LITMIR.BIZ

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was the one I looked up to the most, the one I most wanted to be friends with. He was my uncle’s real son and, like Stella and Jennifer, was treated differently. I knew instinctively that if I could get him to stop teasing me and to like me then the others would too. They were all just copying him, just like he was copying my uncle.

      Liam, Michael, Stella, Jennifer and I all went to the local school, which was on the edge of the estate, a few minutes’ walk away from our block. I tried to keep my head down at school and not draw any attention to myself, to cover up what went on at home. I was quiet and bookish and in many ways an easy target for bullies. But whatever the bullies did was never as bad as what my uncle did to me. School was a sanctuary from home, and no matter how bad it got it was always bearable.

      In the playground one day, some of the bullies in my class found out I’d got four brothers and sisters in the school. They hadn’t realised before because of my different surname, and it felt good. Having them know I was one of five, instead of on my own, made me feel safe. Even though they didn’t know who my brothers and sisters were, it seemed to make me more popular for a while. They stopped picking on me, and I wasn’t always the last to be chosen for games. Then, one lunchtime, they said they didn’t believe me, and a group of them walked me around the playground, making me pick my brothers and sisters out, one by one.

      I pointed out the two small, blonde girls in the infants’ playground, swinging and jumping with the others, then the two bigger boys, playing separately, each in their own gang.

      ‘See,’ I said. It made me feel warm all over that everyone knew I had them there.

      ‘Why are they all blonde and you’ve got that dirty gravy-coloured hair?’ one girl from another class asked.

      ‘I don’t care,’ I replied, which was a response I was trying to teach myself to feel at home.

      For the next few days there was a wide, safe space around me in class, no one getting close enough to push me or tell me I smelt, or make fun of the hand-me-down clothes of Sandra’s I wore, or the old-fashioned boots which someone gave Mummy and which she made me wear to school when it rained. But the bullies grew impatient after a while.

      ‘You’re lying,’ the biggest of them accused me before class one day. ‘They’re not your brothers and sisters.’

      For a minute it sounded like my uncle saying it, and I could almost hear Mummy shouting back, ‘Yes they are, you cruel bastard, leave her alone.’

      ‘Yes, they are,’ I said.

      ‘None of them are your brothers or sisters,’ she spat.

      I wanted to shout again that they were, but nothing came out, and I just nodded and nodded without stopping, as the spiky laughter went on around me, until the teacher came in, smiling, and saw me nodding.

      ‘Yes, what?’ she said.

      They all turned and started laughing again. When I lifted my head to look at the teacher for support she looked away quickly, as if my face had frightened her, and started writing the date in yellow chalk in the corner of the blackboard.

      They carried on at lunch break, surrounding me. ‘Why have you got a different surname then?’

      I didn’t know how to explain that although I had a different surname to the others I was the one who was ‘never going to be sent away’. I just shrugged.

      ‘Names don’t matter.’

      Mummy always said it was the ‘inside things’ that mattered, what you feel on the inside, and so they were my real brothers and sisters, and they always would be.

      ‘They can’t be your brothers and sisters if you’ve got different surnames,’ my tormentor said again. I just walked away fast, humming. Nothing was going to stop me believing it. They were my brothers and sisters.

      ‘Why didn’t your own mum want you?’ they asked for a few days after that, crowding around me, breathing up all the air. Their words hit home. I felt a cold, heavy, sick sensation slip down inside me.

      ‘She does want me. I’ve got my mum, she’s indoors,’ I said, slamming my hands over my ears and running off fast.

      But they ran after me through the playground shouting, ‘She’s not your mum, she’s not your mum, you dirty skinny liar!’

      Even when the bell went and we had to get in line to go in, my heart wouldn’t stop pounding. It punched and punched against my ribcage, as if it had had enough and wanted to escape. And when Miss stood at the board and talked about how to do paragraphs, it was still so noisy that I thought she was about to spin around and tell me to ‘stop that racket’, that she couldn’t hear herself think. I leaned forwards until the edge of the desk was digging into my stomach, and my heart-noise quietened to a steady bom-bom, bom-bom, like one of the slow trains climbing up the hill behind the shops.

      Our block was directly opposite the school, across a narrow one-way road. Because it wasn’t a main road Mummy didn’t have to collect us; we all just met up at the top gate and ran across. Liam had the key to get in on a piece of green string around his neck. Most of the children in my class lived at the other end of the school, and used the other gate where their mums queued up to collect them with sweets and crisps, so they didn’t see us all going home together.

      One day the top gate was still padlocked so we had to use the bottom one. Liam and I were there first and we had to stand around and wait for the others. The two girls from my class with the lightest blonde hair marched up to Liam.

      ‘Is your mum her mum?’

      It was the wrong time to ask him. He was in a temper with me, standing by the boys’ toilets, furiously scraping the cement out between bricks with the point of a compass. It was the kind of time when he might say anything. My heart stopped and I stared at him without blinking, crossing my fingers inside my anorak pocket. But straight away he said, ‘No.’

      ‘Yes, she is,’ I said to all of them, almost before he had got the word out, but four bright-blue eyes were glaring between mine and Liam’s, and I knew they believed him, not me.

      ‘So she’s not your sister, then?’

      Liam was in the year above, and bigger than all of them. Not afraid of anyone either, just like my uncle. ‘I just told you, didn’t I? Are you deaf ? Or just plain stupid?’

      He said it exactly the way my uncle would, and it made me look up at him again, at his tight face, pale and narrow; his little pink scar from where my uncle had thrown the bread knife at Mummy and missed, raised like a trophy on his forehead; the throb high up in the muscles of his jaw going just like my uncle’s went before he snapped. I was in awe of his ability to answer back the bullies. He wouldn’t look at me, just stared at a point in the distance, his eyes grey and unblinking, those same little chips of concrete as my uncle’s.

      ‘Liar.’ The girls turned on me, their faces vicious. I swung my head back towards Liam, wanting him to give them one of his punches, or twist their arms in a Chinese burn.

      I shrugged. ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me,’ I heard Mummy singing in my head as I walked away.

      But things were going to get much worse than just shouting and cruel words.

       Chapter 10

      The idea of me going away to boarding school had started with Kathy bringing some brochures over in her suitcase. One afternoon, not long after that, Marie leaned over the balcony and called me up from the square. She was seventeen by then, one of the grown-ups as far as we were concerned. It wasn’t raining, so I knew we were not all being called in because of that, and she only wanted me. I heard the slap of Stella’s skipping rope slow to a stop behind me and she ran over.

      ‘What do you want Anya for?’

      ‘I’ve

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