by Anya Peters
All I wanted to do was go home and be invisible amongst all the others. Home, where I belonged, and where Mummy always promised no one was going to force me to leave.
When Marie mentioned sleeping-schools again that morning at the train station I felt everything shake inside. I didn’t think about how she might be trying to save me from whatever she had been having to endure at his hands; I just knew that I didn’t want to leave the only family I had.
‘You would really like it there,’ she said. ‘There would be lots of girls your age, and they’d all be friends with you, and you’d have a bedroom of your own. You could still come back in the holidays.’ But she said it in a lying voice, and I knew it was a trick. ‘He’s only going to get worse,’ she said.
‘I don’t want to go…’ I felt the tears slipping out again, and held my breath until I could hear the blood crashing through my ears. ‘Please, Marie, don’t let him make me…I want to stay with Mummy…Please make them let me. I don’t want to leave…I didn’t mean to look. I just woke up and heard noises.’
I never slept in the ‘big girls’ bedroom’ after that night. Stella wanted me back in with her. Mummy didn’t know what the fight had been about, but she knew this time he meant it and I had to be kept out of his way, so Stella got her own way again. Marie left soon after, going to live with her new boyfriend Peter and his parents in Leicestershire. A few months later they came back for a visit and to announce their engagement. They brought an engagement cake with them that Peter, who was training to be a chef, had made himself. It was the first time he’d been to the flats, and Mummy fussed around for days getting everything perfect. Sandra was mostly out and I helped Mummy with the housework and getting the girls ready for school and keeping the boys from each other’s throats. On the day of their visit my uncle drank more and more and everything was tense. We were playing out later when we heard the loud bangs and shouts. I looked up and saw my uncle throwing the cake in its white box over the landing. I hid behind the burnt sheds behind the washing lines at the back of the square and watched my uncle storming along the landing towards the stairs. All the others were out and neighbours were opening their doors calling, ‘What’s going on?’
He came out into the square, swearing at the top of his voice, and started stamping on the cake, which oozed out from the broken box before he kicked it up against the big metal bins. Marie and Peter ran down the stairwell at the other end, with Mummy crying and shouting ‘Run!’ at the top of her voice.
Chapter 12
My uncle called me a ‘sneak’ or a ‘spy’ all the time after the morning I saw him with Marie in the front bedroom. Mummy refused to let him send me away, but I ended up getting sent out to the kitchen to stand in the dark more and more; and they were always fighting about it.
‘I want her out of here…she’s out,’ he’d scream, pushing me towards the front door.
‘Over my dead body,’ Mummy would shout, and sometimes, when he had drunk too much, it very nearly was. He told the girls not to talk to me, that I wasn’t their sister and wasn’t staying. He told Jennifer, the youngest, never to ask me a question, that if she wanted to know anything she had to ask Stella or one of the boys.
I couldn’t shake the memory of seeing him kissing Marie half-undressed in the middle of the bedroom that morning, or how furious he was when he realised I was in the room too. But I couldn’t understand what happened either, or why he said he’d kill me if I told Mummy, or why he screamed at me to ‘look away’ whenever he saw me looking up.
Whenever I saw him after that, even if he didn’t shout it, I quickly looked away and sat with downcast eyes; trying not to think and trying not to see. But everything I did from then on infuriated him. Especially my eyes.
I was used to him making up the rules as he went along: ‘Look at me when I’m talking to you,’ ‘Don’t look at me,’ ‘Don’t look at me with those eyes,’ ‘Look at the telly,’ ‘Don’t look at the telly,’ ‘Stare at that wall over there until I tell you to stop.’ They were never rules that I could learn, so nothing I did was ever right. But I still tried to do everything right; I couldn’t put a foot wrong in case he sent me away. But there was nothing I could do about my eyes, and it was them he hated mostly now.
‘Leave her alone, you bully,’ Mummy shouted back at him. ‘What’s wrong with her eyes?’ But he wouldn’t say. Only he and I knew what was wrong with my eyes—all the things they saw that they shouldn’t have.
The arguing never stopped. With Marie gone, Mummy couldn’t cope with it all on her own. Sandra was the eldest girl then and the one who was supposed to help Mummy out, but she caused even more trouble, skiving off school and being brought home by the police one night for being drunk. Sandra was very different to Marie. Loud and argumentative and fiery; she resented having to stay in looking after us, treating us all roughly and losing her temper at the slightest thing. She was always answering Mummy back and stealing her cigarettes, or money from her purse to buy them. Sandra was very overweight and not pretty like Marie but she had lots of friends, and was always trying to sneak off as soon as my uncle got back from work, to hang out with them, drinking and smoking in the burnt-out cars up by the cemetery.
He sent us out to find her sometimes when Mummy was at her evening job. ‘Tell him to fuck off,’ she’d say if we found her, and we’d go back shaking, pretending we didn’t see her, dreading his anger.
Not long after Marie went to live with Peter, my eyes got me into trouble again. It was raining and my uncle’s building job had been cancelled and he came home early. Sandra was looking after us until Mummy got back from work, and my uncle was in his bedroom sleeping. When he woke up and called her out to go to the shop for him she told us not to make a sound or to leave the room until she got back. Nobody did what Sandra told them and the boys laughed at her, calling her ‘fatso’ and ‘acne-face’ as she went out, but we all knew not to wake my uncle when he was sleeping. There’d be hell to pay if we did.
Waiting for my turn at snakes and ladders, I needed to go to the toilet. Forgetting her instruction I got up and went out. As I passed his bedroom I saw the light on and the door ajar, and didn’t know whether to go forwards or back. I tiptoed past but couldn’t help seeing in out of the corner of my eye. What I saw stopped me in my tracks.
He was sitting on the edge of the bed with his trousers down and his legs open and Sandra kneeling in front of him. Instinctively I knew it was something I shouldn’t have seen, and after what happened the time I woke up and saw him in the bedroom with Marie, I was terrified of seeing anything else. I tried to hurry past soundlessly, struggling to breathe. But suddenly there was noise and commotion and him flying at me, calling me a bitch and a sneak and kicking and punching me up against the front door.
Again I didn’t know what I saw. Over and over after that day, the scene I saw through the door exploded behind my eyes, but there was no one to tell or to ask about it. Sandra told me she wasn’t doing anything but not to tell Mummy, and my uncle said he’d kill me if I told her anything. Every time I was alone with her and he caught me talking to her he hit out at me, asking me what I was whispering, why I was always sneaking about the place. ‘She’s not,’ Mummy would say, ‘she’s just quiet by nature.’ But after I saw him with Sandra he really couldn’t bear the sight of me. He wanted me out even more urgently.
‘Look at the sneaky eyes on her,’ he’d say to get the others laughing. But only he and I knew what he was really saying. I hated having another secret with him, and for Mummy not to know. For days I couldn’t look her in the eye. He said he’d kill me if I told her. A hundred times I almost told her—in the way I helped her indoors, the way I peeled potatoes or stood on a chair to clean out the cupboards to make myself useful when the others were out playing so he wouldn’t make me leave, or the way I pushed orange tinned spaghetti around my plate, pulling it into half-words that spelled out the truth I wasn’t allowed to utter.
One night, after a loud row that the
whole landing seemed to get involved with, Sandra ran away from home and my uncle, sneaking back in one morning after he had left for work to take just a bag of clothes and a box of LPs and some money from Mummy’s purse. After that there was no one to look after us or to help Mummy. I was still not seven, but I was the eldest girl now.
Chapter 13
Mummy has gone to her new evening job to get some extra money for Christmas. My uncle still hates looking after us, but has had to accept there is no one else to do it now that Sandra has gone.
‘Look after them yourself for a change,’ Mummy finally tells him. ’See what I have to put up with day in, day out.’
All evening he’s been resentful, half-drunk, working up to another argument when Mummy comes home. Our programmes end and he sends us to bed.
‘Not you. Here, rinse this,’ he says, shoving his empty beer glass into my hand as I try to go off with the others.
From the kitchen I hear him telling the girls I’ll be in in a minute. I hand him the washed beer glass and quickly turn to go in through the heavy green curtain that hangs in front of the back bedroom door, which leads straight from the front room.
‘Don’t fall asleep,’ he says. ‘I want you for something later.’
‘What?’
‘Come back in when the rest of them have fallen asleep.’
No one ever says no to my uncle, especially me, but I don’t do what he asks. I lie there with the covers over my head, my heart pounding in my ears, trying to force myself to fall asleep ‘by mistake’.
He taps me on the shoulder. ‘What did I tell you?’ he says, his lips close to my ear. ‘Come in.’
The front room is silent, the sound on the TV turned down. The news is on and the grey light from it flickers across the walls. He tells me to comb his hair, from the front.
He was always getting us to comb and to pull any grey hairs we saw from his hair. He would give Stella 2p for pulling ten of them. I always had to do it for free, while he snoozed in front of the TV. His hair was greasy and I hated doing it, trying to lean against the back of the settee behind him without touching the red pimples that covered his heavy shoulders and greasy, muscly back. I wasn’t allowed to stop until he told me to.
‘Pull it into a ponytail and pull it hard,’ he would say.
Mummy would sit there telling us not to do it, saying he was an animal and should be locked up. But we put our fingers to our lips to tell her to be quiet.
This time Mummy isn’t there and he makes me comb from the front. When I reach up to do it he puts his hands up between my legs and slides his fingers in under my pants and inside me. It happens so quickly I freeze, everything stopping inside me.
‘Go in and take these off,’ he whispers, pinging the elastic on my pants, ‘and put on one of Jennifer’s skirts, with nothing on underneath.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean, now do it,’ he says angrily.
But I don’t know what he means. I’m not yet seven years old.
‘Take off all your clothes and just wear some of their small clothes, right!’
The breath won’t go down into my lungs. I go back into the bedroom dizzy with fear, trying to hold back my tears, not knowing what to do, shaking and trying to see through the dark, groping about to find some of the clothes the girls had thrown onto the floor at the end of their bed. I squeeze into Stella’s skirt. It almost fits at the waist but is inches too short. I can’t do it. I have never defied him in anything he has told me to do, but I can’t do this. I don’t know why he wants me to do it, but I know that I can’t do it. I know that it’s wrong, that it’s ‘dirty’.
I take off the skirt and put my dressing gown on instead. I button it up, but his words ‘with nothing on underneath’ get louder in my head. I take my arms out of the sleeves and pull my vest off over my head. I take my pants off but I feel cold and wrong and I can’t go out there like that. I put my pants back on again and button the dressing gown right up to the top.
‘I thought I told you,’ he says when I go back out, almost raising his voice.
‘None of them fit,’ I lie, crossing my fingers in one of the pockets of the dressing gown. ‘I nearly broke the zip. Mummy just sewed it on.’
Mentioning Mummy is meant to panic him, but it panics me instead. What if she comes in and sees?
As I circle him, combing his hair from all angles like he tells me to, I see the silenced newsreader on the nine o’clock news staring out at us and I blush, convinced that he is looking directly into the room at us, and that this is the news; that he is telling everyone else watching about this, that Mummy, in her evening job somewhere, can hear him saying it.
My legs buckle and the walls of the front room seem to collapse in on us. I feel light-headed and dizzy and take shallow breaths in through my mouth, trying not to breathe in the smell of him. I stare at the shire horses on the mantelpiece, at their shiny black eyes. It feels like I’m not there any more, as if I’m looking down on myself standing in front of him there in my banana-yellow dressing gown with the metal comb in my hand, him lying back in his armchair in his string vest, his red pyjama bottoms gaping open and his thing covered in hair lying out on top of it as he wriggles his rough fingers about inside me, and makes me put my hand on the thing between his legs.
After that evening, nothing and nowhere was safe. And the more he did it the more he hated me and wanted me out of his sight, hitting out at me and screaming at me to stop whispering and ‘stop sneaking about the place’, as if I was something squirming around in his conscience, driving him mad.
Chapter 14
Marie and Peter come back to get married in the local church. Everyone claps from the landings as Marie walks down to get into the Rolls Royce in the square, while she smiles up shyly and waves. My uncle gets into the car beside her and I frown away memories, clutching my posy of flowers tighter.
I’m a bridesmaid in a lilac satin dress with short puffball sleeves, which everyone says is the perfect colour for me, with my dark hair piled up and studded with daisies. When I see Peter in the church turn and slowly lift Marie’s veil, which sparkles with sequins, and put his arms around her to kiss her, I look away in embarrassment. I stare down at two white petals, small, silky ovals edged with pink that have fallen onto the long red carpet in the aisle. A lump shifts in my stomach and the powdery, scented taste of Jelly Babies explodes into my mouth.
I try to blink away the thoughts of my uncle kissing her in the bedroom that morning because I think I know what other things he might have been doing with her, because he’s been doing them for months now with me.
For the couple of days Marie had stayed with us before the wedding I’d been sitting or standing silently beside her whenever I could, hoping that she would tell me something, talk about the secrets that went on with my uncle. But she never did. My silence seemed to bother her and she’d walk off quickly or sit there fidgeting, avoiding my ‘sneaky’ eyes that always seemed to see too much.
I was confused and ashamed to see her kissing Peter up at the altar in front of all those people. I looked around at the pews behind; everyone was smiling up at them, and I felt my face flush and had to look away. Brendan was staring at me, not at them, and winked, and my blush grew even hotter, my scalp prickling under all my piled-up hair studded with daisies.
Kathy couldn’t come over for the wedding; she was coming the following week to take Mummy and me off to Spain for a holiday. That was why Brendan had come over instead. I was even shyer in front of him now, wondering if he was going to do those things that my uncle made me do, or whether he knew about them. I felt his eyes on me wherever I went that day as I swished about in my long satin dress, sounding like Kathy in her pleated skirts with their silk linings.
My uncle watched me like a hawk as well while Brendan was there. I knew he thought I was going to tell Brendan secrets, but I wasn’t. I just felt safer next to him. To begin with my uncle told me that Mummy would send me away
if ever I told anyone. He didn’t have to threaten to kill me—he said that often enough during arguments—but sometimes he said it anyway. He didn’t say anything to me at the wedding but whenever I looked he seemed to be there, slipping in and out of the crowd, his little grey eyes following me everywhere.
Brendan had seen my uncle shout at me earlier and thump me for going the wrong way at the gates, and I cried, feeling ashamed that Brendan had seen it. Once my uncle had gone, Brendan came to stand next to me and asked softly, ‘Are you alright?’
I couldn’t look up at him, but I nodded and he stroked the back of my hand. Later he told me I looked ‘gorgeous’, ‘like a princess’ in my long swishing dress. My uncle overheard him and I turned away to go back to all the other bridesmaids standing under one of the pink cherry trees, waiting for the photographer to load another roll of film.
I already felt nervous and frightened around men; now I was disgusted and repulsed by them too. But Brendan was different, he always had been. According to him the Holy Spirit knew everything, so when the sexual abuse started I burnt with shame every time we passed the church on the way home from school, my whole body fizzing with anxiety when I saw the huge, black metal crucifix hanging from the trunk of the horse chestnut tree at the front of the churchyard. The others would stop to knock down conkers, or run in and out of the black metal gates, sprinkling each other with the soft, pink blossom piled under the two cherry trees behind it, while I rushed on worried about the Holy Spirit overhearing all the bad thoughts I’d had about the secret things my uncle made me do.
Brendan didn’t like the loud music and disco lights and big glasses of beer in the church hall after the wedding, and when my uncle wasn’t looking I followed him out into the car park. He told me to go back in but I wouldn’t. Standing next to Brendan made me feel safe, the same way that holding one of the dinner ladies’ hands at break-time made me feel safe. No one could get me when I was with them.