After the fat man had gone, he couldn’t resume the charade that he was the loving uncle and I the child who was dependent on him. I went silently back outside to the garden. He did not try to cajole me. He was not worried that his power over me was diminishing. He knew as well as Chubby did that any chance of my talking was now past: I was far too ashamed to confide in anyone. I could never choke out the words to describe my pain or the nightmare I was living in once again.
I sat on the grass, my arms hugging my knees. The place between my legs throbbed with pain and my mind replayed the images of what they had done to me.
When I had gone into the house earlier, I had left my half-drunk glass of Coke outside. Several wasps had crawled into it. Some were already dead, but others were struggling to climb out up the slippery surface of the glass. But their bedraggled wings only pulled them round in circles so I picked up the glass and turned it upside-down.
Then I took the newspaper that my uncle had left open on the chair and held it out for them. One by one they crawled on to it and the paper started to absorb the liquid that held them down. As they dried and recovered they slowly worked their wings, before flying up towards the warmth of the sun and freedom.
That day, my time in Spain became only a distant memory. It was the end of the chance I had been given to heal and have a normal life. It was the beginning of me meeting other Chubbys. Those men who used, humiliated and destroyed the child I was. After that time the little girl who, with her suntanned face, had called out, ‘Hola,’ to her friends, spun round to the music at the fiesta and rushed excitedly into school full of stories about her holiday disappeared, leaving in her place a little girl who heard screams inside her head.
21
On the days when I did not go to my uncle, Kat and I would take our bicycles out and ride along the lanes until we reached the purple heather-covered moors. Sometimes we would spot a field devoid of animals and farm workers, rest our bikes against a hedge and climb over the gate.
There we would lie on our backs, our heads resting on our arms and the last of the autumn sun warming our faces. With my fists screwed up like binoculars, I held them to my eyes as I searched for wildlife but it was only common small brown birds that I was able to find in the curve of my fingers. I felt a tug of yearning for Spain, with its forests and peace, and wanted to see again the flight of a solitary eagle.
It was on one of those excursions that Kat told me how a woman got pregnant. I knew that she was in a dark mood when we had set out that morning. Her mouth was turned down at the corners, making her look sullen and tired, but it was not until we reached the moors that she told me what was wrong.
The moment she was off her bicycle and into the field, she flung herself on to the ground and looked morosely up at the sky. I waited for her to say something, but she sighed deeply and looked at me bleakly. ‘Do you know what my mother’s gone and done now?’ she asked, rolling her eyes.
All I knew about Kat’s mother was what Kat had told me about her, although she was very friendly when she saw me. Not having a clue as to what she might have done, I remained silent.
‘She’s gone and got herself pregnant. Pregnant at her age! She’s having a bloody baby in five months. A little sister or brother for me – as if I want one. She told me this morning. It was as if she thought I should be pleased. She was all coy and soppy-eyed with his hands on her stomach all the time to feel it kicking. Ugh, how embarrassing is that?’
It was then that she informed me of how women got pregnant.
‘How could she?’ Kat exclaimed in disgust. ‘It’s gross.’ I sat with my arms round my knees, listening to her rant on about how revolting the thought of what her mother and new husband did together was.
But as she spat out her hurt and frustration I felt a creeping sense of horror coming over me. ‘Do you get pregnant every time you do that?’ I asked tentatively.
Kat, wrapped up in her own problem, did not question why a little girl of eight wasn’t shocked at the description of the sex act but curious about the results. ‘I think so. Why else would they do it? It’s so gross,’ she said, with the positive conviction of a ten-year-old, sure she is right.
I pushed the sinking feeling that Kat’s information had given me deep within the recesses of my mind for I did not want her to notice that anything was wrong. Instead I tried to console her, but nothing was going to make Kat feel like smiling that day.
‘Got your Walkman with you?’ she asked and, relieved that I could do something for her, I brought it out of my duffel bag. She had brought her own headphones and tapes. ‘Let’s listen to these,’ she said, ‘not your baby stuff.’ I bit back a retort on the injustice of that remark – hadn’t I chosen ones by stars she said she liked? She slipped a tape in – and for the first time I heard a different type of music than anything that was listened to in my home. The first cassette was by a band called the Sex Pistols.
‘It seriously pisses my mother off when she hears it,’ Kat shouted at me over the music – we each had our headsets on. I did not ask her why she let her mother hear it when she had her own Walkman and could listen in silence. But I had already learnt by then that ‘pissing off’ her mother and stepfather was something she enjoyed. ‘But they can’t stop me listening to what I want – my dad buys them for me,’ she said defiantly.
In that field, cigarettes dangling from the corners of our mouths, Coke bottles frothing over, we bobbed about, joined through each headset to the single body of the Walkman. ‘This is how you pogo,’ she shouted, as she jumped straight up and down to the most controversial band of the decade. To us it came highly recommended by one factor alone: our parents had been outraged by it. Relishing the words that had shocked the older generation, we sang together Johnny Rotten’s version of ‘God Save The Queen’.
But as we danced and smoked, all I could think of was what Kat had told me. Babies might look very small to a full-grown person but to me they were quite big. Which meant that if one was growing inside me, might it not make my stomach burst open when it was ready to come out? I felt cold waves of fear at that thought.
For several days I fretted, and every morning I looked at my stomach to see if it had grown bigger. I was sure I felt something moving inside. Was it a baby kicking? I asked myself, in a panic. In the end, after several worried days, I decided to confront my mother.
‘I think I’m going to have a baby,’ I said baldly and, to my surprise, she did not react with the shocked response I was hoping for but dreading.
‘Don’t be silly, Jackie,’ was all she said, without even looking up from the newspaper.
‘I am,’ I insisted, as my imagination took me from possible to definite.
The newspaper was lowered slowly and the look of resigned impatience I was now so used to was directed at me yet again. ‘Whatever makes you think that?’
I swallowed hard, clenched my fists so that my nails made tiny marks on my palms. This time I was determined she would listen to me. Undeterred by the look she was giving me, I managed to blurt out that I knew how babies were made.
‘Don’t be silly, you’re too young –’
‘I do know!’ I practically screamed at her. ‘The man sticks his thing –’
There was a shout of outrage from my appalled mother. ‘Stop this nonsense. Don’t talk dirty, Jackie. I won’t have it, not in this house. Ever. Do you hear me?’ Then a hint of worry came into her voice. ‘Who told you that? One of those children from that dreadful council estate, I suppose.’ Although there were no council houses within our village boundaries, there were in the next village. A small percentage of the children who lived there had now started to attend our village school, something that my mother was far from happy with.
I knew better than to say it was Kat. I could just imagine my mother storming over to the neighbours’ house and Kat refusing to speak to me ever again. And I would probably be banned from mixing with her. As my parents were reluctant to let me take my bicycle out on the
roads without her, I thought it better to keep that information to myself. So I just nodded.
‘Jackie, what are you trying to tell me?’
‘I’ve done that,’ I screamed, before bursting into tears.
‘You disgusting little girl,’ she started, and I closed my ears to what followed. I knew from the words being hurled at me that she didn’t believe I had done much, but she knew I had been playing games in which parts of the body that should be kept out of view had been exposed.
Through her tirade I heard words I had heard time and again and would continue to hear for some years. How I was a disgrace, a constant embarrassment. On and on she went, until I wanted to place my hands over my ears. If I had hoped deep down that she would put her arms round me and ask what was really troubling me, I finally knew then that it was not going to happen. Out of fear, I had given myself an opening to tell her what was happening every weekend. But she made it clear she had no intention of hearing the words spoken silently between the lines of what I had said aloud. I looked at her then, her perfectly made-up face contorted with anger and disgust, and I knew I could never tell her. She would not believe me.
‘I never want to hear you say anything like that again. We’ve had this conversation before, Jackie, haven’t we? Just after Christmas, wasn’t it?’ and she was off again.
‘I think you’re just deliberately trying to shock and upset me,’ she continued, ‘and I don’t know why you would want to do that.’ She said it had been a waste of time taking me away. ‘I told your father it was, but he insisted.’ She added that there was nothing more she could do for me. She finished by forbidding me to mix with common children and finally dismissed my words entirely by calling me a stupid child and telling me that little girls under eleven could simply not get pregnant. She did not tell me why but, despite my despair, I was relieved that a baby was not going to burst out of my stomach.
Humiliated by her venom, I slunk to my room and sat there with my head in my hands, looking down at my feet. My fingers twisted the ends of my hair as I thought through the reality of my situation. I could never say anything to my parents. They didn’t love me and they wouldn’t believe me if I told them about my uncle and Chubby.
I felt as dirty as my mother had said I was. I went into the bathroom, undressed and then washed every part of my body with meticulous concentration. I soaped and scrubbed but the dirt, invisible to those who did not know it was there, remained.
Somewhere during that time, Florence disappeared from my life and my teddy bears became just children’s toys. With that realization came sadness, for it was then that it dawned on me that I was really on my own.
22
My memories of the next few years are a kaleidoscope of jumbled pictures. Were there nice times? I think so, but any recollection of them is hidden under the layers of the times that happened next.
There was pain – pain inflicted on me by men who, too excited by acting out their fantasies and satisfying their need, forgot to be careful with my small body. Later, as I grew a little older, there were bruises from slaps and the marks of fingers that had pressed hard into soft flesh. Marks that I became skilled at hiding. ‘I slipped’; ‘I knocked myself’; ‘My throat is sore so I need to cover it’ were just some of the many excuses that I made to hide my shame. At school before PE classes I often had to pretend to have a cold. Shivering, my face burning with fear at undressing and those telltale marks being exposed for everyone to see, I stuttered out my excuses.
The anger grew. I gazed sullenly at my mother whenever she spoke, and left the room when my father was there. I couldn’t bear to see the worry and disappointment that so often flitted across his face whenever his eyes rested on me.
At school, I became surly and uncommunicative. Art classes were the only lessons that interested me. But when the other children drew pictures in which the sun was always shining, I drew something quite different.
It was years after I had drawn them that I saw them again. For some reason my mother had kept them. She must have taken them out of my room after I’d left and, instead of throwing them out as I would have expected, had rolled them up neatly and saved them. Just holding them was enough to bring the old anger back. Sometimes there were just violent slashes of dark colours streaking across the page, at others furious squiggles where the paintbrush had been applied so heavily it had almost ripped the pages. There was one of a child with fat tears running down its face. But the most disturbing was the picture of a house under a black sky. There were no trees or flowers in pretty pastel shades as other children drew, just red and grey streaks, representing flames, bursting out of the roof. There were no figures standing outside it. When I had drawn that, was I really imagining everyone inside the house had been devoured by fire? When you looked closely, the small house in the corner was just a black square – yes, I mentioned that little house before and the person who lived there: my uncle.
As I held and examined it, I saw an image of a child small for her age, her face screwed up in concentration as she expressed her anger and hopelessness in the only way she knew how: by drawing them. Each time she put her brush or crayon on the paper the screams filled her head; screams that only she heard.
23
‘We don’t want you going to your aunt and uncle’s so often,’ said my mother.
‘No,’ added my father, as he lowered the paper and smiled at me. ‘We miss you too much. We’re going to do things as a family, just like we did in Spain.’
I thought about how, when I went to school, I heard other children talking about their weekends and holidays. Now I would be able to join in. I had never told the teachers that most weekends I was sent away, for I never wanted them to ask, ‘What did you do there?’
‘Tomorrow we’ll take our bicycles and go into the country for a picnic,’ they both said, almost in unison.
‘You’re more important than the hairdresser and my dinner parties or even Daddy’s golf,’ my mother added laughingly, as she gently stroked my hair off my face. They both smiled warmly at me as I basked in their love.
That evening she cooked my favourite supper and afterwards, instead of going to my room to watch videos on my own, we all sat down together and watched television. I sat next to my mother on the settee and rested against her. I could smell her light flowery perfume and she, feeling me pressed against her, smiled and put her arm round my shoulders to pull me even closer to her.
The next morning, no sooner had I come down the stairs than the picnic basket was strapped to the back of my father’s bicycle.
Other family groups were riding their bikes on the country roads that warm sunny day. Pink-faced with hard pedalling, little blond boys waved at us as we overtook them, and looking up at the clear blue sky, I saw the white vapour trails left by aeroplanes as they flew overhead.
We came to the fields where a lush green carpet thick with daisies and buttercups beckoned us. We dismounted and walked, our legs brushed by flowers. In the distance I saw rabbits, their retreating white tails bobbing as they disappeared into the long grass.
‘This is the perfect place,’ my mother said, as she spread out a brightly coloured woollen rug for us to sit on before opening the wicker basket. It contained soft drinks and an assortment of appetizing food.
She handed round sandwiches and we ate and drank. My mother picked buttercups and held them under my chin. ‘To see if you like butter,’ she told me solemnly. ‘If you do there will be a small yellow circle there.’
‘And do I?’ I asked, giggling with the tickly feeling of her stroking them against my skin.
‘Yes, you like butter, all right,’ she declared, and we all laughed.
My parents lay basking in the sun and I picked daisies and made them into chains that I strung around my mother’s ankles and wrists.
Later I dozed, my head resting in my mother’s lap, her hand stroking my back.
We were tired when we returned home but not so tired that my mother refused to rea
d me a story when I climbed into bed. I was nearly asleep by the time she had finished and I felt her lips brush my cheek before she left my room. ‘Night-night, my darling,’ she whispered, as she closed the door.
When morning came, I woke to a fuzzy feeling of happiness.
The memory of the previous day was sharp and clear. The picture of it replayed in my head while I came fully awake. It was then that I realized memory was unreliable: that day had never happened. During the night my imagination had painted a pastel picture of how I wished my life to be, a fantasy created by my subconscious that unleashed waves of longing – longing to be a normal little girl whose parents loved her and who took every measure to keep her safe.
My grief when I faced the reality of my life was expressed by a string of inarticulate words directed at Paddington who, in my unhappiness, I clutched tightly to me. My body shook with sobs of loss, followed by an open-mouth wail before I pressed my face hard against Paddington’s furry body to deaden the sounds of my despair.
For what had really happened that weekend was that my aunt and uncle had told my mother at the last minute that they had to go away – something to do with my aunt’s sister being unwell. When my mother told me that my weekend visit had been cancelled, I could tell by her clipped tone that she was more than annoyed.
‘Well, Jackie,’ she said, tight-lipped, ‘that’s really inconvenient. We’re having a dinner party tonight and I don’t want you creeping around. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, I know,’ I mumbled, feeling a surge of resentment against her.
That Saturday progressed as all the others did when I stayed at home for the weekend. My father left early to play golf and I accompanied my mother to the hairdresser and the shops. I was given an early supper and two videos were handed to me as I laid down my knife and fork. ‘I got you these to keep you busy. Remember you’re to stay in your room, Jackie,’ my mother reiterated sternly.
Can't Anyone Help Me? Page 9
