Free Abandoned by Anya Peters Page A

tell her to be quiet.
    This time Mummy isn’t there and he makes me comb from the front. When I reach up to do it he puts his hands up between my legs and slides his fingers in under my pants and inside me. It happens so quickly I freeze, everything stopping inside me.
    ‘Go in and take these off,’ he whispers, pinging the elastic on my pants, ‘and put on one of Jennifer’s skirts, with nothing on underneath.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘You know what I mean, now do it,’ he says angrily.
    But I don’t know what he means. I’m not yet seven years old.
    ‘Take off all your clothes and just wear some of their small clothes, right!’
    The breath won’t go down into my lungs. I go back into the bedroom dizzy with fear, trying to hold back my tears, not knowing what to do, shaking and trying to see through the dark, groping about to find some of the clothes the girls had thrown onto the floor at the end of their bed. I squeeze into Stella’s skirt. It almost fits at the waist but is inches too short. I can’t do it. I have never defied him in anything he has told me to do, but I can’t do this. I don’t know why he wants me to do it, but I know that I can’t do it. I know that it’s wrong, that it’s ‘dirty’.
    I take off the skirt and put my dressing gown on instead. I button it up, but his words ‘with nothing on underneath’ get louder in my head. I take my arms out of the sleeves and pull my vest off over my head. I take my pants off but I feel cold and wrong and I can’t go out there like that. I put my pants back on again and button the dressing gown right up to the top.
    ‘I thought I told you,’ he says when I go back out, almost raising his voice.
    ‘None of them fit,’ I lie, crossing my fingers in one of the pockets of the dressing gown. ‘I nearly broke the zip. Mummy just sewed it on.’
    Mentioning Mummy is meant to panic him, but it panics me instead. What if she comes in and sees?
    As I circle him, combing his hair from all angles like he tells me to, I see the silenced newsreader on the nine o’clock news staring out at us and I blush, convinced that he is looking directly into the room at us, and that this is the news; that he is telling everyone else watching about this, that Mummy, in her evening job somewhere, can hear him saying it.
    My legs buckle and the walls of the front room seem to collapse in on us. I feel light-headed and dizzy and take shallow breaths in through my mouth, trying not to breathe in the smell of him. I stare at the shire horses on the mantelpiece, at their shiny black eyes. It feels like I’m not there any more, as if I’m looking down on myself standing in front of him there in my banana-yellow dressing gown with the metal comb in my hand, him lying back in his armchair in his string vest, his red pyjama bottoms gaping open and his thing covered in hair lying out on top of it as he wriggles his rough fingers about inside me, and makes me put my hand on the thing between his legs.
    After that evening, nothing and nowhere was safe. And the more he did it the more he hated me and wanted me out of his sight, hitting out at me and screaming at me to stop whispering and ‘stop sneaking about the place’, as if I was something squirming around in his conscience, driving him mad.

Chapter 14
    M arie and Peter come back to get married in the local church. Everyone claps from the landings as Marie walks down to get into the Rolls Royce in the square, while she smiles up shyly and waves. My uncle gets into the car beside her and I frown away memories, clutching my posy of flowers tighter.
    I’m a bridesmaid in a lilac satin dress with short puffball sleeves, which everyone says is the perfect colour for me, with my dark hair piled up and studded with daisies. When I see Peter in the church turn and slowly lift Marie’s veil, which sparkles with sequins, and put his arms around her to kiss her, I look away in embarrassment. I stare down at two white petals,