Abandoned: The true story of a little girl who didn’t belong

‘None of them are your brothers or sisters,’ she spat.

I wanted to shout again that they were, but nothing came out, and I just nodded and nodded without stopping, as the spiky laughter went on around me, until the teacher came in, smiling, and saw me nodding.

‘Yes, what?’ she said.

They all turned and started laughing again. When I lifted my head to look at the teacher for support she looked away quickly, as if my face had frightened her, and started writing the date in yellow chalk in the corner of the blackboard.

They carried on at lunch break, surrounding me. ‘Why have you got a different surname then?’

I didn’t know how to explain that although I had a different surname to the others I was the one who was ‘never going to be sent away’. I just shrugged.

‘Names don’t matter.’

Mummy always said it was the ‘inside things’ that mattered, what you feel on the inside, and so they were my real brothers and sisters, and they always would be.

‘They can’t be your brothers and sisters if you’ve got different surnames,’ my tormentor said again. I just walked away fast, humming. Nothing was going to stop me believing it. They were my brothers and sisters.

‘Why didn’t your own mum want you?’ they asked for a few days after that, crowding around me, breathing up all the air. Their words hit home. I felt a cold, heavy, sick sensation slip down inside me.

‘She does want me. I’ve got my mum, she’s indoors,’ I said, slamming my hands over my ears and running off fast.

But they ran after me through the playground shouting, ‘She’s not your mum, she’s not your mum, you dirty skinny liar!’

Even when the bell went and we had to get in line to go in, my heart wouldn’t stop pounding. It punched and punched against my ribcage, as if it had had enough and wanted to escape. And when Miss stood at the board and talked about how to do paragraphs, it was still so noisy that I thought she was about to spin around and tell me to ‘stop that racket’, that she couldn’t hear herself think. I leaned forwards until the edge of the desk was digging into my stomach, and my heart-noise quietened to a steady bom-bom, bom-bom, like one of the slow trains climbing up the hill behind the shops.

Our block was directly opposite the school, across a narrow one-way road. Because it wasn’t a main road Mummy didn’t have to collect us; we all just met up at the top gate and ran across. Liam had the key to get in on a piece of green string around his neck. Most of the children in my class lived at the other end of the school, and used the other gate where their mums queued up to collect them with sweets and crisps, so they didn’t see us all going home together.

One day the top gate was still padlocked so we had to use the bottom one. Liam and I were there first and we had to stand around and wait for the others. The two girls from my class with the lightest blonde hair marched up to Liam.

‘Is your mum her mum?’

It was the wrong time to ask him. He was in a temper with me, standing by the boys’ toilets, furiously scraping the cement out between bricks with the point of a compass. It was the kind of time when he might say anything. My heart stopped and I stared at him without blinking, crossing my fingers inside my anorak pocket. But straight away he said, ‘No.’

‘Yes, she is,’ I said to all of them, almost before he had got the word out, but four bright-blue eyes were glaring between mine and Liam’s, and I knew they believed him, not me.

‘So she’s not your sister, then?’

Liam was in the year above, and bigger than all of them. Not afraid of anyone either, just like my uncle. ‘I just told you, didn’t I? Are you deaf ? Or just plain stupid?’

He said it exactly the way my uncle would, and it made me look up at him again, at his tight face, pale and narrow; his little pink scar from where my uncle had thrown the bread knife at Mummy and missed, raised like a trophy on his forehead; the throb high up in the muscles of his jaw going just like my uncle’s went before he snapped. I was in awe of his ability to answer back the bullies. He wouldn’t look at me, just stared at a point in the distance, his eyes grey and unblinking, those same little chips of concrete as my uncle’s.

‘Liar.’ The girls turned on me, their faces vicious. I swung my head back towards Liam, wanting him to give them one of his punches, or twist their arms in a Chinese burn.

I shrugged. ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me,’ I heard Mummy singing in my head as I walked away.

But things were going to get much worse than just shouting and cruel words.

Chapter 10 (#ulink_0d0b001e-f413-5e8d-a470-4725fdecab1f)

The idea of me going away to boarding school had started with Kathy bringing some brochures over in her suitcase. One afternoon, not long after that, Marie leaned over the balcony and called me up from the square. She was seventeen by then, one of the grown-ups as far as we were concerned. It wasn’t raining, so I knew we were not all being called in because of that, and she only wanted me. I heard the slap of Stella’s skipping rope slow to a stop behind me and she ran over.

‘What do you want Anya for?’

‘I’ve just got a small job for her,’ Marie said, ‘that’s all. Stay down there, she won’t be long.’

Stella complained and started, ‘Daddy said …’ which made my heart thump. We all knew what my uncle said I had to do; I had to stay with Stella, and do whatever she wanted me to do. But this time Marie cut her off.

‘She won’t be a minute, okay,’ she said in a firm voice, calling me on with her finger. As I walked up I could feel Stella’s anger behind me.

‘You wait till Daddy gets home,’ she shouted after me. ‘I’m telling.’

My uncle would go mad that I’d defied her. All the way up the stairs and across the landing my heart was thumping.

Marie took me into her bedroom. Over my shoulder as I looked back from the doorway I could see Mummy in the bright kitchen, peeling potatoes; her hair scraped back, her face tired and lumpy. Her eyes were rimmed with red and her face stained with tears. Something was wrong. Why didn’t she look up at us? The bedroom door clicked shut behind us and I tried to swallow quietly. It felt strange sitting on the bed with Marie. I felt the cold I brought up with me clinging to my jumper, and when Marie smiled at me and started to talk I felt my mouth smile back, but the rest of me checked the door and the windows and thought about Mummy in the kitchen with her strained face and red eyes.

Marie went on talking to me in a sleepy kind of voice about how grown-up I was getting, and how bad my uncle could be, and how it was nothing to do with me, and did I know that? I nodded that I did, not sure if that was a black lie or a white one, and crossed my fingers in my pocket just in case. But at the back of my head I was still seeing Mummy with all the potato peelings in the colander and her red eyes, and Stella standing in the stairwell yelling, ‘I’m telling,’ wanting me to go back down and play games that I was two years too old for.

I banged my legs back quietly against the side of the bed and stared at a bottle of pink nail varnish Kathy had left behind last time she visited, sitting on the big, curvy, brown dressing table. I wondered what Marie was saying all this for, and why we were here while Mummy was in the other room with red eyes.

‘It’s not nice to be sad, is it?’ Marie said. ‘The boys are horrible sometimes, aren’t they?’ I nodded again, looking down at my grazed knee, twisting the hem of my jumper around my fingers, wondering if this was a trick, even when she said ‘I think so too.’

Then it came; she told me about schools where girls go to sleep and come back for holidays. But it didn’t mean they were bad and had been sent away, she said. I stopped banging my legs and froze. Before she finished I was already crying and shaking my head and saying I didn’t want to go. She told me it would be a really ‘lucky’ place to go, and that my uncle wouldn’t pick on me or hit me there, and neither would anyone else, and that I could still come back to live with Mummy in the holidays.

She tried to make me look at some of the brochures she’d taken down from a hiding place on top of the wardrobe. I watched all the furry grey dust falling down with them. I was never disobedient, but I shook my head and folded my arms so she couldn’t make me hold them. She put them down on the pillow instead.

‘Does Mummy want me to go?’ I asked.

‘Only if you want to.’

‘I don’t,’ I said, barely taking a breath in between, and looked straight back at her big blue eyes. ‘I’ve got my own school.’

She talked more, saying it wasn’t like I thought, that I wasn’t getting sent away because Mummy didn’t want me there, but that Kathy had offered to pay for it, and she and Mummy thought it would be good for me. I shut her voice out, the way I did when the others said Mummy was not my real mum. She asked if I would at least think about it while she went to the toilet, and I shook my head again, kicking my legs harder against the bed.

‘Just think about it,’ she said, ‘please, for Mummy.’

I shrugged and she said to just look at the pictures, please would I, and it was all up to me, I could choose whichever one of the schools I liked to go to, and if I didn’t like it when I got there I could come right back. She promised, on ‘Mummy’s life’, but she knew I’d like it, she said. ‘You’ll have lots of friends of your own age.’

Marie clicked the door closed behind her as she went out, and I picked my scab, listening to the voices of everyone playing in the square downstairs, all my friends. Through the wall I heard Marie and Mummy talking in the kitchen in low voices, as if my uncle was back. I held my breath and listened harder through the thumping of my heart, and when I was sure he wasn’t there I tried to make my breathing smooth again.

I tried not to see the glossy white brochures she’d left on the pillow, but there was no one there to see me. Clicking my tongue against the roof of my mouth nervously, I opened the top brochure and looked at the pictures of girls in pleated skirts running in playing fields, carrying sticks with little nets on the end; and sitting at desks, wearing stripy dresses with short sleeves, reading books; and another one of them wearing long white overalls and big plastic glasses, standing at wooden benches in front of metal candles with bright flames. Everyone was laughing or smiling, and I could tell there were no boys around, shouting. But I remembered the brochures had come from Kathy, which gave me another reason for hating these places.

When I heard the toilet flush I quickly closed the top page and sat up straight, trying to slow my breathing. The door clicked open and Marie asked if I’d thought about it. I nodded.

‘What do you think?’

‘I think I’m not going. Can I go back downstairs to look after Stella now?’

She let me go and my eyes clashed with Mummy’s on the way out. I could see she’d been crying more but Marie put her hand on my shoulder and steered me past, without letting me talk to her. I ran along the landing, frowning, trying to loosen the tight feeling in my belly. Marie was out, leaning over the balcony by the time I got down, and I called up.