by Anya Peters
That was the hardest part of growing up: learning not to cry, not even allowed to express the pain of it. Pretending to feel nothing.
Huddling around Mummy after one of the worst fights one night, the TV screen kicked in and glass all over the purple carpet, we planned how we’d get rid of him: a drop of arsenic in his vodka, a sprinkling of rat poison in his stew, a pillow over his face while he slept, or his skull smashed in with one of the girls’ heavy, brass lion money-boxes that stood empty either side of the fire surround. We passed one around solemnly, lifting it above our heads, bouncing it up and down on our small, clammy palms, coldly assessing its effectiveness as we demonstrated our love to Mummy through what we were prepared to do.
The solemnity didn’t last long. Soon we were laughing away our tears, picking through the evening’s violence to find some funny detail to hold on to, to neutralise it, finding some way to release the stored-up emotions, letting them out through tears or laughter. When Mummy joined in, the worst of the pain dissolved, but even though she said he was in a drunken coma in the bedroom by then, I couldn’t relax fully; I never could. I always had one eye on the door or, when we eventually moved into a house, on the ceiling, shushing them all if I thought I heard my uncle moving about in his room. My head would be throbbing, my teeth still chattering after his threats to get rid of me again. I would listen out for the creak of floorboards, convinced he would overhear us and come thumping down the stairs two at a time.
The others were frightened of him too, of course. But not always. They were frightened of the drink in him; but when he sobered up they forgot how frightened they were of him when he was drunk and he became their dad again. Sometimes, after the worst of the arguments, he’d come home the next day with a new china ornament to replace the ones he’d smashed, or a brass one to try to win Mummy around, and a bag of pick ‘n’ mix he’d hand to Stella with orders for her to share them out ‘evenly’, which included me. Once, after one of the worst arguments, he even brought back a pair of blue budgerigars on a swing in a wire cage. But no matter what, none of the others had to make themselves good enough or invisible enough so that they could stay and belong.
I never had that experience—of thinking he was my dad and trusting him. I was always wary of him. His leaving me alone never lasted long—even when he was sober and trying to get the others back on his side he would ridicule my nervousness around him.
‘Shall we kick her out?’ he’d say to my brothers and sisters, getting them to join in laughing and teasing me when Mummy was out of the room. I’d sit there swallowing back tears, pretending I didn’t care. ‘Poor divil,’ he’d say.
If Mummy came back in and heard their teasing it often became a trigger for another row. Then I would be seen as the ‘troublemaker’ again, Liam and Michael whispering under their breaths when they got the chance, ‘Why don’t you go to live with your own mum? You’re not wanted here.’ Saying it just the way they’d heard my uncle say it all those years.
Chapter 6
Their fights were so loud it was inevitable that the neighbours would sometimes hear. Most people in the flats knew better than to interfere, but occasionally their fights were so bad that people would threaten to call social services and report us. A few times social services did come, but Mummy sent them packing, telling them they had no right to be knocking on her door telling her how to bring up her kids, that we were all well brought up and loved and to check that with the school. It would have been very clear to them that she was a good mother, and if he wasn’t there, easy to see how they would leave us alone.
One morning, though, Mummy told me a man was coming to talk to us, just me and her, and I got to come home early from school, before the others. I sat on the settee in my best summer dress and new white socks while he and Mummy talked. What they talked about was me, and I listened closely. He was a tall, thin man in a tight brown suit who must have been about the same age as my uncle at the time, in his mid-thirties. He appeared too tall to sit on our settee, perching awkwardly on the edge with his brown leather briefcase on his lap; his back shaped into a letter ‘C’ as he bent over it and his knees up almost to his chin. He said no to the tea and the eight custard creams Mummy had laid out on one of the blue plates for him, and turned down cigarettes too, dismissing them without looking up, with a wave of a long, hairy hand that was all loose-boned, like a skeleton’s.
He clicked the briefcase open and took out a large notebook and a blue folder of papers. I strained to see what was written on them, but Mummy caught my eye and shook her head. Mummy had told me he was going to be asking lots of questions and that if he asked if I liked my uncle to just say yes.
Every question seemed like a trap. He asked me what the names of all my brothers and sisters were, and which one was my favourite, and did I mind having a different surname to them, and did I like school and what was my favourite lesson? When he suddenly smiled and asked who I liked best, Mummy or Daddy, I said Mummy, and then quickly changed it to a shrug, worried that he might send me to Ireland to live with Kathy if I didn’t. I sat there nervously, wiping my hot hands on the cushions. But I felt special sitting there too, in my best clothes and in all the peace and quiet, without all my brothers and sisters talking over me.
Whenever he bent to write answers in his book, mine and Mummy’s eyes glanced at each other across the room swiftly, then away again, like birds flying to and fro across the sky. Mummy was small and pale and the only one in the family with dark hair like me, and I loved it when people said, ‘Don’t you look like your mum?’ or to Mummy, ‘Doesn’t she look like you?’ Sometimes Mummy ruffled my hair and smiled down at me saying nothing, but other times she said almost proudly, ‘She’s my sister’s little one.’
As I sat there, I thought of the way she sometimes said that, trying to shuffle it all straight in my head again, telling myself I didn’t care because Mummy was my real mum really. I looked over at her staring back at me. Her face looked sad and thin and her head was shaking in a way that frightened me. I felt my eyes well up with tears at all the trouble I was causing.
Next time he scribbled something, without moving her head Mummy curled her lip over her top teeth and did buckteeth, pointing at him, and I had to press my fingers over my mouth to stop myself from laughing. She shook her head and pulled a serious face to tell me not to, and I sat on my hands to stop myself from feeling anything at all, trying not to think of his buckteeth. I tried to do everything right and to sit still, and at the end I think we ‘passed’ because he shook Mummy’s hand when he left and patted me on the head.
After he’d gone Mummy looked tired and smoked a lot. I swivelled my eyes over to the biscuits still on the plate.
‘Looking down his nose at us,’ she sniffed. ‘At least I have the manners to accept a cup of tea and a biscuit when it’s offered to me.’
Mummy looked sad and I felt shivery, wondering if it was anything to do with me. In my head I saw the man’s buckteeth again and looked at the hard cream sandwiched between the biscuits. I thought of Mummy doing the buckteeth earlier to make me smile.
‘Maybe he only eats carrots,’ I said shyly.
I felt Mummy’s smile before I saw it, and looked up at her as it grew longer and longer, spreading across her face until she was laughing and tears were rolling down her cheeks. Suddenly she found the energy to get up, ruffling my hair as she passed into the kitchen, saying I was a great girl, and that nobody was taking me away from her, and I could have all the custard creams ‘quick, before the others come in’.
I bit into one, stuffing the rest into the front pockets of my dress, glad that nobody else was here, just me and Mummy and the whole place warm and quiet, all to ourselves, with the gas fire on and the clock ticking quietly up on the wall and everything put away, and the smell of polish everywhere. When I looked up at Mummy I could see that the tears had rinsed all the pain from her eyes, and when she smiled back at me, her blue eyes shining into mine, the smile spread all through me.
Custard creams were the best taste in the world after that.
Chapter 7
The man my uncle thought was most likely to be my father, and who I secretly wished was, was also the type of man he despised: an Irishman who was the opposite in almost every way to him. He was a colleague of Kathy’s, someone who frequently came over from Ireland on business to meet clients and so could visit us more often than her. He never stayed with us when he came over, as Kathy always did. Instead he would stay in ‘posh’ hotels and visit us in black taxis or shiny rented cars, usually while my uncle was at work. Just the mention of his name sent my uncle into a rage.
We came to know him as our rich, kind Uncle Brendan, who never hit anyone or raised his voice and who always smiled and tried to get me to talk. He was the only man any of us ever knew, except for our headmaster, who wore a shirt and tie and shoes you could see your face in, every day of the week, not just to dress up to go to the pub in on a Saturday night. He was definitely the only man, Irish or otherwise, any of us knew who didn’t drink.
He always singled me out for special attention because he was Kathy’s friend and the only person in Ireland who knew about my existence. My brothers and sisters were bemused after my uncle’s treatment of me as to why anyone should pay me any attention at all. By coming to visit us, he was ‘doing Kathy a favour’, Mummy said. But my uncle didn’t want any ‘favours’ from anyone, especially him.
Without the others knowing, I would be put into taxis to visit him at one of the big hotels in central London where he met his clients. I would tap hesitantly in new shoes across the vast marble lobbies, past displays of flowers almost as big as myself fanned out on antique tables, and into quiet hotel restaurants filled with gilt mirrors, silver candelabra and stiff, white tablecloths. It was all a world away from where we lived in the flats.
Brendan seemed fascinated by my shyness. It seemed to put him at his ease too, and when we were alone together he went out of his way to try to put me at mine. He always seemed more relaxed when there were no grown-ups about. He talked more and seemed to relish the opportunity to come down to a child’s level. He drank glasses of Coca-Cola through straws in glasses clinking with ice and, declining the heavy, leather menus, would order cheeseburgers and knickerbocker glories, or steaks full of blood and plates piled high with profiteroles. I blushed at the smiling waiters and at Brendan’s questions about things at home, and tried not to wonder how Mummy and I would pay for this when my uncle found out where I’d been all day. But especially with who.
Sometimes I would stay a night or two with him at whichever hotel he was staying at. I always got picked on for this by my brothers and sisters when I got back, and wished Brendan would treat us all the same, but he never did. When he visited the flats he’d take me to Mass at the local Catholic church with him too. Although all of us had been christened, we never went to church, so it was a novelty when Brendan visited. God was another secret too, something I could only talk about with Mummy. I wasn’t allowed to tell any of my brothers and sisters in case they told my uncle. He’d go mad if he knew Brendan was taking me to church.
Behind their backs he already called both Kathy and Brendan ‘hypocrites’ and ‘Holy Joes’ and warned my brothers and sisters that they weren’t allowed to go anywhere near a church with them. So it was a special time, just me and him. He taught me when to sit and stand or kneel, and when to clasp my hands in prayer, knotting my fingers together like he did. Though on one visit he terrified me by telling me about the Holy Spirit prowling invisibly up and down the aisle reading everybody’s thoughts; swooping down, when you least expected it, on anyone with bad ones. After that I feared the Holy Spirit, who could see inside everyone’s minds as Brendan said, certain that he must know the bad thoughts I had about my uncle.
Brendan didn’t know most of what my uncle did at home—how drunk he got and how violent he was to me and Mummy. Before their visits Mummy made me promise not to tell him or Kathy about the rows and his threats. ‘Nosy parkers,’ she’d say, striking a match to another cigarette and wrestling a smile out of me as she blew it out noisily. ‘It’s none of their business what goes on in our home, is it?’
I would shake my head loyally, but was always unable to look directly up at her, wondering why she didn’t want them to know so that they could help us.
Either Kathy or Brendan came over every few months, apparently unaware of the disruption they were causing in our home. Their visits felt like charades. Everyone on their best behaviour, my brothers and sisters leaving me be, my uncle biting his tongue—his long, aggressive silences scaring me just as much as the eruptions of anger I came to expect the minute they’d gone.
Kathy always dressed exquisitely: silk blouses with high, queenly collars, and cuffs with small pearl buttons, elegant and feminine, her perfume clinging to everything. Brendan would be dressed as usual in his suit and tie, sitting awkwardly in the living room, his cup of tea balanced on his thigh, snapping biscuits and brushing away the crumbs as he tried to make small talk over my uncle’s hostility and laughed anxiously at anything at all; a teetotaller and a near alcoholic eyeing each other across the room. Looking back now, I can understand that my uncle was furious at being made a fool of in his own home. But as a child I had no such understanding.
I dreaded Kathy’s visits because everyone was always reminding me that she was my real mother, and because up to the moment of them my uncle would usually be threatening that this time he would see to it that she would take me away with her. I convinced myself that I hated her because my uncle said she was a ‘whore’, and Mummy got into such trouble for me being left there. And because Mummy couldn’t look like her or spend all her time doing her hair and make-up or walk around in high, clicky heels, when she was ‘working her fingers to the bone’ for all of us.
Mostly I made myself hate her because I already had my mum and my family and I didn’t want another one. I just wanted everyone to forget that she was the one who had given birth to me, and for her to go away and leave us alone. I wanted to belong where I was.
Sometimes, though, I would forget to hate Kathy. Her soft, smiling, gentle Irishness would sneak up on me and I would feel tricked when I caught myself liking her. I always had to keep my guard up.
Before her visits, my brothers and sisters led by my uncle would mimic and ridicule her: the way she walked and talked; her gentleness and dainty ‘put on’ manners, as my uncle called them. I laughed shyly along with everyone else, always trying to fit in, to be accepted. I thought that if my uncle could see how much I hated her, then maybe he wouldn’t say those things about me any more, and would let me belong there with the rest of them. But although I played along, I couldn’t stop the defensive feelings that flared up inside me when the others laughed about her. And I couldn’t stop thinking about her in secret even though it felt like I was being disloyal to Mummy.
It was when I saw Mummy getting hit and shouted at for defending her sister that it was easiest to hate Kathy. And when I listened to Mummy sobbing later, after the arguments, looking pale and tired and suddenly very small, slumped on her corner of the sofa with her purple dressing gown zipped up to the chin and the cushions wedged around her like sandbags, I hated her most. I would watch helplessly as Mummy tore off sheets of toilet paper from a roll and cried into them, blaming her sister for dumping her problems on her, and for the easy life she had ‘swanning about the place’, living ‘a life of luxury’, while Mummy was left looking after us lot with no time even to look at her nails, ‘let alone paint them’.
‘Doing her dirty work for her,’ was my uncle’s term for looking after me, and Mummy sometimes used the same words herself when she’d drunk too much. That was when I was most determined not to like Kathy, no matter how soft and gentle she was, or how nice she was to me. I’d sit next to Mummy, frowning it all into place, my heart being squeezed tight, hate for Kathy rushing down to my toes.
They were not feelings that simply disappeared when Kathy cam
e over, and I never understood how Mummy could forget it all and be best friends with her on her next visit. Despite my feelings, and Daddy’s threats the night before, I would get carried along in all the excitement before she arrived, and would run down to the square in front of our block with the others to carry up her bags and suitcases from the black taxi. We would all struggle like little Sherpas up the steps to the second floor, wondering how much of the weight was presents and sweets and which bags they were in, huffing and puffing along the landing, wondering what lotions and creams were in the blue, leather vanity case that Stella always carried up. But I was still upset for Mummy.
Later, after some of the bags were opened and presents unwrapped, Mummy and Kathy would go out together to the shops or just for a stroll. I would crouch down to watch through the small iron grille in the red brick wall of the landing as Mummy linked her arm through Kathy’s fur-covered one and walked her the long way around the estate to the shops, showing her sister off, holding on to her as if she were some lucky charm, our family shamrock.
Kathy often had tears in her eyes before they went out for those strolls, or when she first got out of the taxi and saw us all standing there in our best clothes smiling up at her, her big, navy-blue eyes welling up with tears. Her tears fascinated me but I never trusted them; they seemed too gentle, too delicate. She didn’t sob and howl like Mummy did; she didn’t rip your heart out.