by Anya Peters
The flight was delayed and I sat where they told me, feeling too grown-up for the children’s activity pack they’d given me. I didn’t open mine. I stared at a small child joining the dots in the colouring book from the pack. She was sitting beside an air hostess, who looked a bit like Kathy, and I wondered what her hands felt like on the little girl’s bare arm—wanting and not wanting to know.
Kathy was wearing green velvet trousers and a white silk blouse with frills down the front when she met me at the airport, her long red curls falling over her shoulders, dramatic against her ivory skin and big, soft, slow-blinking, navy-blue eyes. She held my hand as we walked through the airport but her anxiety showed as she looked around her to see if there was anyone there who might know her. She always seemed to know someone.
Going through my case in the car, Kathy put aside most of the clothes Mummy had bought me for the trip, as if they weren’t good enough. I told her they were mostly new, but still she took me into a children’s clothes shop in the busy part of Dublin where she had already picked out bags of stuff. She dressed me like a doll in a green velvet dress which she told me I was going to be wearing to a medieval banquet at Bunratty Castle. It was a big event and Brendan knew someone who played the harp at it.
I was going to a hotel with Brendan for the first part of the holiday, she told me, and I would be with her for the second part. She drove off the main road to a lay-by and we sat watching traffic speed by, waiting for Brendan. Soon another car pulled up behind us and Brendan got out and came to sit in the back seat for a chat. Then he lifted my suitcase out of the boot and I had to swap into his car. Kathy was nervous in case anyone saw us and guessed I was her daughter. She wanted Brendan to hurry up and leave.
‘Calm down,’ Brendan said, pressing his hand over hers. ‘What am I doing but saying hello?’
But it felt like we were all doing something wrong, like criminals swapping cars in a lay-by, and although Brendan made it seem like fun, and made me giggle, I was already embarrassed by it.
Mummy had wanted to be sure I would say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, and these were almost the only things I did say when other people were around. ’Thank you,’ I’d say shyly, sipping black tea like Kathy from thin china cups and saucers as they took me to visit different places and people.
I was introduced as a friend of a friend’s daughter over from England, or as one of Kathy’s sister’s children, depending on who we were visiting. I had to remember to give them a different surname if anyone asked. Over the years I was always a different person’s daughter or relative as different people asked. I kept smiling shyly, not speaking, wondering what was happening at home, how Mummy was, and if my uncle was going to let me back, but always keeping my thoughts to myself. Every question was a potential trap. My thoughts slid about and I struggled not to lie while trying not to tell the truth either, answering most questions with a shrug or a smile or an ‘I don’t know’.
One day while I was there I got to meet my grandmother. Kathy had left her purse at home and we had to drive back to get it. She insisted I stay in the car while she ran in, but I begged to be able to come in just to see what she looked like, and to see the house that both Kathy and Mummy had grown up in, which I’d heard so much about over the years.
She told me my grandmother was very old and ill, and that she looked and acted strangely sometimes; that it would upset me too much. But I promised that it wouldn’t and she eventually agreed, slipping her leather-gloved hand into mine as we walked in through the gate. We were just going to ‘run in and run out again’, she said, and again I had to promise not to say anything to give away my English accent, except for hello and goodbye. I promised and we went in.
‘Don’t say a word,’ she said, squeezing my hand, as we walked into the hall.
‘Okay.’
The house was tall and grey and covered in red ivy, and inside it smelt of the sea and cats. Her mother was very ill by then, not bedridden, but frail, tiny and childlike. She became very excited by our unexpected arrival. And when she saw me she stared at me for a long time. I stared back at the almost unlined face with its wet-lipped, toothless grin and eyes that Mummy always said were the same green as mine. And though I kept it to myself, I felt some recognition transmitted in her look. I felt it too by the slow way she reached out her hand and ran her cold, bent fingers along my cheek as she stood there barefoot in a grey-blue silk nightdress which reached down almost to her ankles. She had the same tiny hands as Kathy. She tugged at the combs in her silver hair and it unrolled in waves down her back. I smiled almost idiotically at her as Kathy ran off to get her purse. She stepped forwards, smiling, and asked me my name.
I pressed my lips together, keeping my side of the bargain, so she wouldn’t hear my English accent. Grinning back at her, I shuffled from foot to foot, pulling myself up to my full height, trying to be someone she would be proud to have as a granddaughter. Still smiling, she reached over and lifted a handful of my dark hair, bouncing it up and down on her palm while Kathy continued running from room to room, searching for the purse and calling down to us were we ‘alright down there’. Finally, finding it, she kissed her mother and told her to kiss me and rushed me back out to her shiny red car.
As we drove off it was raining hard, splashing noisily against the road and streaming down the windows. And when we turned I twisted around and stared at my grandmother still waving goodbye from the window, looking like a mermaid with her long silver hair unrolled in waves down her back and the long, dark-grey rectangle of sea bubbling up behind the house.
Kathy fired nervous questions at me.
‘What did she say? What did you say? Did she ask you where you were from?’
My grandmother died the following year, but I’m convinced she died knowing about me. My tenacity that day in insisting I be allowed to go in to see her is one of the things I’m most proud of.
When I got back to England, my uncle’s violence got worse. Maybe he was worried that I had said something while I was away about what he had been doing to me, or maybe he just wanted to ensure I was still as petrified of him as I had been before I went.
He never let up, even on my birthday. The night before there was a huge argument. It was about me again. My uncle said I wasn’t allowed to have a birthday, that there’d better not be a single present or card in the place when he got home. We lay in bed listening to them battle it out, Mummy sobbing like a girl, telling him again that he was an ‘evil bastard’, that she was not standing by and watching what he was doing to me, that she was leaving and taking me with her.
Next morning I told her not to be upset, that I didn’t care. His job must have been cancelled because he got home early that afternoon and I could hear them screaming before we even reached the front door. He grabbed me when I went into the front room and started hitting me. ‘Get her out of here,’ he screamed. ‘I don’t want her kind in here. I’m sick of the sight of her, get her out.’
It all happened so quickly, but as he kicked me towards the bedroom I saw a white iced cake in an opened box on the sideboard with little pink twisted candles and a big ‘8’ in pink icing, and birthday cards strewn across the carpet. I knew Kathy had sent money for a cake. I wasn’t supposed to have it, he’d warned the previous night, but Mummy had bought it anyway. Mummy pulled me from his grip and pushed me into the bedroom, blocking the door with her body so he couldn’t come in while I slumped in a daze, sore and bruised and trembling all over.
She came back in later when he was sleeping off his dinner. She was dragging a big blue hamper of presents and told me Kathy had sent them over for my birthday, putting a finger to her lips. That’s what he was angry about.
‘They’re yours,’ she said, ‘but don’t tell the others. Share them out with everyone, okay?’
Her face was red and sore-looking, and she had a black eye, the white all bloodshot. I hated that it was me they’d been fighting about again, Kathy making more trouble for us. She lifted my p
illow to show me a hardback children’s Bible.
‘Shhh, don’t let him or the others see this one, this one is just for you,’ she said, going quiet and biting her lip as she flipped quickly through its pages.
‘Are they true stories?’ I asked and she shrugged and nodded at the same time. ‘Who told them?’
She smiled and said she didn’t know. Making Mummy smile was the best feeling in the world, the way her whole face lit up, and knowing it was just for me. ‘Don’t let him see it though, okay?’
I nodded and put it back under my pillow, used to God being a secret in our house.
Chapter 17
When I was nine we moved out of the flat and into our first house. It had big leaded windows like all the other houses in the street and huge pink rhododendron bushes in the front garden. There were three bedrooms and a cellar, and a lean-to at the back that opened out to an overgrown garden. It was full of weeds as high as my shoulders, and it was our job to pull them out. My uncle tore off the stiff wallpaper in the kitchen, which he said had mice crawling behind it, feasting on the flour-glue the previous owners had used to paste sections of it back down. He put down traps in the corners with tiny bits of cheese, and went out in the dark with a piece of wood, screaming, trying to batter or scare them to death.
I loved all the space in the new house. I thought it would give me more opportunities to get out of his way, but extra space also meant there were more places he could do things to me, away from the others. The abuse just got worse. No matter where I was he always found me.
Their bedroom was above the front room, and if he was up there and wanted something he banged on the floor with a shoe and one of us had to go up. Usually what he wanted when he knocked down was me.
The day I walked over the footbridge with the others to visit the house for the first time I was carrying my new Petite typewriter in its little turquoise plastic case. Kathy had bought it for me in Ireland for my ninth birthday. ‘You can type whatever you like in it,’ she’d said, encouraging me to roll my first sheet of paper into it. But I never could, especially not that day.
I swung it as I walked, listening to a drawing pin stuck to the bottom of my shoe tapping across the concrete, trying not to think about the pain between my legs which was making it difficult to walk. I didn’t want anyone to see me wince from the hurt of the day before, when he’d tried to force himself inside me for the first time. It had felt like he was splitting me open. The pain rammed through my whole body, even though he tried to do it bit by bit until I ‘got used to it’. Agonising pains that filled my body with screams I could never let out.
I always dreaded being in the house alone with him. One Saturday only a few weekends after we had moved I begged to go with Mummy to the market. He was in a bad mood and there was no one else at home, so I knew he would definitely get me once she was gone and I was terrified.
He’d already said he wanted me there to help with the jobs. ‘Please, Mum,’ I begged. ‘Say you need me to carry things, that you can’t manage on your own, please.’
She knew I was terrified of him, I always had been, but I couldn’t tell her the real reason I was terrified of being alone with him now.
She looked pale and tired and got annoyed. ‘He’s in a bad enough mood as it is,’ she said. ‘I can’t keep asking. And anyway I haven’t got spare money for your bus fare.’ She needed every penny she had.
He was putting up a curtain rail in our bedroom and I waited on the stairs, hearing him throw tools down into his box.
‘No, I need someone here to help,’ I heard him say. ‘I’m not doing it all like a fool myself while everyone else swans off.’
I was never allowed to ‘swan off ‘. Since we had moved I hadn’t been allowed to play out like the others. I had to help indoors with the housework all the time now.
‘I tried,’ Mummy said quietly when she came down. ‘I won’t be long. I’ll be there and back.’
But she could see how upset I was. ‘All right, get your coat, don’t mind what he says.’
‘Am I coming?’
‘Be ready to walk off fast. He’ll kill us when we get back though.’
We both stood at the front door ready to go through, my hand on the latch.
‘She’s coming with me and that’s that. I can’t carry it all myself,’ Mummy shouted up, trying to sound angry. ‘Come on, Anya.’
We could hear him shouting, thumping across the uncarpeted room.
‘Get back here!’
Mummy pushed me out of the front door, shouting back, ‘I won’t be long. I know exactly what I want.’
I knew exactly what he wanted too. He was going to try to force it inside me again.
’Please don’t, Dad,’ I beg, ‘it hurts too much. Please don’t…’
‘Keep still and it’ll hurt less.’
He tries to get me into position on his and Mummy’s bed, moving me about, trying to get me to sit down onto him. But my whole body has tensed and he can’t move me. His big, dry hand spreads over my mouth and nose and I can’t breathe through the pain, my fists grabbing the pillow as he lifts me off and crawls over me, his weight dropping down on me, almost crushing me, suffocating me. His bare, dry flesh everywhere, wriggling about, trying to inch himself into me. My insides not stretching, feeling like I will be ripped apart, as my whole body goes into spasm and my nine-year-old mind slams to a stop.
‘Please Dad, I’ll do anything…’
He tells me angrily to put it in my mouth then. That’s the other worse thing. ‘Not that though,’ I say, testing his mood.
‘What do you mean? What then? You have to do one or the other.’
I have no answer. I just don’t want to do either.
‘You’ll have to do it next time,’ he says. ‘It won’t hurt after a while; it’s only at the start. After that you’ll get used to it.’
Chapter 18
The second time I went over to Ireland I stayed with Brendan and his family in their big white house outside Dublin, surrounded by fields which sloped down to the sea. His wife and daughters were just told that I was the daughter of a friend of a friend from work, visiting from England.
Like the last time, I wasn’t allowed to let anyone know my surname because it was the same as Kathy’s. She cut the luggage tag with my name on it from my suitcase and I memorised the surname they told me to say was mine as we drove in from the airport.
‘Will you remember it?’ Kathy asked with a worried look on her face. I nodded, certain that I would, practising it in my head all the way there. ‘It’s very important you don’t tell them what your real surname is, okay?’
I knew she and Mummy would get into a lot of trouble if anyone found out who I was. They made up some kind of story about me. I think they must have said someone in my family had died, because all Brendan’s family held their smiles for ages when they talked to me, and kept asking if I wanted more when we sat at meals, or went to the shops to buy sweets.
‘You can have anything,’ they’d say. ‘Don’t be shy, have what you want.’
I remembered Mummy and my manners and not to show her up and I said, ’No thank you, I’m not hungry,’ even when I was.
I was supposed to be going to stay with Kathy in a hotel somewhere for the last few days but she was busy, so I stayed on at Brendan’s house. His daughters had two horses and a little black pony they’d almost grown out of, which they taught me to ride. During those rainy days, one of them told me I was staying with them a few more days because Kathy’s mother had died during the week and she was too busy to take me.
I wanted to tell her that that was my grandmother, but I knew I wasn’t allowed to say anything because then she would know that Kathy was my mother. I laughed nervously and wished I could ask Brendan about it, but he’d gone away to meet some clients the day before. I knew I should have been sad about my grandmother dying but we never knew each other. All day I kept seeing the watery image of her like a mermaid standing at the window w
aving goodbye, with her silvery hair rippling down her back, and the rain streaming down outside.
As we brushed the horses, and Brendan’s middle daughter, Caitlin, showed me how to stand with my back to the pony and lift his leg to use the hoof pick gently on him, I panicked. If Kathy’s mother was dead, maybe now she would want to keep me there with her? Maybe that was why I was in Ireland. Maybe they had planned it all, tricked me.
As soon as Brendan came back I got him on his own and told him I wanted to go home. He was worried I might have said something about my grandmother and I felt proud to say I hadn’t.
‘Good girl,’ he said, and told me that Mummy was there in Ireland too.
‘Can we go and see her?’
‘They’re both busy with all the relatives and looking after their father. They’re both of them very upset.’
But a few days later he told me that we were meeting Mummy that afternoon in Bray. It felt funny seeing her there in Ireland with none of the others around. She looked different, like a stranger, and I felt shivery looking at her in the distance. Her face was all shiny and her short, permed hair was blowing flat in the wind. She was holding it down with one hand and holding the fur collar of her jacket over with the other. They didn’t look like her clothes. She was wearing black leather gloves like Kathy’s and the same black patent shoes, and her tights were getting splashed with mud as she and Kathy walked over to us.
I wanted to get her on her own to ask her not to go back to London, to stay there, just her and me, just like she always promised me as a little girl.
We walked along the seafront and they gave me money, telling me to go into the amusement arcade as they stood and smoked and talked in whispers. I felt foolish on my own, wandering about the cold dark room from machine to machine with my red cup of tokens, not knowing what to do. I sensed them watching me, saw the strain on Mummy’s face and the set look she had when she was lying. I wanted to go and ask her what happened when I left, to find out how bad my uncle’s mood was, and if he was going to let me come back again.
