LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter 3

      My uncle hated me being there. From the start he wanted me out. And the main purpose of my early years was to try to make myself as silent and as invisible as possible so that he would forget about me, and let me stay, to be part of the family I saw as my own.

      He must have agreed to me being there at the beginning, but it was only ever meant to be a temporary arrangement. And his hatred of me grew as week by week, month by month it became more and more obvious that I was there to stay.

      What he hated most was not being told who my ‘real’ father was. He was convinced that Mummy knew the truth and was keeping it a secret from him on the instructions of Kathy and her colleague from work – who was the only person in Ireland to know about her illegitimate child, and who we grew up knowing as our ‘Uncle Brendan’. He thought they didn’t trust him and that Mummy was lying for them.

      Over and over through the years, Mummy shouted back at him that she wasn’t lying, that she didn’t know who my father was.

      ‘If I knew, don’t you think I would have told you by now?’ she’d scream, sobbing.

      But he knew that Kathy and Brendan didn’t like him, particularly Brendan, and he called Mummy a liar, swearing that they were all taking him for a fool in his own home. The fact that no one would tell him drove him mad and seemed to be the spark for most of their rows.

      She tried all sorts of answers on him, all sorts of ways of saying she didn’t know, and, as I grew up, that I didn’t know either – that I didn’t have a father, that I’d been conceived in the course of a one-night stand. He never believed her. But because of it he called Kathy a ‘whore’, and me her ‘whore’s child’, screaming it out in drunken argument after drunken argument throughout my childhood.

      ‘My sister is not a whore,’ Mummy would scream back.

      ‘Who’s the father then? Who’s the father?’ he shouted, over and over again, maddened that Kathy expected him to have me brought up under his roof, but still wouldn’t trust him enough to tell him who my father was. ‘I don’t want their dirty work, their left-behinds, their whore’s child in my house,’ he’d shout. ‘They can take her back over there with them where she belongs. And I’ll make sure of it this time.’

      It was the same every weekend. Usually, when Mummy managed to send me up to bed with the rest of them – even if I was yelled back down again later and forced to sit there and listen to it – we’d lie there listening to them raging at each other, and to Mummy being hit defending her sister and fighting for me to stay. When he finally stormed off to bed himself, Mummy would sometimes creep to the long back bedroom that the five youngest of us shared, to see if we were all right. Despite her assurances, I still thought with every argument that this time it would happen, that he would see to it that I was sent from my family, over to Kathy in Ireland, who was almost a stranger to us then – the ‘whore’, whose visits I dreaded.

      We didn’t have a dictionary at home – ours was a house without books – but when I was old enough, ‘whore’ was the first word I remember trying to look up in the big, blue-leather dictionary in our school library. I knew it wasn’t a good word and that I couldn’t ask our teacher, but I was desperate to find out exactly what Kathy was, and what a ‘whore’s child’ actually meant. Nervous in case anyone saw me, I sat on the stripy window seat overlooking the playground with my back to everyone, turning the fragile, India paper quietly, with my heart hammering. But I didn’t find out. I was looking under the ‘H’s’, assuming it was spelt as it sounded. Not realising that it was hiding amongst the ‘W’s’ at the end of the dictionary, as if ashamed of itself.

      I never understood why Kathy wouldn’t tell my uncle who my father was, and, as a child, I never forgave her for it. But then she didn’t know exactly how violent and abusive he became. And she could never have imagined just how bad it was going to get.

      Kathy knew the type of man he was, and maybe hoped that since they weren’t married he and Mummy wouldn’t stay together long. She wouldn’t have wanted to give him any information he could later use against her if they did split up. She and her lover would never have survived the scandal if news of their affair got out in Ireland, and my uncle would have known that. If he had been able to find out who my father was, he might well have blackmailed him, or just told his wife and family what he knew. He was always threatening to write to my grandparents to tell them that Kathy had ‘stashed her bastard’ in London with them.

      ‘What would your mum and dad say if they knew about me?’ I asked one night after my uncle had drained the last of his vodka and staggered up to bed, leaving us all huddled around her in the aftermath of one of his rages.

      ‘It’d kill them,’ she said, ‘literally, kill them.’

      The others giggled and I swung my eyes away, shivering the words out of me one by one as I counted the twists of ivy repeated in the pattern of the curtain hanging across our back bedroom door. I tried hard not to imagine the grandparents I’d only ever heard stories about, dying just through knowing that I was alive.