LITMIR.BIZ

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she’d say, striking a match to another cigarette and wrestling a smile out of me as she blew it out noisily. ‘It’s none of their business what goes on in our home, is it?’

      I would shake my head loyally, but was always unable to look directly up at her, wondering why she didn’t want them to know so that they could help us.

      Either Kathy or Brendan came over every few months, apparently unaware of the disruption they were causing in our home. Their visits felt like charades. Everyone on their best behaviour, my brothers and sisters leaving me be, my uncle biting his tongue – his long, aggressive silences scaring me just as much as the eruptions of anger I came to expect the minute they’d gone.

      Kathy always dressed exquisitely: silk blouses with high, queenly collars, and cuffs with small pearl buttons, elegant and feminine, her perfume clinging to everything. Brendan would be dressed as usual in his suit and tie, sitting awkwardly in the living room, his cup of tea balanced on his thigh, snapping biscuits and brushing away the crumbs as he tried to make small talk over my uncle’s hostility and laughed anxiously at anything at all; a teetotaller and a near alcoholic eyeing each other across the room. Looking back now, I can understand that my uncle was furious at being made a fool of in his own home. But as a child I had no such understanding.

      I dreaded Kathy’s visits because everyone was always reminding me that she was my real mother, and because up to the moment of them my uncle would usually be threatening that this time he would see to it that she would take me away with her. I convinced myself that I hated her because my uncle said she was a ‘whore’, and Mummy got into such trouble for me being left there. And because Mummy couldn’t look like her or spend all her time doing her hair and make-up or walk around in high, clicky heels, when she was ‘working her fingers to the bone’ for all of us.

      Mostly I made myself hate her because I already had my mum and my family and I didn’t want another one. I just wanted everyone to forget that she was the one who had given birth to me, and for her to go away and leave us alone. I wanted to belong where I was.

      Sometimes, though, I would forget to hate Kathy. Her soft, smiling, gentle Irishness would sneak up on me and I would feel tricked when I caught myself liking her. I always had to keep my guard up.

      Before her visits, my brothers and sisters led by my uncle would mimic and ridicule her: the way she walked and talked; her gentleness and dainty ‘put on’ manners, as my uncle called them. I laughed shyly along with everyone else, always trying to fit in, to be accepted. I thought that if my uncle could see how much I hated her, then maybe he wouldn’t say those things about me any more, and would let me belong there with the rest of them. But although I played along, I couldn’t stop the defensive feelings that flared up inside me when the others laughed about her. And I couldn’t stop thinking about her in secret even though it felt like I was being disloyal to Mummy.

      It was when I saw Mummy getting hit and shouted at for defending her sister that it was easiest to hate Kathy. And when I listened to Mummy sobbing later, after the arguments, looking pale and tired and suddenly very small, slumped on her corner of the sofa with her purple dressing gown zipped up to the chin and the cushions wedged around her like sandbags, I hated her most. I would watch helplessly as Mummy tore off sheets of toilet paper from a roll and cried into them, blaming her sister for dumping her problems on her, and for the easy life she had ‘swanning about the place’, living ‘a life of luxury’, while Mummy was left looking after us lot with no time even to look at her nails, ‘let alone paint them’.

      ‘Doing her dirty work for her,’ was my uncle’s term for looking after me, and Mummy sometimes used the same words herself when she’d drunk too much. That was when I was most determined not to like Kathy, no matter how soft and gentle she was, or how nice she was to me. I’d sit next to Mummy, frowning it all into place, my heart being squeezed tight, hate for Kathy rushing down to my toes.

      They were not feelings that simply disappeared when Kathy came over, and I never understood how Mummy could forget it all and be best friends with her on her next visit. Despite my feelings, and Daddy’s threats the night before, I would get carried along in all the excitement before she arrived, and would run down to the square in front of our block with the others to carry up her bags and suitcases from the black taxi. We would all struggle like little Sherpas up the steps to the second floor, wondering how much of the weight was presents and sweets and which bags they were in, huffing and puffing along the landing, wondering what lotions and creams were in the blue, leather vanity case that Stella always carried up. But I was still upset for Mummy.

      Later, after some of the bags were opened and presents unwrapped, Mummy and Kathy would go out together to the shops or just for a stroll. I would crouch down to watch through the small iron grille in the red brick wall of the landing as Mummy linked her arm through Kathy’s fur-covered one and walked her the long way around the estate to the shops, showing her sister off, holding on to her as if she were some lucky charm, our family shamrock.

      Kathy often had tears in her eyes before they went out for those strolls, or when she first got out of the taxi and saw us all standing there in our best clothes smiling up at her, her big, navy-blue eyes welling up with tears. Her tears fascinated me but I never trusted them; they seemed too gentle, too delicate. She didn’t sob and howl like Mummy did; she didn’t rip your heart out.

       Chapter 8

      My older sisters, Marie and Sandra, were almost a different generation to us five younger ones. They were teenagers when we were still very little.

      Of us three younger girls I was the eldest. Stella was two and a half years younger than me and my uncle’s real daughter. She was born premature – sick and tiny, small as the palm of your hand, Mummy said – and at first she slept in an empty drawer at the side of their bed. My uncle adored her from the start. Even when he was drunk, she was the only one able to bring out his softer side. Mummy often shouted at him, saying he was giving her attention on purpose to try to make me feel even more left out.

      When she was born he found a use for me. I had to look after her. I was told never to let her out of my sight, and had to go with her wherever she went. As she grew older he told her that if I didn’t do everything she said, or did anything wrong, she had to tell him when he came back from work, and she would, even though Mummy would warn her not to, or even if I pleaded with her. She was his favourite, not Mummy’s, and also his pawn.

      ‘I don’t care,’ she’d say defiantly. ‘I’m telling.’

      Mummy called her a traitor, and told me not to worry, that she’d treat me the next day when my uncle wasn’t there. But Stella didn’t care, running across the square to meet him from work some evenings. I watched her long blonde hair swinging across her back as she skipped off, like a canary sent ahead down a mine. If he was in a bad mood she’d return on her own and sit in front of the TV with her face screwed up, and I would wait, trembling. If she re-appeared around the corner swinging off his arm it wasn’t as bad, although I never knew what she had told him.

      Sometimes, she wouldn’t tell him immediately. She would draw the agony out all evening. I would sit on the end of the settee, like one of the statues on the mantelpiece, waiting to be smashed. Just when I was starting to think she’d forgotten, as we all sat squashed up together on the settee, she would stretch up with a little yawn in her pink nightdress and say out of the blue, ‘Someone did something today.’

      ‘Did what?’ he’d ask, and she’d tell whatever it was.

      ‘Broke a cup,’ she’d say, without taking her eyes from the TV, and my heart would stop.

      ‘Who?’ my uncle would ask, while Mummy swung around to Stella with a tight, angry face that said ‘You wait, you little troublemaker.’

      ‘Good girl, Stella, you tell me what they’ve been up to,’ he would say as Mummy scowled at her. And he would take another opportunity to punish me.

      Sometimes, if he was in a good mood, she’d

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