LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter 11

      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

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