D
uring the year that he had known me the man next door had laid his little traps and then waited with the patience of the accomplished hunter stalking his prey. He had won my trust, made me believe that he would keep me safe and heightened my need for his attention.
I remembered the day when he cemented his control over me.
The clocks had been turned back, reducing the afternoon daylight by an hour. The sun’s rays had paled, grown weaker and lost their warmth. The ever-present clouds threatened rain, while the cold gusts of wind penetrated the thin fabric of my coat and blew swirls of dead leaves along the pavements as I walked home.
Each day as I left the school gates where no one waved a goodbye, wished me a happy weekend or even said, ‘See you tomorrow,’ I had looked for the man from next door, half-hoping that he would be waiting for me, but the days had passed with no sign of him.
It was a month after the start of my winter term when he finally put in an appearance. That day no sooner had I walked through the school gates and taken my first few steps towards the bus stop than I heard the familiar sound of his car slowing down and his voice calling out to me through its wound-down window.
I stood still for a second, wondering which person had arrived – my friend who took away my loneliness and made me feel special but who I was beginning to see less and less of, or the person who drove his car into the woods and wrapped my hand around that hot and damp ‘something’ until I felt the stickiness on my fingers and heard his grunts in my ear. I did not want to be made to do any of those things that I did not like or understand.
‘Hey, Marianne, want a lift?’
Catching sight of his warm smile I saw that it was my friend who had come to collect me. My face lit up in an answering wide grin and I rushed to his car, threw my satchel onto the back seat and jumped in beside him on the long leather front seat.
‘How’s my little lady?’ he asked, giving my knee a gentle squeeze. He told me to open the glove compartment and help myself to sweets. Greedily I filled my mouth with the fizzing sherbet dip I found inside and relaxed to savour it.
Half-way home he stopped the car, but this time to my relief he did not drive deep into the woods.
Instead he switched off the ignition and turned to me.
‘Marianne, how good’s your reading?’ he asked.
I was so taken aback by his query that I turned and looked at him uncomprehendingly.
‘Come on, Marianne, it’s not a difficult question, is it?’ he said with a tinge of impatience at my silence. ‘You must know how good it is by now.’
‘Not very,’ I had managed to answer, my eyes downcast, ‘and I can’t read any joined-up words.’
He laughed at that and pulled out a newspaper from the door’s pocket and pointed to a photograph of a young blonde-haired woman that was placed in a prominent position on the front page.
‘Have a good look at that picture, Marianne. Do you see how pretty she is?’
‘Yes,’ I answered tentatively, unsure of why he was showing it to me.
‘Well, pretty won’t help her tomorrow when they hang her from the neck until she’s dead.’
I shook my head in disbelief at what he was saying, for although I did not have a clear understanding of the meaning of the word ‘hang’ I did know what the word ‘dead’ meant. It was when someone went away and was never seen again.
‘Don’t believe me, do you? Well, newspapers don’t lie, do they?’
‘No,’ I whispered, for something in the tone of his voice frightened me. I did not want to look at the paper or hear the word ‘dead’. I wanted to go home, but he seemed oblivious to my growing unease.
‘Well, can you read what it says about her?’ he asked, trying to push the paper into my hands.
Not only was I a poor reader but I was a child who had never tried to read a newspaper. The only ones that came into our house were opened at the sports pages and, having no pretty pictures to look at, had never caught my interest. I knew something was expected of me and, wanting to please him, I stared at the print, so much smaller than the words in my school reading book, but I could not decipher even one of them. He shook the paper at me with growing frustration.
‘Well, can you read this word at least?’ And his finger stabbed at a word written in the large print above the photograph. ‘It’s a girl’s name.’
‘Ruth,’ I said hesitantly.
‘Yes, her name’s Ruth Ellis. Now, what does it say about her?’
Bewildered, I shook my head. I knew this was some sort of test but I did not know what he expected from me.
‘Come on,’ he said impatiently, ‘of course you can read some of the words. Like, what’s that one say?’ He aimed his finger at the middle of the article and stabbed his finger on another word. ‘Surely you can read that.’
‘H-u-n-g – hung,’ I managed to whisper, my voice shaking with apprehension and humiliation.
‘Yes, hung, Marianne. Do you know what that means?’
‘No,’ I answered as a sinking, sick feeling in my stomach started spreading through my body. Somehow I just knew this was a very bad word.
I just looked blankly at him. I could feel his anger and his growing impatience but didn’t understand what I had done wrong. I wanted to ask what it was, but there was a lump wedged firmly in my throat that stopped me; all I could do was stare vacantly at him.
The man next door gave a snort of impatience; his hands shot out and before I could move they had wrapped themselves around my throat. His fingers dug in and tightened, not hard enough to leave a tell-tale bruise but enough to frighten me. I squirmed in his grasp and he abruptly let me go.
Then he told me what ‘hung’ meant. There was a rope, he said, that was going to be tied around that pretty neck and a hood put over that pretty face – it was meant to cover her eyes so that she could not see what was happening, but she knew – knew that she was standing on a trap door that would open up under her. She would be so frightened, so alone, and behind that hood she would be sobbing and screaming, but no one was going to help her. Tomorrow was going to be her last day on earth, and her departure was going to be a painful one. When that trap door opened her body would drop into a space with no floor. The rope would tighten until blood ran from her bulging eyes and mingled with her tears. Her screams would only stop when she had no breath left, then piss and shit would run down her kicking legs as she jerked and jerked on the end of that rope.
‘And when they cut her down, Marianne, they’ll take that hood off. And do you know what she will look like then, that pretty woman?’
I could not answer him. The image he had drawn was so vivid that answering tears were running down my cheeks and my breath was coming in sobs.
‘Her face will be blue and her tongue will be bleeding and swollen from her biting it. No, she won’t look pretty at all. And do you know why, Marianne? Why they are going to do something so terrible to her?’
Seeing I was incapable of forming any words, he answered the question for me.
‘She’s done something very bad,’ he said. ‘Yes, very bad,’ he repeated mockingly.
Then, slowly, one syllable at a time, he told me what the bad thing was.
She had talked: talked about being with a man in a car, talked about what they had done there. And for that talking the police had come for her in the middle of the night.
My breath left me and I gasped for air. My hands, my legs and my head all started shaking together. Bile rose in my throat – I wanted to cry, to scream, to beg him to stop his terrible words, but all I could do was gasp for air, as in calm measured tones he continued remorselessly describing it all to me.
When his voice finally went quiet the picture of the woman twisting on the end of the rope was imprinted inside my head, while my ears were ringing with the desperate sounds of her shrieks and cries. I saw her dangling there – a broken doll, her body slack, her legs still, her neck twisted – and my body shook even more with rising fear.
It was then that he turned back into the gentle friend, the one who had told me I was safe with him. His arm went around my shoulders and his hand stroked my hair as he drew me towards him along the seat.
‘Don’t you worry, Marianne,’ he said softly. ‘I’d never let anyone do that to you, not to my special little lady.’
That night I took out my silky bridesmaid’s dress, cradled it in my arms, held it tightly to my chest, buried my face in its soft folds dampened by my tears and tried to inhale some trace of its perfume.
As I tried to replace those terrible images in my head with the ones of that happy day when I had worn it, I thought of my aunt’s house with an intense longing. I wanted to go back in time, to be placed in that bath full of warm soapy water, feel clean and wash away his words; those words that had shown me a glimpse of the adult world that to an eight-year-old were terrifying.
But the scent had faded and with it the magic – not even a trace of either was left. I was only holding an old dress, a dress that had belonged to another little girl who had once been told she was special. That was when the word ‘special’ meant something nice.
What I did not know that night when I tossed and turned at the thought of the pretty lady dying the next morning was that the paper he had shown me was an old one: Ruth Ellis had been dead for three months when the man next door had shown it to me.
F
rom out of nowhere another picture came into my head – a smoke-filled, oak-beamed pub, red-velvet cushions on darkwood seats, swirls of cigarette smoke and a noisy group of women intent on a good night out: plump legs encased in tight thigh-high miniskirts, stiletto shoes, teased bouffant hair, wafts of Ma Griffe perfume, laughing red-lipsticked mouths, eyes sparkling with fun, brightly tipped hands waving in the air, and round after round of cocktails, with peculiar names, decorated with paper umbrellas and glacé cherries that were gulped down almost as fast as the barman could pour them. My mind had taken me out of my childhood to when I was nineteen and had been married for three months. The women, mainly older than me, had invited me to join them for a hen party. One of them was due to walk up the aisle the next day and we had been invited to celebrate her last night of being single. Not one woman there knew that what I had told them about my younger years was fabricated – that I had left home because my parents lived in the country and I needed to be nearer work. That I had three brothers and a sister, visited them often and had been happy growing up there.
Earlier that evening I had dressed with care, pulled on the white coat I had worn for my wedding, wriggled into a short grey skirt and a brightly coloured blouse, brushed my curly blonde hair into some semblance of order and finally coloured my lips a pale pink and flicked black mascara onto my lashes. Once I was ready I stood back from the mirror, seeing a girl who at four foot eleven had only grown an inch since she was thirteen. I then wedged my feet into the highest shoes I could find and tottered out of the room.
My husband had viewed my preparations with amusement, told me I looked wonderful and had driven me to the pub where we were all meeting. An hour later I was squirming with embarrassment when, after several rounds of drinks had been consumed, the women regaled the table with no-holds-barred stories of how they had lost their virginity. Eyes widened, the group gasped with pretend shock. Comments of ‘Oh no, you didn’t!’ followed by cackles of laughter encouraged the tellers of each tale to grow more and more ribald. Each woman tried to outdo the others in the telling of the details of their own teenage debauchery.
Hands waved in the air, faces grew flushed and voices became louder and more and more high pitched. Another round was called for and fetched on increasingly wobbly legs. Raucous gales of laughter rang out as they recalled an inexperienced red-faced boy’s fumbling hands and the feel of a car’s leather back seat against a half-naked body. A collective sigh of sentimentality was given as with a nostalgic smile a first love was remembered. Screeches of mirth then erupted as with an embarrassed laugh admission was made to only having a vague memory of an event, as it had been a hasty coupling in a stranger’s flat after vast quantities of alcohol had been consumed.
My hands grew damp as I clutched my glass of brandy and coke and hoped they were not going to ask me.
But seeing my reluctance to join in their reminiscing only encouraged them to throw questions at me. ‘Come on, Marianne,’ one of the group said, ‘tell all!’
‘Yes,’ said another, ‘you’ve been listening to us confess. What was your first time like, eh? Don’t be shy now.’
As I looked at the expectant faces I thought, how could I tell them that my memories were different, that there had been no inexperienced boy’s fumbling with hooks and zips as he looked down at my rosy teenage face before, after a few seconds, leaving me wondering what all the fuss had been about. Neither was my first memory of being kissed with gentleness by the man I loved. It was of being eight and petrified.
My memories were of bare legs being pushed apart, the rough fondling of a flat breast long before it was old enough to have even a tiny swelling, and of my child’s heart fluttering as fast as the wings of a trapped butterfly, a heavy weight, guttural grunts, a thick wet tongue forcing its way into my small mouth, of inhaling a smell like rotting fish, seeing the smear of blood and slime on my legs and feeling both shame and pain.
As I looked at those women who were avidly waiting for my answer, I remembered that when his ‘thing’ that had looked so red and angry was withdrawn and had shrunk to something wrinkled and ugly, the spirit of my fragile childhood had climbed wraith-like out of my body. It rose up into the sky and disappeared from view for ever.
That was the day when my world, the one where I had filled the story book in my mind with the magic of a child’s imagination, ended. Those pages full of pictures, that only I could see, of dancing frogs, playful mice, leaping rabbits and children from another era, crumbled. They turned into particles of dust and followed my childhood’s soul to a place above the sky.
‘It was my husband,’ I answered quietly. ‘He was the first man to make love to me,’ and of course I spoke the truth. What I did not tell them were my memories of the first time I had been made to have sex.
When I read horrific stories about children and women being abused or raped, I often wondered which child suffers the most. The one who is attacked by a stranger, dragged down a country lane or pulled into a car before being abused? Then when found, in blood-stained clothes, too dazed and shocked to talk, being surrounded by adults who want to find the truth; the truth of what happened.
When I’ve read about those children I’ve winced with the empathy I’ve felt for them. I could imagine only too well small pale faces reflecting their fear, bewilderment and shame. If those children are, which is too often the case, too young to even verbalize what has happened to them, then after they have healed physically they are given dolls to play with as their means of communication; dolls that they play with in a room where an unseen video camera records every movement. In there a psychologist and a social worker watch and comfort as small fingers twist plastic limbs into lewd positions to show again and again what the nasty man did.
As the years pass and they grow into teenagers who are constantly aware of the eyes that watch them looking for any signs of long-term damage and they read the newspaper articles where vicious criminals’ behaviour is blamed on a deprived childhood – how, then, are those children made to feel?
Is that worse than being betrayed by a trusted friend or relative, then forced to grow up carrying the burden of a secret too heavy for a child’s small shoulders? To be a child who desperately wants to tell, to have a stop put to it, but lives every day with the fear of what will happen if they do. I’ve never been able to answer that question, but I do know this: a childhood can only die once.
The day that mine left me started with a promise of sunshine and warmth.
That autumn morning rays of golden light flitting across my eyelids had woken me and for a moment I blinked, then felt my face stretch into a smile of pleasure. Through my window I could see that the dismal grey clouds, which had darkened the sky for the last few weeks and kept me imprisoned in the house, were gone. In their place was a patch of pure blue sky. Suddenly I was fully awake.
Flinging the bedclothes back I climbed out of bed and tiptoed to the window, as lightly as possible so not to make the floorboards squeak. I did not want to wake my mother, who still slept.
It was Saturday morning. My father had already left for the farm and my mother, determined to give herself a few hours more rest before he returned and the other children demanded her full attention, had taken herself back to bed.
Outside the sun was rising and spreading pink streaks across the cloudless sky. Dew had turned the grass, still sprinkled with a few clumps of yellow dandelions, into a glistening green carpet and transformed the spiders’ webs that hung on bushes into patches of sparkling gossamer-thin lace.
Next door’s swing rocked gently in the slight breeze as though fairy hands were pushing it, and as I pressed my face between the curtains I watched an old mangy farm cat creep out from under the bushes, stretching as he did so.
In the distance I could see a light mist still covering the fields. It was going to be a hot day.
Too good a one to miss, I thought, quickly pulling on my clothes.
In the tiny box room next to mine I heard my brother rattling the bars of his cot, for having heard my movements he wanted my attention, but, ignoring him, I climbed carefully down the stairs, opened the front door and feasted my eyes on the beginning of what promised to be a sun-drenched autumn morning.
Barefooted, I stepped out into the garden, feeling the coolness of the grass against my feet, then with a child’s unadulterated enjoyment I spread out my arms and spun round and around before reluctantly turning back into the house to start my household chores.
My nose wrinkled as I surveyed the room. Nappies lay soaking in a bucket, a coating of dust and grease had settled on every work surface and the previous night’s supper dishes were still piled in the sink. The last was something I could manage to do and, sighing, I ran hot water into the bowl, picked up the rag that served as a dishcloth and started washing them. The pans I left; they were too heavy for me to clean.
But nothing was going to spoil my pleasure in the day, not even when my mother, blousy haired, with sleep creases in her face, came down the stairs with the baby under one arm and dragging my tottering brother with the other. She handed over my brother for me to change and feed; two duties that I performed as quickly as possible before taking him outside. She settled down with a tea and a cigarette to feed the baby herself.
It was when I was sitting on our step watching Stevie amusing himself in the garden that I heard the crunch of gravel and, squinting against the glare of the sun, saw the man from next door approaching. Scampering around his feet were the two dogs he had recently acquired: a small rough-haired white terrier and a larger, boisterous black-and-tan dog of dubious parentage. His two children, still unsteady on their feet, were toddling along behind him.
‘Doggie,’ said my brother, with a wide beam reaching out his arms to pat the terrier. The little dog rewarded him with a rough-tongued lick that removed the last lingering crumbs of breakfast from his rosy-cheeked face. Ignoring both the dogs and the two children, I waited silently to see what it was that the man next door wanted.
‘Thought we would all go out on a picnic later,’ he said. ‘Shame to waste a nice day like this. Don’t know when we’ll get another.’ I happily smiled my agreement. Picnics meant nice food and no washing up.
He called out a cheerful greeting to my mother, who was nursing her third cup of tea, and told her that his wife wanted him to take the children off her hands to give her a rest.
‘Marianne can bring Stevie,’ he told her, ‘and you can go over to ours. Dora’s not going to be doing anything, so you two can have a nice afternoon together.’
Hearing those words my mother needed no further persuasion for us to go. Not only did she have two less mouths to feed but she was free to drink tea and gossip, uninterrupted by the demands of a toddler. My baby sister, even if she was awake, would be content with a bottle or a dummy dipped in jam to suck and a blanket to lie on.
A couple of hours later, along with his children and the two dogs, he arrived carrying a basket full of food and soft drinks. We took our old black pram to put the three small children into when they grew tired and, with me pushing it, we set off down the lane.
As we reached the farm tracks that led to the pond my feet scrunched the dry russet leaves that only a few months earlier had been buds that unfurled to cover the branches of trees with their dense green foliage. That day the crackling sound they made told me that even if the insects, woken by the warmth of the day and buzzing round our heads, thought it was summer, in fact winter was just around the corner.
I pushed aside those thoughts of short days and cold nights, along with being in parked cars and derelict houses, because that day was a bonus. I was having a picnic in my favourite place with my best friend. As though reading my mind, the man next door smiled at me, that wide warm smile that made his eyes crinkle at the corners, the smile I thought was just for me, and I, feeling a surge of happiness, smiled back.
‘Let’s look for some rabbits’ holes,’ he said to the smaller children, once we arrived at the pond. Not understanding what he meant, they just looked at him vapidly. He took them a little way from the chosen picnic site and found a rabbit hole for them to look into. He explained that rabbits, those fluffy ones with white tails, lived with their families in these burrows, as well as cages, and if they were lucky they might see some, but only if they were very quiet and did not move.
While they did that, he continued, he and I would get the picnic ready. I should have guessed then that his talk was only an excuse to separate three pairs of eyes from us. His two dogs would have chased any brave rabbit back into its burrow long before it had even a chance to wriggle its ears. But the sun had lulled me into an acceptance of his words. Seeing the small children’s lack of enthusiasm at being left looking at a hole in the ground, he pointed to the basket of food.
‘Do you know what I have in this bag?’ he asked.
Three heads shook in unison.
‘Ice cream!’ Three faces smiled widely.
‘But only if you stay there to see if a rabbit comes out,’ he said sternly, before giving them each a sweet and taking me by the elbow.
‘Come, Marianne,’ he said, ‘let’s get everything ready.’ At the feel of his hand firmly grasping me, the warmth of the day seemed to evaporate.
That day, as he pushed me back onto the grass, there were no fairies’ kisses, nor even a preliminary lesson in how grown-ups kiss. This time he taught me the word ‘fuck’ and asked if I knew what that meant.
‘You know the word?’ he asked. ‘Well, it’s time you did.’
Then his arm was on my chest, stopping me from moving. The explanation of the word ‘fuck’ I learnt that day was my knickers being pulled down and my dress up. It was him on top of me, his mouth over mine, silencing my protests and cries but not stopping the pain. It was tiny stones grinding into my back and coarse grass under my bottom; it was the muscles in my legs pulling; it was that thing going into me – in and out of me. I thought that day that he was going to split me in half, and wondered if when he finished there would be two pieces of Marianne lying there. Then I was looking at the blue, blue sky and hearing him telling me to wipe myself clean. I used a clump of grass – it stuck to me – and put my knickers back on.