by Anya Peters
Chapter 8
My older sisters, Marie and Sandra, were almost a different generation to us five younger ones. They were teenagers when we were still very little.
Of us three younger girls I was the eldest. Stella was two and a half years younger than me and my uncle’s real daughter. She was born premature—sick and tiny, small as the palm of your hand, Mummy said—and at first she slept in an empty drawer at the side of their bed. My uncle adored her from the start. Even when he was drunk, she was the only one able to bring out his softer side. Mummy often shouted at him, saying he was giving her attention on purpose to try to make me feel even more left out.
When she was born he found a use for me. I had to look after her. I was told never to let her out of my sight, and had to go with her wherever she went. As she grew older he told her that if I didn’t do everything she said, or did anything wrong, she had to tell him when he came back from work, and she would, even though Mummy would warn her not to, or even if I pleaded with her. She was his favourite, not Mummy’s, and also his pawn.
‘I don’t care,’ she’d say defiantly. ‘I’m telling.’
Mummy called her a traitor, and told me not to worry, that she’d treat me the next day when my uncle wasn’t there. But Stella didn’t care, running across the square to meet him from work some evenings. I watched her long blonde hair swinging across her back as she skipped off, like a canary sent ahead down a mine. If he was in a bad mood she’d return on her own and sit in front of the TV with her face screwed up, and I would wait, trembling. If she reappeared around the corner swinging off his arm it wasn’t as bad, although I never knew what she had told him.
Sometimes, she wouldn’t tell him immediately. She would draw the agony out all evening. I would sit on the end of the settee, like one of the statues on the mantelpiece, waiting to be smashed. Just when I was starting to think she’d forgotten, as we all sat squashed up together on the settee, she would stretch up with a little yawn in her pink nightdress and say out of the blue, ‘Someone did something today.’
‘Did what?’ he’d ask, and she’d tell whatever it was.
‘Broke a cup,’ she’d say, without taking her eyes from the TV, and my heart would stop.
‘Who?’ my uncle would ask, while Mummy swung around to Stella with a tight, angry face that said ‘You wait, you little troublemaker.’
‘Good girl, Stella, you tell me what they’ve been up to,’ he would say as Mummy scowled at her. And he would take another opportunity to punish me.
Sometimes, if he was in a good mood, she’d get up onto his lap and fall asleep there, curled up like a kitten. But as soon as she felt ready she would say, ‘Come on, Anya, I want to go to bed.’ Even if it was near the end of the programme we were watching, just when we were about to find out what happened, I had to go with her. Mummy would try to make her wait, or tell her to go on her own.
‘She’s old enough to go on her own now,’ she’d say, if my uncle was in the right mood.
‘No, I want Anya to come,’ Stella would insist.
I couldn’t say anything in front of my uncle, and she knew it. So I would have to lie in bed thinking about the programme the others were still watching, trying to guess what happened next.
When my uncle couldn’t stand the sight of me any longer he would send me out to the kitchen to stand in the dark. In our small flat there was nowhere else to send me.
‘She’ll stay there until her whore of a mother gets here to take her back over with her,’ he’d say.
He used to send Marie and Sandra out to the kitchen too. But they were older by then and had to clean while they were there. He’d send one of us out to check up on what they were doing.
‘Sneak up on them,’ he’d say, trying to get us all not trusting each other. ‘Don’t talk to them, just check and then come back and tell me what they’re doing, d’you hear?’
If we didn’t tell the truth, or warned them that he had sent us out, we were the ones that got hit. He always seemed to know.
Sometimes, if they were both out there together for some reason, he’d make us stand outside the door to hear what they were talking about. He always thought everyone was whispering about him. Mummy said he was ‘paranoid’. ‘Sick in the head with all the drink, you are,’ she’d shout at him, as he shut the door on her and tiptoed along the hallway to see what one of us was doing, or saying about him.
When he first sent me out to the kitchen I was too young to clean it. I just had to stand in the dark. I wasn’t allowed to sit or turn on the light or move from the exact spot on the red lino where he’d told me to stand. The kitchen was always cold and if he’d thrown me out there in the middle of one of their rows, I’d be there for hours, until Mummy fought for me to come back in, or to be allowed to go to bed with the others when it was time.
I didn’t mind it in the kitchen most times. It was quiet and the short, red checked curtains were so thin that even with them drawn I could see from the landing light outside. I would read the backs of boxes and jars of food, finding things to do: a box of Cornflakes weighs 225g, divide by 2 that’s? Add 7? Minus 15? Times 5? I practised school work: doing sums, memorising the spellings on the packaging and telling stories inside my head. If I got all the spellings right I would lick my finger and have a dip in the sugar bowl, smiling at how naughty I was being. Inside my head I’d say, ‘I don’t care,’ and pull my nightie off one shoulder and shrug it bare like Stella did to make my uncle laugh. It felt as if I’d got a friend there that I was talking to.
Sometimes when I was sent to the kitchen Mummy would decide she’d had enough. Instead of whispering in to me when she came past to go to the toilet that she would ‘treat me tomorrow’, she would come barging out, saying, ‘No…no, I’m not having this,’ and switch on the light, talking in a loud voice and then whispering down to me, ‘It’s alright, it’ll give him a fright.’ She’d then return to her screaming voice, calling him names and trying to drag me back in behind her, my heart tumbling about in my chest as I tried to resist and grab things to hold on to, trying to stay where he told me.
Occasionally she would win. But most times he jumped up and was there behind her, forcing me to get back, and Mummy would get hit instead. When she shouted louder than him and managed to pull me back into the front room, she would push me onto the end of the settee, telling the others to move up and to make room for me.
‘She’s staying there, right? I’m not having her treated any different to the others.’
But he never stopped threatening things. Even if he had slept off his rage and woken up quiet, I wasn’t allowed to move on the settee or make a sound. Even if someone pinched me to move up I couldn’t pinch back, not while he was there.
Soon the settee wasn’t big enough for five of us and one of us sometimes had to sit on the floor. I loved being up on the settee, squashed in amongst the others, but if my uncle was in a good mood Stella might say, ‘I’m too hot, sit on the floor, Anya.’ And my uncle would laugh with her and I’d have to sit on the floor.
‘No, she won’t,’ Mummy would say to Stella. ‘You sit on the floor, madam, and just shut up—I’m warning you.’
I wished Mummy would let me fight my own battles. I was willing to sit on the floor if it meant I could have some peace.
The others used to sit like statues in a row on the settee and refuse to look at me after fights, after he’d told them not to talk to me, that I wasn’t one of them. I knew they hated me for all the trouble I caused by being there, and for making them take sides when Mummy and their dad argued. I know they thought it was my fault. Me the troublemaker again.
Later, in bed, I’d burrow down into last night’s wet sheets and lie there crying, trying to find a way to stop the tears and everyone picking on me. But when I woke up in wet sheets again the next morning they’d start up again. It would be years before I stopped wetting the bed most nights.
If he woke up in his armchair and heard us whispering around him, try
ing not to wake him, he would fly into one of his rages and his mantra would start up again. ‘She’s out,’ he’d shout again, meaning me, his hand flying out, and the gold signet ring on his little finger busting my lip.
‘Don’t listen to him, okay,’ Mummy would say to me after the rows, when she came out to the kitchen to check I was okay. When I asked her what I’d done wrong and what I had to do so that I wasn’t in the way, like he said I was, she would pull me to her, ruffling my hair, telling me I was never in the way.
‘Don’t mind him. You’re as good as gold, better than all the rest of them put together,’ she’d say.
I was always frightened he would come in and catch her talking to me, but she would refuse to go back into the front room until I’d given her a smile. She’d lift my face to look at her and stick her tongue out, pulling funny faces and flicking V-signs towards him in the dark, until eventually she made me smile.
‘One day me and you are going to leave this place, okay?’ she’d say, lifting my chin and trying to make me look into her eyes. ‘Just you and me, okay.’
I probably believed her the first few times. I stopped believing everything after a while.
When everyone was at home, there were nine of us, including Mummy and my uncle, so you could never be on your own unless you were being punished. In a way I liked it when I was sent outside and all the sound stopped and I could think of things, or of nothing at all. For a while he used to send me to the bedroom the five of us younger ones shared, and it was nice because I could read. Although once, when I lay on the bed happily reading a book, chewing a Black Jack I’d found in the lining of Sandra’s jacket, he caught me and laid into me, tearing the book away and ripping out its pages. From then on, when I was sent there I had to keep the lights off. But if one of the others tipped me off that he’d gone to sleep in his armchair I would sometimes risk standing on the bed and go under the curtains to read on the windowsill by the bright light on the landing outside our flat, escaping into the better worlds in stories.
Chapter 9
Liam blamed me for everything. He was only eight months older than me, but when I came along he had to share Mummy with me. He grew up listening to my uncle shout at me, and copied him, picking on me, accusing me of being a troublemaker and of being in the way.
I hated the spiteful way he would tell me I wasn’t wanted, that I should go back to my own mum, with his skinny little chest stuck out and his shoulders back, sounding like he really meant it, just like my uncle. But sometimes he was just quiet and let me be his sister, and as long as Mummy didn’t make it worse by shouting at him to leave me alone I could stand up to him for myself.
Liam was the one I looked up to the most, the one I most wanted to be friends with. He was my uncle’s real son and, like Stella and Jennifer, was treated differently. I knew instinctively that if I could get him to stop teasing me and to like me then the others would too. They were all just copying him, just like he was copying my uncle.
Liam, Michael, Stella, Jennifer and I all went to the local school, which was on the edge of the estate, a few minutes’ walk away from our block. I tried to keep my head down at school and not draw any attention to myself, to cover up what went on at home. I was quiet and bookish and in many ways an easy target for bullies. But whatever the bullies did was never as bad as what my uncle did to me. School was a sanctuary from home, and no matter how bad it got it was always bearable.
In the playground one day, some of the bullies in my class found out I’d got four brothers and sisters in the school. They hadn’t realised before because of my different surname, and it felt good. Having them know I was one of five, instead of on my own, made me feel safe. Even though they didn’t know who my brothers and sisters were, it seemed to make me more popular for a while. They stopped picking on me, and I wasn’t always the last to be chosen for games. Then, one lunchtime, they said they didn’t believe me, and a group of them walked me around the playground, making me pick my brothers and sisters out, one by one.
I pointed out the two small, blonde girls in the infants’ playground, swinging and jumping with the others, then the two bigger boys, playing separately, each in their own gang.
‘See,’ I said. It made me feel warm all over that everyone knew I had them there.
‘Why are they all blonde and you’ve got that dirty gravy-coloured hair?’ one girl from another class asked.
‘I don’t care,’ I replied, which was a response I was trying to teach myself to feel at home.
For the next few days there was a wide, safe space around me in class, no one getting close enough to push me or tell me I smelt, or make fun of the hand-me-down clothes of Sandra’s I wore, or the old-fashioned boots which someone gave Mummy and which she made me wear to school when it rained. But the bullies grew impatient after a while.
‘You’re lying,’ the biggest of them accused me before class one day. ‘They’re not your brothers and sisters.’
For a minute it sounded like my uncle saying it, and I could almost hear Mummy shouting back, ‘Yes they are, you cruel bastard, leave her alone.’
‘Yes, they are,’ I said.
‘None of them are your brothers or sisters,’ she spat.
I wanted to shout again that they were, but nothing came out, and I just nodded and nodded without stopping, as the spiky laughter went on around me, until the teacher came in, smiling, and saw me nodding.
‘Yes, what?’ she said.
They all turned and started laughing again. When I lifted my head to look at the teacher for support she looked away quickly, as if my face had frightened her, and started writing the date in yellow chalk in the corner of the blackboard.
They carried on at lunch break, surrounding me. ‘Why have you got a different surname then?’
I didn’t know how to explain that although I had a different surname to the others I was the one who was ‘never going to be sent away’. I just shrugged.
‘Names don’t matter.’
Mummy always said it was the ‘inside things’ that mattered, what you feel on the inside, and so they were my real brothers and sisters, and they always would be.
‘They can’t be your brothers and sisters if you’ve got different surnames,’ my tormentor said again. I just walked away fast, humming. Nothing was going to stop me believing it. They were my brothers and sisters.
‘Why didn’t your own mum want you?’ they asked for a few days after that, crowding around me, breathing up all the air. Their words hit home. I felt a cold, heavy, sick sensation slip down inside me.
‘She does want me. I’ve got my mum, she’s indoors,’ I said, slamming my hands over my ears and running off fast.
But they ran after me through the playground shouting, ‘She’s not your mum, she’s not your mum, you dirty skinny liar!’
Even when the bell went and we had to get in line to go in, my heart wouldn’t stop pounding. It punched and punched against my ribcage, as if it had had enough and wanted to escape. And when Miss stood at the board and talked about how to do paragraphs, it was still so noisy that I thought she was about to spin around and tell me to ‘stop that racket’, that she couldn’t hear herself think. I leaned forwards until the edge of the desk was digging into my stomach, and my heart-noise quietened to a steady bom-bom, bom-bom, like one of the slow trains climbing up the hill behind the shops.
Our block was directly opposite the school, across a narrow one-way road. Because it wasn’t a main road Mummy didn’t have to collect us; we all just met up at the top gate and ran across. Liam had the key to get in on a piece of green string around his neck. Most of the children in my class lived at the other end of the school, and used the other gate where their mums queued up to collect them with sweets and crisps, so they didn’t see us all going home together.
One day the top gate was still padlocked so we had to use the bottom one. Liam and I were there first and we had to stand around and wait for the others. The two girls from my class with t
he lightest blonde hair marched up to Liam.
‘Is your mum her mum?’
It was the wrong time to ask him. He was in a temper with me, standing by the boys’ toilets, furiously scraping the cement out between bricks with the point of a compass. It was the kind of time when he might say anything. My heart stopped and I stared at him without blinking, crossing my fingers inside my anorak pocket. But straight away he said, ‘No.’
‘Yes, she is,’ I said to all of them, almost before he had got the word out, but four bright-blue eyes were glaring between mine and Liam’s, and I knew they believed him, not me.
‘So she’s not your sister, then?’
Liam was in the year above, and bigger than all of them. Not afraid of anyone either, just like my uncle. ‘I just told you, didn’t I? Are you deaf ? Or just plain stupid?’
He said it exactly the way my uncle would, and it made me look up at him again, at his tight face, pale and narrow; his little pink scar from where my uncle had thrown the bread knife at Mummy and missed, raised like a trophy on his forehead; the throb high up in the muscles of his jaw going just like my uncle’s went before he snapped. I was in awe of his ability to answer back the bullies. He wouldn’t look at me, just stared at a point in the distance, his eyes grey and unblinking, those same little chips of concrete as my uncle’s.
‘Liar.’ The girls turned on me, their faces vicious. I swung my head back towards Liam, wanting him to give them one of his punches, or twist their arms in a Chinese burn.
I shrugged. ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me,’ I heard Mummy singing in my head as I walked away.
But things were going to get much worse than just shouting and cruel words.
Chapter 10
The idea of me going away to boarding school had started with Kathy bringing some brochures over in her suitcase. One afternoon, not long after that, Marie leaned over the balcony and called me up from the square. She was seventeen by then, one of the grown-ups as far as we were concerned. It wasn’t raining, so I knew we were not all being called in because of that, and she only wanted me. I heard the slap of Stella’s skipping rope slow to a stop behind me and she ran over.