by Anya Peters
‘What do you want Anya for?’
‘I’ve just got a small job for her,’ Marie said, ‘that’s all. Stay down there, she won’t be long.’
Stella complained and started, ‘Daddy said…’ which made my heart thump. We all knew what my uncle said I had to do; I had to stay with Stella, and do whatever she wanted me to do. But this time Marie cut her off.
‘She won’t be a minute, okay,’ she said in a firm voice, calling me on with her finger. As I walked up I could feel Stella’s anger behind me.
‘You wait till Daddy gets home,’ she shouted after me. ‘I’m telling.’
My uncle would go mad that I’d defied her. All the way up the stairs and across the landing my heart was thumping.
Marie took me into her bedroom. Over my shoulder as I looked back from the doorway I could see Mummy in the bright kitchen, peeling potatoes; her hair scraped back, her face tired and lumpy. Her eyes were rimmed with red and her face stained with tears. Something was wrong. Why didn’t she look up at us? The bedroom door clicked shut behind us and I tried to swallow quietly. It felt strange sitting on the bed with Marie. I felt the cold I brought up with me clinging to my jumper, and when Marie smiled at me and started to talk I felt my mouth smile back, but the rest of me checked the door and the windows and thought about Mummy in the kitchen with her strained face and red eyes.
Marie went on talking to me in a sleepy kind of voice about how grown-up I was getting, and how bad my uncle could be, and how it was nothing to do with me, and did I know that? I nodded that I did, not sure if that was a black lie or a white one, and crossed my fingers in my pocket just in case. But at the back of my head I was still seeing Mummy with all the potato peelings in the colander and her red eyes, and Stella standing in the stairwell yelling, ‘I’m telling,’ wanting me to go back down and play games that I was two years too old for.
I banged my legs back quietly against the side of the bed and stared at a bottle of pink nail varnish Kathy had left behind last time she visited, sitting on the big, curvy, brown dressing table. I wondered what Marie was saying all this for, and why we were here while Mummy was in the other room with red eyes.
‘It’s not nice to be sad, is it?’ Marie said. ‘The boys are horrible sometimes, aren’t they?’ I nodded again, looking down at my grazed knee, twisting the hem of my jumper around my fingers, wondering if this was a trick, even when she said ‘I think so too.’
Then it came; she told me about schools where girls go to sleep and come back for holidays. But it didn’t mean they were bad and had been sent away, she said. I stopped banging my legs and froze. Before she finished I was already crying and shaking my head and saying I didn’t want to go. She told me it would be a really ‘lucky’ place to go, and that my uncle wouldn’t pick on me or hit me there, and neither would anyone else, and that I could still come back to live with Mummy in the holidays.
She tried to make me look at some of the brochures she’d taken down from a hiding place on top of the wardrobe. I watched all the furry grey dust falling down with them. I was never disobedient, but I shook my head and folded my arms so she couldn’t make me hold them. She put them down on the pillow instead.
‘Does Mummy want me to go?’ I asked.
‘Only if you want to.’
‘I don’t,’ I said, barely taking a breath in between, and looked straight back at her big blue eyes. ‘I’ve got my own school.’
She talked more, saying it wasn’t like I thought, that I wasn’t getting sent away because Mummy didn’t want me there, but that Kathy had offered to pay for it, and she and Mummy thought it would be good for me. I shut her voice out, the way I did when the others said Mummy was not my real mum. She asked if I would at least think about it while she went to the toilet, and I shook my head again, kicking my legs harder against the bed.
‘Just think about it,’ she said, ‘please, for Mummy.’
I shrugged and she said to just look at the pictures, please would I, and it was all up to me, I could choose whichever one of the schools I liked to go to, and if I didn’t like it when I got there I could come right back. She promised, on ‘Mummy’s life’, but she knew I’d like it, she said. ‘You’ll have lots of friends of your own age.’
Marie clicked the door closed behind her as she went out, and I picked my scab, listening to the voices of everyone playing in the square downstairs, all my friends. Through the wall I heard Marie and Mummy talking in the kitchen in low voices, as if my uncle was back. I held my breath and listened harder through the thumping of my heart, and when I was sure he wasn’t there I tried to make my breathing smooth again.
I tried not to see the glossy white brochures she’d left on the pillow, but there was no one there to see me. Clicking my tongue against the roof of my mouth nervously, I opened the top brochure and looked at the pictures of girls in pleated skirts running in playing fields, carrying sticks with little nets on the end; and sitting at desks, wearing stripy dresses with short sleeves, reading books; and another one of them wearing long white overalls and big plastic glasses, standing at wooden benches in front of metal candles with bright flames. Everyone was laughing or smiling, and I could tell there were no boys around, shouting. But I remembered the brochures had come from Kathy, which gave me another reason for hating these places.
When I heard the toilet flush I quickly closed the top page and sat up straight, trying to slow my breathing. The door clicked open and Marie asked if I’d thought about it. I nodded.
‘What do you think?’
‘I think I’m not going. Can I go back downstairs to look after Stella now?’
She let me go and my eyes clashed with Mummy’s on the way out. I could see she’d been crying more but Marie put her hand on my shoulder and steered me past, without letting me talk to her. I ran along the landing, frowning, trying to loosen the tight feeling in my belly. Marie was out, leaning over the balcony by the time I got down, and I called up.
‘Did you tell Mummy I didn’t even look at the pictures?’
‘Not yet,’ she said in a tired voice.
‘Tell her, don’t forget…Say, “She didn’t even look at one picture.”’
I ran off proudly, happy that Mummy knew I wanted to stay with her and not go away to live in Ireland or to a ‘sleeping-school’. I could feel Marie watching me from the balcony. There was always someone staring at me these days: Brendan standing outside the school railings looking in at me as I sat reading on the steps in the playground; or Kathy staring in at us through the gap in the half-opened bedroom door as we all lay on the carpet doing the jigsaw puzzles she’d brought us; or looking up in class and seeing Miss’s shaky smile when I stared at her; everyone suddenly looking at me as if I’d done something wrong.
I didn’t need friends in school anyway. I had lots of brothers and sisters when I came home, and they were enough. People outside our home were ‘nosy parkers’, and I didn’t tell anyone our business. I knew Marie thought I didn’t have any friends anywhere and that was why I should go away to a sleeping-school, but there were loads of children to play with in the flats. I looked up over my shoulder and saw that Mummy was out with Marie on the landing now too. They were turned towards one another talking, with their arms folded up on the landing wall. I watched Mummy’s cigarette smoke stream into Marie’s long blonde hair and thought she was probably telling her that I wasn’t in the way and that she didn’t want me to go anywhere, and that I’d got my own bed to sleep in and didn’t need to go away to a school to sleep.
In case she looked down I skipped across the square, humming loudly to show her I wasn’t sad on my own. I hoped they weren’t looking down at me, both thinking that I didn’t belong there. I ran over to the bigger girls at the skipping rope queue and stood at the end, looking up at the balcony to see if they were still there watching.
Jackie, from one of the flats on the top floor, said the rope was too high for me, but I refused to go away and said, ‘I don’t care. I know I c
an jump it this time. I’m playing anyway.’
They laughed at me and let me stay and I beamed up at Mummy and Marie, pressing closer to the girl in front of me so they knew she was my friend, singing the skipping rope songs as loudly as I could, with a hot feeling in my tummy. Marie and Mummy waved back, and Mummy’s smile told me that she knew I’d got my own friends and that I belonged right there with her.
Nobody mentioned the school for a while after that. But whenever Mummy stopped to have a cigarette or to sit down with a cup of tea, I saw her face about to talk about it and I would get up and do something to make myself useful.
‘Do you want me to help you clean the drawers out?’ I would volunteer. ‘I’ll make the beds. I can make them on my own now.’
‘I don’t know what I’d do without you,’ she’d say. ‘You’re better than all the rest of them put together.’
I had no idea Marie had been offering me an escape route or how much worse things were about to get.
Chapter 11
I’ve woken up too early. The light in the bedroom is the colour of fish tank water, and my eyes swim up drowsily through it towards the sounds in the middle of the room. It’s my first morning waking up in the ‘big girls’ bedroom that Marie and Sandra share by the front door, and everything is unfamiliar. I’m supposed to be getting up early to go with Marie to the train station. I have to bring the child benefit money back from the post office, hiding it in my sock and crossing two main roads and then the streets with the trees and big houses, and then the footbridge back to the flats on my own. I’ve never done that before and Mummy’s worried that I’m too young. But she is on a new shift and has to go into work early, before we all get up, and Michael needs money for a school trip. There’s no other way to do it, and so in the end she agrees. I’m not yet seven and excited at the thought of proving how useful I can be, but even more excited at sleeping in the ‘big girls’ room and soon being one of them, no longer having to sleep in the back room with all the younger ones.
The noises sound like voices, whispers, and I wonder if Marie has forgotten about me. I push back the blankets and sit up on my knees, shivering, hugging myself against the cold as I blink into the thick, green light, trying to remember which end of the room the bed is. The big double wardrobe, with its rusty key hanging from a piece of red string, comes bulging out of the dark and I run my eyes across the crack of yellow light under the door to the hallway, and then back around the room.
Then I see Marie with her back to me. She has her white work shirt on and her blonde hair is hanging loose down her back, almost to her waist. She has no skirt on. I’m about to ask her if it’s time to wake up, but then the dark dissolves a bit more and when she moves her shoulder I see that my uncle is there, standing up against her. I freeze. Suddenly everything is wrong. My uncle never goes into the bedrooms. He has his arms around her waist and is kissing her. It doesn’t make sense. I lean forwards, frowning, and the coats that covered the bed during the night fall heavily onto the floor. Instinctively I try to hide back under the covers but it’s too late; my uncle looks over Marie’s shoulder and sees me.
He pushes Marie out of the way and comes hurtling towards me, shouting, the buckle on his open belt clattering, his fists thumping me down into the bed, then dragging me out by the hair, throwing me across the floor as if I’m a sack of concrete he’s pulling from the back of a trailer, instead of a stunned six-year-old in stripy blue pyjamas.
My arms are clamped over my head and his big, heavy hands are dragging and slamming me as I cry, ‘Sorry, Dad…sorry,’ looking up at his livid face, the dark rope of muscles at the side of his throat jumping like eels. But I’m not sure what I am saying sorry about. Why was he kissing her in the middle of the bedroom? Nobody kisses anybody in our home. Marie and my uncle are screaming over me, and behind them I see the boys in their vests and underpants, standing in the hallway watching.
‘Get her out of here. What’s she doing here? The sly bitch,’ he shouts, kicking me against the iron leg of the bed and pounding down on me again. All the air seems to leave the room and everything turns black and I can hear Marie screaming.
‘Leave her alone, leave her alone you maniac, you’ll kill her.’
He didn’t kill me, but something died. Something inside me just shrivelled up and blew away like dust.
Nothing was ever the same after that.
Later I walked across the footbridge and along the unfamiliar, tree-lined roads to the train station with Marie in a kind of silent, slowed-down dream. Sore from the beating and confused by the threats and by what I’d witnessed, unable to make sense of this glimpse of the adult world.
We walked in silence most of the way, both still struggling to hold back our tears, both anxious for the walk to be over. Every shadow and every rustle of wind around every corner seemed to be him, about to pounce. The threats that he wanted me out by the time he got back were still screaming in my head and I knew Mummy wouldn’t be able to do anything this time. I pressed my hand over my mouth, to muffle the sound of my crying as we walked, and tried to blink away the image of the two of them I’d seen. I was still trying to work out what I’d done wrong.
We sat on a bench in front of the post office and waited for it to open so that Marie could collect the money that I had to take back in my sock.
‘What’s gonna happen?’ I asked eventually.
‘Nothing,’ she snapped. ‘Try not to think about it.’
Her sharpness surprised me and made me cry again. Marie never shouted at us.
‘Please don’t let me get sent away, Marie…I didn’t do anything…What’s gonna happen?’ I cried.
‘Just keep out of his way. Stay in the bedroom when he gets home and try not to make any noise.’
‘I don’t.’
‘I know. It’s not your fault. It’s him, he’s an animal.’
‘Why?’
‘He just is.’
Nobody ever knew the reasons for things in our house. But the why’s never stopped. ‘That’s what school’s for, and books,’ Mummy would say. ‘Ask your teachers all those questions.’ But the questions just piled up and up in my head like a tower that would one day come crashing down. Marie left school at fifteen to work, and wasn’t good at school work, and we knew not to ask her too many questions.
Neither of us had mentioned what had happened that morning and I was still waiting for her to explain it. I sat on one of my hands like I always did when I was trying not to feel anything, watching her as she read the words on the back of her bus ticket. Sandra always said Marie couldn’t read properly and that she used to go to a ‘special’ school because she was ‘backward’, but she wasn’t, and anyway it wouldn’t matter because we all wanted to be like Marie when we grew up—beautiful and quiet and kind.
I could smell my uncle’s stale, peppery sweat on her shoulder. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the blood crusted in her right nostril and had to fast-blink through the memory of the chaos that had happened in the room after he saw me looking, the way he sprang across as I tried to pull the blankets over my head, ripping me from the bed, with Marie throwing herself in between us the way Mummy did.
‘Do you hate him?’ she asked.
I shrugged, frightened of having opinions or being ‘ungrateful’ in case I got sent away.
‘I do,’ she said, and I stared up at her. Until then I thought what I’d seen that morning meant that suddenly she didn’t. But I was glad that she still did; just the way Mummy still hated him. Hate seemed safer the more people who did it.
‘Mummy would get really upset if you told her what happened.’
I felt my head lean against her arm and left it there, hoping she would put her arm tightly around me to stop the shake inside, but instead of pulling me towards her she pulled away from me as if I’d given her an electric shock. ‘She’d get really upset, wouldn’t she? And I don’t like seeing her like that, do you?’
I shook my head. She knew I never wanted to
upset Mummy.
As soon as the post office opened and Marie had watched me fold the money down inside my sock I wanted to go. I lied, saying Mummy had forgotten to give Liam the note telling my teacher I was going to be late for school. She rustled the large bag of sweets she’d bought with her part of the money and asked me to wait with her until her train came. I shook my head as the tears continued to stream down, but she cried at my crying, and put an arm around me and said, ‘Please.’
She pulled the bag open and the scented, sugary smell of Jelly Babies burst out between us into the cold air. We stood in silence on the platform, biting the heads off the Jelly Babies, chewing loudly as we watched people bundled in winter clothes hurrying through the turnstile into the station.
Marie told me how she wouldn’t have to hate my uncle for much longer because she’d met a boy at work and they were getting engaged, and were going to live together. I couldn’t tell anyone about that either, she said; that was another secret that only she and Mummy knew about for now. I bit a green Jelly Baby in two and chewed loudly, licking the scented powder from my lips, keeping my eyes still, not knowing what I could and couldn’t look at any more.
Whatever I did always seemed to be the wrong thing. ‘She’s a good-for-nothing little bitch,’ my uncle would yell when he wanted me out, and no matter how hard I tried nothing I did was ever good enough for him. I stood stiff and awkward, trying to swallow quietly, not knowing what to do or say, wishing one of the others were there so that I could copy them.
‘Remember those brochures of boarding schools I showed you?’ she said. ‘Will you have another look at them?’
I peeled the Jelly Baby from the roof of my mouth and held it in my fist. Without looking at her, I shook my head firmly, my face screwed up in refusal. I couldn’t look at her; she was going to let him send me away to live in a school.