Silent Child

by Toni Maguire

  ‘The land’ being an overgrown garden at the front and when later I went out to explore what was at the back of the house, I found a vegetable garden where not much looked alive. However great the building that resembled an outhouse more than a home might look in the future, it certainly did not look it then. Things did not improve either when Carl unlocked the door with the largest key I had ever seen and we all walked into a small, dark hall. Even the furniture delivery men looked slightly aghast at the amount of grime and dust we saw in each room we walked into as Carl showed them where to put everything. The sitting room was now termed ‘the lounge’, I noticed, while ‘my study’ was the title given to a very small box room. And I really don’t want to dwell on how awful the kitchen was – my shoes just about stuck to the floor.

  The moment the delivery men had gone, out came scrubbing brushes, disinfectant and bleach. Gallons of disinfectant and bleach were poured into the toilets and wiped over the bathrooms before we tackled that kitchen, which took us the entire day.

  ‘Think the pigs must have lived in here,’ my mother muttered as she emptied yet another bucket full of greasy water.

  ‘It was rented out for a while,’ was Carl’s only concession when asked how it had got into such a state.

  Mum didn’t mention that it would have been a very good idea to have got a team of cleaners in before we moved there, nor did he offer any explanation as to why he hadn’t.

  I was told to put my things in a small room at the back of the house. This, he told me, was where I would sleep until he had finished smartening the rest of the house up. The only good thing about it, I thought, was at least I might not hear their rows as the room was the furthest away from them.

  My mother managed to produce a couple of scrappy meals during the day and then it was bedtime. Going to my room, even though it was an uncarpeted, airless place that smelt of damp, was still a relief.

  Dear Diary

  I don’t like it here. The house is so ugly and dark. Mum’s not happy either. And we are both tired out from cleaning. I helped as best as I could, but it still looks horrid. And I miss everyone so much.

  Chapter 44

  I have said that my daughter is wired up a little differently, a little more differently than I was at her age. What I, my close friends, my partner and in-laws see is a loving, lively little girl.

  What other children see is someone who is not the same as them.

  And it’s that difference that invites bullying from her peers.

  I can’t explain that she should ignore the ones who jeer at her. Nor can I get through to her what it is she does that appears to encourage them. She simply wouldn’t understand and would probably think I was angry. Maybe if she looked different, the parents would sit down and explain to their children that we are not all the same and that they should be kind to those who are not like them. But Sonia looks like any other five-year-old – a bright, alive little face, a wide smile and boundless energy.

  She so wants the other children to play with her. It just about breaks my heart when I see her gaze longingly at groups of children laughing and giggling together. I know she’s hoping that one of them will walk over and invite her to join them in their games.

  This is something that never happens, though.

  I’m aware of the reasons that they turn their backs on her. Her wanting to be liked makes her mimic them. If they laugh, she laughs too; if one falls over and cries, she does as well, and if they scream out when high on a swing, she opens her mouth wide to release the same sound, even though her feet are still firmly on the ground. Already forming their herd instinct, the others huddle together to cast out the one they see as being different. Should she try and approach them, at best they turn their backs; at worst, they push her away and shout aggressively.

  It’s not the first time when I have gone to collect her from school that I have found her sobbing. Yesterday, the teacher had not brought her out to meet me, which always meant something was wrong.

  Her eyes were still wet with tears when I walked into the classroom. She was sitting by her teacher, a kind young woman who had her arm around her. I bent down and gave her a cuddle while I listened to another story of her being mocked.

  Of course, like any mother, I felt the urge to march up to those bullies and lash out at them and not only with words. Instead, I kept her hand tucked in mine as I took her home.

  Her sister, still wobbly on her feet, tottered over and put her arms around her. Sonia smiled up at me then, everything forgotten – she was back in the place where she knew she was loved. Watching them together puts a smile of contentment on my face. It also springs open another drawer, the one labelled ‘First Day at My New School’.

  * * *

  The following day, Mum took me to the new school. Carl had already left for work so there was no chance of him giving us a lift. Instead, we walked up that lane and caught a bus. Doubtless once she met the Head, my mother would manage to talk about my clumsiness, as well as point out some of my issues with food and a few other little things. In other words, make sure the school knew I wasn’t quite normal right from the start, just in case they didn’t notice.

  ‘Mind you pay attention on the way,’ Carl had said the night before. ‘Then you’ll be able to find your way home, won’t you?’ I could tell by the offhand manner he mentioned it that he was not particularly concerned about me getting lost.

  ‘Yes,’ was initially all I could muster, not, ‘Oh, I’ll just draw a map in my head on the way in and refer to it when I come back.’ Not something that would make a good start to the day, for he always grew angry when he refused to accept that there were some things I could do that he was incapable of. ‘I’ll write down a couple of the road signs,’ I added none too nonchalantly, but acting the part he liked.

  A child who didn’t know that much and had to turn to her stepfather for help.

  Mum, I noticed that morning, had actually put on a little make-up, washed her bobbed blonde hair and sorted out a pretty deep-blue woollen dress to wear under her stone-coloured mac. I was a split second away from telling her she looked pretty when, without drawing breath, she told me to finish my breakfast, that she had a lot of work to do and walking me to school was a one-off – I’d better pay attention on the journey because she wasn’t going to make the trip twice, did I understand?

  My compliment disappeared from the tip of my tongue almost as quickly as it had appeared.

  The first sight of the school, yet another grey stone building behind iron railings, made me feel completely lost. The playground was already teeming with children who clearly all knew each other. Outside the gates, a group of women, who must have met at the school gate twice a day for months, stood chatting. Other children arrived by car and ran excitedly into the playground, calling out to their friends as though they had been separated from them for weeks.

  No one spoke or smiled a welcome at us when we walked past the group of mothers to the gates. They appeared too wrapped up in their own conversations to notice us. My mother did not seem to be any more comfortable than me. She took hold of my elbow firmly, squared her shoulders and walked us briskly into the building. Looking back, I realise that in a way, it was her first day too. Her first in walking past groups of people where she didn’t know a soul and her first at talking to a headmistress she had never met before. After all, she had grown up in the town I had spent all my early years in. Her family were well known in the community and we seldom walked down a road there without being greeted by an old school friend or someone she had worked alongside. Making small talk to strangers was just not something she had any experience of.

  Luckily, she didn’t have to ask directions to the Head’s office. Dressed in a smart tweed suit, a tall, dark-haired woman with horn-rimmed glasses was standing by the door as we entered. Her welcoming smile removed the initial impression of the severity her clothes gave her, as did the warmth in her voice when she introduced herself as Elizabeth Dunn, the Head.
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  ‘Ah, Mrs Corby,’ she said, stretching out her hand. ‘And you must be Emily,’ she added, smiling down at me.

  ‘Now, Emily, we have your school reports from your old school. I know you will find some of the classes a little different, as you are joining them mid-term, but looking at the grades you achieved in your last school, I’m sure it won’t take long for you to catch up. Now, why don’t I take you to your classroom and introduce you to your teacher?’ she asked before she and my mother said their goodbyes.

  That was the friendly part of my first day there.

  The teacher introduced me to the class and I felt a flush sailing up my cheeks as what seemed like 20 pairs of eyes looked me over. I had noticed on my way in how most of the girls were dressed. Pretty coloured jumpers and skirts just above their knees. No clumsy shoes for them either – they wore ballet shoes or neat leather lace-ups. Most of the girls in my class had long hair tied back with a ribbon matching their outfit. Mine in contrast was even shorter than the time the hairdresser had cut it. Mum had been instructed to keep that style in place and she had managed inexpertly to retain the shortness, if not exactly the style. It looked as though a small pudding basin had been sat on the top of my head before it was trimmed with blunt garden shears. Well, that’s what I saw when I looked in the mirror anyhow. I could feel all those eyes sliding down from my hair to my below-the-knee skirt until they finally rested on those clumpy shoes and thick grey socks. I must have stuck out like a sore thumb and judging by the expressions on their faces, I was sure there was no doubt in their minds either.

  Still, the teacher seemed nice enough as she introduced the lesson – English. Staring down at the books I’d been given, I could see they were different from the ones in my previous school. But the subject was the same, the usual spelling and grammar. I bent my head down while hands shot up in the air to inform the teacher they either had a question or an answer to one of hers. Mine stayed still in my lap – I had no wish to draw any attention to myself.

  The next lesson was Maths, which I soon found out was to be a difficult one. My previous teacher had accepted that I worked out the answers in my head. This new one made it clear that he wasn’t going to. But with more complicated Maths, it was beginning to become a problem. There were no signs of my working out the numbers, not even a few little squiggles – I just wrote down the answers.

  ‘And how did you come to those answers?’ asked the Maths teacher.

  ‘I worked them out in my head,’ was the answer I gave. I could hardly say in front of the class that just looking at the questions sent the answers to my head, which in turn forwarded them to the fingers that wrote down the answers.

  When I first started learning simple arithmetic and the times tables I had no idea that the answers came to me in a different way from all the other children. But before I was seven, I had learnt that was how it worked for me. Another reason for me to be labelled weird, though then it was said with some degree of affection.

  ‘Well, that’s good. All of them are right, by the way,’ he told me. ‘But one day, you will be sitting important exams and they will want to know how you worked out the answers. The examiners will fail you if you don’t show them how you have reasoned the Maths so make sure you put down all your working-outs, all right? I believe in marking everyone’s work the same way as they will when you go to the senior school so that means you get much lower marks if you don’t do it the way the teachers expect you to. And you don’t want that to happen, do you?’

  Of course, the answer to that was ‘No, I don’t.’ Facing Carl with a less-than-perfect school report would lead to him punishing me.

  I nodded, but I knew it was going to be a problem. I had never really understood just how my brain had worked everything out, that was the real issue. I could probably manage to show some of the workings-out, but not all of them. I had a sinking feeling that as the Maths became more complicated, the problem would only get worse and I wondered if there was a way I could slow my brain down and see how it got to the answers – something I had tried more than once but with no success.

  By the end of the day, I had the titles of a couple of books I needed to read, some Maths questions to answer and an essay, or as the teacher had called it ‘a story’ about what we did at the weekends. This, I knew with some certainty, I would have to make up – I could hardly write, ‘Try and avoid Carl as much as possible’. I decided to conjure up a nice memory and so I described a day when I was at one of my family get togethers. Now that would work – I just altered it a bit to make it sound as though it happened most weekends.

  All that day I had tried to switch off my inclination to draw comparisons with my old school, where I had felt popular with both classmates and teachers. I already knew that it was going to be different here. On our lunch break, a couple of girls asked me where I had lived before we moved and then wandered off to join their friends as soon as I told them. No one in the playground showed any interest in my joining them – their little cliques were already formed and they clearly did not want to enlarge them. Unless another new girl, with dreadful clothes and a terrible hairstyle, came into our class, I guessed I would be stuck on my own for a very long time.

  Might as well read on the breaks, I decided, perching myself on a wall. I expect that got me a lot of stares, but by then I didn’t really care. If they were not going to be friendly, I would carry on doing things my way. For me the important thing was to do well in the end-of-term exams otherwise there would be trouble at home – I knew Carl would make no allowances for a new school and a curriculum change.

  At the end of my first day, without any goodbyes coming in my direction, I took myself home. Neither Carl nor Mum thought to ask how my day had gone. Instead, my stepfather told me he had put an alarm clock by my bed set for 7:30am – my mother needed a lie-in and I was old enough to make my own breakfast. Now that was a plus – I wouldn’t have to see him the moment I left my room.

  * * *

  I woke to a freezing-cold morning and shivered as I looked out of the frost-encrusted windows at the grey sky and decided it was unlikely to get much warmer. After hastily swallowing a slice of toast, on went a thick sweater over my vest and the thick navy-blue skirt I hated underneath my raincoat. To keep my head warm, I pulled on the hat Gran had knitted for me.

  Shivering must have stopped me thinking straight because if I had, I might have worked out that it would have been a good idea to remove that hat before walking into the playground. Then I would not have been subjected to the whoops of laughter that broke out when I appeared, nor seen fingers pointed in my direction.

  Once I realised that it was me who had caused that mocking laughter, I had a flash of memory of another conversation with Carl before we left our flat: ‘The school I have arranged for you to attend will be better for you,’ he had told me. Meaning, I understood perfectly, You will be on your own there. No cousins to protect you, no friends to spend the break with and no Ben still wanting to get you home safely. Even better, no interfering grandmother watching how I’m treating you.

  Then I had wondered just how bleak my life could get.

  Now I knew.

  I was never going to fit in there.

  Don’t show them they bother you, said Reason, my inner voice. Hold your chin up and ignore them.

  So, I did.

  Chapter 45

  What can I say about the following years? I worked hard at school, ignored my classmates’ mocking jeers about my eating habits and other peculiarities as best I could. In contrast, I was praised by my teachers and at the end of every year, I came first again.

  At home, I learnt to cope, up to a point, with Carl’s unpredictability while counting the days until I could escape to Dad’s. I had my diary to confide in, although I did not write down all the details of every beating, every hair pulling, every taunt and every act designed to humiliate me.

  Had I done so, they would have filled every one of my diaries six times over.
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br />   The worst of the beatings occurred when I was still in junior school. It was when my first school report came in, the one I thought I was so clever in altering. Carl was by now used to me being first in my class. He expected no less ‘after all that work he had put in’ when I ‘knew absolutely nothing’. I had been given a low mark in Maths but a high one in English. In other subjects I was close to the top, but not first. Although the teachers had written glowing remarks about how well I was doing, that would not impress him.

  I just about shook with fright when I saw the report, knowing he would not be happy. And when my stepfather was unhappy, he took out his frustration by punishing me. I hadn’t been beaten since the move – oh, a few slaps here and there, but I had learnt to handle the pain of those – so I guess I was due and those grades would play into his hands all right. The teachers’ comments about how hard I had worked were not going to cut it. I knew that he took a perverse delight in me not living up to his expectations and really enjoyed ridiculing me, holding anything with mistakes on it up in the air and waving it about. Once satisfied that I appeared sufficiently cowed by him yelling enough insults to work up his temper, those big, hard hands of his would lash out.

  I just knew the beating would be bad. Anything connected to my education brought out the worst in him. My anxiety levels grew so high that I began getting panic attacks, which started around then and have refused doggedly to leave me to this day. When they come, they keep me awake most of the night, I’m so afraid of the nightmares sleep will bring. Unreasonably, I believed that during those unwelcome spells, closing my eyes would mean that I would wake to the worst-case scenario.

  It was during those early hours when my brain was swirling around that I made a plan: I would alter the grades on my report. After crawling out of bed and picking up Tippex in one hand, a calculator in another, I got to work. I made the grades a bit higher – nothing unbelievable, just enough to hopefully save me. And I used the calculator to ensure the averages worked together. My stepdad wasn’t one to miss out on detail like that – I knew he would double-check it.