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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.

       Chapter 12

      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.

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