The Step Child (2 page)

Today, I’ve got a problem. Before I was sent in here, I had a glass of water. Now I need the toilet. But I can’t use the one that stands in front of me. I’m not allowed. If I use that, I will have to move. And I’m not allowed to move. If I ask to go to the loo, I’ll have to talk. And I’m not allowed to talk. I can’t even use the toilet when other people come in. That happens a lot – my stepbrother comes in and pees in front of me, and I have to stand there in silence, not moving, listening to the rush of his piss in the toilet and desperately wanting to do that myself. He calls me names and tries to provoke me because he knows that if I answer back, or nip him, then it’s me who will get into trouble. So I have to stand there like a statue, and take whatever he throws at me.

I can’t stop thinking about going to the loo. I’ve been standing here for hours, and I’ve got even more hours to go, but I can’t do the most natural thing in the world, the thing that everyone else does in this room. This has happened before, and I’ve got to work out what would be for the best. If I do ask to go I’ll get battered. If I don’t ask I’ll have to piss myself – and I’ll probably get battered for that too. If I do just let it go, then at least I’ll get a bit of heat while it runs down my leg. That doesn’t last though,
and it’ll go cold really quickly and there’ll be a smell. Tomorrow’s a school day, and she won’t let me get washed before then. I know I’ll have to wet myself – I don’t really have a choice – and I’ll have to do it a few times if I’m in here as long as usual. It’s the smell I hate when I go to bed and have to lie in my wet knickers, and then I get up in the morning and I’ve been lying in it all night, and when I go to school the other kids call me names and refuse to sit next to me because I stink.

My tummy hurts. It hurts from needing the loo, and it hurts from being punched most days, and it hurts so much from being hungry all the time.

My head hurts too. I get headaches because I go from being in the dark most of the time to bright light when I’m dragged out of my room. It aches from thinking about what I need to do, how to avoid my stepmother and her anger, how to behave from one day to the next, whether to cry and risk her getting really cross at me again, whether to shut myself off and risk it even more.

My body hurts from being kicked and hit practically every day. I may be small and skinny, but it doesn’t stop my stepmother using me as a punchbag. I’m never without bruises. The fact that most other kids have bruises too doesn’t help; it makes me feel worse to know that they get theirs from playing, from climbing trees and mucking about. I’m not really allowed out to play or to have friends. My bruises come from other things. My back aches and I’m sore all over. There’s barely a place on me that she hasn’t battered.

But most of all, my heart hurts.

I don’t want this to keep happening.

I don’t want to be a bad girl any longer.

I don’t want to be without a real mummy.

I want this hell to stop.

Edinburgh, 2003

The hell never did stop.

I’m 44 years old. I’m married with three wonderful children. I’m a successful artist with a history of acclaimed exhibitions and commissions. And I’m sitting in Edinburgh’s High Court looking at a woman I haven’t seen for 30 years.

Helen Ford is standing in the dock. She looks much smaller than she did the last time we had anything to do with each other.

Back when she was my stepmother.

Back when she locked me in cupboards.

Back when she starved me, beat me, tortured me.

Back when she organised her parties, turned the music up louder, and laughed while the men she called her friends raped and abused me in our home.

When I left this morning, my six-year-old daughter asked me what I was going to do. I told her that when I was little, a woman called Helen had been mean to me, but now, today, someone in charge would be telling her she had to say sorry. My daughter takes it all in, trusts every simplified word. Whether I believe it myself is another matter. The hope that someone might finally listen is more than I can dare to believe.

I didn’t ask for this.

I haven’t brought this case.

I haven’t sought retribution, or revenge, or even justice for what she did to me all those years ago.

I have pushed all this from my mind for so long that my head and body are in shock from having to face these memories.

This woman standing in front of me looks so innocuous. She is completely unmemorable to people she passes every day of her life. She could be any woman in her late 50s going through a perfectly normal day. Her hair is short, plain, unstyled. Her face is free from make-up. Her dark jacket and tapered trousers are unexceptional. Her white blouse and court shoes anonymous.
She still wears big prescription glasses as she did when I was little. But Helen Ford looks like an unremarkable woman.

Over five days, she won’t flinch when asked about battering me when I was little more than a toddler. She will not weaken when it is put to her that she regularly smashed my face into the mirror, fed me dog food, made me stand almost naked for hours in a bath, forced me to clean the house with a nailbrush, threatened to flail me within an inch of my life. She will not baulk when asked for any justification, any reasoning for imprisoning a child and refusing to feed it. The questions will not upset her. Why was I malnourished? Why did I steal food from the pockets of classmates at school? Helen Ford answers in monosyllables whenever she can. She shows no emotion at any stage of the proceedings.

She stands there accused of ‘procuring a child for sexual abuse’ and it barely registers on her face. But I am that child. It was me who was procured. It was me who shivered in terror every time I heard the music outside my room get louder and the handle on my door turn. It was me who knew the fear of being sent on ‘errands’ to local men who would abuse me as easily as they would say ‘hello’ to their neighbours. It was me who lay on my bed petrified, awaiting the ring of the doorbell which signalled another of Helen’s ‘friends’ had come to rape her eight-year-old stepdaughter.

And I’m waiting. I’m waiting for the story to end, for some reason, some explanation to appear and make sense of the memories I have denied for so long.

I’m waiting for her to say ‘sorry’ …

I
HAD A MUMMY
once. But I lost her.

Her name was Breda. Was. Is. I’m not sure – she may be reading this now; she may be dead. In my memory, my Mum can’t be pinned down. Some records will say her name is Brenda; others that she was called Bridie. My Gran said once that it was Breda, and that seems to fit, so Breda she is.

I have a photograph of her on her wedding day. She is in white. There are four people in the picture. On the far left is Adam, the man who would be her first husband, the father of my elder half-brother. He is wearing a dark suit, his right leg slightly bent – it looks as if he is trying to make himself smaller to accommodate the tiny Breda standing next to him. My mother is dark-haired; she wears a short veil and a dress that ends some inches above her ankles. She carries a handbag and wears a corsage. A couple stands beside Breda and Adam – I have no idea who they are, or who they were to Breda at that time. Witnesses? Good friends who disappeared? Strangers dragged in off the street for the day?

No one in this picture looks particularly happy. They are standing on some paving slabs with a railing beside them and tall buildings either side. This area now has a shopping mall nearby,
the St James Centre, one of the ugliest constructions in Edinburgh. It’s hardly a scene of bridal delight. There is no joy in the photograph, nothing I can really hold on to. God knows I’ve tried. This is all I have of my mother. She looks so young, her dress too big for her, a girl playing at being a bride. And yet by the time this image was taken, she had already been the subject of scandal, ripped her own family apart, shamed them. Or so the legend goes. My own experience tells me that there will be another version of her life, another layer, as yet unheard – Breda’s tale.

My mother was born and raised in County Tipperary in the Republic of Ireland. Her life began on 3 May 1935 but the details I have of her are few. What is known about Tipperary is that, like the rest of Ireland in the first half of the 20th century, times were hard for women. Most people will only have heard of the area through the song, ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ – but outsider knowledge of the county itself is, like much of Ireland, more myth than dreary reality.

Any quick glance at a tourist brochure will give you the official angle – Tipperary is Ireland’s largest inland county, completely landlocked. Those who have visited speak of its beauty, and the 2,300-feet-high Slievenamon mountain. That Slievenamon translates as ‘mountain of the fairy woman’ in Irish Gaelic is unsurprising – the Irish like their fairy tales as much as they like their theoretical admiration of women.

It’s only real life that spoils things.

Breda Curran, my Mum, had three brothers that I know of – Pat, John and her eldest brother, Michael. In 1953, when she was only 18, she left Ireland along with Michael and headed for England. The details I have are sketchy, but I have been told that both my mother and Uncle Michael managed to find work in London, where they settled for a while. As time went on, things must have looked a lot better than Tipperary, as my maternal grandparents and their two other sons also came to these shores.
However, this was not a happy family set-up. Breda was considered headstrong – she was described as knowing her own mind; having a clear idea of what she wanted; not being backward at coming forward. To me, these phrases sound all too familiar, ways of simply putting down a young woman who was probably trying to get away from the shackles of an oppressive family life. Being an only girl in a family of boys, with staunch Catholic parents who themselves were living in a strange land, did not necessarily make Breda wild. It’s an age-old story – a girl trying to break free of the straitjacket of stereotyping is always perceived to be so much more trouble than a boy doing the same thing.

Who knows whether Breda was truly a flighty soul, or whether she just decided to live up to the stories which were circulating about her anyway? Whatever the reason, she found herself in a relationship with a man who was not only considerably older, but also married, and a family member – her cousin.

It doesn’t take psychic powers to work out where Breda was heading. The relationship with Robert Cummings was doomed, due to a lethal combination of his marital status and the disapproval of her family. This same family did not take kindly to their daughter’s pregnancy at the age of 19. Hypocrisy is an emotion of enormous strength. The fact that girls had been messing about with boys and ending up with large bellies and shattered reputations since time immemorial did not stop the family from treating Breda as if she were the first ever to find herself in such a position.

Only recently has Ireland managed to shake off its reputation as the most sexually repressed country in Europe, where women were second-class citizens and the Catholic Church ruled virtually unchallenged. When Breda Curran was a young woman, the view that sex outside marriage was wrong permeated the society in which she lived – despite the fact that her family actually lived across the water. The Currans had brought their values with them – and Breda would pay the price.

The child of my mother and Robert Cummings would be my elder half-sister Frances. What happened between the pregnancy being announced, the relationship ending and Frances’s early years has never been explained to me – it all became wrapped up in the package that was my mother’s ‘bad ways’. What is obvious is that the society in which the Currans lived had given them a set of principles which worked only in theory – and rarely for women. Sex for them was permitted only in marriage, and only really supported as part of the ultimate goal of having children. Enjoyment and freedom never came into the picture. Rarely did men feel the same restrictions.

I don’t know whether my mother considered abortion as an option – if she had, there would have been ways and means of accessing an end to her first pregnancy – but for some reason she decided that her child would be born, despite the environment of disapproval and badmouthing it would inhabit. With all of this baggage, it’s hard to see how Breda could have escaped the destiny hurtling towards her. Before long, she had a child out of wedlock by a married man. How or why she then ended up with Adam Robertson, the groom from the photograph I have, is a mystery to me. For not only did that marriage quickly turn sour, but Adam was also the nephew of Robert Cummings. Having moved to Edinburgh, the two were married on 7 August 1956. In October 1957, their son, Simon, was born. I now had a half-sister and a half-brother waiting for me.