Abandoned (15 page)

Chapter 32

T
hen I was almost seventeen, five and a half years after I was whisked away to Marie’s from the police station, I went back to visit Mummy in the house in London. It was the first time I’d been allowed to go back, and a few days before Marie had sat me down and told me that my uncle was back living in the house. I swallowed back the lump in my throat, but other than that I felt numb. I pretended it was the most ordinary thing in the world, and that it didn’t bother me in the slightest. But for days I had headaches that wouldn’t go and although I didn’t put it into words it felt a little like my recurring nightmare, when I saw him and Mummy walking away together, leaving me torn to pieces on the platform.

When I arrived he was up a stepladder, changing a light bulb in the dining room ceiling. I walked quickly past the doorway, blinking away some cold, painful feeling I didn’t recognise, and down into the sizzling roast lamb smell of the kitchen. Mummy whispered to me to go back in to say hello to him. I did as she said, as if nothing had happened. He was bent almost double up on the ladder to avoid the ceiling, but still looked enormous, bringing all my physical fears rushing back.

I stepped forwards, all smiles, one hand behind my back still gripping the doorframe. I hoped he’d speak first, but he didn’t. The doorbell went and everyone was streaming into the hallway saying hello, bundling me into the family. I felt shy and awkward at suddenly being the centre of things. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

‘Hi,’ I said eventually.

‘All right, Anya?’ he said and the ice was shattered. He’d never asked me in my whole life if I was all right.
Everything really had changed
. I nodded that I was and tried to push the fear out of my smile. He nodded and our eyes met for the first time in all those years, before we both quickly looked away. Even hearing his voice again after so many years was frightening. He seemed quieter, though, like something had gone out of him. What I would have given for a‘sorry’, but for the first time I felt pity for him, unaccountably saddened to see him standing so awkwardly at the top of that ladder. And I took his quietness as some kind of apology.

‘Good girl,’ Mummy said, smiling, when I went through to the kitchen.

It was a hot day. The boys’ friends were in and out drinking tea and eating biscuits; everyone was laughing and happy. The whole house bustled with people and sound, radios and TVs playing in every room, the cat prowling around the place, flicking her tail. After the silence of my little box room at Marie and Peter’s it felt like heaven. This was my family; these were my brothers and sisters. I felt I belonged again; I was part of something.

The boys were allowed to smoke in the conservatory.

‘Go on,’ Mummy said,‘I know you like a sneaky smoke, just don’t let me see you do it.’

It was all so warm and easy-going and, still after all those years, everyone and everything was so familiar that when it was time to leave I didn’t want to. I wanted to go back.

Mummy explained that my uncle had begged her to take him back. The girls had begged her too, she said. I guess she didn’t have much choice. The girls needed their dad—and it would have been hard for her to cope on her own with four children still at home. He was a‘reformed character’, she said, he’d learnt his lesson, he’d never do anything like that again, and the girls told me he didn’t drink half as much any more, and that they hardly rowed like they used to.

After playing netball against a wall at the top of the road during that first visit, the girls linked arms with me on the way back. We bought a Chinese takeaway on the high street, and the men from the garage at the top came out flirting.

‘Who’s your friend?’ they asked the girls.

‘She’s not our friend,’ they said.‘She’s our sister.’

I was so proud I couldn’t breathe. I was a sister, part of something again. I belonged.

Stella bounced the netball along the pavement on the way back.‘I wish you were back living with us,’ she said.‘It was much better with you here.’

Someone wanted me! My sisters wanted me! And my soul floated back into my body.

That night I told Marie I wanted to move back to London. She asked Brendan, who said he’d talk to Kathy. Nobody seemed able to make decisions for me. Finally Brendan flew over to try to talk me out of it.

‘Why would you want to go back there?’ he asked. But in his heart he knew why. I’d talked to him more than anyone over the years, all those late nights in hotel rooms, and he knew how much I missed them all, how empty I felt inside. He kept trying to fill it with God, or‘Wait until you are qualified, it’ll all be different then.’ Eventually he gave in and said he would ask Mummy. Mummy said she’d have to talk it over with my uncle.

What if they didn’t want me? But they did and it was all agreed. The money Brendan was paying Marie and Peter to look after me would now be paid to Mummy. A new bed was bought and arrangements were made.

On my first day back Mummy took me aside and said:‘I know he won’t, but if ever he does anything to you again, you make sure you tell me, okay?’ I nodded.‘Now, that’s the last we’ll mention about all that stuff, okay? The past is the past. Forgive and forget; that’s my motto. Let bygones be bygones.’ And that was the first and last time we ever spoke of it.

Although I longed to be back as part of the family, it was hard to suddenly be amongst people who shouted and swore after years of people who had been calm and quiet and considerate to one another. Quickly all the emotions from the past resurfaced, and soon became overwhelming. But I couldn’t tell anyone. When it got too bad, I retreated into books, which distanced me further from the rest of the family because none of them read for pleasure or studied for exams. I was seen as an oddity for it and ridiculed.‘Anya’s trying to be different again, thinking she’s better than the rest of us.’

Learning came easily to me and I did well at school, but deep down my only real ambition was to be part of my family. All I wanted was to be accepted by them all, to fit in and have a family of my own again. So I sat on the same settee as my uncle and watched news items or programmes that referred to some form of child abuse and didn’t blink. I just sat there trying not to move a muscle, keeping my breathing shallow while he drank beer and chewed peanuts noisily, making sounds or movements to draw attention to himself. Sometimes I thought I saw a smile on his lips, or that look in his eyes I’d seen in the car park behind the police station that day. Both of us knew that I hadn’t forgotten, even if I tried to give the impression I had, and only the two of us knew the full horror of what had gone on over those years.

After a couple of months I found myself back in the role of scapegoat, in amongst the chaos of their arguments and his drunkenness, repeatedly told that I wasn’t wanted again, that I was‘out of here’. The novelty of having an older teenage sister in the house soon wore off for Stella, and they all started telling me I was their slave, laughing that they had only wanted me back to do the housework. The sarcasm and hostility and put-downs restarted. I had never heard anybody speak like that in the years I’d been away and it was shocking.

When I lost my small, pink five-year diary from boarding school, with its little gold key and all my school friends’ addresses in the back, I felt I had lost my last connection with that time. My memories of school began to blur and it soon seemed like another lifetime ago. By contrast, everything that had happened before I was sent away sharpened and came back into focus.

One boiling hot day that summer, the girls were out in their swimming costumes in the garden. There had been a huge drunken row the night before and Mummy and I were in the kitchen getting the lunch ready. Out of the long kitchen window we watched the girls squirming in delight as my uncle jetted them with cold water from the hose, hopping from foot to foot screaming, their hair dripping, their swimming costumes stuck to their slim, straight bodies.

Suddenly I was embarrassed. I wanted them to cover up, to get away from him. I knew he had learned his lesson, and wouldn’t ever do anything like that again—especially to Stella and Jennifer—but I didn’t know where to look. I wasn’t ready for the feeling of horror that came up. I looked away. Not daring to look at Mummy I beat the stuffing smooth, trying to ignore the hot sharp pain tangled in my stomach. The mocking look in his eye when he came in to get a beer shocked me. I was sure he knew what I was thinking.

Soon I was back into a routine of housework and ironing. The only place I could do my homework in the evenings was the kitchen table, so if I wanted it cleared after dinner I had to do it myself. I’d do all the washing-up first while they all just got up, leaving their plates on the table, and went off to the other room to watch TV. I felt stunned after the serenity of those years away but at least I was still there, still one of them, even though I was the cause of most of the arguing again.

I agreed with things just to avoid confrontation, eager to please, wanting to do anything to fit in and be one of them. I threw myself into homework at night until my uncle started turning off the light in the kitchen, not letting me finish. I would take it under the bed covers with a torch, but the girls would call him to get me to turn it off.

‘Dad! Tell Anya…’ was all they had to say, and I would feel a pain tightening across the back of my head as I switched it off and dropped my book to the floor, still as terrified of him as I’d been as a little girl.

I knew I’d never be accepted as myself and be able to fit in. When the arguments got more frequent and more and more violent again I said I wanted to do my A levels in a year, to make up for the year I was behind because of the change of schools. I asked Brendan if I could do them at a private tutorial college on the other side of London because it was the only place you could do A levels in a year. I knew Brendan would agree and wouldn’t let me travel all that way every day when I could be studying. He came over and rented me a flat close to the college. It was the perfect excuse to leave home again, bringing my big blue school trunk back up out of the cellar and getting a taxi on my own after everyone went off to work and school.

I moved out on a Friday. On Sunday it was Mother’s Day and I went back for lunch and to give Mummy her present and card. By then the girls had already swapped rooms with Mummy and my uncle, going back to the smaller room. A third bed wouldn’t fit in that room too, and as I walked in Liam and my uncle were carrying my mattress out to the garden. They were laughing, on their way out to throw it over the back fence to burn it. It all felt so final. I had been fooling myself all along. I would never belong there.

Chapter 33

I
was always looking for proof that Brendan loved me. Although he always said he was closer to me than his other children, and loved me as much, I never trusted his words. So when I turned eighteen and he kicked up a fuss, saying I was too young to go on my first holiday with friends, I saw it as proof of how much he cared for me, and told my friends almost proudly that my Dad wouldn’t let me go.

Instead, he and Kathy planned a‘family’ holiday to America for the three of us. I’d been away with both of them before but never together, except when I visited them in Dublin—when I usually just transferred between their cars on country roads. This would be the first time the three of us had been abroad as a‘family’, and I was really looking forward to it. I was feeling very close to both of them by then, but particularly Brendan, who spoiled me whenever he came over, and who Kathy said I had wrapped around my little finger.

A few weeks before we were due to go, during one of his visits to meet a client in London, Brendan came with me to Somerset House to get a copy of my birth certificate so I could apply for a new passport. He waited outside while I went in. As I stood in the queue I saw a notice on the wall saying that fathers of children registered illegitimately could put their names to the certificate retrospectively. I went back outside to find him and asked him, proudly but shyly, if he would come in and put his name on mine. He looked offended and became very angry.

‘You don’t need a signature to know I’m your father. I’m paying for our holiday, aren’t I? And I’m the one paying for your flat and to go to university. Who else would pay out thousands of pounds like that?’

I was stunned. Everything always came down to money with Brendan, but I thought he’d know how important this was to me. It wasn’t about the money but about how much I needed to be acknowledged by him, even though he could never do that publicly because of their affair. I tried to get him to look at me, but he wouldn’t. He stood there stiffly, his face without expression, waiting for me to go back in.

I tried to convince myself that he didn’t deserve to have his name on my birth certificate, in an effort to dull the pain of the disappointment. But as I was thinking it,‘Please,’ escaped my lips. I felt like I was betraying myself, hearing myself say it again. I had said please when I first asked; now it felt like I was begging.

‘No,’ he said angrily. He turned and walked off fast down the Strand, leaving me crying and ashamed amongst the crowds of tourists filing past.

He obviously didn’t trust even me, and for a second I understood some of what my uncle must have felt over the years when they didn’t trust him enough to tell him who my father was. I remembered Brendan once telling me he thought my uncle might blackmail them if ever he knew. I was offended and angry that he might think that of me too. Especially after all those years at boarding school when I had to phone him at home to tell him my holiday dates and the times of the trains to meet me. I could so easily have told his wife or one of his children who I really was when they picked up the phone. But of course I never would.

‘It’s not to blackmail you with…if that’s what you think,’ I shouted after him down the Strand.‘It’s to get a passport, not to get even.’

I went back to get the birth certificate feeling wretched; dragging the heavy book off the shelf and over to the table, shaking with hurt and anger. When I saw the diagonal line drawn in blue ink through the last box in my entry, and in crabbed handwriting,‘unknown’ written in place of ‘Father’s name’, it seemed more accurate than the truth. That afternoon I realised I definitely didn’t know him as well as I thought I had all these years.

Next morning he apologised for not doing that for me. Brendan rarely apologised for anything. When I recall the way he came out of the hotel bathroom—his face half-covered in foam, his razor lifted and head hung, telling me that he was sorry—I knew it was sincere. I knew that it couldn’t wait until he was finished shaving; that perhaps he couldn’t look into his own eyes. I felt he was apologising for more than that too. I still feel such a pang of love for him when I remember how sad he looked that time that I could forgive him anything.

He went on to explain that although he obviously couldn’t put me in his will he had already arranged to set aside some money for me in a separate deal that none of his family knew about. I knew he was trying to show that he did consider me his daughter, although he couldn’t publicly admit it or treat me the same as them. But I didn’t even want to talk about it. I hated thinking that one day Brendan wouldn’t be there.