by Anya Peters
We sat outside the church hall in the cream-coloured wedding Rolls Royce with red seats. No one in our family had a car or could even drive so it was always a real treat to be in one, and we talked about driving. Brendan said he would teach me to drive one day.
‘Will you teach me now?’
‘Come here,’ he said, putting my hand on the gears, telling me how things worked and the names of things. ‘Sit up here, it’ll be easier.’
I stiffened as he lifted me onto his lap, and waited. But Brendan was gentle and kind and it felt nice sitting close to him. He didn’t do anything to me or make me do anything to him but my heart was beating fast as I waited for it. When he took my hand from the gear stick and held it tight in his and let it fall on his lap I froze for a second before snatching it away.
‘Do you like Vince?’ he asked, talking about my uncle, and I shrugged, lowering my eyes, uncertain what the right answer was.
‘I don’t know.’
When I looked up he had his head in his hands and was crying, his shoulders shaking with emotion. I was shocked. He lifted my hand and put it onto his lap again, looking at me as he did it. I thought he was going to make me open his zip, and my eyes welled with tears.
‘It’s all right,’ he said, taking his hand away, ‘ I’m not going to hit you. What’s wrong?’
‘I wish you were our dad,’ I whispered shyly, checking through the curved mirrors in case anyone overheard, half-shocked I’d said it out loud at all.
’Go back into the hall with the others,’ he told me. I thought he knew why I had frozen, knew what my uncle made me do, and what I had thought he was going to do to me too. Of course he didn’t know, but sometimes I was tormented with thoughts of how he might have known but had left me there anyway, unthinkable thoughts that over the years swam like fish through my blood, in and out of my brain.
‘One day I’ll come and take you away from here,’ he said again as I got down from the car.
I nodded without looking at him and walked across the gravel with my lilac bridesmaid dress lifted, feeling special and looked after, convinced that he would come back to get me and Mummy one day, but ashamed at the same time to think he cried because he knew about the things my uncle made me do.
Later I told the dinner lady at school—the one whose hand I held in the playground at lunchtime—that one day my Uncle Brendan was going to come and take me away in a shiny cream-coloured Rolls Royce.
‘Why a cream Rolls Royce?’ she asked.
‘That’s his car,’ I lied. ‘He’s very rich.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘He’s a millionaire,’ I said, adding wild embellishments. ‘He’s coming to get me because I’m his favourite and he likes me.’
‘What about your mum, will she just let you go?’ she said after a while, smashing the fantasy to smithereens.
‘She’s coming too,’ I said. ‘They’re going to get married and I’m going to be their bridesmaid, in a lilac satin dress, and look like a princess.’
After the wedding I went to Spain with Kathy and Sandra. Mummy was supposed to come but my uncle wouldn’t let her.
I grew closer to Kathy during those two weeks. I remember the softness of her voice as I lay in bed at night pretending to be asleep as she and Sandra talked. And I remember the light feel of her hands as she gently rubbed sun cream into my skin on the beach, and covered my eyes at the bullfight so I didn’t see blood. Little did she know what I saw at home some weekends. I remember feeling confused and disloyal as I sat up close to her in the heat, feeling her gentle hands on me but remembering that all the trouble at home was her fault.
My uncle’s violence escalated after we got back from Spain, as did the abuse. Mostly it was me having to do it to him, with my hands and my mouth.
‘If you tell your mother you’ll have to leave her,’ he told me. ‘This is a test. She knows all about it, but she’s waiting to see if you can keep a secret; to see how good you are. If you tell she’ll be the one sending you away.’
My head wouldn’t take it in. For a long time I couldn’t look Mummy in the eye. She would never do that; she would never send me away. She hated him. The things she had said went in and out of my head. ‘I’m only staying with him for you kids.’ ‘As soon as you’re all grown up I’m out of here.’ ‘Don’t worry, one day me and you are leaving this place. Let them all stay here with him, we’ll go away, just me and you.’
At night I lay in bed thinking of all these things, rolling from side to side under the heavy grey blankets, trying to reset all the information in my head. He was lying. Mummy would never be tricking me like he said, ’testing’ me, to see if I told. But what if he wasn’t?
The others would complain, ‘What’s she snivelling about now?’ ‘Shut up, Anya, or we’re calling Daddy.’
‘Daddy,’ the ace always up their sleeve.
Chapter 15
Mostly it happened in the evenings, while Mummy was at her job, but also during the day if she was at the shops or had gone to the hairdresser’s or the laundrette. He would call me into whatever room he was in and I would have to do whatever he said.
If she had only gone out locally, and might come back at any time, he took me into the kitchen, turned the light off and sat me up on the draining board, him in front of me, standing up so that he could keep watch out of the window down over the square.
There was no gentleness or coaxing, there was no petting or confusion of feeling, there was just force and aggression and anger and speed. I was just a ‘whore’s child’ and he could do what he liked to me, and if they were going to leave me there, this was how he was going to get his own back. He’d always make me open his belt, pull down the zip and take it out. I’d close my eyes and my whole body would recoil from it; my fists wouldn’t uncurl and the feel of it in my fingers gave me the same shock each time, the same jumping out of my skin.
Sometimes my fingers wouldn’t work. I would wrestle with the cold metal of his belt buckle, having to push my fingers in under the waistband against his hairy stomach as he breathed in to help me undo it.
‘I can’t do it,’ I would say each time, as if that would stop things.
He would simply breathe in more and tell me to hurry up. I would hear the clank of the buckle falling down against the front of his brown trousers, hoping someone would come in to make it stop, half-hoping one of the neighbours would walk past and see us, half-dreading it, already ashamed, as if it was my fault. But nobody ever caught him. The tearing sound as he made me pull his zipper down was like a rip right through my brain. I was still only six or seven years old, too young to even guess at why he was forcing me to do this, why Mummy was testing me, why I was so repelled by it all.
His rough, heavy, calloused hand would be pressed firmly over my small soft one, forcing me to hold it. I would close my eyes, hearing other children playing down in the square, the thump of a ball against the wall outside, the slap of a skipping rope, sing-song voices.
‘Like this…’ he had to tell me angrily each time, ‘go easy with it.’
But my brain wouldn’t keep the information and my fingers always forgot how.
‘Pretend it’s an ice-lolly, use your tongue on it like that,’ he would say, imitating how you’d lick an ice cream. ‘Watch your teeth, you bitch. Suck it, don’t scrape your teeth on it. Open your mouth wider.’ But I couldn’t; my mouth was too small, my jaw locked, I was heaving. I didn’t want to breathe in the smell or taste of it. At the first taste I would instinctively jerk my head away but he would push it back, forcing me to stay.
‘Keep going until I tell you to stop.’
I couldn’t breathe. My mind tried to shut off until it was over, to float out of my body, up and away through the window, over the trees and into the sky. But I was always doing it wrong, and he jolted me back with some instruction or warning or slap, and I had to keep squeezing and pulling until it got bigger in my hand, like something waking from sleep, something dirty and stink
ing and repulsive and alive. Despite having brothers and seeing them naked I hadn’t known this thing even existed that changed size and shape and was covered in hair.
When it was finished, or we saw or heard Mummy coming back, he would knock me out of the way, and since I was already crying he would punch or hit me so Mummy wouldn’t wonder what my tears were about. Flaring up into rages that I was always too stunned to see coming, he would tell me he’d give me ‘something to really cry about’ if I didn’t stop.
Mummy was used to seeing me cry, so she never had to ask what it was for. He’d hit me for anything and nothing, he always had. But she would still defend me and a new fight would erupt. She would never have guessed the real reason for my tears.
Afterwards, if he didn’t want me for anything else and I was allowed out, I would run off as fast as I could across the square so that nobody could see me crying. Sliding in under the corrugated iron fence at the back I’d climb up the railway embankment and roll down the spiky grass, over and over and over until I was sore and dizzy and all his bad had spilled out of me. I’d go to the corrugated iron shelter after, pushing away the weeds that grew all over the entrance, and crouching down inside, trying to sit on the dry bits, to avoid the puddles of brown rainwater, I’d wait for my head to empty.
Nobody came to this bit of the embankment; it was too far. I didn’t tell anyone about the shelter or that at the back of it were some of the biggest, juiciest blackberries and tiny wild strawberries. It was my hiding place; the one place my uncle couldn’t get me. In the summer I stepped over all the tall stinging nettles, holding my sleeves down over my hands like gloves to push them out of the way, hunting for the juiciest fruit, pushing them around my mouth to take away the taste of him.
When I fell into the nettles I wouldn’t tell anyone because Mummy had warned us never to go there on our own, always to go with the bigger children. Once, when I went back with my legs and arms covered in big flaming white spots I tried to hide them but everyone knew where I’d been. I tried not to scratch them or to cry but I got into trouble, and Mummy shouted at me to teach me a lesson, as all the others laughed behind their hands.
That was the day she told us to look for the big dock leaves if ever we got stung and to rub our stings with those.
‘They’re always there growing by the nettles somewhere,’ she said. ’Wherever there’s bad, there’s always good nearby, that’s nature’s way.’
‘Is nature God?’
‘I don’t know. Now that’s enough of your questions. Don’t be smart with me, ask your teachers those kind of things, I’ve got enough to do. Now scram, before he gets in.’
He’d go mad if he saw her paying attention to me. He’d tell her to leave me alone. ‘Don’t put any of that on her,’ he’d said the last time I got stung and she got out the calamine lotion. ‘You’ve got better things to do than take care of her. She’s not your responsibility.’
Sometimes, after he’d finished with me, he would give me money. Coins taken from wobbly silver and copper piles on the mantelpiece in their bedroom. I didn’t want it. I wish I’d never taken it, but sometimes I did. He would tell me beforehand how much I could have after I’d finished doing what he was asking.
‘I don’t want to,’ I’d say each time, but it made no difference; he made me do it anyway.
‘Here, you greedy bitch,’ he’d say afterwards, ‘take it and get out of my sight.’ I’d try to get out of the room quickly. But usually he’d say, ‘Where do you think you’re going? Clean this.’
I’d have to go down to get toilet paper to wipe him and the sheets with; wiping the gunk from my hands and mouth, trying not to breathe in the smell.
I could never tell anyone else where I’d got the money from. I’d use it to buy an ice-lolly or sweets from the sweet shop, or if there was enough a bag of ‘broken biscuits’ from the corner shop. I’d run back with them hidden in my pocket or under my clothes so that nobody saw them or my tears, and across to the corrugated iron shelter on the embankment to eat them out of sight of anyone else.
Once, I bought a comic with the money. It was raining and I snuck back to read it in the bedroom while my uncle snored in his armchair with his feet up on the pouf and the paper over his belly. I read it sitting on the big pile of clothes and blankets at the bottom of the wardrobe, the door ajar to let in some light. But the boys caught me and when Mummy came in they said it wasn’t fair that I’d got a comic and asked her where I’d got the money.
I couldn’t think of an excuse quickly enough. I told her I’d stolen the comic from the sweet shop. I just heard myself say it, almost as shocked as Mummy was. She slapped me across the face, put her coat back on and marched me straight down to the shop. It was the first time she had ever hit me.
‘Don’t you think I’ve got enough to do without you playing up as well?’
She made me give it back, forcing me to tell the shopkeeper that I’d stolen it and to apologise. I was burning with shame. I could hear Liam and Michael laughing behind me. I’d counted the pennies out into the man’s hand less than twenty minutes before and I knew he remembered me, this pale, timid little girl with her overgrown pageboy haircut and swollen, red-rimmed eyes. I saw him frown in confusion and hung my head so I didn’t have to look him in the eye, hoping he wouldn’t recognise me. If he did remember, he said nothing. Afterwards, Mummy seemed sorry for what she’d done and sent me and Liam down to the allotments to get an armful of rhubarb from the woman down there and she made my favourite crumble for our tea. I sat there eating it with the others, wanting to tell her with every mouthful where I’d really got the money from, and what he was making me do.
But I knew that she would do worse if I told her. She would send me away, just like he always threatened.
Chapter 16
‘Close that door,’ Mummy says, and I guess this is going to be another secret.
She tells me Brendan has asked if I want to go to Ireland. My chest tightens.
‘I don’t want to,’ I say, my eyes already filled with tears, ‘I want to stay with you.’
‘Shhh, it’s okay, you’ll be able to come back. It’s only a holiday.’
‘How do you know?’
I mean how does she know about it being just a holiday, but she misunderstands and says she got a letter from Brendan that morning, pulling it out of her cardigan pocket.
‘Don’t let any of the others see you reading it,’ she says, handing it to me, ‘I don’t want all of them moaning.’
It’s only me that’s going, none of the others. They aren’t to know until the last minute, just like when Brendan comes over to visit. My body is bursting with secrets. Back in the front room the girls are lying side by side on the brown rug in front of the electric fire, watching TV. I sit on the corner of the settee hugging one of the cushions, wondering what another country will be like, excited about seeing all the places Mummy talks about.
Then I start to worry, wondering if I’ll really be allowed to come back to England, not knowing who to trust. I feel myself being ripped away from my brothers and sisters layer by layer.
’Don’t show me up, will you?’ Mummy warns when the day of the holiday arrives.
I shake my head.
‘I know you won’t…you’re as good as gold, you are. I wish the rest of them were more like you. Don’t tell them about anything that goes on in our house, it’s none of their business, is it?’
I shake my head again. ‘No!’
‘I’m not having my sister and Brendan looking down their noses at me, thinking they’re better than us. They’re not better than us, are they?’
‘You’re better than anyone,’ I reply, meaning it.
‘Nosy parkers,’ she says and smiles, making a game of the complicated relationship she has with her much-loved sister, and we both giggle together. ‘If they ask you any questions about what goes on here, just say you don’t know.’
We both knew that when she told my uncle he’d say I wasn’t
wanted back, and he did.
‘This time I mean it. I’m not letting them make a fool out of me any longer,’ he says, ripping open another beer. ‘She can go back to where she belongs…sneaky little bitch…She’s not wanted here.’
He wouldn’t let her take me to the airport either, saying she had more important things to do, that she had her own children to run around for, not me, and that if they were that interested they would come over and get me themselves.
I concentrated on doing up the zip of my anorak, pretending not to hear him, staring down at my new case with our home address written out neatly on the tag.
‘That’s what you do in case it gets lost and someone has to send it back,’ Mummy told the girls, writing it out in red capital letters.
‘Is she coming back?’ Jennifer asked, frowning, knowing what my uncle had been saying. ‘Daddy said…’
‘I know what he said. Don’t mind him, of course she’s coming back. This is her home too.’
I was feeling very grown-up in my white ribbed polo neck and my first pair of jeans, turned up inches at the bottom because Mummy hadn’t had time to take them up.
The night before, when he started drinking, Mummy put up a fight again, saying she was taking me to the airport herself and that was that. But in the end she’d had to back down; there was only so much she could do. Sandra had to come back to take me. She’d made friends with the minicab driver on the way there and wanted to drive back with him. At the Aer Lingus check-in desk she handed my case and my ticket over to the woman in the green uniform and hat who said she would get someone to look after me. Being a minor I had to wear a big tag around my neck with my name on. I was nervous at anyone seeing my surname because I knew that in Ireland it had to be a secret, that nobody was allowed to know it.