Free Can't Anyone Help Me? by Toni Maguire

Florence, who crept in beside me, offering words of comfort.
    My ghostly pallor the next morning was put down to my having eaten too much rich food over the previous days. ‘No more mince pies for you,’ someone said.
    That Christmas I do remember.
    Afterwards the one room that I had thought safe no longer was. The bears now knew my secret and I turned them to face the wall. I didn’t want to look into their faces and I no longer wanted to sleep in there. It was Florence, kind, patient Florence, who now comforted me at night. ‘Why have you done that with your bears?’ she asked, when we were curled up in bed together with her arms around me. And I told her that they had seen what my uncle and I had done.

15
     
    My mother held out a pair of small dark blue knickers and pointed to a mark in the centre of the crotch. I cringed when I saw it, for I knew what it was: a tiny stain that must have escaped my uncle’s eagle eyes, for he washed and inspected my underwear whenever I stayed with him.
    ‘Jackie, what’s this?’ she asked, and behind the question, I heard a note of fear.
    ‘Don’t know,’ I lied, but my mother and I knew the stain was blood.
    ‘How did it get there?’ she asked.
    Surely she knew, I thought. There was only one way it could have got there. My mind spun. I knew she was not going to be fobbed off and I searched desperately for something to tell her; something she would believe.
    Why did I not tell her the truth? If I’d told her everything, I would have been safe. But that was not something that even entered my head. Just give her something, some half-truth, so she would leave me alone was all I could think of doing.
    ‘I was playing,’ I said slowly, trying to find a plausible excuse, ‘with one of the boys at school.’
    I saw a look of something like relief cross her face but still her mouth was compressed as, grim-faced, she waited for me to continue.
    ‘Go on,’ she said, when I made no effort to tell her more.
    ‘You know, games,’ I said, into the wall of chilling silence. ‘He showed me his willie and I showed him mine.’
    ‘And? Looking doesn’t make a stain like this, does it?’
    ‘Well, he …’ I paused, dreading the consequences of my words ‘… he put his finger inside my pants.’
    At those words my mother exploded and her angry words swamped me. I was a dirty little girl, a disgrace to the family; she was ashamed of me. On and on she went, and I stood there shaking. Eventually she told me to go to my room. ‘And stay there till I tell you to come out,’ she shouted.
    I ran up the stairs before she could hurl any more words at me.
    ‘What would she have said if I had told her the truth?’ I asked Florence tearfully, but this time she had no answer for me. She just agreed that if I had, my uncle was right, we would be in very bad trouble.
    That was the start of a new period of my life. In my parents’ eyes my behaviour significantly worsened. Now I no longer wanted to be in my room and tantrums occurred each time I was told to get ready for bed.
    I fought off sleep, with its associated nightmares, for as long as possible.
    And when eventually, unable to battle against my eyes closing, I entered the room where the little girl was, her fear became mine. My eyes would fly open and I would find that the air in my room was threatening to suffocate me.
    That was when I started pulling my bedclothes off and, half asleep, I would take them on to the landing. There, I would curl into a tight ball and fall back to sleep.
    It was my father who found me the first time. ‘Jackie, what are you doing?’ he asked, as he picked me up and carried me back to bed.
    The first time he was not angry but when I was found there time and time again, both parents were. Was I sleepwalking, they asked, as they looked in despair at the child who was showing even more signs of disturbance.
    It was not much longer before they found me hunched in a corner of my bedroom, thumb in mouth,