Free Abandoned by Anya Peters

tried to hurry past soundlessly, struggling to breathe. But suddenly there was noise and commotion and him flying at me, calling me a bitch and a sneak and kicking and punching me up against the front door.
    Again I didn’t know what I saw. Over and over after that day, the scene I saw through the door exploded behind my eyes, but there was no one to tell or to ask about it. Sandra told me she wasn’t doing anything but not to tell Mummy, and my uncle said he’d kill me if I told her anything. Every time I was alone with her and he caught me talking to her he hit out at me, asking me what I was whispering, why I was always sneaking about the place. ‘She’s not,’ Mummy would say, ‘she’s just quiet by nature.’ But after I saw him with Sandra he really couldn’t bear the sight of me. He wanted me out even more urgently.
    ‘Look at the sneaky eyes on her,’ he’d say to get the others laughing. But only he and I knew what he was really saying. I hated having another secret with him, and for Mummy not to know. For days I couldn’t look her in the eye. He said he’d kill me if I told her. A hundred times I almost told her—in the way I helped her indoors, the way I peeled potatoes or stood on a chair to clean out the cupboards to make myself useful when the others were out playing so he wouldn’t make me leave, or the way I pushed orange tinned spaghetti around my plate, pulling it into half-words that spelled out the truth I wasn’t allowed to utter.
    One night, after a loud row that the whole landing seemed to get involved with, Sandra ran away from home and my uncle, sneaking back in one morning after he had left for work to take just a bag of clothes and a box of LPs and some money from Mummy’s purse. After that there was no one to look after us or to help Mummy. I was still not seven, but I was the eldest girl now.

Chapter 13
    M ummy has gone to her new evening job to get some extra money for Christmas. My uncle still hates looking after us, but has had to accept there is no one else to do it now that Sandra has gone.
    ‘Look after them yourself for a change,’ Mummy finally tells him. ’See what I have to put up with day in, day out.’
    All evening he’s been resentful, half-drunk, working up to another argument when Mummy comes home. Our programmes end and he sends us to bed.
    ‘Not you. Here, rinse this,’ he says, shoving his empty beer glass into my hand as I try to go off with the others.
    From the kitchen I hear him telling the girls I’ll be in in a minute. I hand him the washed beer glass and quickly turn to go in through the heavy green curtain that hangs in front of the back bedroom door, which leads straight from the front room.
    ‘Don’t fall asleep,’ he says. ‘I want you for something later.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Come back in when the rest of them have fallen asleep.’
    No one ever says no to my uncle, especially me, but I don’t do what he asks. I lie there with the covers over my head, my heart pounding in my ears, trying to force myself to fall asleep ‘by mistake’.
    He taps me on the shoulder. ‘What did I tell you?’ he says, his lips close to my ear. ‘Come in.’
    The front room is silent, the sound on the TV turned down. The news is on and the grey light from it flickers across the walls. He tells me to comb his hair, from the front.
    He was always getting us to comb and to pull any grey hairs we saw from his hair. He would give Stella 2p for pulling ten of them. I always had to do it for free, while he snoozed in front of the TV. His hair was greasy and I hated doing it, trying to lean against the back of the settee behind him without touching the red pimples that covered his heavy shoulders and greasy, muscly back. I wasn’t allowed to stop until he told me to.
    ‘Pull it into a ponytail and pull it hard,’ he would say.
    Mummy would sit there telling us not to do it, saying he was an animal and should be locked up. But we put our fingers to our lips to