by Anya Peters
We went on outings, me and my two little blonde sisters in our new cork-heeled sandals. Sometimes we all dressed the same, like triplets, in new clothes Brendan bought us from C&A—petrol-blue boiler suits with zips up the front and racing-driving patches sewn onto them: Ferrari and Silverstone and Marlboro. We walked into the town centre with Marie on Fridays to do the weekly shop in our new outfits, thinking we were the bee’s knees. My two little sisters and I inseparable, as it should be, Stella no longer the boss now that my uncle wasn’t around.
Brendan bought bunk beds for us, to put in Jack’s room.‘They can easily be dismantled again,’ I heard him tell Peter. But he never mentioned when that might happen. Nobody did. All of us were adjusting to life without my uncle, growing new skins, nobody mentioning him, not even the girls. Not having to do the housework as I did at home, I was almost a child again: playing badminton on the long summer evenings and chasing my sisters around the long narrow garden; reading The Little Prince to the girls on the kitchen step until it was too dark to make out the words; brushing their long silky hair as we watched TV on the black-and-white portable in Marie and Peter’s bedroom. Meanwhile, Mummy was falling apart downstairs; I tiptoed around her, not understanding why she had changed towards me, why I seemed to be upsetting her so much—thinking it was all my fault.
Kathy came over for a few days and all I remember is her sitting in with Mummy whispering and crying most of the time. When she and Brendan went back to Ireland, Mummy got worse. She wore sunglasses if she came into town with us. Her head shook and she was jumpy and weepy and kept the girls around her like bodyguards whenever I tried to sit or be near her. I knew instinctively it was her way of trying to put all that vile stuff she’d been forced to hear at the police station out of her head, and I knew to keep out of her way, but it still hurt to feel her pulling away from me.
During the day, indoors, she sat in the front room with the curtains drawn watching TV, living on Silk Cut and milky tea and her nerves. When she passed me to go to the bathroom one morning after getting a postcard from the boys asking when she was coming home, I smelt drink on her breath. I smiled at her but she looked away and went off, wiping tears. She looked terrible: cold and bony. Everything was my fault.
I didn’t know what to do with myself. I kept waiting for something to happen. Everything made me jump. I laughed it off, but every shadow and every sudden movement was him, lying in wait for me. But after the first time, when I ran in breathless, slamming the back door, sure I’d seen him crouching behind the wall at the bottom of the garden, I didn’t tell anyone.
‘He’s not there,’ Marie had said.‘They’re not letting him out. And anyway, don’t worry, he doesn’t even know where I live.’
After helping Marie wash the soup bowls from lunch I asked her if I could bring Mummy in her cup of tea. I put a small plate of Rich Tea biscuits on the arm of the settee, but she didn’t even look at them. I stood there staring at the TV. It was Crown Court again: all the serious-looking men in grey wigs and black gowns in the wooden courtroom. I plumped up the cushions and wanted to ask Mummy what was going to happen now but I didn’t want to remind her of it all. Instead I just asked if she wanted me to open the curtains. She shook her head and took a sip of her tea, and then took headache tablets from the white tub on the shelf behind her and knocked them back. I didn’t know what else to say, standing there feeling foolish and lonely and shut out. I wished I could make her smile the way the girls could.‘Is there anything else you want me to do?’ I asked, standing awkwardly in the doorway, but she had already closed her eyes and slid down on the settee with one of Jack’s blue baby blankets pulled up over her.
‘Is Mummy okay?’ I asked Marie when I went back out.
‘She’ll be alright. She just needs a bit more of a rest.’ I watched her wipe tomato soup from the top of the cooker and fill the kettle again. ‘No…actually I’m getting a bit worried about her, to tell you the truth. I might give the doctor a call,’ she said, lowering her voice so the girls didn’t overhear.
Deep inside me something shook.‘Why?’ I asked, spinning around.
‘She’s started drinking during the day and can’t stop crying. She can’t go on like that much longer. She’ll have to go back to London soon. Everyone has to get back to school.’
I asked if there was anything I could do to help.
‘Just keep out of her way, and let her see you’re okay. That’s the best way you can help, by letting her see that.’
That evening Marie whisked up big bowls of butterscotch Angel Delight for dessert, and I sat outside on the kitchen step watching the girls spin red Hula-Hoops with their skinny, hipless bodies. I felt numb and distant, hollow inside, worrying about what was happening to Mummy. When I heard the tap in the kitchen go and turned to see her there at the sink pouring a glass of water, I knew I had to show her I was all right. I began singing out the scores along with the girls, clapping and laughing loudly as Jennifer’s hoop wobbled down onto the crazy paving, cheering Stella on; getting up, taking Jennifer’s hoop and saying,‘My turn now. Show me how to do it, Jen.’ Hoping Mummy could hear me—me being all right—me pretending everything was normal.
As the summer went by the girls became restless. Nobody, not even they, talked about my uncle, but they said they missed their friends and Michael and Liam who were still in London, and started to ask Mummy more often when we were going home. Kathy came over again and slowly Mummy pulled herself out of it. She started to drink less and did jigsaws with the girls on the dining room table; she polished her shoes and went into Marie’s hairdressers in the precinct to have a perm. But when she had to talk to me, she still seemed to stare between my eyes, not at them.
The girls needed to get back to school and the boys needed their mum. I was outnumbered.
One morning she just left.
Chapter 26
The night before, when she told me she was going, I couldn’t look at her. I was upstairs on Marie’s bed watching TV with Stella and Jennifer. Mummy told the girls to go downstairs, that she wanted to talk to me on my own for a second. Stella took her time, picking playing cards up one by one and doubling the elastic band around the pack, saying she just wanted to watch the end of something. Someone opened the kitchen door downstairs and I heard the washing machine, suddenly realising it had been going all day. For some reason it made me glance up at the top of Marie’s wardrobe and I saw that the blue leather suitcases had gone.
‘It’s for the best,’ Mummy said.
She told me that Kathy and Brendan were looking for a boarding school for me to go to. She told me that I’d live at school and in the holidays I’d be able to come back to Marie and Peter’s to stay.
I could see our tiny reflections in the blank TV screen up on Marie’s dressing table.‘Please don’t leave me, Mum, please. You said you never would…’ I felt childish saying it, but it just came out, the way I used to say it as a little girl.‘You’ve always said I’d never have to leave you.’
‘Don’t cry,’ she said.‘You’re making me cry again. You don’t want that, do you?’
I shook my head.
‘Look at me,’ she said.
But I couldn’t. I was frightened of what she might see in my eyes—what accusations might be there. I couldn’t upset Mummy; I’d done enough already.
I said sorry over and over.‘What have I done?’ I asked, finally.
She wiped her eyes on her sleeve.‘Nothing…Don’t ever let me hear you say that, okay? You’re as good as gold.’ Saying it the way she used to always say it to me as a little girl.‘I don’t want you thinking that.’ She looked away, out at the trees at the back of the garden.‘It’s for the best,’ she said again. When her eyes swung back, they were dull and heavy, and something was missing from them.
‘Don’t let me down, will you? Let’s just forget all this now; we don’t need to talk about it again. Not to anyone…’
I knew she meant to Kathy and Brendan. I nodded, swall
owing back tears.
‘It’s over now, okay?’ she said.‘I’ll always be your mum though, okay?’ She pulled me towards her. I felt her tears wet against my face, and bit the flesh on the inside of my cheek, trying to hold back the tears.‘Always,’ she said,‘no matter what happens, okay?’
All my life she had promised me no one would ever take me away from her, and now my whole family was being amputated overnight, just at a time when I needed them most.
The day Mummy left, something inside me snapped shut forever.
Kathy and Brendan stepped uneasily into the role of‘parents’ after that. Brendan was like a real uncle to us by then, not just a family friend. Both of them still lived in Ireland and could only get over five or six times a year so there was only so much they could do. But there was nobody else to do it. Everything that had happened was pushed under the carpet. Maybe Mummy told the authorities that I was taken back over to Ireland to live with my‘real’ mum; perhaps she told the police they just took me out of the country and she didn’t know where I was. Maybe that was why no social workers were involved.
Brendan and Kathy arranged for me to go to boarding school. To begin with I was so desolate without Mummy and the rest of my family that I didn’t care what happened to me. All I knew was that I had lost the one person I needed most. I didn’t have a family or a home any more. My worst fears had come true. It felt like I was being punished for what I’d done. But I soon found that boarding school was the perfect place to try to forget your past.
On the outside I adapted easily and rapidly: sleeping in dormitories was like being at home with all my brothers and sisters again, but with nobody to bully me or tell me I was different. Here everyone was different, and everyone had a different surname, not just me. And adapting to a new life in such a different environment, with all the strict rules and new ways of doing things, left me little time to think about the past. It was like brainwashing and I loved it.
On the inside everything was being gradually shrink-wrapped, stored out of sight. There was never a time I forgot my earlier life: the abuse and the violence, and how it all ended. It didn’t go away. It was all bound together in my mind with the separation from Mummy, and I couldn’t forget her. But the memories and the painful feelings soon pulled away from each other, like skin from bone. I would think of what had happened in the past sometimes, but without feeling. At other times, not thinking of anything at all, I would suddenly feel things for no reason, stopped in my tracks with emotions I didn’t understand.
I was surprised how quickly I adapted to boarding school and absorbed all the new ways of doing things. I had elocution lessons and riding lessons and started to do well in class, and gradually came out of my shell and settled in well. Everyone was surprised that I didn’t feel homesick, but then there was no home for me to be homesick for. Kathy was still living at home caring for her elderly father over in Ireland, who still didn’t know about me, and Brendan had his own family, so even on my many trips over there during the holidays I couldn’t be a part of their families or stay in their homes, as I had once stayed at Brendan’s house for a holiday as a child. I did phone Brendan on his home number sometimes, and they encouraged me to write letters to them, but I always had to send them to their business address.
It was Mummy’s letters I longed for. She was never much of a letter-writer and they only came occasionally. When they did arrive I soon found myself embarrassed at her spelling mistakes, and even at the cheap blue writing paper. I was ashamed of myself for noticing that, but I’d become accustomed to the expensive cream paper my friends’ letters were written on and the type I now used in the expensive leather writing case Brendan bought me. When the other girls got their letters and parcels from home handed out in the long, oak-panelled dining room during breakfast, memories of Mummy and my old home would come up and I would yawn them away, trying hard not to see the flashes of long blonde hair, just like Stella’s and Jennifer’s, amongst all the younger girls who were darting between the tables handing out the post. None of my friends knew I had any brothers and sisters.‘They’ll only ask you why they don’t go to boarding school too,’ Kathy and Brendan told me.‘Just say you don’t have any.’ So I did.
When Mummy’s letters did arrive I would never hand them around the table or read parts aloud in the dormitory as some of my friends did. I read them quickly, trying to conceal the thin, cheap envelopes they came in, and mention of the brothers and sisters I wasn’t supposed to have. As soon as I’d read them I’d stuff them into my pocket, later sliding them into one of Brendan’s shirt boxes that I kept at the bottom of my tuck box, until I was alone and could read them through again. I was always left longing for more news and for something I couldn’t have any more; and struggling with emotions I didn’t understand.
The hardest times were the holidays and half-term breaks. All my friends grew more and more excited as they approached, but I came to dread them. For the first week or so I would stay with Brendan or Kathy in one of the big London hotels—the ones in which I had visited Brendan so shyly as a child—and then be put on a train down to Marie and Peter’s for the rest of the holiday. Staying in all the best hotels sounded exotic to my friends at school, but to me it was soon boring and lonely. All I really wanted was to go back to a proper home and family life like them.
Chapter 27
Nothing had ever felt secure in my life and I found it hard to believe that I would ever be safe from my uncle. Nobody ever told me what happened to him, so I could only hope that he was in prison.
Although I was surrounded by people at school I felt very alone whenever the fear struck. When I woke at night from unsettling dreams or my one recurring nightmare, or when I doubled over with sudden stomach cramps during the day or woke in the mornings soaked to the armpits in warm urine, there was no one to talk to about it, no one to help me understand the emotions. So I shut them down more and more. I taught myself not to feel things.
The nightmare I had for years afterwards was always the same in every detail. It was me at a railway station, about to board a train. Mummy was with me on the platform, seeing me off, but just as I stepped up onto the train my uncle appeared and tried to pull me from the carriage. She tried to fight him off, screaming, just like she used to in real life, both of us crying, terrified. He dragged me out onto the platform and they pulled me in different directions, one by the arms, the other by my legs. They pulled so hard I was ripped apart, blood and guts spilling out, my intestines and organs left in a bloody pile on the platform. I was still not dead though. I was lying there watching it all, until finally the two of them just laughed and walked away together, arm in arm.
When my friends came up to my bunk and tried to comfort me, asking me what the nightmare was, I’d say I couldn’t remember, or make up other ones to tell them.
I spent most of my life covering up my background, shrugging it off, trying not to think about Mummy and my brothers and sisters and what happened back at home. The other girls in my dormitory Blu-Tacked their family photos beside their beds. When, at night, they drew their fingers across them, saying‘Love you’ and pressing finger-kisses down on smiling faces, I looked away, finding some distraction, blinking images of Mummy, Stella, Jennifer and the boys out of my head. They’d gone now; that life was over.
Chapter 28
Although I saw Brendan only four or five times a year, he was the closest thing I had in my life to a family now. I still had no idea who my real father was, so my relationship with him was in many ways like that of father and daughter.
His visits gave me a taste of what it would be like to have a family, but never the real thing. When he left I always felt more alone than before. Sometimes, when he and Kathy turned up to collect me from school together, introducing themselves as my‘parents’, and we stayed in hotels in London, sleeping in a big triple room and going out to dinner and the theatre every evening, it felt like we were a proper family. But of course we weren’t; they both had the
ir own lives and families over in Ireland. So as much as I enjoyed our time together, even if I pretended I didn’t, I always knew it would be over too quickly and never allowed myself, or them, to get too close.
It was particularly hard to accept Kathy’s new role in my life. I didn’t need another mum, and couldn’t let her in. I felt that they were just hiding me away in boarding school because I had to be kept a secret, in case the affair Kathy had had came out. Sometimes the loneliness I felt deep down would surface. And, as I grew more confident, I would challenge them on the decisions they had made about me, complaining that I didn’t fit in anywhere now.
‘What were we supposed to do, send you to a home?’
‘At least I’d belong to someone then. At least I’d be with other people who were the same as me. I’d learn to survive. They might not have families, but they’ve got each other; I’ve got no one. You’ve made me a freak. I don’t fit in anywhere.’
‘Of course you do.’
‘Where?’
‘You’ll find your place. Wait until you’re qualified then you’ll see,’ Brendan would always say.‘You’ll be one of them then, with your own people. No one will care where you come from then.’
‘I’ll care,’ I’d always snap before storming off to the bathroom or turning up the volume on my Walkman.
