Helpless (19 page)

T
he day after I had been accepted at the factory I had gone to the school and told my headmistress of my father’s decision. She had uttered conciliatory noises such as ‘maybe when you are a little older’, but she and I both knew that it was not going to happen. Once in a factory, girls rarely went back to study further and get qualifications. I could see in her eyes that these were hollow words of encouragement. I hated letting her down, and I hated my father’s ignorance and his bullish refusal to help me improve my prospects.

It was that very day that the man next door appeared out of nowhere and listened to me when I tearfully told him that my father had refused to let me leave home and live in the nurses’ home.

He had sympathized with my not being able to fulfil my ambition, and even confided in me that something similar had happened to him. He told me that he had wanted to stay on at school, pass exams and go on to university, but instead his father had insisted he learn a trade.

‘Book learning doesn’t pay a decent wage,’ were his father’s actual words, the man next door explained and, seeing the similarities in our shattered dreams, I believed him. Once he had finished his apprenticeship he met Dora, ‘and then it was too late,’ he added.

Later I wondered if even that was true or was it just another ruse to win my sympathy and make me feel we had a bond?

Several weeks passed before I saw him again, and in that time I had come, if not to like the routine of the factory, at least to get used to it. I enjoyed my growing friendship with Bev and the teasing I got from the other women as my appearance changed. With my overtime money I bought new underwear and shoes, had my hair cut and experimented with make-up for the first time. The real difference came when I started wearing the new outfits that Bev made for me at work.

‘Don’t keep it for best,’ she had said after the first one was finished. ‘I’ll make you another one just as soon as you buy the fabric.’

It was a Saturday when the man next door put in another appearance. I had done a morning’s overtime and was just leaving work when I heard his voice. This time he had walked up behind me.

‘You look very pretty today, little lady.’

That day I was angry with him. Where had he been? Just turning up when he wanted to. He, seeing the expression on my face and understanding only too well the mixture of emotions running through my head, laughed.

‘Missed me, did you?’

‘No!’ I replied a bit too quickly. ‘Of course not.’ But whether I admitted it or not, he knew I had.

‘Heard you’ve been making plenty of new friends,’ he said, and I supposed my mother had told Dora, who in turn had told him. Or perhaps he had been the one peeking through the curtains when Bev and Phil were dropping me off.

‘You’ll be forgetting me soon, won’t you?’ he said, looking defiantly into my eyes.

He received the answer he wanted: my denial.

He took my elbow and steered me in the direction of his car. With a flourish he flung open the passenger door and I climbed in. That time, instead of taking me straight home, the car turned off the road and into the woods.

He held his arms out to me. ‘Come here, Marianne,’ he said, and I flinched. He had spoilt the day. It made me realize just how I did not want to return to the situation of him making me do things that not only did I not like, but knew were wrong.

I cried a little, he stroked my back. I said I only wanted to talk.

‘And this?’ he said, his arm around my shoulder as his fingers gently stroked my neck. ‘But you like this, don’t you, Marianne?’

He was right. I did. I liked the comfort of being held. After all, he was still the only person who showed me affection. Ever since I was small and had seen parental affection only given to my younger siblings, I had wanted that intimacy for myself. But I did not want the other part of it, the part I knew he wanted.

For three weeks I said no to any other advances.

‘Who did you say the father was?’ he asked, a question that he must have been fully aware of the answer to.

‘You know I told them I didn’t know,’ was my reply, hoping that he would show some gratitude for my protection of him.

‘So,’ he asked, ‘when you filled in those forms, those official legal forms, about getting your baby adopted, what did you write on them? Also “father unknown”?’

‘Yes,’ I replied, emphatic that I had not betrayed him.

He explained to me then that what I had done was illegal. I had lied on a government form. His face was sombre and serious. ‘Don’t you know how serious that is, Marianne?’

‘But you told me not to tell,’ I said indignantly but with a creeping fear of having done something illegal.

I knew then that I had not given him the right answer, but what I did not know was that there was no right answer I could have given.

‘I didn’t tell you to lie on a government form!’ was the terse response that he spat out at me.

I burst into tears at the unfairness of what he was saying.

Once again he said he would not let anything happen to me. His voice mellowed and he crooned in my ear and said he would do that because I was special to him. Once again I felt trapped and powerless to walk away from him.

That was the afternoon I didn’t say no.

I swallowed my shame, for I still needed to hear those words telling me I was special.

He knew which words to use to manipulate me. He understood my fears and vulnerability, for had I not confided them all to him voluntarily?

Why did I let him abuse me again? That’s a question I’ve asked myself over and over again. I did not love him; if anything I was scared of him. I hated what he did to me. But I was also scared of him not liking me. And I knew that he was stronger than me, more determined that he would make me give in than I was at refusing him. I felt that I had no choice.

I did not understand then that the real reason I went with him was because, at fifteen, I was still little more than a child, a child who from birth had been both lonely and emotionally deprived.

He was careful this time, careful not to be seen with me. He never came to our house or laid in wait for me near home. He just turned up on that stretch of road somewhere between the factory and the bus stop, turned up with that friendly smile and the right words to make me feel that someone cared, someone listened to me.

It was when I threw up one morning that I realized that he had not been as careful as he thought.

I
waited a few days hoping against hope that my vomiting had been caused by something I had eaten. After three more days of throwing up before breakfast I had to face the fact that it wasn’t, and with a sinking feeling I had to face the fact that it was three months since my last period. Surely this time he would have to help me? For the first time in several years it was me who went in search of him.

When I was certain there was no one around, I went to his workshop and left a note there for him saying that I had to see him.

The next day he was waiting for me near the factory and, as I climbed into his car, I blurted out that not only were my periods late, but I was also being sick every morning. ‘Shit,’ was the first word he said, followed by the same question he had asked me two years earlier: ‘Are you sure it’s mine?’ I cried then, both in anger at his doubt and terror for the predicament I was in.

‘I just can’t go through that again,’ I told him.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘You won’t have to.’ Then his arm went round my shoulders. But that day, instead of feeling comforting, its heaviness turned into a weight that seemed to press me down and trap me in my seat.

He told me that he would think of something and that he would be waiting for me when I finished work the following day.

That day dragged like no other, and when the clocking-off whistle blew, instead of hanging around for a chat with Bev, I just said a muttered goodbye, picked up my bag and left. His car drew up alongside before I had taken more than a few steps in the direction of the bus stop and his voice ordered me to jump in quickly. I knew immediately that this urgency was because he was scared that someone would see us together.

Into those woods we went, this time further in than he had ever driven before.

Grim faced, he reached into the back and brought out a bag which contained a flask and those coils of black rubber things I had last seen on the tray that Dora had held in her hands nearly two years earlier.

‘No!’ I screamed and tried to get out of the car. But he was too strong for me, his arm shot out and pushed me firmly down on the car’s bench seat with one arm underneath me. Then before I could squirm away from him, he straddled me, one knee pinning me down and the other leg holding me in place against the car seat. He was stronger than me and I was terrified that he was really going to hurt me.

My knickers were pulled down to my ankles and my knees were pushed roughly apart and I felt the hard rubber of the nozzle being thrust inside me. I cried out in pain, for in his desperation and anger he was rougher than Dora had been and the soapy water in the flask was even hotter than I remembered. I thumped his shoulders and sobbed in fear as he poured it into me, but not until every drop was inside me did he pause. Then he climbed off me, pushed my legs together and jerked them roughly into the air.

‘Got to keep that inside you for a bit,’ he said. ‘You want to get rid of it, Marianne, don’t you? Think what your dad might do to you if he finds out this time.’ And that thought made me shake with fear.

That afternoon the pain was far worse than I had remembered it being before. By the time I reached the part of the lane near our house where he always dropped me off, cramping pains and waves of nausea were making me feel faint and dizzy. Not wanting to arouse my mother’s suspicions, I feigned a headache to give me an excuse to go straight upstairs to bed.

I tried to stop my moans of pain by stuffing the sheet in my mouth and chewed on it. I was frightened that my sister might hear me and tell my parents. Sweat beaded my forehead, pain shot through my body, and when tiredness sent me into a merciful deep sleep I dreamed of a large pool of blood with a dead baby floating in it.

In the morning there was no sign of my period; instead I was sick again.

It was a week before the man next door turned up again.

‘Well?’ he said, when I climbed into the car.

‘No sign,’ I replied. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I described how I was still being sick every morning. With every word I uttered I saw all signs of my childhood friend disappear, until a stranger was sitting next to me, a stranger who looked at me with cold, angry eyes.

‘You’d better stick to the same story as before,’ he said eventually. ‘Don’t think you can drop me in it. Nobody would believe you.’

Oh, I tried to protest. I told him that he could not abandon me this time, that he had to help me, but he simply brushed aside my feeble efforts to get his support.

‘Don’t be a silly girl, Marianne,’ he said, when I paused to draw breath. ‘I’m a respectable married man. Ask anyone. While you? Didn’t you go and tell the world that you were sleeping around when you were only thirteen? Didn’t you write down on a government form that you didn’t know who the father of your last baby was? Who’s going to believe your lies now?’

Still I continued to beg him, and those pleas for help were met with a derisory laugh.

‘If you mean help get you an abortion, forget it. They cost money and I haven’t got any to spare. Anyhow, it’s illegal. No, you just stick to that same old story. You should have got it off pat by now.’

He said nothing more, just drove until we were about a mile from our houses and then drew up.

For a moment I thought he must have had a change of heart or perhaps he had come up with an idea for helping me, but that hope was quickly dashed.

He just leant over me and opened the door.

‘Get out, Marianne,’ he said coldly. ‘I’m not going to risk being seen with you. Maybe a fast walk will bring you on.’

I looked at him unbelievingly. He couldn’t mean to leave me on that dark country road. Could he? He did. Seeing that his words had not sunk in, he gave me a sharp shove.

‘I mean it, Marianne. Out you go.’

Without thinking and too shocked to protest further, I did as he said. Then I stood on the grass verge and watched the tail-lights of his car fade into the darkness of that chilly winter evening. Then, still in a daze, I pulled up the collar of my coat and started walking.

When I finally got to our front door his car was already parked next to his front door. I looked numbly at the drawn curtains of his house and pictured him sitting in front of the fire with little thought in his head for me.

I wanted to march up to his door, bang on it, demand he helped, but I knew that he would simply laugh at me and deny any accusations I made. After all, he had got away with it before.

I was on my own and I knew it.

It was nearly two years before he and I spoke again.

T
he next few weeks passed in a daze. In the daytime, when I was at the factory, I tried to bury my head in the sand and pushed all thoughts of my pregnancy aside. But in the very early hours of the morning, when terrible and disturbing dreams awoke me, that sinking feeling of dread and fear was already lodged in my churning stomach.

Each time I ran to the toilet to kneel before the bowl as I vomited, I was reminded that too many months had passed for there to be any chance that I was not going to give birth to another child – for, unlike my first pregnancy, morning sickness had not ended after three months.

What was going to happen to me? This was the main question that kept spinning round and round in my head. I tried to will it away as I was just too frightened to contemplate it. I carried on hiding my expanding waistline under looser clothes, rinsed my mouth with a strong mouth wash to disguise the smell of vomit and burnt matches in the outside toilet to disguise its lingering odours.

It was Bev who noticed first.

‘Marianne,’ she said quietly at our morning break. ‘You’re pregnant, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I whispered. Immediately it seemed that just uttering that one word of admission gave me a sense of relief.

She asked me how far gone I was and looked shocked when I told her that I must be in my sixth month. More questions followed, and her horrified expression deepened when I replied that not only had I not been to a doctor but that I had not confided in my parents.

How could I have told her that they would be neither understanding nor supportive? That the reason I knew was that this was the second pregnancy in three years, a fact that I could or would never confide to Bev?

My nails dug into the palms of my hands as I waited for the one question I dreaded more than any other.

‘Who’s the father?’ she asked.

This time I understood what saying I did not know would imply about me. I looked at my feet as I mumbled the prepared lie that it was a boy I had gone out with a few times who had since left the town. ‘He buggered off to London,’ I embellished. ‘Just dumped me after I let him the first time.’

She gave me a sympathetic look. After all, she knew that I had very little social life and I suppose she imagined that I had fallen for the first boy who had shown some interest in me. As I spoke my face flushed, both from embarrassment and also the shame of deceiving my only close friend. Seeing I was very close to tears, she put her arm around me and told me that she would help.

‘But Marianne, you have to tell your parents, that’s a condition,’ she said, and of course I reassured her that I would.

It was Bev who made the doctor’s appointment for me and took a day off work to accompany me. The examination confirmed that I was six months pregnant. The doctor made an appointment for me to attend the antenatal clinic and wrote a prescription out for both iron pills and tablets to help stop my persistent morning sickness. I was undernourished, he said, as well as anaemic, and needed good food and rest. He seemed to think that Bev was a relative, for it was to her he addressed most of his comments.

Bev took me home with her afterwards. She fussed over me and made me a cup of tea and opened a packet of chocolate digestives. It was then she told me that she and her husband Phil had talked over my plight.

‘We’ve both agreed,’ she said ‘that if your parents won’t let you stay at home with them whilst you have the baby, you can come to us until everything is over.’

I tried to find the courage to tell my mother but, before I could, matters were taken out of my hands. Three days after my doctor’s appointment my father found my medication in my bedroom. When I arrived home from my Saturday-morning shift he was waiting for me.

As soon as I walked through the door my heart lurched as I sensed the strained atmosphere in the room. My mother was standing by the sink as though by looking out of the window above it she was not participating in the drama that was due to unfold.

On the table were the bottles containing my medication, and standing by them was my father. He gave no explanation for the reason he had searched my belongings, and later I wondered just how long he had guessed that I was pregnant. But that day all I felt was fear when he turned on me.

‘What are these for?’ he asked with deceptive calm.

‘They’re just iron tablets, Dad,’ I replied, and blanched when I saw his face blacken with rage.

In two strides he had crossed the room and grabbed the front of my coat.

‘Iron? For what, you little whore?’ he yelled. His eyes were blazing with anger that was stronger than I had ever seen before.

‘You’ve fucking well gone and done it again, haven’t you?’ he shouted, poking me painfully in the chest and stomach with his beefy index finger as he swore at me. As I tried to cover my bump with my hands, his fist, aimed at my stomach, shot out. The air left my body and as I doubled up with the surge of pain I felt his hands grab my limp shoulders. I bit my tongue and my teeth rattled in my head as he shook me.

‘What’s in there, then?’ Eh? You bloody little slut,’ and insult after insult rained down on me as, like a rag doll, I was tossed backwards and forwards.

‘Who’s the father this time? Who’s the bleeding father?’

That question that I had been asked so often was now being spewed out of my father’s mouth and his spittle flew onto my face. I felt a sudden rage at the unfairness of it. I needed him to stop.

‘You know who it is,’ I screamed, for I suddenly knew that to be true.

My father shook me again. ‘Tell me his name, Marianne,’ and I did.

He exploded. ‘I knew it! Well, you’re not bringing this little fucker home,’ and his fist rose to punch me again. Doubled up, still trying to protect my stomach from his blows, I tried to tell him between sobs that I had made arrangements to have the baby elsewhere.

‘It’s sorted, Dad, it’s sorted!’ I cried, but he was too far out of control to hear me. Instead he hit me even harder, then threw me across the kitchen table.

One hand held me down whilst the other unbuckled his leather belt. I tried to roll off, tried to crawl away, but my bump made me clumsy and heavy. Down came that belt on my legs, shoulders and arms. I felt the metal buckle slice open my skin, I heard a buzzing in my ears that seemed to mingle with my mother’s screams, and then everything went black.

When he finally stopped hitting my limp body he stormed out of the house, telling my mother to make sure I was gone before he returned. As I came round I crawled off the table and went up the stairs on my hands and knees to my bedroom. My stockings were torn, there was blood running down my legs and I was frightened. Frightened that he had harmed my baby.

I sat on my bed, sobbing and hugging my stomach as I tried to get some of my strength back. I kept hoping that my mother would come up and ask if I was all right and put her arms around me and comfort me. But I hoped in vain. Realizing that, I pulled a few clothes and toiletries into a shopping bag and climbed painfully down the stairs using the wall to support my aching body.

My mother was still standing by the sink, but this time her back was against the wall and her hands were over her face. She seemed to have shrunk, and I could see her body was shaking.

‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ I said. ‘I am so, so sorry.’

She did not reply.

‘Goodbye, then,’ and I waited just for a few seconds for some sort of response. But not receiving it, I walked to the front door and opened it.

It was then that I heard her voice. It was strained and higher pitched than usual.

‘Marianne,’ she said. ‘Look after yourself, love,’ and I saw the silent tears raining down her face before I turned and walked away.