by Bruno Noble
Mum said, ‘I don’t know.’
I sat on the top step. Through the banisters, I could see, in the front room below, the edge of a packing case and, on a grubby magnolia wall and on the worn wooden floors, Mum’s and Wanda’s shadows. Wanda’s shadow moved closer to Mum’s.
‘You won’t be going back to him this time,’ said Wanda.
‘No,’ said Mum. ‘Not this time.’
Wanda’s long-fingered shadow patted Mum’s on a distended, pointed knee.
‘Last time, it was…’ Mum sighed. ‘Different. Sherah was just a baby.’
Somewhere, somehow, someone had turned life’s large volume knob up. Cries and the sound of car engines reached me through the open window and the chug-a-chug of a train picking up speed to Putney Bridge blended with the whoosh of the rush of blood from my head as I stood. I snapshot saw rather than counted sixteen passengers standing in the penultimate carriage and six in the last before I fell. Relaxed, I folded and unfolded down the stairs. My head met a cardboard box of soft furnishings destined for a bedroom.
Terrified, panic-stricken, solicitous Mum and Wanda fussed over me as, upside down, I looked up two pairs of nostrils above two double chins. Their hair as they bent over me and their hands as they searched for a grip around my arms and back tickled my cheeks and my armpits.
‘I only wanted to know,’ I said to Wanda, ‘how you would like me to arrange your books.’
Isabella
It was a winter of unusually misty and monochrome days in which I would confuse the fug in my mind with the fog in the town, in which the difficulty I had in seeing to the end of my street and my inability to recall events with much clarity came together in a vague but persistent picture of greys and a sentiment of perplexity. Cosmo and I spent nights with the Baldocks and were shepherded along Oxford’s wet and pea-souper streets during the day by Mrs Baldock or Mrs McKey to interviews with the police, social services, psychologists and doctors. Clothes were fetched for us from home. We received visits at the Baldocks’ house, where adults conferred behind closed doors and made telephone calls from the hallway to – I knew, because I could hear them despite the hushed tones – our relatives, after which they would put the receiver down with a sigh and a disbelieving shake of the head. Cosmo and I were interviewed, together sometimes, alone at others. He found it all extremely difficult and was maddened by his inability to communicate until someone had the idea of presenting him with dolls again and with pen and paper so that he might draw.
To the astonishment of some people, Cosmo asked for Papa a lot. I understood, though, and would hug him as he clung to me. I felt curiously detached from it all, volunteering little information and answering questions economically, stopping answering them altogether when some clever clogs of a policeman suggested that Mama had been complicit in Papa’s delinquency. Although it was never said to me explicitly, I realised with horror that Papa was blaming Mama for the abuse of his children and that it was he who had encouraged that particular line of questioning. This only added to the rage of conflicting emotions in me. I felt the confusion of loving Papa because I didn’t know how not to, and yet hating him for his humiliation of his children and for slurring our loving Mama posthumously. Had it not been for Cosmo and for Mama’s death, which had thrust a sister’s responsibility upon me, I don’t think I would have led Cosmo to expose Papa. I forced myself to confront the reprehensible and crazy idea that, at some outrageous, deep level, I resented Papa’s rejection that had followed once my periods had begun. I had wrestled with this shameful notion and faced it down in the mirror but, lacking the courage to reach a definitive answer, had told myself that it was best to do the right thing even though it may, in very small part, have been motivated by the wrong reason. In the aftermath of my exploitation by Papa, of Mama’s dying, of my monthly cycles commencing and, most recently, of this abrupt disintegration of what had once been a family, I felt my judgement failing me at every turn and considered anything possible. No matter how much I reasoned, Papa’s treatment of me remained tied to the belief that he had administered just punishment for my bed-wetting – no matter that I may have never wet the bed. For some indefinable reason, I felt that I had deserved his chastisement and I had even wondered, as I had grown older, if I hadn’t in some way asked for his physical attention even though I knew I hadn’t.
Cosmo and I didn’t see Papa, but it was clear from the things that the police and social workers said that the police had had numerous meetings and conversations with him. On occasion, the adults would speak to each other as though neither Cosmo nor I were in the room, and so I learnt certain things before we were told them formally – sometimes days later – and other things I was surprised never to be told directly at all.
After numerous consultations with speech therapists and examinations by doctors, Cosmo became the subject of a dispute. One doctor advised that he would require reconstructive oropharyngeal surgery, which meant that he would have to submit to several operations over a number of years to repair damage to his throat and palate that had occurred as a consequence of the repeated insertions of foreign objects into his mouth from an early age. The speech therapists assigned to Cosmo rubbished the notion.
We were told that we would be placed in a foster home, and were given the opportunity of meeting our foster parents before we actually moved in; a stage we never reached that day, because Cosmo, to whom it had been explained that the new man he was about to meet was to be his new father, had, eager to please, immediately tried to undo the man’s belt buckle and trouser fly. The man and his wife had become very embarrassed and angry at social services for not having been given Cosmo’s and my full histories. Much to the mortification of the social workers who had been assigned to our care, it was another month before we said tearful goodbyes and heartfelt thank-yous to the Baldocks.
*
Cosmo and I were welcomed into the Iffley home of Sonia and Gregor Bobeckyj, motivated to foster children despite having two of their own by the example set by, they said, the many European families who had sheltered Mr Bobeckyj; having seen his parents killed, he had made his way from Poland to England immediately after the Second World War. ‘Just as we children of the war formed the peace of today, so the children of today will form the Europe of tomorrow,’ he would say as Mrs Bobeckyj piled steaming pie and vegetables on our plates. Incapable of consuming the large helpings we were presented with, Cosmo and I would exchange guilt-ridden looks until Mrs Bobeckyj accepted that neither of us would eat as much as her son, Tomasz, who was a year younger than me, and her daughter, Zuzanna, who was a year older than Cosmo. Cosmo ate little for good reason: he was subjected to a number of operations on his mouth in the five years we stayed with the Bobeckyjs and, consequently, there were periods in which it was uncomfortable for him to consume solid food. Our hearts went out to him and we were full of admiration at the resolve with which he bore pain; but he and we could hear the benefits of the operations and the speech therapy he received, as his speech improved to the point at which, in short exchanges at least, no stranger would have guessed that he had a speech impediment. Of course, Cosmo had his coping tactics: his favourite words and a slight stammer were deployed to give the impression that he was thinking hard and weighing his words carefully.
My reasons for eating little were more psychological than physical, a truth I would only confront when awake in bed, when everyone else in the house, to the extent that I could tell, was asleep. The social worker and psychologist assigned to me had made things worse rather than better. Hampson Lafontaine was a well-meaning young woman who spoke with a plum in her mouth and always arrived with a basket of fruit for Cosmo and me. She set about her job as though it were a blend of charity work and research for a thesis. Armed with books that she would remove from a tote bag and leaf through prior to interviews, she would ask me leading questions or try to place words in my mouth that, I assumed, would conform to whichever theory was the subject of the books she’d been readin
g. She would sigh and consider me pityingly before consulting a book and dolefully asking her colleague, ‘May I?’
Christian Johnston would bow his head, his hair falling forward, as though acknowledging his colleague’s natural born right to lead.
‘Did he tell you that you wouldn’t be believed if you told?’ asked Miss Lafontaine, conspiratorially,
‘No,’ I said.
‘Did he tell you that he’d hurt you if you told?’ she asked me in hushed tones.
‘No.’
‘What did he tell you?’ she asked exasperatedly.
‘That he was sorry.’
Miss Lafontaine looked lost for a moment. ‘Did he tell you that you enjoyed it?’ she asked with an uncomfortable mix of cunning and desperation.
‘No.’
‘Well, for goodness’ sake! Why didn’t you tell anyone?’ Miss Lafontaine flung herself back in her comfortable chair.
I wanted to say that I had, eventually, in a sense; but instead said nothing.
Mr Johnston leant forward and parted his long, lank, greasy hair, which formed brackets either side of a face punctuated by the scars of childhood acne and an exclamation mark of a pursed mouth and plumb-line nose. ‘And did you enjoy it?’ he asked quietly.
‘No!’
‘It’s all right, you know.’
‘But I didn’t.’
‘You mustn’t feel ashamed.’
‘I don’t.’
‘You mustn’t feel’ – and here he sniggered – ‘dirty.’
It had never occurred to me to feel dirty – dirtied, yes, but not dirty.
‘You don’t have to be so defensive,’ said Mr Johnston.
It was hard to say that I wasn’t without appearing so.
‘It wasn’t your fault. Unless.’
‘Unless what?’
Miss Lafontaine placed her hand on Mr Johnston’s arm and pulled him back. She interrogated the open book on her lap with a long fingernail and said to him quietly, ‘You are at risk of confusing a perceived truth with an empirical truth. Remember, as far as the patient is concerned, only the perceived truth matters.’ Louder, to me, she said, ‘You’ve done nothing wrong.’ She enunciated very clearly.
That was a conclusion I had reached for myself.
Mr Johnston appeared peeved and, lowering his head, disappeared behind the curtains of his hair.
It took Miss Lafontaine’s and Mr Johnston’s inept interrogations to force me to confront my feelings and face the extent to which things had happened around and to me that I had had no say over. The realisation of my former powerlessness, combined with a large degree of self-reproach for my slowness in reaching that awareness, sent me reeling and spinning as I lay on my back in bed; neither patterned wallpaper nor frilly bedspread and bedside lampshade arrested my dizzying descent into a sleep in which I dreamt of control and of the lack of it, of its loss and regaining.
Sharon
I sat cross-legged in the park in the last days of the summer holiday in shorts, halter top and trainers.
A recurring daydream was of a hole immediately before me that, somehow, has my shape. Leaning and peering in, I see nothing, just browns and greys that turn to black. I feel a tremor beneath my feet and fall back from the edge of the earthy rim as that hole that is me climbs out of itself, liberates itself from its substrata of stone, clay, sand and pebbles and assumes a form through which the wind and the light pass without obstruction. I want to comfort it and it me and we stumble and fall into each other.
‘What are you hugging yourself for?’ asked Dad, standing unknowingly at the very edge of the hole. ‘It’s not cold.’ He hit the outstretched palm of one hand with his tennis racquet. ‘Where’s Seamus?’
Dad’s face was against the light but I could tell from his tone that he knew I didn’t know, so I said nothing but looked around me and at the milling, funning children on swings and slides.
‘Yes,’ said Dad gleefully, tapping the soles of his tennis shoes with his tennis racquet. ‘You’ve no idea, have you?’ He paused and when I said nothing he added, bored, businesslike and sarcastic in succession, ‘I came to tell you that he’s gone with Mum and Sherah to buy new school uniforms. To Kingston. Just in case you worried for him and thought of looking for him.’
Seamus was going to a new school, as was Sherah – to a crammer, in order to resit her exams. I looked up, resisting my desire to beg for a new uniform too, intent on disappointing Dad. The breeze picked up and I saw him through strands of my hair, as if on old, striated film, and he seemed as irrelevant and unconnected to me as the film stars in the black and white films he and Mum sometimes fell asleep to.
‘You’re okay, though, aren’t you?’ he said hopping from one foot to the next in exercise. ‘You can wear Sherah’s old uniform. It’ll fit, won’t it?’ Dad knew that I hated living in hand-me-down clothes that were the fashion of some three years previously, that Sherah had frayed, stretched or discoloured. ‘Won’t it?’ he insisted, testing the strings of his tennis racquet.
The goblins and elves of my parents’ coming separation and my sister’s antipathy lurked in trees and bushes, behind the children who swung to and fro and climbed up and slid down. They were too quick and cunning for me to see them out of anything but the corner of my eyes.
Isabella
No matter the superficial changes I imposed on my outer appearance, I remained a young girl, a teenager, and Tomasz was a young boy and a teenager too. I grew thin and tall and confident with my new sense of control and self-esteem; only recently made aware that I had been powerless, I stopped feeling it. As I ate less and more fastidiously, my stomach and my belly shrank to the same extent that my breasts swelled and, as my cheeks hollowed, my cheekbones acquired greater prominence. Despite what Papa had subjected me to, I was a young woman, had become one, grown into one with the physical appetites of one; my wings had dried and the time had come to show them off. Tomasz noticed it and I noticed him and his noticing it: the attraction was mutual.
I sought to justify my nascent sexual appetite to myself intellectually, by understanding my feelings in terms of the natural chemical changes a young woman goes through (as explained by Miss Lafontaine) and viscerally, more guiltily and yet pleasurably, by considering it a consequence of the manner in which I had been used and humiliated: having been used by men, I would use men in return, get my own back, get my power back. Sexual predation would be my way of rising above my personal history, of regaining control. And yet, such affirmative thinking only took me so far, so far as to fool around with Tomasz, to feed his infatuation, to tease and to flirt, to deliver parcels of promise. I was like an advent calendar to Tomasz but opening windows over weeks rather than days and, while opening some, closing others – to his frustration and yet secret delight.
It wasn’t just Tomasz who noticed my transfiguration into palpitating womanhood but Mr and Mrs Bobeckyj too or, to be more precise, Mrs Bobeckyj who noticed her son and her husband noticing it, and decided to do something about it; though whether to safeguard her son’s relative innocence or her husband’s constancy, I was uncertain. I read the decision in her eyes on my 16th birthday when both father and son kissed me too close to the mouth and that little too long and held me that little longer than propriety allowed on the occasion of wishing someone many happy returns of the day, after which Miss Lafontaine and Mr Johnston paid me three visits in a fortnight, during the last of which they suggested I move to a sheltered home for older girls in Littlemore, just south of Iffley. I had crossed from north to south Oxford already and told myself that this was London exercising its inexorable pull, and so assented without objection. The move had been sold to me as something that would be good for me and good for Cosmo, as a boy of his age would replace me in the Bobeckyj household. Cosmo and I were close, as brother and sister, but our age gap and gender difference was at its widest in adolescence and I was neither his confidante nor even his close friend, our secret history having left a tart taste in our mouths
and become unmentionable. Besides, Mrs Bobeckyj had become the mother figure for him, a role I had been relieved to relinquish to her, and he was discovering academic excellence at school – what with the confidence that accompanied the improvements in his speech – and great skill as an artist.
Sharon
In RE we learnt about Christianity, Islam and Judaism. ‘There’s more than one way to skin a cat, even if it’s only a Cheshire cat,’ said Dad. ‘Protestant or Catholic, Sunni or Shia, Ashkenazim or Sephardim, take your pick. Double cream, full fat, semi-skimmed or skimmed, why not try goats’ milk? You can have one one week and another the next.’
Mum glared at Dad in rebuke.
‘Why not? I know people who’ve done just that. You know, chop and change, duck and dive.’ Dad bobbed his head like a chicken when he said that. He claimed to be Church of England but when pressed as to why he never practised on a Sunday and went to play tennis instead, he could only muster a weak, ‘What I need to practise is my tennis serve,’ which in of itself was quite true.
*
We decorated the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve, a Polish tradition that Dad was happy to follow because he could wait until the very last minute before selecting an overstocked Christmas tree supplier and haggling aggressively. At Dad’s insistence, we had our Christmas meal on Christmas Day rather than on Christmas Eve. ‘That’s the way we do it in our family. Turkey and a vinorosso. No pierogi, no fish and vodka, thank you very much,’ was said to endear himself to Nonna, Mum’s Italian mother.