Читать книгу Abandoned: The true story of a little girl who didn’t belong - Anya Peters - Страница 17

I’ve woken up too early. The light in the bedroom is the colour of fish tank water, and my eyes swim up drowsily through it towards the sounds in the middle of the room. It’s my first morning waking up in the ‘big girls’ bedroom that Marie and Sandra share by the front door, and everything is unfamiliar. I’m supposed to be getting up early to go with Marie to the train station. I have to bring the child benefit money back from the post office, hiding it in my sock and crossing two main roads and then the streets with the trees and big houses, and then the footbridge back to the flats on my own. I’ve never done that before and Mummy’s worried that I’m too young. But she is on a new shift and has to go into work early, before we all get up, and Michael needs money for a school trip. There’s no other way to do it, and so in the end she agrees. I’m not yet seven and excited at the thought of proving how useful I can be, but even more excited at sleeping in the ‘big girls’ room and soon being one of them, no longer having to sleep in the back room with all the younger ones.

The noises sound like voices, whispers, and I wonder if Marie has forgotten about me. I push back the blankets and sit up on my knees, shivering, hugging myself against the cold as I blink into the thick, green light, trying to remember which end of the room the bed is. The big double wardrobe, with its rusty key hanging from a piece of red string, comes bulging out of the dark and I run my eyes across the crack of yellow light under the door to the hallway, and then back around the room.

Then I see Marie with her back to me. She has her white work shirt on and her blonde hair is hanging loose down her back, almost to her waist. She has no skirt on. I’m about to ask her if it’s time to wake up, but then the dark dissolves a bit more and when she moves her shoulder I see that my uncle is there, standing up against her. I freeze. Suddenly everything is wrong. My uncle never goes into the bedrooms. He has his arms around her waist and is kissing her. It doesn’t make sense. I lean forwards, frowning, and the coats that covered the bed during the night fall heavily onto the floor. Instinctively I try to hide back under the covers but it’s too late; my uncle looks over Marie’s shoulder and sees me.

He pushes Marie out of the way and comes hurtling towards me, shouting, the buckle on his open belt clattering, his fists thumping me down into the bed, then dragging me out by the hair, throwing me across the floor as if I’m a sack of concrete he’s pulling from the back of a trailer, instead of a stunned six-year-old in stripy blue pyjamas.

My arms are clamped over my head and his big, heavy hands are dragging and slamming me as I cry, ‘Sorry, Dad … sorry,’ looking up at his livid face, the dark rope of muscles at the side of his throat jumping like eels. But I’m not sure what I am saying sorry about. Why was he kissing her in the middle of the bedroom? Nobody kisses anybody in our home. Marie and my uncle are screaming over me, and behind them I see the boys in their vests and underpants, standing in the hallway watching.

‘Get her out of here. What’s she doing here? The sly bitch,’ he shouts, kicking me against the iron leg of the bed and pounding down on me again. All the air seems to leave the room and everything turns black and I can hear Marie screaming.

‘Leave her alone, leave her alone you maniac, you’ll kill her.’

He didn’t kill me, but something died. Something inside me just shrivelled up and blew away like dust.

Nothing was ever the same after that.

Later I walked across the footbridge and along the unfamiliar, tree-lined roads to the train station with Marie in a kind of silent, slowed-down dream. Sore from the beating and confused by the threats and by what I’d witnessed, unable to make sense of this glimpse of the adult world.

We walked in silence most of the way, both still struggling to hold back our tears, both anxious for the walk to be over. Every shadow and every rustle of wind around every corner seemed to be him, about to pounce. The threats that he wanted me out by the time he got back were still screaming in my head and I knew Mummy wouldn’t be able to do anything this time. I pressed my hand over my mouth, to muffle the sound of my crying as we walked, and tried to blink away the image of the two of them I’d seen. I was still trying to work out what I’d done wrong.

We sat on a bench in front of the post office and waited for it to open so that Marie could collect the money that I had to take back in my sock.

‘What’s gonna happen?’ I asked eventually.

‘Nothing,’ she snapped. ‘Try not to think about it.’

Her sharpness surprised me and made me cry again. Marie never shouted at us.

‘Please don’t let me get sent away, Marie … I didn’t do anything … What’s gonna happen?’ I cried.

‘Just keep out of his way. Stay in the bedroom when he gets home and try not to make any noise.’

‘I don’t.’

‘I know. It’s not your fault. It’s him, he’s an animal.’

‘Why?’

‘He just is.’

Nobody ever knew the reasons for things in our house. But the why’s never stopped. ‘That’s what school’s for, and books,’ Mummy would say. ‘Ask your teachers all those questions.’ But the questions just piled up and up in my head like a tower that would one day come crashing down. Marie left school at fifteen to work, and wasn’t good at school work, and we knew not to ask her too many questions.

Neither of us had mentioned what had happened that morning and I was still waiting for her to explain it. I sat on one of my hands like I always did when I was trying not to feel anything, watching her as she read the words on the back of her bus ticket. Sandra always said Marie couldn’t read properly and that she used to go to a ‘special’ school because she was ‘backward’, but she wasn’t, and anyway it wouldn’t matter because we all wanted to be like Marie when we grew up – beautiful and quiet and kind.

I could smell my uncle’s stale, peppery sweat on her shoulder. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the blood crusted in her right nostril and had to fast-blink through the memory of the chaos that had happened in the room after he saw me looking, the way he sprang across as I tried to pull the blankets over my head, ripping me from the bed, with Marie throwing herself in between us the way Mummy did.

‘Do you hate him?’ she asked.

I shrugged, frightened of having opinions or being ‘ungrateful’ in case I got sent away.

‘I do,’ she said, and I stared up at her. Until then I thought what I’d seen that morning meant that suddenly she didn’t. But I was glad that she still did; just the way Mummy still hated him. Hate seemed safer the more people who did it.

‘Mummy would get really upset if you told her what happened.’

I felt my head lean against her arm and left it there, hoping she would put her arm tightly around me to stop the shake inside, but instead of pulling me towards her she pulled away from me as if I’d given her an electric shock. ‘She’d get really upset, wouldn’t she? And I don’t like seeing her like that, do you?’

I shook my head. She knew I never wanted to upset Mummy.

As soon as the post office opened and Marie had watched me fold the money down inside my sock I wanted to go. I lied, saying Mummy had forgotten to give Liam the note telling my teacher I was going to be late for school. She rustled the large bag of sweets she’d bought with her part of the money and asked me to wait with her until her train came. I shook my head as the tears continued to stream down, but she cried at my crying, and put an arm around me and said, ‘Please.’

She pulled the bag open and the scented, sugary smell of Jelly Babies burst out between us into the cold air. We stood in silence on the platform, biting the heads off the Jelly Babies, chewing loudly as we watched people bundled in winter clothes hurrying through the turnstile into the station.

Marie told me how she wouldn’t have to hate my uncle for much longer because she’d met a boy at work and they were getting engaged, and were going to live together. I couldn’t tell anyone about that either, she said; that was another secret that only she and Mummy knew about for now. I bit a green Jelly Baby in two and chewed loudly, licking the scented powder from my lips, keeping my eyes still, not knowing what I could and couldn’t look at any more.

Whatever I did always seemed to be the wrong thing. ‘She’s a good-for-nothing little bitch,’ my uncle would yell when he wanted me out, and no matter how hard I tried nothing I did was ever good enough for him. I stood stiff and awkward, trying to swallow quietly, not knowing what to do or say, wishing one of the others were there so that I could copy them.

‘Remember those brochures of boarding schools I showed you?’ she said. ‘Will you have another look at them?’

I peeled the Jelly Baby from the roof of my mouth and held it in my fist. Without looking at her, I shook my head firmly, my face screwed up in refusal. I couldn’t look at her; she was going to let him send me away to live in a school.

All I wanted to do was go home and be invisible amongst all the others. Home, where I belonged, and where Mummy always promised no one was going to force me to leave.

When Marie mentioned sleeping-schools again that morning at the train station I felt everything shake inside. I didn’t think about how she might be trying to save me from whatever she had been having to endure at his hands; I just knew that I didn’t want to leave the only family I had.

‘You would really like it there,’ she said. ‘There would be lots of girls your age, and they’d all be friends with you, and you’d have a bedroom of your own. You could still come back in the holidays.’ But she said it in a lying voice, and I knew it was a trick. ‘He’s only going to get worse,’ she said.

‘I don’t want to go …’ I felt the tears slipping out again, and held my breath until I could hear the blood crashing through my ears. ‘Please, Marie, don’t let him make me … I want to stay with Mummy … Please make them let me. I don’t want to leave … I didn’t mean to look. I just woke up and heard noises.’

I never slept in the ‘big girls’ bedroom’ after that night. Stella wanted me back in with her. Mummy didn’t know what the fight had been about, but she knew this time he meant it and I had to be kept out of his way, so Stella got her own way again. Marie left soon after, going to live with her new boyfriend Peter and his parents in Leicestershire. A few months later they came back for a visit and to announce their engagement. They brought an engagement cake with them that Peter, who was training to be a chef, had made himself. It was the first time he’d been to the flats, and Mummy fussed around for days getting everything perfect. Sandra was mostly out and I helped Mummy with the housework and getting the girls ready for school and keeping the boys from each other’s throats. On the day of their visit my uncle drank more and more and everything was tense. We were playing out later when we heard the loud bangs and shouts. I looked up and saw my uncle throwing the cake in its white box over the landing. I hid behind the burnt sheds behind the washing lines at the back of the square and watched my uncle storming along the landing towards the stairs. All the others were out and neighbours were opening their doors calling, ‘What’s going on?’

He came out into the square, swearing at the top of his voice, and started stamping on the cake, which oozed out from the broken box before he kicked it up against the big metal bins. Marie and Peter ran down the stairwell at the other end, with Mummy crying and shouting ‘Run!’ at the top of her voice.