LITMIR.BIZ

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I finished I sat tugging down my pink nightdress, trying to control my tears and the pain in my head, waiting for him either to go to bed or to let me go back. I stared down at my pale legs, turned brown under the smoked glass, shrinking them down in my mind to the size of one of the china figures on the mantelpiece, so still and quiet sitting up there that nobody noticed them, hoping my uncle would forget me one day the same way.

      Mummy would always refuse to give him Kathy’s address in Ireland, and that night she pleaded with him to have a heart, saying it had gone on too long now, that there was nowhere else for me to go, that it would kill her mother if she ever found out Kathy had had a child. He wouldn’t listen. While he went off to look for envelopes himself she ran across and tried pulling the letter from me and pushing me out of the chair to get up to bed. But I was paralysed with fear. Tears and mucus streamed down my face as I pushed her away in case he came in and saw her trying to comfort me.

      She’d never tell him where the envelopes were either, but he always found them.

      ‘Search all you like, there are none left, you madman,’ she screamed, as he stamped around the rooms, slamming drawers in the kitchen, opening and closing cupboards, pulling things out onto the floor. He finally came back with some, throwing the blue airmail envelopes with their stripy red and blue border down with the address book onto the glass and ordering me to find Kathy’s address in it and to write it on one.

      ‘I’ll get a stamp for that tomorrow … I don’t want their left-behinds here, do you hear me?’

      I went to bed convinced each time that the letter would be posted and that his threats to send me over to ‘them’, ‘on the next boat’, would finally be carried out.

      Saturday nights were the worst, the times when the arguments always exploded into violence, him threatening and intimidating and finally lashing out. Sometimes the boys got hit too, but mostly it was me and Mummy.

      We were primed by Tom and Jerry earlier in the evening, who showed us that violence was funny. We laughed the cartoon violence off loudly, looking around at each other as we sucked and chewed our way through a bag of pick ’n’ mix and slurped our fizzy drinks. Me, the only dark-haired one amongst all my blonde brothers and sisters, trying my hardest to fit in and be invisible to my uncle – trying to put out of my mind the tension I could already feel building between him and Mummy.

      But sitting there, waiting for the evening to start, it was hard to shake the pictures of last time still in my head. Pictures I still see now: of Mummy, looking frail and tiny, her small body up against the living room wall; his big, heavy, calloused hands around her throat, the diamond in the gold signet ring on his little finger flashing under the wall-lights as he tightened his grip; her face almost scarlet, her feet lifted off the ground, her eyes bulging, choking. I can still see her collapsing to the ground when he let go; thinking she was dead this time, all the breath gone from my lungs, my heart slamming almost to a stop as I watched her being dragged across the purple carpet by her hair.

      She was probably almost as drunk as him by then, kicking and screaming at him to leave us all alone, her skirt up around her hips as he kicked and spat down on her, but still refusing to tell him who my father was. Her voice was tiny and hoarse with emotion and exhaustion but she still defended her sister from being a ‘whore’ and me from being ‘a whore’s child’.

      I was forced to sit and watch it all after the others had been shouted off to bed. Warned not to cry, pushing my fist or my fingers or my shirt cuffs into my mouth, chewing down on them or the inside of my cheek until my mouth filled with the taste of blood. My shoulders heaving up around my ears, unable to breathe properly as Mummy’s screams tore through me. I feel myself slipping away, the room floating in and out, the sounds of her blouse being ripped as he drags her through the archway, shouting that he wants her out too, his knees and fists punching into her as she struggles up and kicks back; vile names I don’t yet know the meaning of screamed into both of us. I sit wedged between orange cushions on the end of the fake-leather sofa, shivering, helpless, contorted with fear and the effort to stop my crying, waiting for him to start back on me. The terror of what he is doing and of Mummy leaving forcing my mind out of my body, until the sound of her head being knocked like a coconut against the living room wall jolts me back – not knowing whether to look or not look, listen or not listen, trying to reverse the flow of tears – to stop feeling.

      That was the hardest part of growing up: learning not to cry, not even allowed to express the pain of it. Pretending to feel nothing.

      Huddling around Mummy after one of the worst fights one night, the TV screen kicked in and glass all over the purple carpet, we planned how we’d get rid of him: a drop of arsenic in his vodka, a sprinkling of rat poison in his stew, a pillow over his face while he slept, or his skull smashed in with one of the girls’ heavy, brass lion moneyboxes that stood empty either side of the fire surround. We passed one around solemnly, lifting it above our heads, bouncing it up and down on our small, clammy palms, coldly assessing its effectiveness as we demonstrated our love to Mummy through what we were prepared to do.

      The solemnity didn’t last long. Soon we were laughing away our tears, picking through the evening’s violence to find some funny detail to hold on to, to neutralise it, finding some way to release the stored-up emotions, letting them out through tears or laughter. When Mummy joined in, the worst of the pain dissolved, but even though she said he was in a drunken coma in the bedroom by then, I couldn’t relax fully; I never could. I always had one eye on the door or, when we eventually moved into a house, on the ceiling, shushing them all if I thought I heard my uncle moving about in his room. My head would be throbbing, my teeth still chattering after his threats to get rid of me again. I would listen out for the creak of floorboards, convinced he would overhear us and come thumping down the stairs two at a time.

      The others were frightened of him too, of course. But not always. They were frightened of the drink in him; but when he sobered up they forgot how frightened they were of him when he was drunk and he became their dad again. Sometimes, after the worst of the arguments, he’d come home the next day with a new china ornament to replace the ones he’d smashed, or a brass one to try to win Mummy around, and a bag of pick ’n’ mix he’d hand to Stella with orders for her to share them out ‘evenly’, which included me. Once, after one of the worst arguments, he even brought back a pair of blue budgerigars on a swing in a wire cage. But no matter what, none of the others had to make themselves good enough or invisible enough so that they could stay and belong.

      I never had that experience – of thinking he was my dad and trusting him. I was always wary of him. His leaving me alone never lasted long – even when he was sober and trying to get the others back on his side he would ridicule my nervousness around him.

      ‘Shall we kick her out?’ he’d say to my brothers and sisters, getting them to join in laughing and teasing me when Mummy was out of the room. I’d sit there swallowing back tears, pretending I didn’t care. ‘Poor divil,’ he’d say.

      If Mummy came back in and heard their teasing it often became a trigger for another row. Then I would be seen as the ‘troublemaker’ again, Liam and Michael whispering under their breaths when they got the chance, ‘Why don’t you go to live with your own mum? You’re not wanted here.’ Saying it just the way they’d heard my uncle say it all those years.

       Chapter 6

      Their fights were so loud it was inevitable that the neighbours would sometimes hear. Most people in the flats knew better than to interfere, but occasionally their fights were so bad that people would threaten to call social services and report us. A few times social services did come, but Mummy sent them packing, telling them they had no right to be knocking on her door telling her how to bring up her kids, that we were all well brought up and loved and to check that with the school. It would have been very clear to them that she was a good mother, and if he wasn’t there, easy to see how they would leave us alone.

      One morning, though, Mummy told me a man was coming to talk to us,

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