‘Are they really doing it?’ I asked her in horror. ‘But it sounds like he’s hurting her!’
‘Look, I’m going to show you something.’ Jenny had that glint in her eye, which meant she was up to something. We climbed into the attic, which, since the day it had served as a hiding place in our attempt to miss a day’s school, had become our secret refuge and the place where we planned adventures. Jenny sat down cross-legged and ceremoniously unrolled a magazine with a picture of a naked woman sandwiched between two erections.
‘I found it in the back of Frank’s car,’ she said proudly, in reply to my unspoken question.
When they finally got round to sex education at school we knew that as often as not women did it with two men at a time.
* * *
I got used to Frank’s eyes. I stopped questioning them. He was fun to have around. Most of all he made Mother happy, and when Mother was happy she didn’t drink neat vodka. It was the nearest we ever came to being a ‘family’ and at school we paraded our new-found normality, brave enough for the first time to invite people to play at our house without fear of being confronted by Mother in one of her ‘moods’, as Nana so gently called them.
Then Nana received news of the death of her mother and decided it was time to return to her country and look after her ailing father. We learnt the meaning of loss. Nana had provided the safety net that Mother had never been able to. It was Nana we turned to for comfort and for grown-up answers to our childhood questions. We knew, of course, that Nana had her own ties and history in Chile. We knew the names of her parents and the sad past that had exiled her and the husband who died two years after fleeing from their home country, but all this was the stuff of stories. Nothing had prepared us for the intrusion of her past into our present, for the loss, at the age of nine, of the only unconditional adult emotional presence in our lives.
My memory of her leaving is blurred. It was a time that locked my sister and me together, as we clung instinctively to each other for support. Mother seemed impervious, engrossed in Frank’s attentions, either unaware or uncaring of what this meant to Jenny and me. My reaction was one of withdrawal; Jenny’s was more overt. She became petulant in Mother’s company, refusing to respond to instructions that had normally come from Nana, accusing Mother of sending Nana away. Frank’s presence calmed us all.
Chapter 32
Frank bought Mother an enormous bunch of red roses one Valentine’s Day. ‘Yawn, yawn, there will be noises tonight,’ said Jenny under her breath as Mother squealed in delight.
‘Jenny, Pippa, I have something for you, too. Something for all of us.’ Winking at Mother, he said, ‘Now sit down and close your eyes. I am going to give you something and you have to guess what it is, but don’t open your eyes until I say you can.’
I felt something like pieces of paper or a very small magazine in my hand and thought of the magazine full of naked bodies that lay enshrined beside the sheep’s skull in our attic hoard of childhood treasures.
‘Money!’ cried Jenny.
‘Now don’t open your eyes. It’s not money, but it did cost money. Pippa?’
‘Is it a magazine?’
‘No, sweetheart, it’s not a magazine. It’s a piece of paper to go on holiday with.’
And so went the game until the identity of the air tickets was revealed. We were all going on holiday to Cancun. In the months that led up to the summer, Jenny and I embarked on an extensive research programme, which took place as much in our imaginations as in reality. We knew that this was Nana’s continent, and we plotted adventures that took us from Mexico to her doorstep in Santiago. We antagonised Mother by speaking in rusty Spanish together in front of her. We were the envy of our classmates. And we were grateful to Frank.
* * *
It was a holiday of firsts. The first time we went on a plane. The first time we went outside Europe. The first time we felt the fearlessness of snorkelling with coloured fish, of swimming side by side in endless turquoise water. The first time we heard Spanish spoken by anyone besides Nana and each other. The first time we experienced hot, wet heat and thunderstorms that blackened the sky. The first time we tasted lobster and drank papaya juice. The first time we looked like a normal, happy family on holiday.
And the first time Frank touched us.
* * *
It could have been innocent. Jenny and I had been swimming and Mother and Frank held towels up to us as we came out of the water. Jenny grabbed the first from Mother and embarked on an excited account of her fish-spotting as she dried herself down.
‘Come on you, let’s get you dry,’ said Frank in his affectionate, rough and tumble voice, enveloping me in the towel. And he started to rub me dry. My arms, my back, my legs, my thighs. ‘Rubadubdub,’ he crooned as he moved his hands up my leg. I had a lightning sensation of an unfamiliar and pleasant tingling between my legs.
‘There we go. I think you’re done, my little Pipsqueak.’
The problem with a name like Pippa is that it lends itself to stupid nicknames. Jenny’s name was much more glamorous.
I said nothing to Jenny about the funny feeling, but I wanted Frank to rub me dry again to find out if I had imagined it. I tried drying myself in the same way he had done to see if it made me tingle, but it didn’t.
The towel-drying became a ritual. Frank was very fair. He would dry one of us on one occasion and the other on the next. The tingling didn’t come back and Jenny never said anything to me about a tingling when Frank dried her, so I forgot about it.
Until one afternoon when Mother and Jenny had gone off to buy cold Coca-Cola. This time Frank sat me on his lap to dry me and the tingling was much stronger than before. All the time he crooned on and looked straight at me as if there was nothing unusual and nothing to be afraid of. I felt the slightest sensation of his fingers dipping under my swimsuit, a touch as swift and light as a feather, so quick I might have believed I had imagined it were it not for the funny tingling which persisted in an unknown part of me.
* * *
‘Jenny, do you ever get a funny tingly feeling inside?’ I asked her, finally, one afternoon. She knew immediately what I meant.
‘Sometimes I get it in the shower. And . . . Pippa . . . ?’
‘Yes,’ I answered, without her needing to voice the question, ‘when he dries me.’
‘You, too, then,’ she said slowly.
‘What do you think it means?’ I asked my big sister, relieved that it had happened to both of us.
‘I think it’s his way of showing he likes us.’
‘I wish Nana was here. Do you think we should ask Mother what she thinks?’
‘I don’t think Frank would like that.’
‘Do you think we’re bad?’
‘Not if it only happens once a week.’
And so we reasoned, trying inexpertly to deal with the paradoxical emotions and sensations such gentle abuse evoked in our children’s minds, comforting and reassuring each other in the absence of an adult voice to help us understand the conflicting cycle of pleasure and guilt, fear and self-doubt that shrouds the mind of the abused child– and ensures that the abuse remains unexposed.
Chapter 33
Then the unspeakable happened. Even now I find it difficult to talk about it in whole sentences. I can talk around it, I can describe in words in my mind what happened before and after, I can brushstroke the scene, but the detail remains a prisoner of isolated nouns, unconnected, like a pile of tin cans on a rubbish heap.
It was a few months after our return from Cancun. Frank was practically living in our house now and the towel-drying had stopped with the end of our holiday. His presence sat comfortably between us and Mother, a new kind of safety net, which filled patches of Nana’s absence, yet Jenny and I avoided talking about him, in the same way that we had sometimes observed adults avoiding each other’s eyes.
Occasionally I wonder how I would have reacted if Jenny had not been there. At the time, of course, I never question
ed it. At the time I clung to the knowledge that it happened to both of us. I clung to the strength in Jenny, yet it meant that there was a witness. It meant that I could not pretend to myself.
Mother told us that she was turning over a new leaf. This involved talking openly about vodka, strained shopping outings with the two of us, food that we had never tasted before, and something she called drama therapy on Thursday nights, which normally meant that she came home puffy-eyed and wanting to discuss things we found embarrassing. Frank, apparently, approved, and when she told him the group was spending a weekend away, he told her not to worry. She must go and he would look after us.
He spoilt us. We went to the cinema in the afternoon and saw a film about a boy who makes friends with a wild horse in Canada. Nana never let us eat sweets when we were out (Mother never took us to the cinema), but Frank bought us bags of popcorn, which we munched through the film. It was a relief, after Mother’s recent self-conscious behaviour, to simply relax and have fun. That evening we went out to a Chinese restaurant and Frank teased us about what the different ingredients might be.
How long can I make the day last without speaking of the night? How can I speak the unspeakable? Subject – verb – object. It must be possible to say it in simple, chronological sentences. Jenny could. Jenny was better at putting things into words. I would think things and Jenny would put them into words. The first time I fell in love and found myself trying to deal with the demands of intimacy alone, I felt literally tongue-tied. When, in frustration no doubt at my bouts of silence, my boyfriend asked me the woman’s question ‘What are you thinking?’ I wanted to say, ‘Ask Jenny.’ Why not use Jenny’s words then? I can hear them in my head. They are stuck there like fossils.
* * *
I, we, were ten years old. Something woke me. Subject – verb – object. I felt something. Subject – verb – object. It hurt. Subject – verb. It hurt me. Subject – verb – object.
But the nouns are there, tin cans jangling in my consciousness, serrated edges, sharp enough to draw blood.
Torch.
Tongue.
Fear.
Jenny? Jenny, where are you? Why is he shining a torch? What is he doing? He’s hurting me. There you are. You’re in my bed, too, now. What has he done to you?
Silence.
Fear.
Pain.
When – he – had – finished – with – his – tongue – he – forced – us – to masturbate – him.
Is it rape if a man of forty puts his tongue into a ten-year-old child’s vagina? I was twenty-one before I could have sex.
Chapter 34
He left us clinging to each other. We woke clinging to each other.
‘I’m going to tell Mother,’ were Jenny’s first words. I said nothing.
‘Pippa, we have to.’ I said nothing but she answered my thoughts. ‘Because if we don’t, it will happen again.’
My next question froze inside me but she took control again. ‘Well, if it does, then we’ll run away.’
‘He won’t come in now.’
‘We can’t stay here like this.’
Throughout the conversation, I said nothing.
I don’t know where the ten-year-old strength in Jenny came from, but it was enough for both of us. If enough means that we were able to get up and wash and dress, and pretend that nothing had changed. If enough means that, when Mother returned, we watched Frank hug her and kiss her as if everything were perfectly normal.
‘The girls aren’t feeling very well. I think they may have a bout of flu or something coming on.’
‘They look awful! Are you alright, girls?’
‘We’re fine. We just had a bad night.’ Jenny spoke. I couldn’t look at any of them.
Mother noticed nothing. That week, we asked if we could have a television in our room and before Mother could open her mouth Frank offered to buy us one. This gave us the alibi we needed, and we retreated into each other’s safety.
One night, on her return from a cheese-stealing foray, Jenny reported a conversation overheard in the living room.
‘Don’t you think the girls are behaving strangely at the moment?’ Mother was asking Frank. ‘They seem to have cut themselves off from both of us.’
‘Honey, don’t fret. They’re probably just going through one of those bonding phases twins have. In a few years they’ll be dyeing their hair different colours and fighting over the same boyfriend, so make the most of it!’
‘Why don’t you come to my therapy group, Frank? You take things so much in your stride.’
‘So why go to therapy?’ Laughing and muffled kissing sounds.
Then Mother again. ‘But maybe the girls are feeling jealous. I mean, there’s never been a father in their lives, and then Nana leaving, and you and I so close.’
‘You could be right. They have been a little distant lately. And they did seem to resent it when you went away that weekend.’
Mother sighing.
‘Listen Honey, don’t be too hard on yourself. They’ll be fine, trust me. Just give them time.’
‘Thank you, Frank. Thank you for caring.’
* * *
Years later, when she was old enough to dramatise the past, Jenny would say that this conversation sealed the fate of men in her life. It was a good line and she threw it at men like bait. Without fail they would bite, strive to convince her that not all men were the same, peacock in front of her as the exception that would prove her rule, but no one was allowed to break the rule, and in Jenny’s book all men were fair game.
It takes time for a child to learn that an adult can be gullible. I had only Jenny’s version of the conversation, yet my reaction was equally raw and, whereas Jenny hatched fanciful plans to slip poison into Frank’s drink, I focused on Mother’s stupidity. Why can’t she see? Why can’t she see he doesn’t love her? Why can’t she see who he is? I told you he had bad eyes.
‘We have to tell her,’ said Jenny one day in the middle of watching Blue Peter.
I froze and then slowly shook my head. ‘Why?’
‘Because.’
‘He might kill us.’
‘Scaredy-cat.’
‘What if he kills Mother?’
‘If you don’t want to I’ll do it without you.’
So we did. We waited until business took Frank away to London for a weekend and we told Mother. Or rather Jenny told Mother, in words that I cannot remember, in words that Mother did not understand, did not want to understand, could not allow herself to understand, and finally understood, while I stared into a plate of shepherd’s pie and discovered whole planets in it; planets which were suddenly bombarded by pieces of broken china, smashed plates, screaming, tears and confusion. I sensed rather than saw the movement around me, somehow heard my name in the screams.
‘PIPPA! Is this true? Are you saying this is true?’ I must have given some form of response. ‘NO!’
I watched more of my planet spilling onto the table. She fled from the room and Jenny and I clung to each other.
Chapter 35
Then Mother made a choice. Who knows how difficult it was for her or at what level of her subconscious she processed the information she had been given by her ten-year-old daughters. What does anyone do with information like that? The man you love, the man who saved you from the precipice, the man who cares – this man you trust is supposed to have abused your daughters? God knows her relationship with the twins had never been easy. She had felt excluded from the start and their olive complexions were a constant reminder of the man who had walked out of their lives before they were born. Therapy had opened up the wounds and laid bare her resentment; she had confronted it, weeping, in a fierce and angry role-play. The twins seemed to have created their own world, a world that Nana had perhaps been able to penetrate, but which she had not. Since Nana had left they were still more distant, more moody, yet they had seemed to warm to Frank. Could they be punishing him? Punishing her? Their imaginations often frightened he
r. There was something too creative, too morbid, in the games they played together.
At least those are the kind of thoughts I imagine hovered over the abyss around the choice she faced. Because, at some level, however unconscious, it was a choice, a choice I have tried and failed to forgive, a choice that turned something in Jenny into stone. Mother made her choice. She rejected the information we had given her.
It took her twenty-four hours. Sometimes, still, when I want to understand, I try and imagine what she must have gone through to make her capable of closing her eyes; the demons that must have thrashed that night as she drank herself into temporary oblivion while her daughters retreated to their room to deal with their confusion and their fear as best they could. During the course of the night we heard sobbing, we heard music, we heard hysterical laughter, we heard a sound like broken glass and we wished for Nana. Silence finally told us that Mother’s ‘mood’ had passed. She would sleep late into the next morning and ask us, sheepishly, whether we had made our own breakfast.
But the next morning, Jenny woke me.
‘Mother’s not here. She’s left us a note. It says we are to make our own breakfast and watch TV, and that Mrs Hoyes will pop round to make us lunch. She says she will be back late afternoon.’
Later, much later, when we tried to piece together what happened into some kind of explanation, we decided that Mother must have made contact with Frank and arranged to meet him for lunch. She must surely have told him what we had said, must surely have confronted him and must have accepted his denial, his reassurances, his devious sympathy. How can he have dealt with her accusations and her doubts? What stuff inside his make-up allowed, enabled him to deceive the mother of the daughters he had abused? I picture his eyes and I shudder.
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