by Anya Peters
I wasn’t good at that. I was too shy and it took too long to filter out all the things I wasn’t allowed to say, all the secrets. I always let my brothers and sisters do all the talking when anyone was there, and kept quiet in class, just like Mummy always told me to. ‘You’re there to learn, not to make friends,’ she’d remind me if she found out I’d been bullied again.
I had mixed feelings about going on to the ‘big girls’ school.
‘Pull up your top, let me look at you,’ my uncle says, cornering me in the kitchen the night Brendan goes back.
‘No.’
This time he is in a good mood and laughs at me. ‘Pull it up. I want to check to see how big you’re getting.’ I turn away but he reaches across and pulls my top up himself, then lifts my vest, rubbing his big, rough hands over my still-flat chest as I cringe away from him. He makes me pull down my pants to show him if I have any pubic hairs growing yet. I can hear the TV in the other room, and someone upstairs in the bathroom walking about, and out of the window watch the cat walking along the high fence between the gardens.
‘It won’t be long now,’ he says, tugging at my nipples again. ‘I can put them in my mouth and suck them then. Would you like that?’ I wipe at my tears and shake my head, still refusing to look up at him. ‘Kathy likes that. She’s always wanting me to play with hers when she’s here,’ he says. ’Did you know that?’ I freeze, as he laughs. ‘She loves it,’ he says. ‘She can’t get enough.’ Everything he says is lies…
In the end I got a ‘1’ in English, a ‘1’ in maths but only a ‘2’ in verbal reasoning. For the grammar school you had to get a ‘1’ in all three. Instead I went to the big girls’ secondary school in a blazer two sizes too big and a green kilt skirt down almost to my ankles. A girl called Heather who lived in one of the new maisonettes at the back of the shops went there too. Both of us were book-mad and we waited for each other by the lamppost at the top of her road with our noses always in our books.
We were in different classes, though, and when she went off at the bell I felt lost. Sometimes I wouldn’t talk to anyone until I met her on the walk home again, but I didn’t care; I didn’t need friends outside.
‘There are enough of you here,’ Mummy always said. ‘You all have each other.’ That was all I needed, that and Mummy and books.
Chapter 20
The boys know.
Recently he has been very lax. I’ve heard their footsteps outside his bedroom, heard the loose floorboard outside it creak, have felt them there, daring each other up the stairs to stand outside the door to listen. I can’t bear that they know. It is another layer of abuse on top of it all.
A few times they’ve even burst in, and I’ve jumped off the bed while my uncle shouts, ‘Get out! What are you doing in here?’ But he never sees them until it’s too late.
‘Sorry,’ they say from the landing, making excuses about something they were looking for.
For a few months they’ve been hinting at things.
’What do you do when he calls you into their bedroom?’
‘What do you do when you go into the bathroom with him?’
‘What do you use the black comb for?’ they say, laughing at each other.
The ground shakes under me.
’Nothing, I just give it to him.’
‘Yeah, right! It doesn’t take half an hour to give him a comb.’
‘What else are you doing in there?’ Michael says, to make Liam laugh.
‘Nothing…cleaning the bathroom, tidying up the mess after one of you’ve been in there probably,’ I say, trying to get them off the subject.
‘Yes you do, we know.’
‘Know what?’
They tap the side of their noses, knowingly. ‘We’re telling Mummy.’
My chest hurts. I can’t breathe. I fight back tears. ‘I don’t do anything.’
‘Why are you crying then? Whore!’
’What?’
‘You heard.’
They make the rude, squelching noises at the sides of their mouths that they have been tormenting me with for weeks now, to imitate the sound of masturbation, driving me from the room blushing furiously.
If they tell Mummy she’ll make me leave, make me go away, not him.
He’s been getting too casual about it. He even makes me touch him in front of them sometimes. He did it last night, when Mummy wasn’t there. We were all in the front room; the boys were in the armchairs and he was sitting on the sofa behind them with my sisters and me. He told the girls to sit on the floor, and after a while motioned for me to sit closer to him. I shook my head. I knew he couldn’t say it out loud in front of them, but when he did it again I had to obey.
He had his red pyjama bottoms on and a newspaper over his lap. He grabbed my hand and pulled it under the newspaper, in through the slit in the front of his pyjamas until it was over his soft penis. My hand recoiled but he pressed his big rough hand over mine and forced me to hold it. I sat there paralysed with fear and revulsion, pretending to watch TV, hardly breathing.
‘Pull it,’ he whispered.
I defied him, doing nothing. He couldn’t shout it out in front of the others.
‘Pull it,’ he repeated, under his breath.
I tried to move my hand away.
The girls tried to find excuses to look around. ‘What did you say?’ Stella kept asking, looking over her shoulder.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Watch the TV.’
But she kept looking around. She wanted me to sit on the floor with them but he wouldn’t let me. ‘What’s she doing?’
I yanked my hand away and shook my head at her.
‘Turn back around,’ he told her angrily, ‘or go up to your bed.’
I clenched my fist and tried to resist his pulling my hand, but he yanked it back over and made me continue masturbating him under the newspaper. I could hear the noises terrifyingly loud: the sound of my hand pulling; the loud rustling sound of the paper on top as my knuckles knocked against it; the sound of my heart and the blood pounding in my ears. It was all so loud. I felt certain the others must have known what was happening. I kept my eyes on the backs of their blonde heads—the girls like twins with their waist-length, white-blonde hair down loose over their shoulders, and the boys a darker, sandy-blond colour like him. I watched all of them at once, tuned into them, ready to pull my hand away if any of them made the slightest move to look around. Every now and again the boys passed looks between each other—serious, knowing looks—but no one turned around again.
He’s done it before like this in front of them. But last night was different; he tried to make a game of it, tried to make me like it. He sent the boys down to the off-licence to get more beer.
‘And get Coke and crisps for you all.’
There was excitement all round at his generosity. He told the girls to go too. Stella said it was too cold and she didn’t want to, but he said she had to. I had to stay there. ‘There’s a job I want her to do.’
Once they were gone he made me put my legs up at the side of the mantelpiece. I tucked my school skirt in between my thighs, trying to hold it there, over my knees, but he pulled it down and stroked the insides of my thighs.
‘Do you like that?’
I shook my head.
But for the first time in my whole life with him, he was almost gentle, stroking instead of pulling and pushing aggressively.
‘Is it ticklish yet?’
‘No.’
But something different had happened. I was getting some sensation in my legs, some ticklish feeling when he ran his fingers along my thighs. It shocked and frightened me. I felt betrayed by my own body. I didn’t want any feeling at all with him, and I sensed that he was crossing another line, trying to get me to enjoy something that had repulsed me ever since I was that little girl he sat up on the kitchen sink at the flat, fumbling with his zip as he kept lookout.
When the doorbell rang he let me swing my legs back down and get myself neat and back into position
. He went to open the door, saying, ’Follow me up to the bedroom when I get up to go in a few minutes, okay?’
I couldn’t look at the boys when they came in, but I felt them looking at me. I sat there blushing, staring at the adverts on TV, pulling open the packet of smoky bacon crisps Stella had handed to me.
I didn’t follow him up later. I sat eating the crisps, almost swallowing them whole, feeling the sharp edges scrape the back of my throat on the way down as I struggled to hold back my tears; repulsed by the smell of him on my hands. Trying not to think what the others were thinking. A few minutes later he called down from outside his bedroom and I had to go up, as the boys snickered and made the squelching sounds of masturbation.
As the abuse got worse and he became more casual with it, the boys picked on me more and more, calling me a ‘slave’, a ‘slut’ and a ’prostitute’ under their breaths. Words they would never dare say if Mummy was there. Words that stunned me.
Chapter 21
Saturday mornings have always been the same in our house, until this one. My uncle has long gone by the time we get up. Mummy works all day, just a few roads away, starting at nine and finishing at five. She gets up first and then calls me and we both get dressed quietly and go downstairs, having our breakfast together while the others sleep.
I love that part of the day, my time on my own with her once a week, just me and Mummy together pottering around making tea and toast, putting the radio on low for the news, drawing the curtains back to let the sun fill the rooms, the back door opened for fresh air. A safe, normal start to the day—before my uncle comes back and gets me on my own.
The girls go swimming with one of their friends from school. The boys sometimes get the bus down there later, or play football at the top of the road with their friends, after they’ve helped me with the jobs, ready for inspection when my uncle gets in at midday. The house has to be cleaned from top to bottom on Saturdays. My uncle goes mad if everything isn’t done by the time he gets in. In the afternoon it will just be me and him. That is how it usually goes.
On this Saturday at the beginning of May, when I am still a few months away from my twelfth birthday, the boys are refusing to help with the housework, taunting me about the things they claim they have seen me do with my uncle. ‘Rude’ things that probably both disturbed and confused them, but also amused them. Things they accuse me of liking, of wanting to do.
Over the years he has encouraged them to tease and ridicule me, to treat me the way he treats me, and this is just another thing to tease me about.
‘We know what you do. We’ve seen you, we know!’
‘Know what?’ I ask again, ashamed. My whole world tumbling down.
‘With Daddy…We’re telling.’
My heart stops each time. Mummy can’t know.
Liam is less than a year older than me, and Michael almost two and a half years older than me. Both of them are at secondary school, but too young themselves to really understand what they have been seeing, or what they have been tormenting me about now for months. They know it’s something wrong, something unspeakable, but this is our house; this is what happens in it. Nothing is said outright, just loaded questions and innuendoes, hints and snickering, half-accusations and, when it suits them, whispered threats that they will tell Mummy if I don’t get the housework done, as they run out early to play football.
But the strain of having someone else know, of having all this half out in the open, is unbearable.
Usually I don’t say anything, I can’t. But this morning, a few months after they first began their teasing about it, I scream at them to be quiet. I never normally scream; I’m the quiet one, all the spontaneity and boldness knocked out of me over the years. But their teasing about this on top of everything else is too much, and I crack.
Instead of helping me clean the house they create more mayhem, throwing food and cushions at each other and tearing around the rooms aggressively, fighting or threatening each other one minute then turning on me to try to impress each other, making one another laugh by tormenting me, telling me they will tell Mummy what I do with him. Just boys being boys, their father’s sons. But this time I really think they will tell.
Running from room to room after them I demand to know what they mean, what they’re planning to tell her.
They run out of the house, elbowing past me in the hallway, mocking my tears. They say they’re going out to play football with their friends at the top of the road and I’d better have all the jobs done by the time my uncle gets back in, or there’ll be murder. ‘Slave,’ they call from the front door, ‘just do it.’
‘We’re telling anyway,’ Liam calls back.
When they’ve gone I collapse, sobbing, in front of the gas fire in the kitchen, and am not prepared for the waves and waves of emotion that come. I don’t know how to stop it. He’ll be in soon and nothing is done. I can’t manage on my own, and don’t know if they are really telling Mummy. I have to get them in to help me straighten the house in time, and to find a way to stop them tormenting me, a way to convince them that I don’t want to do those things to my uncle, that he forces me.
I am shivering, crying uncontrollably, but I have to confront them; it’s the only way to get them to stop.
I open the front door and, squinting into the bright sun, call them in. They are humiliated at a younger sister calling them in in front of their friends and refuse, but eventually they come, full of bravado, shouting back at me that I am going to get it if this isn’t good.
Once they’re in the house I plead with them to stop saying that stuff. I tell them that he makes me do those things; that I don’t want to. They don’t want to hear it but it half comes out…someone now knows about all that vile, repulsive stuff. All the secrets that I have been carrying around for years. I have put something into words…broken through the years of silence. And when I do, I can’t put it back in again. I just implode, rocking backwards and forwards in floods of tears, my head in my hands, struggling to breathe. I didn’t mean to tell them. I just wanted them to stop.
Liam stops bouncing the football. They both look at each other and the room goes icy cold. It must have dawned on them that they have stepped over a mark. We all have.
‘Shhhh,’ one of them says, but the tears and shaking won’t stop. Everything blurs, goes in and out of focus, dark and light…dark and light. The ornaments on the mantelpiece look like they are about to fall, sliding about, and the ground won’t stay still. The boys shout at me to stop crying. But they don’t tell me how to.
I hear them say ‘please’, and promise they will never say anything about it again. I can hear the fear in their voices, and it makes me worse. Michael shouts that my uncle will be back from work any minute and that he’ll guess what’s wrong. ‘We’re all gonna get it if you don’t stop.’
But it is all out of control. I am shaking, my head is wobbling and I can hardly breathe. It feels like a million ball bearings have been set off inside me from my head to my toes and I am trembling all over. Inside, I scream at myself to keep still and to stop crying but the tears won’t stop, coming in streams of mucus from my nose, my eyes almost sealed with them.
My uncle is going to kill me…
Their reminders that he will be back any minute only make it worse. The emotion of all those years floods through me. All those years of violence and threats, all that terror, that fear, those drunken nights of being dragged out of bed, forced to sit on the settee and listen to talk of my ‘whore of a mother’.
All those years of absorbing Mummy’s pain, trying to be invisible and not a ‘troublemaker’, as the others sometimes called me. All those years of having to hold it all in, and now here it all is crashing out of me, and I don’t know how to stop it or what is happening to me.
Michael slaps me to stop me from crying hysterically, but I still can’t. I can hear what they’re saying about it killing Mummy, about her maybe leaving us if she finds out, about social services taking me away.
<
br /> ‘The whole family will be split up if they find out,’ Liam says.
I can sense their panic and want to stop, but none of the ways to control my thoughts or my body work any more. All I know is that my uncle is going to come in any minute, and that I have to get out before he does. If he sees me like this he’ll know I’ve been talking to the boys about it, or he’ll guess from their behaviour. I have to get out, he’ll kill me…
‘I have to go,’ I stutter. ‘I’m telling Mummy I want to leave.’
‘You can’t.’
’I have to.’
’What are you going to say if she asks why?’
‘I don’t know…’
They plead with me not to go, the way I pleaded with them earlier about their teasing. They try to frighten me more by telling me how much it will upset her, how she’ll probably leave us or have a breakdown, how I will be taken away.
I can’t breathe. His key will be turning in the lock any minute and I have to get out of here before it does.
I make for the door but Liam holds me down while Michael guards the doorway, his arms stretched across, looking stunned and skinny and frightened at my newfound physical strength.
But in the end, when I promise that I won’t tell her why, just that I want to go over to live with Kathy in Ireland, they let me go. She knows that the boys have been picking on me more than usual recently, encouraged by my uncle, copying him, using any excuse for a fight.
Michael stands aside to let me pass, but I can’t stop shaking and my legs won’t cooperate. I beg one of them to come down to her office to tell her for me.
Michael walks off, refusing. ‘I’m not being part of this,’ Liam says when I plead with him. But in the end, after I promise again that I won’t tell her the real reason, that I will just tell her I want to leave because of their teasing and picking on me, he comes.
It has been the constant threat hanging over my whole childhood—that I will be sent away from Mummy—and now here I am asking for it.
