation, Erna. Most ordinary white folks don’t get that chance. But, since you asked, this is my second outing at university. I studied medicine at Glasgow, but only because the choice was either to go into the priesthood, or become a doctor like my father.’
I sat up at this.
‘Oh, so you’re a doctor. Wow.’
‘Not exactly. There was no fucking way I was going to become a priest. I might have been brought up a Catholic, but religion is not for me. And I didn’t figure out that doctoring wasn’t for me either until I was in my last year. Same difference, as far as I was concerned. You know, playing God? So, I left the course, grabbed a backpack and went travelling around India. Came back without a fucking clue what to do with my life, which is why I’m here,’ he laughed. ‘I’ve always liked reading, so studying English made sense, but I need a job as well. So here I am.’
‘Well, before you ask, this is the only way I could afford to go to university myself. No free ride in my family. But I love the Open University set up and everything I’m learning.’
‘Well, I like you already,’ he said with a broad smile. ‘You seem like a girl who knows her own mind.’
‘And one who knows that the next lecture is about to start,’ I said, clambering to my feet and brushing myself down.
‘I hope you don’t think I’m being too forward, Erna, but I think you’re stunning. There wasn’t another woman in that lecture theatre who came even close to you in good looks,’ he added, standing up next to me.
I was shocked. No one had ever spoken to me in this way before, and suddenly I felt like the small girl from the village again. I blushed heavily and reached up to wipe away the perspiration that had suddenly appeared on my brow.
‘Oh, thanks, that’s a really nice thing to say. But this is a summer school, not a dating agency,’ I said, gathering my things and putting them into my shoulder bag.
‘Well, take it from me, you’re really very beautiful, Erna. I love how your skin just glows,’ he said.
Even though I felt no rush of feelings towards this skinny white bloke who was standing far too close to me, I still felt special and rather flattered. I didn’t have any experience of being chatted up, and the only person who had ever told me that I was beautiful was my long-dead grandmother. Then I thought of Patsy, who constantly attracted the attention of men, even ones who were years older than her. She had grown into a stunning young woman, with her long legs and honey-coloured skin. But, not surprisingly, she hated the attention. ‘He used to tell me how pretty I was,’ she’d confided in me, ‘when he wasn’t beating me.’ All I’d ever experienced was having my black skin and large eyes commented on, usually in ways that suggested that I’d been born with some great misfortune. So I was intrigued that this white guy was interested in me, and that it was partly because of my ebony skin that he liked me so much.
Sean followed me back to the lecture room and I began to realise that I wasn’t going to get rid of him. And that maybe I didn’t want to. We sat together for the remaining lectures that day and later shared a meal in the café in the main hall. Afterwards, Sean invited me back to his room.
‘Are you okay?’ he asked, as he clicked the bedroom light on.
The light was disturbingly bright and I hung back in the doorway. If I stepped forward, there would be no turning back, but if I hesitated I was afraid I’d lose my courage and run.
Sean walked over to the bedside table and switched the lamp on. Then he came back and leaned behind me to pull the door shut, so that I had no choice but to enter the room. He turned the main light off and reached down into a backpack on the floor, pulling out a bottle of Lambrusco.
‘It was all they had at the offy,’ he shrugged, noting my expression, ‘apart from lager. And I don’t like lager.’
He tore the foil off and popped the cork, which flew across the room and hit the window as red wine foamed out of the bottle and spilled on to the bedspread. I burst out laughing, the whole scene seemed so absurd. Sean laughed too, shaking his head. Then he grabbed a tall glass from the bedside table, filled it and handed it to me.
‘It’s the only one there is,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t expecting to be entertaining anyo
ne.’
I sat on the edge of the bed and sipped the sweet fizzy wine. Sean sat down next to me and put an arm round my shoulder.
‘I’m guessing this is your first time,’ he said, ‘although I thought you Caribbean girls…’ he didn’t finish his sentence.
‘What, you think we’re all easy, is that what you’re saying?’ I made to stand up, but he held me firmly in place.
‘No, no, that’s not what I meant at all,’ he replied in his soft Irish lilt. ‘I’m sorry, I’m an idiot. You’re nervous, I get it.’ He took the glass from my hand and placed it on the bedside table. Then he leant closer and stroked the side of my face with two fingers. ‘You really are beautiful, you know,’ he whispered.
The next day I woke to find Sean sitting on the edge of the bed, pulling his khaki shorts on. The sun was already glaring through the flimsy orange curtains.
‘What time is it?’ I said, blinking in the bright light.
‘Seven-thirty.’
‘What?’ I replied, pulling the sheets over my head. ‘I’m not ready to get up!’
‘I like to have an early breakfast,’ Sean said, standing up, ‘sets me up for the day.’ He leaned over and kissed me on the top of my head. ‘You don’t have to get up, though.’
I peeked over the edge of the sheet. I felt barely able to look Sean in the eye.
‘Thank you for last night,’ he said. He extracted a white t-shirt from the backpack and pulled it over his head. ‘I like you very much, Erna. We should definitely make the most of this week, don’t you think?’
The Day I Fell Off My Island Page 22