Living With Evil (20 page)

I felt ashamed of the old rags and cut-up jumpers in my knickers.

Uncle Frank and Aunt Mag called me a dirty bitch whether I was bleeding or not, and so did Aunt Ann, though they were touching me less and less these days.

Some of the men in the building remarked on it, and even seemed to like seeing my blood. I could never forget the leering comments they made, even though, every time I went there, I felt like bits of my brain had fallen out of my head.

Daddy never spoke to me in bed, apart from to tell me sometimes it was ‘Mammy’s fault’ he was hurting me. ‘Get here now, you!’ he said most nights, and after that he just grunted.

I wondered if my life would ever change. I thought about my big sister Esther and wondered if maybe one day I could get on a boat and sail away like she did.

Margaret had sailed away now too. I heard Mammy and Daddy discussing how she had gone off to start a new job. Theresa wasn’t two yet, and it was decided that Mammy and Daddy would adopt her.

I was about to join fifth class at school. I was nearly eleven, and I looked forward to being one of the bigger girls in the school. I was growing up fast.

I hoped that maybe now I was a big girl my life might finally change for the better. It couldn’t get worse, could it?

I loved joining fifth class, and I was delighted to meet our teacher. She was young and pretty with blond hair.

She looked so much kinder than Mother Dorothy, and I noticed from the very first day that I got asked the same questions and was given the same chances to join in as all the posh kids.

If I didn’t have a pencil or a copy book the teacher always managed to find me one, and when I told her I ‘forgot’ my cookery ingredients she gave me a kind look, like she understood and had actually been there when Daddy said, ‘No way! I’m not givin’ you the money. Your mother can teach you to cook!’

Our teacher gave us singing lessons, and I loved joining in with the songs she taught us, like ‘Lord of the Dance’ and ‘Morning Has Broken’. All my friends told me I had a great voice, and when I belted out those songs I felt like a singer on a stage. At break time I sang ‘Brown Sugar’ by the Rolling Stones and put on pretend shows for my friends, holding an invisible microphone and kicking my legs.

Every morning when I opened my eyes, I really looked forward to school. It wasn’t just because I could have a laugh with my friends and enjoyed escaping from home, I was learning new things every day, and I found out I was good at reading and writing, and could even do maths better than I ever had before.

Now I was bigger, I washed myself with a bucket of water and a rag and managed to clean my clothes sometimes, too, after Esther visited and brought us soap and washing powder.

Nobody called me smelly any more, and even though my head still itched, I felt better about my appearance. The horrible things that happened outside of school still happened but, for the first time, they didn’t feel like they were the whole of my life.

Daddy had bought us a black Yorkshire terrier, and we named him Charlie. I loved him to bits. He would follow me to school every day and wait for me outside the school gates until I came out at lunchtime. He was very special, and I loved him dearly. He made me smile.

I hadn’t been in my new class very long when I started to feel sick a lot. It wasn’t much after my eleventh birthday.

It was a very strange sort of sickness. It wasn’t like the way I felt sick when Aunt Mag made me eat her disgusting mutton stew, or when Mammy mashed up those pills from the big white tub into my sandwiches, which I now knew said ‘Valium’ on the side.

This sickness was different from any other sickness I’d felt before. I had this funny feeling in my stomach all the time and I felt sort of dizzy. The strange thing about it was that I didn’t feel I was actually going to be sick, it was just a constant feeling of having a queasy tummy.

It went on for days and days, and eventually weeks. At first I was scared of telling Mammy about it because I didn’t want any more of that medicine in case it made me feel worse. I’d worked out that the white pills gave me sickening headaches and made me dizzy and forgetful, so I didn’t want any of those. I’d prefer just to feel sick.

The sickness just wouldn’t go away though, and in the end I decided I had better tell someone. I didn’t want to tell the nuns because I didn’t want to be sent home from school, so one night I told Mammy.

‘Mammy, I feel sick and want to vomit, but nothing’s coming out,’ I explained. ‘What’s wrong with me?’

I was relieved that Mammy didn’t ignore me. In fact, she seemed to know what to do straight away. She didn’t shout at me for complaining, and she didn’t try to give me those white pills either, so I was very glad I had told her my problem.

‘Drink a pint of salt and water,’ she told me firmly.

She didn’t seem worried, and didn’t even get out of her rocking chair or put down her tumbler of port. It couldn’t be anything serious. ‘Just go and drink a pint of salt and water, Cynthia,’ she said with confidence.

I felt relieved I was getting a cure, even though I retched as I forced the disgusting salt water down my throat.

I was very disappointed when I didn’t vomit or feel any better, but thankfully Mammy knew what to do. ‘Add more salt,’ she told me. ‘Add as much as you can.’ I poured in huge spoonfuls, but Mammy’s cure still didn’t work. I wasn’t sick, I just had a raging thirst.

When I went to bed, I prayed that I’d wake up feeling better the next day, but I didn’t. As soon as I opened my eyes the sickness swept over me. I felt worse instead of better, but I’d noticed the mornings were always worse.

My tummy felt weird now too. I didn’t feel like eating my Weetabix for breakfast, and when I got the little ones ready for school my head was spinning.

Changing the babies’ nappies made me gag, but still I couldn’t be sick. I just felt nauseous, it was so weird. I didn’t want to tell Mammy again in case she made me drink more salt water. It hadn’t helped, and it tasted foul. I didn’t want any more of that.

So I put up with the sick feeling for what felt like weeks, hoping every day it would just go away.

One day, I was sitting at my desk concentrating hard on a maths problem on the board, when I felt something fly inside my stomach.

It felt exactly like a butterfly, but not like the type of butterflies I got when I felt scared. This felt like I really had a butterfly fluttering its wings inside me.

I didn’t know what to do, so I just sat there feeling strange. I didn’t mention it to anyone, not even my friends at school. I thought they would think I was weird or telling one of my silly stories to entertain them. Maybe I was imagining it? No, I felt it again and again. I held my book low down across my tummy in case you could actually see my tummy move.

The sickness was still there too, and now I had something fluttering inside me. What if I had something seriously wrong with me? I had to talk to Mammy again. Hopefully, this time, she would know of a better cure.

‘Have a pint of salt water,’ Mammy told me again sternly. ‘Put as much salt in as you can.’ I groaned at the thought of that salt water, but I thought Mammy must know best.

She didn’t seem worried about the fluttering when I told her about it. She didn’t frown or do anything but sit in her chair drinking. Perhaps I was making a fuss about nothing?

‘Go and buy some vitamin tablets,’ she said in the end, after I’d made a scene of drinking down some salt water with the tiniest bit of salt I could get away with. It made me retch, but nothing came up.

Mammy sent me to the shop and told me exactly which vitamins to buy. They were called Haliborange, and she announced later that all the children in the house were to take them.

‘Line up now,’ she ordered the younger kids. I felt pleased that Mammy was trying to help me get over my sickness. She was looking after me, and she was making sure the little ones didn’t get sick too. She’d never given us vitamins before, and they weren’t cheap either. I’d been surprised how much money she gave me to go to the shop.

Mammy dished out a tablet to each child in turn, but when she got to me at the end of the line she put the box of Haliborange down and brought out a dark bottle of medicine, telling me that, because I was older, I needed different vitamins.

It was dark, thick, sticky liquid that looked like treacle but tasted a bit fishy. It was foul, but I dutifully licked the spoon clean, hoping my sickness and funny tummy would get better soon.

Mammy told me to keep taking the salt water too, just to ‘make sure’, and so I did, but all that happened was that I started to feel even more unwell.

I couldn’t understand it. I was drinking pints of salt water, eating raw eggs and liver and taking my vitamin mixture, all of which were meant to ‘do me good’, so why weren’t they helping?

I didn’t look ill. We all had Mammy’s fine skin, and I had roses in my cheeks. I was still feeling very sick in the mornings, though, and in the afternoons I was exhausted.

When I complained to Mammy that I didn’t seem to be getting better, she just told me to keep drinking the salt water and taking the vitamins. In the end I stopped complaining.

Daddy didn’t seem worried at all. One night I felt so weary and my head ached so much I begged him to leave me alone. ‘Daddy, please, no,’ I said. ‘I think I’ll be sick.’

‘Get here now!’ he sneered, tying his belt around my chest. ‘You know what happens if you start!’ As he tightened the buckle, I could feel my heart beating ferociously in my chest. It was going so fast I was sure it would burst out and snap that leather belt right off me.

I wished I actually could be sick, thinking that would make Daddy get off me. My stomach was doing somersaults. He smelled worse than usual tonight. He’d used the toilet bucket, and the room smelled overpoweringly vile too. I wished I could vomit all over him, but I just lay there feeling sick and helpless and suffocated by his sweat and reeking breath.

The next day, I was sitting behind my desk listening to the teacher when I felt something move sharply inside me. It felt like a kick. It wasn’t a flutter like before. It was unmistakably a kick. But how could something kick me inside my stomach? What had got in there?

I stared at the blackboard and tried to work it out. What could the explanation be? What illness could make something feel like it was kicking me inside the tummy?

I looked around at my classmates. They were all just staring at the blackboard or looking bored and jotting notes like always. Everything looked so normal, but I felt detached, like I was on a different planet from everybody else. I looked round again and felt a wave of loneliness sweep over me. I knew I couldn’t tell anyone what had just happened. How could I? I didn’t even know what it was, so how could I explain it? People might laugh at me or think I was mad.

I had to talk to Mammy again. She had helped the first time, rushing me out to buy vitamins, so she must care about this and she would help me again.

I raced up to her bedside as soon as I got in from school.

‘Mammy, something’s banging inside my stomach,’ I told her. ‘It’s scaring me.’

I looked at Mammy intently, desperately hoping she would have another answer, or another medicine that might work better. She looked back at me with no expression in her eyes. ‘You’re having a baby,’ she said in a harsh, frosty voice.

The room around me started to shift. The walls wobbled and the floor tilted. Nothing was still except for Mammy. She sat propped up like a shop dummy in front of me, her eyes directed at me but seeming to look straight through me.

I didn’t know what she meant. I was eleven years old, and little girls didn’t have babies. Only mammies had babies, and I wasn’t a mammy.

I stared at my mammy and didn’t know what to say. My lips felt as if they were stuck together. The room was swirling around me. I still felt sick, and the mere thought that I was having a baby made me feel sicker still.

How could a baby get inside my tummy? My tummy wasn’t big enough to have a baby in it. It wasn’t big and round like Mammy’s was when I pushed my ear up to it to listen for baby Michael’s heartbeat.

Mammy began to speak again as I stood in front of her, dumbstruck. This time her voice was angry.

‘You’re a freak,’ she blurted out. ‘Your baby will be disabled.’

I knew it was real now, and what Mammy was saying was true. I didn’t understand anything at all about having babies. I didn’t want to have a baby. A tear ran down my cheek. I really didn’t want to have a disabled baby. I didn’t grasp what any of it really meant, but her words frightened me to death. I imagined I had some scary monster inside me, not comprehending how it got there or how it might go away.

Mammy snapped me out of my thoughts, pushing me on to the single bed, shouting very loudly, ‘D’you hear me? You’re a freak! Stay up here until I say!’

She pulled the thick curtains tightly across the black blanket on the window.