Chapter 8

The following morning I awoke to hear voices talking in the kitchen. It took a few seconds to remember where I was. Nan’s house was a council house, pebble-dashed outside, a terraced house in what looked like a jungle of terraced houses. They all looked exactly the same apart from individual curtains and plants in the gardens. I was staying in the spare room with Alex; he slept on the floor on a mattress. The wallpaper had big pink roses all over it and they looked so real, almost like you could reach over and pick one up. The curtains were white with pink stripes and the carpet was red with orange and white patterns. It looked old and worn by the door. Nan had lots of different ornaments on the fireplace, all different green Leprechauns on one side and glass cats on the other. In the middle of the shelf was a large glass vase; in the bottom of it was a small brown China mouse. Clinging onto the side about to climb in the vase was a grey China cat. Poor mouse, I thought.

Whilst I was getting dressed in the clothes nan had put out for me, I could hear the voices were getting louder and angrier.

“I’d of had ‘em!” Aunty Helen shouted in her Cockney accent. “Why on earth leave em there when you knew what she was doing? You worked away all week, every week and left her to do what she liked to your kids.” There was silence, I didn’t know who this was aimed at, but I guessed it was probably dad. I felt sorry for him. He had never done anything wrong to me as far as I knew, but everyone was treating him like he was the one who beat me up.

“I never saw you go running back there to try and help those kids after she kicked you out,” dad bit back. “You’re just as much to blame.”

I heard a lot of talk that I really wasn’t meant to hear, either through open doors or pretending to be asleep when I wasn’t. I found out that all my uncles had known what mum was doing to us when dad had gone. Even our neighbours had complained to dad and even rang the police when mum had gone out with one of her boyfriends and locked us in the house for the night. No doubt they must have heard us kids screaming when we were getting a beating or having our heads banged off the wall to “knock some sense into us.” No one ever mentioned Uncle Joe though, so I guessed they didn’t know that bit.

They spoke about how mum’s own kids got all the nice new clothes and toys whilst Alex and I got clothes from charity. It reminded me of an occasion at school when one of my friends accused me of stealing her coat. It turned out she had seen her name in the collar and her mum hadn’t told her she had given it to the charity shop. That friend then told everyone at school how I had stolen her coat and that I wore tramp’s clothes.

I overheard one of my uncles saying that no one from this side of the family knew for quite a while that my real mum had died. When I heard that I thought to myself, What could they have done even if they had known? No one could have been aware that our new mum got her kicks from picking on kids.

As I sat listening to the grownups in the other room my mind drifted away thinking of how me and Alex were treated differently. All the things I was overhearing made me realise the things that had been happening to me were not normal.

It didn’t take long--once something triggered it off--for me to be back into my world of hatred, my world of pain. Every day my mind slipped back to when my stepmother tortured us and tried to kill my spirit. I started feeling bad all the time. Every moment I was there, my anger built up inside me, and my life fell back to an all-time low.
My thoughts and hopes and dreams were soon smashed out of me, as once again violence struck. I knew that the anger against my stepmother had built to a point of no return. My mind wandered back into dark memories. Fists came at me from nowhere, blood dripping from my nose and ear. Mum walked patiently around me, waiting for me to break and cry. It was her game, her way of controlling me and making me suffer. She stopped only when I could fight no more.

I shook my head but all I could think about were those dark memories. I remembered coming home from school once and being dragged to the bathroom. The look in her eye was crazed, her eyes glazed over when she was in one of those moods. I had learnt to stay away from her, but sometimes she planned things and on that particular day she had known exactly what she was doing.

“You are disgusting,” she screamed in my face slapping me around the head. My facial skin felt like it was burning off. I had that giddy feeling that you only get as a kid.

“I’ve had a letter from school,” she said throwing it at me. “You’ve got head lice, you dirty slut!” With that I was picked up and thrown into the bath. It was full of freezing cold water smelling of bleach.

“I’ll get you clean once and for all,” she yelled. She scrubbed me from head to foot with the floor scrubbing brush. My eyes were stinging, my skin was burning, but all I could do was sit there and take it. Inside my head was screaming and wishing I could have a silly pill. But the tears didn’t come out as I struggled to get away slipping in the bath, feeling like a rag doll, a lifeless body getting flung around. As my head was pushed under I wished I could remain under water forever and never come up. But Molly and I had been practising how long we could stay under water so I survived the dunkings.

“What’s wrong with you?” mum screamed continuing to shake me. “How dare you embarrass me like that? In future wash properly then this won’t happen will it?”

“I will, I promise,” I said, rubbing my stinging eyes. I was hauled out of the bath. My eyes were in agony and I couldn’t see properly. All I could hear were scissors clipping and cutting away at my lovely, golden brown hair. Everyone used to comment on how nice my hair looked. But now, my hair was shorter than my brother’s and I felt like a boy. I felt ugly and dirty and was sent to bed with no dinner.

Mum had been forced to take me to see the doctor after my skin and eyes reacted to the bleach. He gave me eye-drops and cream for my skin. Mum told him I had thought the bleach was bubble bath after she had changed brands. The Doctor believed her, again.

The voices were getting louder, bringing me back to my senses, “Stay here for a while!” nan pleaded. “They’ve been through enough don’t cha know?”

Dad said he had to go to work in the morning so we would stay with nan while things got sorted.

Nan was a hard lady to say “no” to. No one argued with her, not even grand-dad. Nan smelt of lavender, and her hands used to shake for no reason. “Parkinson’s,” my aunt called it.

Maggie was arriving in a few days, I heard them say.

“Maggie? Who’s Maggie?” I asked Alex.

“I think it’s dad’s new girlfriend,” he shrugged.

“New girlfriend?” I walked into the warm kitchen and asked Nan.

“Yes,” she spat back.

I could tell she wasn’t very impressed about this Maggie person. Nan said we needed “TLC” and lots of it, never mind competing with more kids. Maggie had three kids of her own but they wouldn’t be coming straight away.

“Great, more kids to share dad with!” Alex snapped back sarcastically.

I hadn’t thought of it that way, but there was no way I was sharing MY dad again. I agreed with Alex.

Little did I know that everything had already been arranged and Maggie was on her way to be with us permanently.

My aunty had arranged for me to go to school in London. I hated it! Being the new girl, everybody stared at me. They would look at me a giggle.

“I look like a boy, I know I do,” I complained to nan when she asked how my day had gone.

“I hate school. I don’t want to go there again. The teachers don’t do anything and everyone is picking on me,” I moaned at nan for hours that night.

The next morning nan instructed my aunty to escort me to school demanding to see the head of year. She disappeared into an office and re-appeared again after about 20 minutes, apologising to the head teacher for wasting her time. She grabbed my arm and told me lying is not going to stop me from going to school, so I had better just get on with it. She told me if anyone started on me to, “Sort them out big time!” I thought that meant to smack them one. So that’s what I did the very next day. That was how it always got sorted in London.

My aunt was called into school again, this time it was because I had hit several pupils. I was not very patient with anybody and when I hit someone “usually for no real reason,” I felt so good for ages afterwards. It had a real calming effect like I had been given that sugar sandwich all over again. The kids at that school didn’t bother me much after that. If they did annoy me, they soon learnt not to. Boys or girls it didn’t matter. No one scared me because I had no fear. What on earth could they do compared to what my mum had done? If they only knew what I survived, they would leave me alone, I thought, but I never mentioned anything to anyone.

I did start to make friends, but I think it was more because the kids thought it was better to be my friend than my enemy. Kids left Alex alone too. My reputation for trouble had spread to years above me.

“Get ready,” Nan shouted from the kitchen through to the garden, “Your dad is arriving with his new girlfriend.” Alex and I looked at each other not saying anything, but with knowing thoughts. We headed inside to meet the infamous Maggie.