A House Without Windows (3 page)

Mummy’s had a wash and she’s smiling again.  I plait her hair because Joe, The Man, had undone it.  I think I’d like to do algebra like Philip, so I ask Mummy if she knows how to do it.  She says yes and I learn about x being the variable and then I have to find out what x is in a sum.  Sometimes I can do it, and sometimes Mummy makes the sum too hard, but then she shows me how to find the right answer. 

I get bored with algebra, so Mummy teaches me about my body.  I learn the names of bones and muscles, and how the muscles and ligaments will move my bones to where they want to go.  I ask if my quad muscles can move my femurs so that they are outside the house, but Mummy says Edwin has to unlock the door first and then leave it unlocked, because femurs, tibias and fibulas can’t walk through closed doors.

I try and think of my heart pumping all the blood around my body.  I can feel it sometimes if I jump up and down, but I can’t see it.  It pumps away even before we are born.  Mummy says that if you listen with a special instrument you can hear a baby’s heart beating while it’s still inside its mother’s womb.

How does the baby get out from the womb?  Does it climb out?  Does all the climbing out make its heart beat faster and faster?  I ask Mummy if I climbed out of her womb.  She says that it took many hours for me to come out, and at the end she pushed me out onto the bed we’re sitting on with her pelvic floor muscles.  I didn’t feel her pushing me though, so I must have been asleep.  I asked her if anybody caught me as she pushed me out, but she said that she pushed me out on her own and caught me herself. 

She says that sometimes babies can’t be pushed out and that the mother has to go to hospital for the baby to be cut out by a doctor.  I want to know where the babies are pushed out from, and Mummy says they come out from the hole where you do a wee, which can stretch to be as big as a baby’s head.

I don’t understand hours because there are no clocks in our house.  Mummy draws clocks sometimes and says that they usually have three hands that move around, but I’ve never seen one.  Do the hands move slowly?  I want to see one, but all I get told is that want doesn’t always get.

When is it daytime?  Mummy says it’s when the sun shines brightly and it’s light outside and you can see everything around you.  At night it becomes dark and you have to turn the lights on to see.  We don’t have daytime in our house, so probably that’s why we don’t need a clock.

I need to find out what happened to Jack, Philip and Kiki.

Joe comes into the cellar where the boys are hiding, but Kiki makes a sound like Joe coughing, and Joe gets really frightened and runs, touching the boys by accident in the dark on the way out and getting even more scared, and then he gets told off by Aunt Polly in the kitchen.  Jack and Philip laugh a lot to think Joe was frightened of them, and find he was so scared that he left his key in the cellar door.  They take it and go through the door into the part of the cellar that Philip knows, to find boxes were in the way that had hidden the door, and Philip hadn’t known the door was there.  He felt excited about finding it.

How can I make Joe frightened of me?  The light is always on in our house because it’s never daytime, so he can always see me.  If he can’t see me he knows that I’ll be sitting on the toilet. 

Perhaps when I hear his footsteps I can run and turn off the light and then run out of the door when he opens it, but where can I turn off the light?  I get up and walk around our house, looking for something to turn it off with.  Mummy asks me what on earth am I doing, but I just say I’m going for a walk. 

I can’t find anything that turns off the light.  I look up and there’s a wire that goes from the light bulb up into the ceiling.  I can’t reach up to the ceiling and there are no trapdoors up above like Jack and Philip found.  It’s not fair; how is it that they can find a trapdoor and I can’t?

I’m going to have to think of another plan….

CHAPTER 7

Jack and Philip creep up the cellar steps into the kitchen, but nobody’s about so they go to the outer door and run down the cliff path again to the cave where Dinah and Lucy-Ann were still waiting for them to come out of the tunnel.  Philip creeps into the cave and throws a starfish at Dinah and makes her jump. 

Dinah hates her brother.  I wish I had a brother or sister; I wouldn’t hate them at all.  Mummy says she doesn’t want another baby, because I’m quite enough for her to look after, and anyway the house isn’t big enough.  I ask her if we can have a house as big as Craggy-Tops, but Mummy says no. 

I hear the bolt sliding back and Joe’s footsteps coming to the door.  Mummy gives me that look so I slide off the bed, grab my book, and run to the toilet as keys jangle in the lock outside.  We haven’t long eaten, so I think Joe wants to take Mummy’s hair out of its plait again and spread it on her pillow.  Mummy stands up to wait for him.

I wish I could read in the toilet, but if I try to it hurts my eyes.  I hold the book against me and listen, and wait for Joe to stop making the bedsprings creak.  When the noise stops I hear him say that something has split, but that’s all he says and there’s no reply from Mummy.  I hear a zip being done up and I clutch my book to me, hoping he’ll go straight out.

He doesn’t.  He comes to the toilet, the place where I try and hide, and stands in front of me.  I hate him.  He fills the toilet with his great body and looks down on me.  I pretend to like him and smile.  I can see Mummy standing behind him with her hair all loose and hanging down, and I want him to go away.  He asks me if I like the reading book, and I nod. 

He says he wants me to call him Daddy.  He says if I don’t call him Daddy he’ll take my reading book away.  Behind him I can see Mummy nodding as though she wants me to say yes, but I remember her saying that my daddy is called Liam.  She’s nodding really hard and looks as though her head is going to fall off.  I want to laugh at Mummy’s head going up and down, but then look at Joe and the bubbling laughter inside dies away.

I can see that the only way to make him go away is to give him what he wants.  I tell him I will call him Daddy, and Mummy’s head stops nodding.  He turns around to Mummy and takes some of her hair in his hands and strokes it, before unlocking the door and going back out.

Mummy says she needs a wee and that I was a very good girl, but I tell her how can I be good when I’ve told a lie?  She smiles and says that sometimes in life you have to tell little white lies that aren’t as bad as actual lies so that people don’t get angry and hurt you.  Thinking about what might happen if Daddy gets too angry, I see that Mummy is probably right and I’m glad I lied to him.

Daddy’s gone and I can sit on the bed and read again. 
There’s a wet patch on the duvet that smells funny, so I move away from it and sit on the other side.

Jack lies in the grass at the top of a cliff looking through binoculars at the Isle of Gloom.  He sees somebody rowing near Craggy-Tops in a boat and thinks it must be Joe, but on his way back to the house he sees that Joe’s boat is still there.  He tells the others he’s seen somebody with a boat, and Philip says they should try and find the owner of the boat and make friends.

That night they look out of the window of the tower room and see Joe sailing his boat towards the shore with some cargo on board. They creep down to the harbour where Joe’s boat was heading and jump out at him, making him fall into the water in fright.  He comes out of the water very angry and hits Jack, but Philip charges into Joe’s middle and makes him gasp for breath.  Then the boys run along the beach with Joe chasing after them and disappear down the secret tunnel in the cave, but they have to find their way back to the cellar in complete darkness.  Joe doesn’t know about the secret passage and waits outside the cave for them, but wonders if it was Jack and Philip on the beach when they appear at breakfast the next morning as if nothing had happened.

I was glad I didn’t make Daddy angry.  He might have hit me like Joe had hit Jack.  Mummy never makes him angry either.  I think I’ll pretend I like Daddy and smile and smile, and then he might give me what I want.  I want some new clothes because the ones I’ve got are too small; the sleeves are halfway up my arms, and my trouser legs are way above my ankles now and the waist is too tight.  Mummy already asked him for clothes, but he never brought any.  She always tells me that want doesn’t get.

I smile at Daddy when he brings our dinner and I ask him for some bigger clothes.  Mummy looks surprised and says I should mind my manners and say please.  I smile again and say please, and then look down at my book.  Daddy smiles back at me and says he will bring some clothes and some more pencils and colouring books.  I make sure I say thank you to Daddy and smile again.  He goes away I feel warm inside, because not only can I keep my reading book, I’m now going to get some new clothes and pencils and colouring books as well.

Mummy doesn’t really want me to talk to Daddy, but I don’t see why I can’t.  He’s horrible, but he seems to like me more now I smile at him. 

When we wake up Daddy brings our breakfast and our lunchtime sandwiches, and he also brings a larger pair of black trousers, a blue and white dress, two bigger jumpers (one red and one green), and white socks and knickers the next size up for me.  I’ve never seen so many clothes and I smile and smile as though my life depended on it.  From the pockets of his overalls Daddy brings me pencils, paper, colouring books, and a big bar of chocolate.  My mouth changes into an ‘o’ shape, and I remember to call him Daddy and say thank you.  It’s hard to talk when I have to smile so much.  He says he is going to work, but he will bring dinner later on.  He goes out and turns the key in the lock, and I hear the bolt sliding across on the outer door.

I look at Mummy and she looks at me, and we both burst out laughing.  She says she will have to try smiling at him as well.  I try on the jumpers and they fit. The dress is a bit big, but Mummy says I’ll grow into it.  The trousers are a little bit too long, so I turn them up at the bottom.

I do some colouring with my new pencils after breakfast, and then it’s time for me to jog on the spot.  The trouser bottoms start coming down again when I jog, and Mummy says she wishes she had a needle and thread.  I say that I’ll smile at Daddy and ask, but she shakes her head and says he’d never give us any needles.

Daddy brought us ham and tomato sandwiches for lunch and some fruitcake.  There are bits of seeds inside the tomatoes that fall out of the bread onto my new jumper.  I run to the sink and wipe them off, and then pick up my reading book.

The children are swimming in the sea.  Philip swam out to some rocks and climbed on them to rest, and saw the boat tethered on the other side of the rocks that Jack had seen a few days before.  They go exploring and find a hut built into a cliff, and a man comes out when he hears the children.  He says his name is Bill Smugs and that he’s a bird watcher.  The children make friends with him and he takes them out in his boat for trips and for a ride into town in his car, where they buy torches so that they don’t have to use candles in their bedrooms and in the secret tunnel. They see Joe in town and he has no idea how they could have travelled there. 

Joe watches them as they go into a posh hotel to meet Bill for lunch.  He sits outside and waits for them to come out, but the children and Bill go out the back way and Joe is angry when he returns to Craggy Tops and sees the children there.

I wonder if Daddy would be angry if I could find a back way out of my house and meet my real daddy for lunch in the same posh hotel?  How can I escape? I look at the greeny-grey walls with my pictures stuck on them, but can’t see any other way to get out except through the door that Daddy always keeps locked.  There’s no secret tunnel either, because I’ve already checked.  How come that Jack and Philip could find one but I can’t? 

Perhaps there’s a door hidden under one of my pictures?  I pull some of the Blu-tack away on one corner of the picture of Prince while Mummy is in the toilet, but there’s only more wall behind it.

I ask why the door is always locked.  Mummy looks sad when she says that
Daddy wants to keep us inside the house and doesn’t want us to get out.  I feel scared that I might never get outside to see the sea and caves and hotels and parrots until I’m grown up.  Mummy cuddles me and says that my real daddy will be searching for us, and that we must be brave and not complain because we must not make Daddy cross. 

Mummy says it’s time for singing.  I like singing; it makes me feel happy inside.  She teaches me a new song by somebody called Rolling Stones.  It’s called ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want.’  My voice sounds like Mummy’s when I sing, and as I learn the words I find out that if I try sometimes, I might find I get what I need. 

I’m going to try and get what I want.  I really want to get out of my house, so I have to try and please Daddy so that I can get what I need.