M
y mother became pregnant again.
There was no hiding it: my father knew the difference between weight gain and a belly swollen with pregnancy.
It was one evening when he noticed; he had sat down to eat his dinner when, with a saucepan in hand, she bent across to put potatoes on his plate and her dress was pushed tightly against her body by the edge of the table. That was when his eyes lifted to stare straight at her stomach.
A tide of red suffused his face; his eyes glittered with rage and he stared at her in disbelief.
‘You bloody whore, it’s his, isn’t it?’ he shouted, banging his fist down on the table. Hearing the venom in his voice, icy shivers slid down my spine.
My mother’s face blanched and her lips trembled as she tried to force them to say the word ‘No’.
‘Don’t lie to me, you bitch! Look at me.’
Tears spurted from my mother’s eyes. ‘Don’t!’ she screamed, as she tried to run to the door. ‘It’s yours.’
But he was too fast for her. His chair shot back with a crash, and food went flying onto the floor as he moved around the table, caught her by the hair and swung her around.
His fist rose, then in a blur it descended. The crack it made as it connected with her cheek made me flinch. My mother’s hands lifted to protect her face from more blows and her knees sagged; only his grip on her hair kept her upright as he rained more blows onto her head and arms.
The two smaller children screamed with fright.
He threw her to the floor, his body stooped over her, punching and punching. She, unable to defend herself, curled up in a ball with her hands over her stomach and begged him to stop.
Something broke in me then. I had to get out of the house – get away from the brutal fight happening in front of me, away from something that children should not be forced to look at or hear about. I pulled my brother down from the table and, with the strength of desperation, for he was a plump little boy, hoisted him into the pram, then picked my sister up off her chair and placed her in with him.
Pushing open the door I wheeled the pram out and walked – not to where I could have got help at the house next door but into the lane where, ignoring the cries of the two wailing little children, I carried on putting one foot after another firmly in front of me.
There was nothing that I could do, nothing that was going to stop my parents’ fight, and I wanted to put as much distance as possible between them and me, somewhere where those cries and shouts could not reach me. I thought then if only someone could lift me up and put me in a home that sparkled with cleanliness, where there was a mother that listened to me, a father that smiled and where there was no Dave or man next door, how different my life would be. Small drops of rain started spitting at me, and still I walked. The drops of moisture ran down my face and mingled with my tears.
It was then that I heard my father calling out my name and, turning, I saw him peddling his bicycle furiously a few yards behind me. He had come looking for us.
‘Get you back to the house, Marianne,’ he said, but this time he spoke quietly as though his anger had finally drained all his energy. ‘And take those two with you,’ he added unnecessarily. As he spoke I saw that, like mine, his face was streaked with the dampness of tears, and just for a moment I wanted to stretch my arm out to comfort him. Then I looked at his large farmer’s hands grasping the handlebars, hands that I had seen too often raining blows on my mother, and the pity disappeared to be replaced by something akin to hatred.
I glared at him. Then, without saying anything, I turned the pram round and pushed it back to the house.
The two little children, their tear-stained faces masks of confusion and fright, stared beseechingly at me and I felt another wave of rage. How could my parents do this to them? I asked myself. Why had they had children if they cared so little for us? They only think about themselves, I thought sadly. That rage stayed with me until I reached our house and saw the crumpled form of my mother lying on the floor.
I ran across the garden to the house next door, crying out to Dora who, on hearing my cries, flung open the door. I clutched her arm and, through my frightened sobs, begged her to come with me. Over her shoulder I could see the white glimmer of
his
face looking at me, but for once I ignored him. It was Dora, my mother’s friend, who I wanted to help.
‘Whatever has your father done to her this time?’ she exclaimed when she saw the battered form of my mother still lying on the floor. But I was powerless to do anything or say anything more than just stand helplessly by her side. It was Dora who helped my mother onto the settee, forced her to drink warm, sweet tea and dragged the tin bath in. She filled saucepans with water, placed them on the stove and, while we waited for them to heat it, fed and put the two distraught small children to bed.
Only once the bath was filled with warm water, my mother undressed and helped into it, did she leave. She gave me instructions of what I had to do, and with her departure I felt I had been cast into the role of an adult who could somehow help solve my parents’ problems.
I wanted to run from the room and not have to look at my mother’s naked body in the bath, but my love for her overcame my aversion and, gently, I took a cloth and squeezed the warm soapy water over her bruises while she just hugged her tummy and cried and cried.
It was three days before my father returned, unshaven, smelling of stale sweat and beer, but the anger that so often had appeared to consume him had gone. Instead he appeared beaten. My mother cried again when she saw him, great fat glistening tears that ran unchecked down her cheeks. Without speaking he went to her and put his hand on her shoulder. And hers rose from her lap to cover his.
Dave never visited our house again. Sometimes his car passed me in the lane, and once I saw him driving a tractor. He waved at me but I always took no notice. My mother stopped looking out of the window. And that smile, the one that had showed me briefly the young carefree woman that once she had been, did not appear again.
I
t seemed that an alien force had taken up residence in my mother’s body; a force that was not just content to make her stomach swell but, as though wanting to punish her, sent its tentacles into every other part of her body. It sucked the colour from her face, changed her curly hair into lank strands, gave her backache and made her ankles puffy. But even worse was the sickness that did not confine itself to the morning, but made her heave and retch throughout the day. Nor did it cease after thirteen weeks; it remained with her until she gave birth.
As my mother’s approaching confinement drained the life force from her, it also changed my father. He seemed smaller, more tired; his shoulders, no longer hunched with anger, were now bowed with defeat.
I only heard him voice his uncertainty of the baby’s parentage once. My mother was sitting on the settee, a cushion behind her back, her face white with tiredness.
‘Doesn’t matter how often you deny it, I still don’t think that baby’s mine. You’ve never looked like that before.’ He sighed then. ‘You know, I remember that dance where we first met. You were the prettiest girl there. Now all I see is that swollen belly of yours.’ What made his words painful to hear was the sadness in them.
‘Maybe you should have told me. Told me just once that you thought I was pretty,’ she replied.
‘Aye, maybe I should have, but I married you, didn’t I?’ He got up then went out of the door. I knew that he was going to the pub.
That summer, while we waited for the ‘alien’ to leave my mother’s body, must have been one of the hottest on record. The heat made my mother’s face gleam with beads of moisture and her breath come in laboured gasps. It made both my brother and sister querulous and tied me to the house more and more, for now looking after the children fell to me.
When my mother reached her sixth month, she said she was too tired for her Saturday trips with Dora, so for several weeks I was able to avoid the man next door.
It was September when the baby was born. This time my mother gave birth in the local hospital. My father had taken her there when her pains started. He left her there and refused to visit.
Dora took me, and when I looked in the cot beside my mother’s bed all feelings of resentment towards this unwanted baby vanished. I did not see an alien, I saw another brother, one that was so tiny, so helpless – I just wanted to hold him. ‘Not until he’s a little older,’ was all my mother said when I asked. I had heard my mother say to Dora on more than one occasion, ‘Please let the baby have brown hair.’ I saw that he didn’t. The fuzz covering his head was bright copper.
‘So did you see the little bastard?’ my father asked me when I returned.
I did not know how to reply to him. I knew that ‘bastard’ was a bad word to call a baby but I did not know what it meant.
He took no notice of my confusion and asked me another question.’ What colour is its hair?’
‘Red,’ I answered, and my father asked me no more questions.
My mother came home with the baby a few days later.
‘Call the bastard what you like,’ he said. ‘Just don’t give him a name that anyone in my family has.’
My mother named him Jack.
He was a good baby. It was as though he sensed a need to be as quiet as possible when my father was at home, and he seldom cried. On the rare occasion when he did I would hear my father mutter, ‘Shut up, you little bastard,’ and watch as my mother picked him up and scurried from the room. His cot was put into my bedroom and I fell asleep listening to his faint snuffling baby sounds, and I was often woken by my mother creeping in before it was light to give him his early-morning feeds.
‘Don’t want to disturb your father,’ was what she told me, but I knew it was because my father could not bear to look at him.
I’d seen how he averted his eyes from looking at Jack when my mother fed him. I had also noticed that, unlike my brother and sister, he was bottle-fed.
I knew my father did not like this addition to the family but I did not know just how much until the day my mother had left him in the cot with just me to watch him. My father came home earlier than expected.
I heard his feet on the stairs, then a noise I did not recognize. A rattling sound came from my bedroom, followed by wails from the baby.
I flew up the stairs to find my father shaking the cot. The baby was red faced with fright and was screaming. My father was shouting, ‘Shut up, shut up, or I’ll make that pretty face of yours as blue as your bloody eyes.’
‘Dad,’ I pleaded, ‘leave him alone.’ My father turned, a sudden look of shame on his face.
‘You’re too young to understand, Marianne.’
He was right. I was.
Lifting the howling baby out of the cot I held him against my shoulder and glared at my father.
‘He’s just a baby,’ I said.
My father looked away, then turned and left my bedroom. But somehow after that, even if he was not happy at Jack’s presence, he seemed at least to accept it.
It was not until after his mother paid one of her rare calls that his attitude towards Jack changed completely and he went from being barely tolerated to being sat on my father’s knee.
‘He’s the spitting image of you when you were little,’ she said, with almost a nostalgic smile.
‘What? Don’t be stupid. I never had red hair.’
“No, but your grandpa did until he went bald,’ she said.
Later I heard him say a word I had seldom heard from him. ‘Sorry.’
My mother admitted then that she had been flattered by Dave but it had never gone beyond a flirtation and my father seemed content with that. A few months later she was pregnant again.
W
hen I look back at the six years from when I was seven until I reached the age of thirteen, so much of it is just a jumble of hurt and confusion.
The man next door had become both my friend and my tormentor. As I grew he now had little need for the pretence that I was special to him, and he showed me less and less of the tenderness that at seven had captured my heart. He stopped calling me his little lady and I became just Marianne.
It was only when he felt the need to regain any of the control that he felt was slipping out of his grasp that the gentle strokes and tender words would be resumed. But it was always after he had made me do something I had not wanted to.
There were no more fairy kisses either. It was just me, a skinny child with her dress pulled up and her knickers pushed down, who lay down wherever the man next door told her: the kitchen floor, the back seat of his car and sometimes in the fields.
My periods came, and with them breasts started to grow.
He liked to squeeze them until they hurt.
‘Nice little buds you’ve got there,’ he said with a snort of laughter and, embarrassed by my changing body, I would jerk angrily away from his hands.
Those times when I looked into the face that had once smiled so warmly at me and saw his lips twisted into a sneer, I hankered after those early days when he had made me feel safe and cared for. I thought it was me, something I had done that had made him change, and asked myself time after time what it was. There were moments when maybe he thought I was slipping away from his control and once again his voice would murmur in my ear and his hands sooth me.
Over those years my fears grew: fear both of his anger and of being alone again.
Suddenly it seemed to me that his children, who when small had blended into a group he called the ‘little ones’, became small people who demanded his time and his affection. It was his daughter that I noticed first had changed. The plump toddler that I had first seen in the playpen had become a pretty little girl of four with thick, dark, wavy hair and big velvety-brown eyes.
‘Up, daddy,’ I would hear her say as she raised her rounded little arms to him. With that beaming smile that once I had thought was just for me, he would bend down, scoop her up, place her on his shoulders and race around the garden, while she laughed and screamed with glee.
‘Daddy’s girl,’ he called her, and I, watching them from my window, would feel a pang of hurt when I saw him with his family.
His two were placed on the swing, pushed gently back and forth and taken for rides in the car while I stayed at home looking after my own three siblings. I would see him return with presents and watch as his children tore the paper from them. The much-coveted blonde-haired Barbie doll was given to his daughter, new Dinky cars to his son. Bags of sweets made their cheeks bulge and the juice of ice-lollies stained their clothes.
Sometimes I would see Dora standing next to him and watch as his arm slid round her waist, then as though with a sixth sense he had felt my gaze, his head would turn, his eyes meet mine and his mouth twitch into a mocking smile before, with a small shrug of his shoulders, he would look away and place his hand on her bottom and caress it.
They asked me to baby-sit. ‘Taking Dora out,’ for her birthday, their wedding anniversary or for no reason but that he wanted to give her a treat, he would say, with his arm around her shoulders and his eyes looking into mine. ‘Are you doing anything tonight, Marianne?’ he would ask, knowing that it was unlikely I was. And on my answering, ‘No’, he would continue with, ‘Then will you keep an eye on the children for us?’
‘Oh, thanks, Marianne. Don’t know what we would do without you!’ Dora would add before I had a chance to say that I would. ‘Help yourself to anything you want to eat and watch whatever you like on television.’ Then she would give a time to come over that always seemed to be well before they left.
On those nights I would watch Dora fixing her make-up, spraying on perfume, pulling her tight skirt into place. Her hairpiece, which to me looked like a small furry rodent, would be taken from its stand and carefully pinned to the top of her head. Her style was very fashionable and, knowing it, she would always ask, ‘So Marianne, how do I look?’
‘Very nice,’ I would mumble, then watch the man who forced me to have sex with him kiss his wife on the neck before taking her by the arm and leading her out of the door to the front seat of the car.