Free Wake Up, Mummy by Anna Lowe Page B

stood, frozen to the spot, as I tried to decide which I wanted more – to know or not to know what they were talking about.
    Then my grandmother sighed a deep, unhappy sigh and said, ‘Well, you’ll have to tell her. I simply can’t do it.’
    I heard the familiar creaking of wood as my aunt rose from one of the old kitchen chairs, which, as my grandmother constantly reminded my grandfather, needed to have their joints re-secured. I turned and fled back into the living room, where I threw myself on to the sofa. A few seconds later, my aunt came into the room and sat down beside me. I ran the damp palms of my hands along my skirt and looked up at her, as she put her arm around my shoulders and began to stroke my hair.
    ‘I’ve got something to tell you, Anna,’ my aunt said, in a hesitant, tired-sounding voice. ‘You’re going to have to be a big, brave girl. Can you do that for me, darling?’
    I nodded, although what I really wanted to do was shout at her, ‘Don’t tell me! I don’t want to know.’
    ‘Granddad is very ill,’ she continued, pausing for a moment and making a small noise as though she was clearing her throat. ‘He can’t go to work any more. So he and Grandma are going to have to sell this house and go and live somewhere they can be looked after.’
    By the time the words had passed from my ears to my brain they seemed to have become all jumbled up, and I couldn’t really understand what she was saying. But the heavy, sick feeling in my stomach told me that something really bad was about to happen, something far worse than any of the many bad things that had happened so far in my life. I began to pray that my aunt would say something that I could understand, something that would make me realise everything was going to carry on as normal and be all right. But she just kept stroking my hair and holding me.
    ‘Does that mean Chris and me will have to live all the time with Mummy…?’ I swallowed, unwilling to add the words ‘and Carl’.
    When I looked at my aunt, I could see the answer in her expression, and I burst into tears as my entire worldfell apart. The hours I spent with my grandparents were the only good times in my life. No one else loved me, and there was no one else I could turn to when everything became so horrible. I didn’t think I could bear it any longer. It was terrible that my grandfather was ill, and I think I could sense the fact that he might be going to die. But my grandfather’s death was something I couldn’t even begin to imagine, whereas living alone with my mother and Carl was something I could.

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8
Worse becomes wretched
    ALMOST EVERY NIGHT, Carl would watch me while I got undressed. Then he’d hang around on the landing until Chris had gone to bed, before coming into my bedroom to abuse me.
    He’d be holding a towel in one hand and a flannel rinsed out in hot water in the other, and he’d pull the covers back from my bed, lift up my nightdress, part my legs with his short, stumpy tattooed fingers and wash me. Then, as he dried me with the towel, he’d tell me how important it was for that part of my body to be washed particularly well, and I’d notice how his face grew older and uglier as he spoke. He’d ask me questions, too, about whether my friends ever discussed their fathers touching them. And when I told him they didn’t, he called me a liar, assuring me that all fathers did exactly the same thing to their daughters.
    At that time, and for a long time afterwards, when Carl did things to me that I hated, I had no idea I had the rightto say ‘No’ – although perhaps that was just as well, because it would only have made him angry and violent towards me. I was too young and naive for it even to have crossed my mind that what he was doing might not be normal, and I used to wonder if my mother had asked him to wash me like that. It had never happened at my grandparents’ house, but I just accepted