Читать книгу Abandoned: The true story of a little girl who didn’t belong - Anya Peters - Страница 18

My uncle called me a ‘sneak’ or a ‘spy’ all the time after the morning I saw him with Marie in the front bedroom. Mummy refused to let him send me away, but I ended up getting sent out to the kitchen to stand in the dark more and more; and they were always fighting about it.

‘I want her out of here … she’s out,’ he’d scream, pushing me towards the front door.

‘Over my dead body,’ Mummy would shout, and sometimes, when he had drunk too much, it very nearly was. He told the girls not to talk to me, that I wasn’t their sister and wasn’t staying. He told Jennifer, the youngest, never to ask me a question, that if she wanted to know anything she had to ask Stella or one of the boys.

I couldn’t shake the memory of seeing him kissing Marie half-undressed in the middle of the bedroom that morning, or how furious he was when he realised I was in the room too. But I couldn’t understand what happened either, or why he said he’d kill me if I told Mummy, or why he screamed at me to ‘look away’ whenever he saw me looking up.

Whenever I saw him after that, even if he didn’t shout it, I quickly looked away and sat with downcast eyes; trying not to think and trying not to see. But everything I did from then on infuriated him. Especially my eyes.

I was used to him making up the rules as he went along: ‘Look at me when I’m talking to you,’ ‘Don’t look at me,’ ‘Don’t look at me with those eyes,’ ‘Look at the telly,’ ‘Don’t look at the telly,’ ‘Stare at that wall over there until I tell you to stop.’ They were never rules that I could learn, so nothing I did was ever right. But I still tried to do everything right; I couldn’t put a foot wrong in case he sent me away. But there was nothing I could do about my eyes, and it was them he hated mostly now.

‘Leave her alone, you bully,’ Mummy shouted back at him. ‘What’s wrong with her eyes?’ But he wouldn’t say. Only he and I knew what was wrong with my eyes – all the things they saw that they shouldn’t have.

The arguing never stopped. With Marie gone, Mummy couldn’t cope with it all on her own. Sandra was the eldest girl then and the one who was supposed to help Mummy out, but she caused even more trouble, skiving off school and being brought home by the police one night for being drunk. Sandra was very different to Marie. Loud and argumentative and fiery; she resented having to stay in looking after us, treating us all roughly and losing her temper at the slightest thing. She was always answering Mummy back and stealing her cigarettes, or money from her purse to buy them. Sandra was very overweight and not pretty like Marie but she had lots of friends, and was always trying to sneak off as soon as my uncle got back from work, to hang out with them, drinking and smoking in the burnt-out cars up by the cemetery.