Can't Anyone Help Me? (4 page)

‘Oh, just some friends, no one you really know,’ my mother replied, in a more friendly voice than usual. ‘I’ll feed you first, and as a treat you can watch a video upstairs in your room.’ When she noticed my apparent lack of interest, the friendly tone was replaced with the more familiar impatient one. ‘Jackie,’ she said sharply, ‘very few people have video recorders in their houses, and there you are with one in your own room. At least look grateful.’

I mumbled my thanks but inside I felt growing resentment: I understood only too well that a film was just her way of getting rid of me.

I had my supper in the kitchen, then was sent upstairs, where my father had found a suitable film that he had already placed in the video recorder for me to watch. It was later, long after the film had finished and my mother had come upstairs to put me to bed, that I tossed and turned as sleep eluded me.

I could hear music playing softly, and after the doorbell chimed, my mother greeting new arrivals. The sounds of laughter and chatter drifted up from the sitting room, and eventually I dozed off.

Later, when it was dark outside, I woke up. For a few moments I felt disoriented, but realized gradually that noise from downstairs had woken me. Curious – our house was not one in which loud laughter rang out often – I crept out of bed and down the stairs.

At first the group of adults in the sitting room did not notice me standing in the doorway, watching the strangers that my parents had turned into. My mother, her face flushed, a drink in her hand, was sitting on one of the settees. Her skirt had ridden up above her knees, showing far more leg than I had ever seen her display before, and instead of my father, one of her friends’ husbands was sitting next to her. My eyes opened wide when I saw his arm around her shoulders and his hand stroking her neck. As I watched, his fingers trailed down until they slid under the fabric of her lacy top.

I glanced around the room for my father and saw him leaning back on one of our easy chairs with the other man’s wife jigging around on his knee. His hand was under her skirt, her blonde head was against his chest and her fingers were stroking his hair. The other two couples were dancing slowly to the music but I had seen them often enough to know that they had changed partners. I felt a twinge of unease. I was witnessing something that I was too small to understand but that glimpse of adult life unsettled me. I already wished I hadn’t seen it. I just wanted to go back to my room and climb under the bedclothes before I was seen. But somehow I was unable to move.

It was my mother’s friend who saw me first. Her head rose and she squealed, then tried to remove herself hastily from my father’s lap. ‘Dora,’ she called to my mother, ‘we have a little visitor.’

My mother opened her eyes, lifted her head and looked angrily in my direction. Her face went even redder as she jumped away from her friend’s husband, brushing his hand off her. She marched to where I was, grabbed my arm and pulled me up the stairs. ‘Just stay in your bed like I told you,’ she snapped.

I had broken her rule that I should never come downstairs after I had been put to bed, so I said nothing, just curled into a ball and tried to go back to sleep. But no matter how hard I tried, my brain was working furiously, trying to make sense of what I had seen, which it failed to do successfully. Throughout the night I heard more bursts of laughter, footsteps on the stairs and my mother’s voice sounding different from her usual well-modulated tones: it was higher-pitched and slightly slurred. A man’s voice that I knew was not my father’s spoke to her. Then doors opened and closed and the sounds became muffled.

Again, I was driven by curiosity to find out what was happening, and even though I knew I’d be in trouble if I was caught, I crept out of my room and along the corridor to where the other three bedrooms were. My parents’ door was shut, as was the second bedroom’s, but the third was ajar. Unable to resist temptation, I placed my eye to the crack and saw my father with a woman, the one he had been with downstairs. This time she was kneeling on the bed, naked. Her face was turned away from me, but I recognized her long blonde hair, which now hung around her shoulders. My father, also undressed, was kneeling behind her. His hands held her hips and he was moving back and forwards. As I watched, his movements became faster until his body jerked and his shout mixed with the woman’s high-pitched yelps.

I felt sick and wished, as I had earlier, that I had obeyed my mother and stayed in my room. I might not have understood then what I had witnessed but it added to my earlier unease. I crept away from the door as quietly as I could – I knew that the two people inside the room would be very angry if they saw me.

Nothing was said to me the next day about what I had witnessed the night before. My mother was her usual brisk, efficient self as she bustled around the kitchen, shooing me out of the way as she prepared the Sunday lunch, and my father hardly raised his head from the pile of newspapers.

But the next weekend my uncle arrived. ‘Coming to stay with us, darling,’ he said, ruffling my hair.

‘I hope she’s not too much trouble,’ my mother said, as she always did, in a voice that conveyed she was not interested either way.

He flashed her a white-toothed smile and gave the expected answer. ‘Oh, she’s such a good little thing. Aren’t you, sugar?’ With those words, his smile included me in its warmth. ‘You mustn’t worry, Dora, we love having her to stay. She’s no trouble at all.’ Then he picked up my small case, with a change of clothes, my pyjamas and my special Paddington Bear, and led me to his car.

On the drive to his house he drove with one hand on the wheel, the other touching my hand or stroking my legs. ‘Is anything the matter?’ he asked, for images of the weekend before had temporarily rendered me silent. I shook my head.

‘You know you can tell me anything, don’t you?’ he continued. I nodded.

‘You’re my special little girl, aren’t you?’

Hearing his words, I felt the knot of unease start to uncoil in my stomach.

It was just a week before I was due to start school. I was holding Paddington tightly that day. Summer was ending, the sun was thinner and the leaves had already started dropping from the trees. I can still picture myself checking that Paddington’s duffel coat was buttoned up tightly to keep him warm.

But what I remember most about that day is my uncle taking me to meet his friend.

‘You’ll like it there,’ he had told me. ‘There will be other children for you to play with.’ I felt pleased then; it was so rare that I was able to be with children of my own age. Children were not little people to my mother: they were nuisances who might trample dirt into the house, make a noise, or leave their toys scattered on the furniture. Friends who already had small grandchildren visited us periodically when they were babysitting. They handed the infants over to me to entertain either in the garden or in the furthest part of the sitting room, where an eye could be kept on me and my small charges.

‘Jackie’s so good with the little ones,’ a bright voice would say.

Looking down at a gurgling toddler, I would wish it was a child of my own age, whom I could talk to and play more interesting games with.

My uncle kept up a light patter of conversation with me as we drove to the outskirts of the town. Instead of turning towards where he and my aunt lived, he drove straight on towards the old run-down area, with its warren of narrow streets and rows of terraced houses.

He pulled up outside one that looked even less cared-for than the rest. Although it was still daylight, the curtains were closed, giving it a shuttered, deserted look. Weeds grew between the cracks of the broken paving stones that made a short path, while the small front garden had scarcely a tuft of grass, far less a flower or shrub. The porch we stood under when we rang the bell was just a cap of concrete roofing, designed to protect anyone standing there from the rain. But that day it was sunny, and I remember looking over my shoulder as a gust of wind blew an empty plastic bag along the deserted street. It whirled up high, and I watched as it disappeared from sight.

The door we were facing had, some years earlier, been a dark green, but the paint had worn off in patches, and long splinters of wood were missing from the bottom edge. I wondered who lived there, for it was not the sort of place I had ever visited before.

A thin, slightly stooped man, whose head, apart from a fringe of white hair, was almost bald, opened the door to us. His pale grey eyes blinked from the bright light that the door let in, and then he smiled a welcome. Without uttering a word he gestured for us to enter the tiny hall. As we stepped inside my uncle placed his hand on my back and gently pushed me into what he said was the sitting room.

It was a shabby, dimly lit room that smelt of stale smoke, beer and neglect. Worn furniture stood on lino that attempted to look like pine floorboards. A coffee-table, stained with the white rings made by countless wet bottles and hot mugs, stood in the centre of the room, but the focal point was the large television. It was clear that the man spent much of his time watching it, for all the furniture was oriented in its direction. The sound was turned right down but there were flickering images on the screen, and I noticed that the man had left his glasses on the arm of the two-seater settee.

‘Been watching movies,’ he said to my uncle, with a snigger, as though that explained why the curtains were drawn in the middle of the day. The two men exchanged a look that managed to be both secretive and knowing; a look that, in its exclusion of me, sent prickles of unease through me. I wanted to leave the room, go back outside, get into the car and for my uncle to drive us away but, unable to express those feelings, I just stood there without speaking.

A boy, a few years older than me with a mop of dark chestnut hair curling around his ears, came into the room. Dressed in jeans and an un-ironed grey T-shirt, he was, like the room, unkempt and neglected.

‘Ah, Dave,’ the man said, ‘take this pretty little girl into the garden, will you, and give her some lemonade?’ Now I saw the man and the boy exchange a look that I didn’t understand.

The boy took my hand and led me out of the room into the kitchen, where he picked up a bottle of what he told me was lemonade. He then took me outside and, as he passed me the bottle, I noticed a rim of dirt under the chewed-down edges of his fingernails.

The nervousness I had felt ever since I had gone into the house had made my throat dry and I gulped the drink, hardly tasting it. At the bottom of the garden, a gate led to a path with a river flowing alongside it. The boy beckoned to me to follow him. He said nothing, just started gathering up smooth stones. I began to help him. Once there was a small pile, he threw them one by one across the water with a quick twist of his wrist. I stood beside him, watching the ripples they made as they skimmed across the surface.

‘Let me try too,’ I said.

He smiled at me. ‘Your hands are too small,’ he said, but he gave me one of the smaller stones.

He was right, my wrists were not strong enough to spin it, and the stone dropped straight into the water and sank.

I can’t remember any more than that, whether we played any games or what we talked about, only what happened in the house when we went back inside.

‘Got something for you two to watch,’ the man said, motioning for us to sit on the settee.

The boy and I sat as we were told to do, side by side. His hand crept across the space between us and held mine. Did he feel sorry for me because he knew what was to happen next? Or was it for his own comfort that he held the hand of a child who hadn’t even turned six?

I was handed some more lemonade.

‘Drink it all up, Jackie,’ my uncle said, when I tried to put the glass on the floor. I felt the other man’s eyes watching me, and the combined pressure of his gaze and my uncle’s words made me swallow it. It was sweet, far sweeter than any drink I had been given before, and I started to feel sleepy.

The film began, and suddenly I was looking at a naked woman on all fours with a man positioned behind her, gripping her buttocks. Another man came on to the screen and, within seconds, there were three naked bodies all joined together. I pulled my hand away from the boy’s and tried to look away. I didn’t want to see it.

‘It’s what people do, Jackie,’ said my uncle, and underneath the warmth of his voice there was a sudden firmness. ‘I want you to watch it.’

He hadn’t told me anything I didn’t already know – I had glimpsed as much through that bedroom door – but still I kept my head turned.

My uncle forced me to move up so he could sit next to me. I put my fingers over my eyes but nothing could block out the grunts and squeals coming from the television. The boy pulled my hand away from my face, then gently laced his fingers through mine. ‘Do as he says and watch it,’ he whispered, squeezing my fingers reassuringly. ‘They’ll get cross if we don’t.’ My uncle had never been cross with me before so I wasn’t afraid. I just wanted him to take me away from there, out of that grubby room, which suddenly felt very hot. On the TV I could see groups of naked people, their bodies contorted into various positions and their faces shiny with sweat, performing acts that disgusted me.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw my uncle leaving the room and, panic-stricken that I was alone with the man and the boy, I tried to run after him.

It was the man who stopped me. His hard fingers gripped my shoulders. ‘Stay here, girl,’ he said. ‘Your uncle’s just gone to the car. He’ll be back in a tick.’ Frightened now, I sat down on the settee again.