Abandoned

by Anya Peters

  I should have realised Brendan was my father; I resembled him in so many ways. His colouring was different to mine and I didn’t have his height or his heavy splattering of freckles, but behind them you could see me there. Our natures were very similar too. But no one ever mentioned the resemblance between us growing up, except Brendan himself occasionally. One day on the way to Hyde Park in a black taxi, he lifted my hand as I sat with him. He unclenched it gently, finger by finger, as my body tensed, and laid it palm to palm on his to measure it. My hot and clammy hand was half the size of his then but undeniably his in miniature—the same shape and proportions, the same narrow wrists and long, almost evenly-sized fingers—but at the time I didn’t think that meant he was related to me.

  I had imagined things would change completely once I knew who my father was, but they didn’t. Especially now that it turned out to be Brendan. At times I could convince myself that my relationship with him and Kathy, and our playing‘happy families’ in hotel rooms for a few days at each end of my school holidays, was‘normal’ family life, but in truth I knew that it wasn’t.

  He made an effort to get closer to me, giving me lots of attention, and now that I knew he was my father the promises piled up. He even talked about getting a‘family’ home for us to live in one day.

  But inside I still felt like I didn’t belong anywhere. Even though Brendan said I could rely on him I knew I couldn’t, that his family and his own children—who could never know about me—would always come first.

  Even before I found out who my father was, I had always known my existence was awkward for everyone. Eventually that feeling became too much, and almost two years later I decided everyone would be better off if I wasn’t around. I decided to end everything once and for all. I locked myself in the big, cold bathroom on the laundry corridor at school, the ‘haunted’ bathroom that everybody tried to avoid, and cut my wrist several times with a razor blade. Slumped there on the white painted floor, watching the blood spurt across the white planks, I completely expected and hoped to die. I’d taken painkillers beforehand and had a flannel in my mouth to muffle the screams, but the pain was excruciating and I couldn’t cut deep enough.

  Eventually, when someone rapped at the door asking me how long I was going to be, I asked them to use another bathroom. But they kept coming back. When they had gone another time I knew I somehow had to get back to the dorm before someone discovered me and sent for an ambulance, which would prevent me from dying. I tightened my school tie around my wrist just above the cut, pulling it as tight as I could with my teeth and other hand, cleaned up as best I could and bundled several hand towels around it. The lights were already out and everyone was asleep and I lay in bed with the towels wrapped around my arm soaked in blood, expecting to fall into a coma and not wake up next morning. But I did. The bleeding had stopped. Although the gashes were pretty messy for a long time, with a lot of effort I managed to conceal it all.

  Things were even more unsettled after that. I felt more self-conscious and ashamed. It was another secret to hide, another incident to alienate me. I withdrew from my friends more and more—I didn’t need anyone, I told myself.

  That half-term Brendan was meant to meet me from the train, but he wasn’t at the station. He was never reliable, always turning up late and breathless or getting arrangements wrong. We weren’t allowed to leave without someone meeting us, but eventually I slipped away from whoever was chaperoning us and waited all day on the spot where I had agreed to meet him if ever that happened. I was feeling on the outside of everything, watching everyone meeting and greeting around me. He was supposed to be there at 11 a.m. I phoned his home number and his wife said she didn’t know when he would be back, that he was away on business for a few days. I felt like telling her that I was the‘business’, but of course I didn’t. Hour after hour passed and I stood there at the station until 11 o’clock that night, ridiculously thinking that maybe he thought we were meeting at 11 p.m. rather than in the morning. Finally I went to the station police and a policewoman phoned the school for me.

  She tried to chat to me, asking me about my family and what they did, and if I had any brothers and sisters, but every question felt like a trap and I shrugged most of them off. I had to censor everything, hold back, unable to be myself. I couldn’t tell anybody I had brothers and sisters because it would have seemed odd if I was the only one who went to boarding school. Even my best friends at school had never known. I couldn’t tell her where my‘parents’ lived in Ireland either, or give her a telephone number to call either of them at home, in case Brendan’s wife answered, or Kathy’s father. Nobody was supposed to know about me. I was a secret.

  I knew my silence made people feel uncomfortable, but it was easier to tell them nothing than tell them the lies and half-truths I was supposed to. Most of my life was a secret now—nobody at school was allowed to know about my‘past life’ with Mummy and all my brothers and sisters. But if Mummy had had a telephone number I probably would have given her that, but she still didn’t have a phone then.

  Although I had already missed my last connecting train, they arranged for me to go back on the last train part-way, and for a taxi to meet me and drive me all the way through the foggy countryside to school. It was well past midnight when I got there and I felt stiff and cold and sleepy. I decided to have a hot shower to warm myself up. I didn’t hear Matron coming until she ripped the shower curtain open angrily, demanding to know why I was having a shower at that time of night.

  ‘What were you doing all day at the station?’ she asked, her thin lips trembling with anger.

  ‘Waiting,’ I said, wrapping my arms around my dripping body, ashamed to be seen naked. It was only years later that I realised what conclusion she must have jumped to and why she was so angry.

  I spent the rest of the half-term at school with the overseas girls who had no one in Britain to go to either. It was a small school, so they were all my friends and we had a nice time, but I still felt left out, lonely and intensely aware I was a burden to Kathy and Brendan.

  Everybody else just got on with things, so I did too; I knew my feelings must be wrong, so I pushed them further and further down. I withdrew more and more and felt alienated, certain that nobody could understand me, and by the end of the year I felt I didn’t fit in at school either.

  Staying with Kathy and Brendan in another hotel room, this time the Sheraton Skyline at Heathrow, I decided to tell them I wasn’t going back the following term; that I wasn’t going to school again, anywhere. There was no one to force me to. What could they do? They behaved like parents only when it suited them. I knew they’d be angry because the last thing they would want was the authorities getting involved.

  I leaned back against the radiator in the hotel room telling Brendan of my decision. I felt almost detached, curious about what he would do as much as anything else. Deep down I wanted him to force me to go back, to take charge like a parent should if he really cared about me.

  Brendan told me how selfish and ungrateful I was. That afternoon he stormed back to Ireland early and I was left wandering around Heathrow pretending there was nothing wrong. I’d wanted to be able to speak my mind, to shout and scream and tell him that I didn’t want him there, but I didn’t want him to actually walk away and leave me. I could never have told anyone that, though.

  Marie and Peter let me stay at their house, even though they had two children by then and Marie was heavily pregnant with their third. There were only three bedrooms, and since I was in one, all three of her children had to share one room. Nobody said I wasn’t welcome, but once I was living there full-time I felt in the way. In the end I realised I had to go back to school but they had already told my headmistress I wasn’t going back, so for a term I went to the local girls’ comprehensive. It was a shock to the system after all those years at boarding school, and because of the time I’d missed I got moved back a year. I was soon bored with the classes and never made friends or settled in there.
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  No matter how kind Marie and Peter were and how lovely their house was, it never felt like a home I could really call my own. Brendan was paying them for my keep and I felt like a lodger, and still had this sense of longing for something I almost didn’t recognise any more.

  Chapter 32

  Then I was almost seventeen, five and a half years after I was whisked away to Marie’s from the police station, I went back to visit Mummy in the house in London. It was the first time I’d been allowed to go back, and a few days before Marie had sat me down and told me that my uncle was back living in the house. I swallowed back the lump in my throat, but other than that I felt numb. I pretended it was the most ordinary thing in the world, and that it didn’t bother me in the slightest. But for days I had headaches that wouldn’t go and although I didn’t put it into words it felt a little like my recurring nightmare, when I saw him and Mummy walking away together, leaving me torn to pieces on the platform.

  When I arrived he was up a stepladder, changing a light bulb in the dining room ceiling. I walked quickly past the doorway, blinking away some cold, painful feeling I didn’t recognise, and down into the sizzling roast lamb smell of the kitchen. Mummy whispered to me to go back in to say hello to him. I did as she said, as if nothing had happened. He was bent almost double up on the ladder to avoid the ceiling, but still looked enormous, bringing all my physical fears rushing back.

  I stepped forwards, all smiles, one hand behind my back still gripping the doorframe. I hoped he’d speak first, but he didn’t. The doorbell went and everyone was streaming into the hallway saying hello, bundling me into the family. I felt shy and awkward at suddenly being the centre of things. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

  ‘Hi,’ I said eventually.

  ‘All right, Anya?’ he said and the ice was shattered. He’d never asked me in my whole life if I was all right. Everything really had changed. I nodded that I was and tried to push the fear out of my smile. He nodded and our eyes met for the first time in all those years, before we both quickly looked away. Even hearing his voice again after so many years was frightening. He seemed quieter, though, like something had gone out of him. What I would have given for a‘sorry’, but for the first time I felt pity for him, unaccountably saddened to see him standing so awkwardly at the top of that ladder. And I took his quietness as some kind of apology.

  ‘Good girl,’ Mummy said, smiling, when I went through to the kitchen.

  It was a hot day. The boys’ friends were in and out drinking tea and eating biscuits; everyone was laughing and happy. The whole house bustled with people and sound, radios and TVs playing in every room, the cat prowling around the place, flicking her tail. After the silence of my little box room at Marie and Peter’s it felt like heaven. This was my family; these were my brothers and sisters. I felt I belonged again; I was part of something.

  The boys were allowed to smoke in the conservatory.

  ‘Go on,’ Mummy said,‘I know you like a sneaky smoke, just don’t let me see you do it.’

  It was all so warm and easy-going and, still after all those years, everyone and everything was so familiar that when it was time to leave I didn’t want to. I wanted to go back.

  Mummy explained that my uncle had begged her to take him back. The girls had begged her too, she said. I guess she didn’t have much choice. The girls needed their dad—and it would have been hard for her to cope on her own with four children still at home. He was a‘reformed character’, she said, he’d learnt his lesson, he’d never do anything like that again, and the girls told me he didn’t drink half as much any more, and that they hardly rowed like they used to.

  After playing netball against a wall at the top of the road during that first visit, the girls linked arms with me on the way back. We bought a Chinese takeaway on the high street, and the men from the garage at the top came out flirting.

  ‘Who’s your friend?’ they asked the girls.

  ‘She’s not our friend,’ they said.‘She’s our sister.’

  I was so proud I couldn’t breathe. I was a sister, part of something again. I belonged.

  Stella bounced the netball along the pavement on the way back.‘I wish you were back living with us,’ she said.‘It was much better with you here.’

  Someone wanted me! My sisters wanted me! And my soul floated back into my body.

  That night I told Marie I wanted to move back to London. She asked Brendan, who said he’d talk to Kathy. Nobody seemed able to make decisions for me. Finally Brendan flew over to try to talk me out of it.

  ‘Why would you want to go back there?’ he asked. But in his heart he knew why. I’d talked to him more than anyone over the years, all those late nights in hotel rooms, and he knew how much I missed them all, how empty I felt inside. He kept trying to fill it with God, or‘Wait until you are qualified, it’ll all be different then.’ Eventually he gave in and said he would ask Mummy. Mummy said she’d have to talk it over with my uncle.

  What if they didn’t want me? But they did and it was all agreed. The money Brendan was paying Marie and Peter to look after me would now be paid to Mummy. A new bed was bought and arrangements were made.

  On my first day back Mummy took me aside and said:‘I know he won’t, but if ever he does anything to you again, you make sure you tell me, okay?’ I nodded.‘Now, that’s the last we’ll mention about all that stuff, okay? The past is the past. Forgive and forget; that’s my motto. Let bygones be bygones.’ And that was the first and last time we ever spoke of it.

  Although I longed to be back as part of the family, it was hard to suddenly be amongst people who shouted and swore after years of people who had been calm and quiet and considerate to one another. Quickly all the emotions from the past resurfaced, and soon became overwhelming. But I couldn’t tell anyone. When it got too bad, I retreated into books, which distanced me further from the rest of the family because none of them read for pleasure or studied for exams. I was seen as an oddity for it and ridiculed.‘Anya’s trying to be different again, thinking she’s better than the rest of us.’

  Learning came easily to me and I did well at school, but deep down my only real ambition was to be part of my family. All I wanted was to be accepted by them all, to fit in and have a family of my own again. So I sat on the same settee as my uncle and watched news items or programmes that referred to some form of child abuse and didn’t blink. I just sat there trying not to move a muscle, keeping my breathing shallow while he drank beer and chewed peanuts noisily, making sounds or movements to draw attention to himself. Sometimes I thought I saw a smile on his lips, or that look in his eyes I’d seen in the car park behind the police station that day. Both of us knew that I hadn’t forgotten, even if I tried to give the impression I had, and only the two of us knew the full horror of what had gone on over those years.

  After a couple of months I found myself back in the role of scapegoat, in amongst the chaos of their arguments and his drunkenness, repeatedly told that I wasn’t wanted again, that I was‘out of here’. The novelty of having an older teenage sister in the house soon wore off for Stella, and they all started telling me I was their slave, laughing that they had only wanted me back to do the housework. The sarcasm and hostility and put-downs restarted. I had never heard anybody speak like that in the years I’d been away and it was shocking.

  When I lost my small, pink five-year diary from boarding school, with its little gold key and all my school friends’ addresses in the back, I felt I had lost my last connection with that time. My memories of school began to blur and it soon seemed like another lifetime ago. By contrast, everything that had happened before I was sent away sharpened and came back into focus.

  One boiling hot day that summer, the girls were out in their swimming costumes in the garden. There had been a huge drunken row the night before and Mummy and I were in the kitchen getting the lunch ready. Out of the long kitchen window we watched the girls squirming in delight as my uncle jetted them with cold water from t
he hose, hopping from foot to foot screaming, their hair dripping, their swimming costumes stuck to their slim, straight bodies.

  Suddenly I was embarrassed. I wanted them to cover up, to get away from him. I knew he had learned his lesson, and wouldn’t ever do anything like that again—especially to Stella and Jennifer—but I didn’t know where to look. I wasn’t ready for the feeling of horror that came up. I looked away. Not daring to look at Mummy I beat the stuffing smooth, trying to ignore the hot sharp pain tangled in my stomach. The mocking look in his eye when he came in to get a beer shocked me. I was sure he knew what I was thinking.

  Soon I was back into a routine of housework and ironing. The only place I could do my homework in the evenings was the kitchen table, so if I wanted it cleared after dinner I had to do it myself. I’d do all the washing-up first while they all just got up, leaving their plates on the table, and went off to the other room to watch TV. I felt stunned after the serenity of those years away but at least I was still there, still one of them, even though I was the cause of most of the arguing again.

  I agreed with things just to avoid confrontation, eager to please, wanting to do anything to fit in and be one of them. I threw myself into homework at night until my uncle started turning off the light in the kitchen, not letting me finish. I would take it under the bed covers with a torch, but the girls would call him to get me to turn it off.

  ‘Dad! Tell Anya…’ was all they had to say, and I would feel a pain tightening across the back of my head as I switched it off and dropped my book to the floor, still as terrified of him as I’d been as a little girl.

  I knew I’d never be accepted as myself and be able to fit in. When the arguments got more frequent and more and more violent again I said I wanted to do my A levels in a year, to make up for the year I was behind because of the change of schools. I asked Brendan if I could do them at a private tutorial college on the other side of London because it was the only place you could do A levels in a year. I knew Brendan would agree and wouldn’t let me travel all that way every day when I could be studying. He came over and rented me a flat close to the college. It was the perfect excuse to leave home again, bringing my big blue school trunk back up out of the cellar and getting a taxi on my own after everyone went off to work and school.