by Toni Maguire
Chapter 30
I had just turned eight when my mother told me that she was pregnant. She was, I could see straight away, simply overjoyed at the thought and so was I. Whether it turned out to be a brother or a sister, I didn’t mind. I knew with a wave of excitement that I would not be separated from paying any attention to this new arrival. He or she would be in our home and there would be no stopping me seeing my sibling every day.
‘Are you happy for me, Emily?’ she asked and my answer was a wide grin and several enthusiastic nods.
Happy for her? Oh, I was simply overjoyed for both of us – I so wanted a little brother or sister!
For the first time in a long while our smiles were shared. I had never seen her look so happy, not even on her wedding day.
It was after she told me this news that my mum and I became almost close. If I have any good memories of my childhood after Carl came into our lives, it was during those months leading up to my sister’s arrival in the world.
After her first scan, Mum brought home a funny-looking picture of something that looked to my eyes like a tadpole. Of course, to her it looked like her precious baby, who she could hardly wait to meet. She pointed out where the head, arms and feet were, before telling me that the little tadpole was a girl.
‘Another daughter,’ she said proudly, ‘and we’re going to call her Maria.’
I felt totally thrilled that I was going to have a sister, a little person I could love and who would love me back.
If my mother was glowing with happiness then I was simply over the moon. For the first time since my dad left, I felt included in her life. Especially as she was happy to chat to me about the baby’s progress. I almost danced around the flat with joy after she had shared that news with me. For once nothing I did seemed to annoy her. I have to say too that Carl seemed a different man. Not only was he even more attentive to Mum, but he seemed almost placid. No more outbursts of temper and for the next few months, there was peace and tranquillity in the house.
Or more to the point, he did not hit my mother, or throw her against a wall or place his hands tightly around her neck. He even left me alone, most of the time. There were some evenings when she was resting when he demanded we shower together and I had to put up with him rubbing the whole of my body down and not always through the towel either. Slaps on the legs to remind me just who was in charge of the household continued, but at least that temper of his seemed to be under control.
* * *
One of my favourite memories is an evening when Carl was out and my mother let me feel the baby move: ‘Come here, love,’ she said with a smile and hardly believing my ears, I scuttled over to sit beside her on the settee. ‘She’s kicking away all right, my active little girl! Here, give me your hand and you can feel her for yourself,’ and taking my hand firmly in hers, she placed it on her stomach. At that moment, as we both felt those tiny ripples of movement under our hands, I saw my mother was incandescent with joy and excitement.
‘Can you feel her?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I whispered, almost dizzy as goose bumps raised up on my arms.
The magical spell was broken when I heard the door open and Carl’s voice booming out, though not even he could spoil how I felt.
That night, I went to bed, rolling her name over in my mind, and as I fell asleep, my last thought was how much I was looking forward to meeting Maria.
Chapter 31
I assumed that because Carl and my mother were just so happy about the baby, they would both be pleased that I was as well.
That’ll teach me to make assumptions.
There was no way my stepfather, as he insisted referring to himself as, wanted Mum and I to become so friendly. She might not have seen the scowl on his face when he walked in and saw us sitting together, before he quickly replaced it with a smile, but I had. I had seen how he paused just for a moment when he saw our joined hands resting on her stomach. That initial expression gave away his anger at seeing us sitting so close together. I heard Fear muttering, Look out, he’s going to lose it!
The one thing that must have stopped him finding something to explode about was that he didn’t want to upset Mum during her pregnancy. After all, she was in her thirties then, which meant she was not considered a young mother and that in itself could cause complications, so raised fists and loud shouts were out of the question even for Carl. Knowing that the circumstances made his rage impotent gave me a feeling of triumph, although I was careful not to let that show on my face. Mind you, I should have worked out that him having to control his temper was only a temporary occurrence. But then my head was just full of meeting Maria, not worrying about him – another one of my really big mistakes.
‘Your mum says you can’t wait to meet your new little sister,’ he said in the morning when I was getting my breakfast of cereal and juice. ‘So, is that right? Are you looking forward to having a baby in our home?’
‘Oh, yes!’ I said, beaming up at him.
I thought he would have been pleased at my response but the mocking smile he gave me in return made my stomach clench as I realised he clearly wasn’t.
‘Wonderful, isn’t it, that your mother’s carrying my child! I don’t expect you thought that would happen, did you?’
Another of his rhetoric questions where he had no interest in the answer, just giving me his cold fish stare every time he repeated that question, which he did at every opportunity.
‘Well, not quite so soon,’ was the answer that I could have given, but didn’t. After all, only a few weeks had gone by since the wedding, when Mum confided in me that she was pregnant. I sensed, after the scan when I was told it was a girl, that he was still annoyed. All the glee and pride he felt about becoming a father failed to stop him taunting me.
‘So, now you will soon have two baby sisters to play with, won’t you?’ he said mockingly when it was the weekend I was to visit Dad.
I hadn’t told them about Lily not wanting me to hold Crystal but somehow it seemed he knew. Maybe because I didn’t talk about her. When I refused to take the bait, smiled and replied yes, a flash of annoyance flickered across his face.
A small victory, I knew, but I was learning to enjoy them.
‘Just remember, if it hadn’t been for that court case to get him to support you, you wouldn’t be seeing your dad or his family.’
It seemed nothing made my stepfather happier than repeating such unpleasant statements. I could see the enjoyment in his eyes when I flinched. Unfortunately for me, he succeeded with that next accusation in placing a question in my mind – a question that I could not get rid of. Once he had made sure that comment had sunk in, he would give me what he considered was a warm, friendly smile.
‘Remember, we are the ones who care for you, Emily. We buy your clothes and feed you – he doesn’t. And since your father has obeyed the Court and come back into your life, has he ever bought you anything?’
I thought it better not to mention the ice cream and cakes, so I just shook my head.
‘Thought not,’ he said triumphantly and that smug smile of his told me he was pleased he had caused me some emotional discomfort.
Not that he was about to let it go at that – he must have really wanted me to feel unloved all right.
‘You know, he wasn’t just told he had to spend time with you at the court case, don’t you? There were other conditions too. Do you know what they are?’
No, I didn’t and of course he knew it. With a sinking feeling, I wondered what he was going to say next.
‘I’ll tell you then,’ he continued. ‘He was told that as you are his daughter, he has to help provide for you, pay money into your mother’s bank account every week. Not that we wanted it for ourselves, I don’t want you to think that. You know I look upon you as my daughter, don’t you?’
I knew no such thing, which did not stop me nodding my head in agreement instead of speaking.
Nodding was not exactly the same as telling a lie, was i
t?
‘Our plan,’ he told me, ‘was to put it into a savings account for you. Set you up when you get to school-leaving age. We wanted you to have enough money to buy yourself a nice little flat, that was our plan. Only one thing missing for us to go ahead with that. Guess what it is?’
I just looked helplessly at him, knowing by his smug tone what was coming.
‘His payments, that’s what. Shows what he thinks of you, doesn’t it?’
I wanted to put my hands over my ears and block his voice out, but he would only have caught hold of them and pulled them down. No, it was better to try and stop them entering my mind. I didn’t want to believe what he was saying, but then why would he lie? Hadn’t he told me so many times that lying was a sin? The adult me now realises that he didn’t want me to trust anyone enough to confide in them, but that didn’t stop the child me wondering about it for a long time.
Many years later I found out the truth before I went to uni. I finally plucked up enough courage to ask Dad about it and saw the look of anger combined with grief when I told him what Carl had said.
‘What?! You believed that for all these years?’ he said sadly.
Before my dad even showed me the receipts of all the payments he had made during that time, I knew Carl had lied. I think I had known all along, but still there was always that niggling doubt.
‘That paid for all your clothes and any presents they gave you, I suppose,’ he told me. And I felt his sadness at the huge rift between us that my stepfather had orchestrated.
On the other hand, maybe there were other reasons I was never quite sure if I believed Carl or not. There was no doubt that until I was a teenager, Lily just wished I would disappear into thin air. She had started complaining about the bedroom I slept in as soon as Crystal was born.
‘It’s all right, her having that room while Crystal is still a baby,’ I heard her saying to Dad. ‘But what about in a few months’ time? She can’t sleep in our room for ever, so she will need a room for herself, won’t she?’
‘Leave it, will you, Lily! Let’s wait until she does, shall we?’ my father said tiredly, before he did what he had always done when my mother nagged him – picked up his newspaper and buried his head in it. The glare she gave him was almost strong enough to scorch the pages.
Of course, what I had really wanted to hear him say was how important I was to him; that the room would be big enough for two children to share and she should stop making a fuss. Just some words to that effect might have reassured me. But the end result was that she got her way and I was relegated to a folding bed in the dining room – just another sign that made me feel unwanted and that fertilised the doubts Carl had planted.
I wonder if he thought, as I did, that she should have been grateful to me? After all, if I had not spilt the beans, she would not be living with the man she had chased after for so long. Not to mention this time she had produced a baby where the father’s name was on the birth certificate. I remember how upset her son Paul was when he found his birth certificate and saw that ‘father unknown’ was where the father’s name should have been.
‘I can’t believe she didn’t know his name, can you?’ he had asked me, his face pale with shock.
The answer to that was probably yes. Though what I said instead was maybe he had asked her not to put his name on the certificate. I had learnt that sometimes little white lies are permissible, especially if they are told to protect someone’s feelings.
Whatever I thought Lily should have felt, there was no doubt that gratitude did not play any part in it. She complained about my not liking certain colours of food on my plate and repeatedly asked why I could not just eat like everyone else – her son had to, didn’t he? But then she said, without caring that I was within earshot, that she was not the only one who thought I was odd and that I made them all feel uncomfortable.
To be fair, my dad did try a couple of times to say that my eating quirks were hardly a problem.
‘So, it’s OK for you to say that, you’re not the one who does the cooking, are you?’
There was no answer to that, just an awkward silence at the table that prevailed while we finished our meal.
Although Lily and I barely tolerated each other, I still wanted to escape my home and spend weekends there. After all, most of the time Paul and I were upstairs playing board games in his room. Looking back, I can see how even before the baby was born, Lily had little time for him. When I scroll through the years to a time I have tried to remove from my memories, I can still see my stepbrother Paul so clearly – a gangly, dark-haired boy with bony knees and elbows, an earnest freckled face and a smile that made his dark green eyes crinkle. Such an empathetic little boy! He understood how I felt about Lily’s lack of affection for me and did his best to distract me from it by telling a funny story, or daring me to beat him at a new board game. I think now, with Lily giving so much attention to her new daughter, he might have felt as I did: unwanted and lonely.
As I was not allowed to bring home any school friends – ‘They should be doing their homework and not stop you doing yours’ – I was grateful to have Paul as a friend. Common sense told me not to talk too much about him at home though. When his name was mentioned by Carl or my mother, I just shrugged and said, ‘He’s all right, I suppose.’
Before Crystal arrived, I was so looking forward to having a new sibling. Then once she did, Lily shattered those little girl dreams of mine.
Did my father not know how upset I was when I was never allowed to hold her?
Would I even be allowed to play with her when she was older?
It’s not a question I asked him when I was leaving, but it all added up to the reason I did not entirely disbelieve Carl.
Chapter 32
When my mother’s bulge was so large that she found it uncomfortable sitting, she tried lying down on the settee. Dark rings circled her eyes, due, she told me, to lack of sleep – ‘Your sister just won’t stay still, she must be getting impatient to meet us,’ she said with a laugh. ‘I’m no sooner dozing off than she gives me a kick to let me know she’s still awake.’
It was around that time that Gran, knowing Mum was tired, began turning up at weekends with homemade cakes and casseroles. Often my aunts came as well, something that I knew annoyed Carl immensely, as did seeing all the gifts the family kept sending. Little pink outfits and lacy booties seemed to be everywhere. Often, because Mum was working, Gran would meet me at the school gates and walk home with me. Although I still missed going to her house after school, our time together on the journey home did make up for it a little.
* * *
During those last few weeks, my stepdad’s chest was puffed up with pride as he bounced around with more energy than I had ever seen before. Impregnating Mum must have made him feel like a real man. Not only did he escort her when she went for her scans, he even went with her to all those prenatal classes as well.
I just can’t imagine him joining in those classes though. You know, the ones where loving partners sit behind, their arms holding bulky bodies? The ones where women are shown the correct way to breathe and their partners encourage them – yes, those classes.
Let’s just say I seriously doubted it.
* * *
It was just over a week before the due date. My mother and I were ticking off the days on the calendar, both of us excited about meeting the new arrival.
To my delight, it was arranged for me to stay at my grandmother’s during the week before the baby was due. I’m sure, had there been another choice, Carl would have taken it. But if my mother had to be rushed into hospital even he could not leave me in the house alone for an indefinite period. Or rather, he would not want the family to know he had. Not when Gran had made her offer of me staying with her until Mum brought baby Maria home. However much I was looking forward to meeting my sister, I relished the thought of having that time with my family.
It was Carl who drove me over on the Saturday.
&n
bsp; ‘Might as well get you settled in,’ was all he said to me when he placed my suitcase in the car.
My mother was resting, but nervous at him not being home was the excuse he gave Gran for not stopping, though a charming smile was flashed as he told her how much he and Betty appreciated her help – ‘Don’t know what we would have done without you,’ he added.
Not exactly the sentiment I had heard him express after her visits.
Before he turned around and made his fast exit, he handed over my case and a bag of what he said would be some useful extras for the house. Bending down, he gave me a kiss on the cheek, brushed his fingers lightly on my cheek so I could feel each of those rings against my skin and whispered to me to be good. Then using the cringy ‘sweetie’ word, he straightened up, patted me on the head and walked to his car.
Lunch with the family followed, as did kicking a ball around with my cousin Ben and being made a fuss of by everyone. No one commented on my eating, or my twisting my hair round my fingers – or anything else for that matter. Instead, they just let me know how happy they were to have me there with them.
Questions were asked about whether I was looking forward to meeting my sister but very little was said about either my mother or Carl, though funnily enough, my father’s name came up more than once.
‘Are you enjoying spending time with him?’ I was asked. I told them I was and then filled them in about him often taking me out for cakes and ice cream. When I told them that, I noticed them glancing at each other. I think they’d worked out this was not something Carl or my mother ever did with me. As I seldom did anything interesting on those weekends when they made an excuse not to join the family, I was relieved they did not ask me about them – I guess they all knew it was just that Carl didn’t want to come.
I’m sure too they could all see just how happy and relaxed I was to be with them. Some of my old confidence had returned and without being aware of Carl watching my every move, I found myself chatting away non-stop. Also, I wasn’t dreading the phone ringing to summon me home. I was where I was happy to be and not just for a couple of hours either, but a whole week or even longer.