Abandoned Read Online Free PDF Page B

when Brendan visited. God was another secret too, something I could only talk about with Mummy. I wasn’t allowed to tell any of my brothers and sisters in case they told my uncle. He’d go mad if he knew Brendan was taking me to church.
    Behind their backs he already called both Kathy and Brendan ‘hypocrites’ and ‘Holy Joes’ and warned my brothers and sisters that they weren’t allowed to go anywhere near a church with them. So it was a special time, just me and him. He taught me when to sit and stand or kneel, and when to clasp my hands in prayer, knotting my fingers together like he did. Though on one visit he terrified me by telling me about the Holy Spirit prowling invisibly up and down the aisle reading everybody’s thoughts; swooping down, when you least expected it, on anyone with bad ones. After that I feared the Holy Spirit, who could see inside everyone’s minds as Brendan said, certain that he must know the bad thoughts I had about my uncle.
    Brendan didn’t know most of what my uncle did at home—how drunk he got and how violent he was to me and Mummy. Before their visits Mummy made me promise not to tell him or Kathy about the rows and his threats. ‘Nosy parkers,’ she’d say, striking a match to another cigarette and wrestling a smile out of me as she blew it out noisily. ‘It’s none of their business what goes on in our home, is it?’
    I would shake my head loyally, but was always unable to look directly up at her, wondering why she didn’t want them to know so that they could help us.
    Either Kathy or Brendan came over every few months, apparently unaware of the disruption they were causing in our home. Their visits felt like charades. Everyone on their best behaviour, my brothers and sisters leaving me be, my uncle biting his tongue—his long, aggressive silences scaring me just as much as the eruptions of anger I came to expect the minute they’d gone.
    Kathy always dressed exquisitely: silk blouses with high, queenly collars, and cuffs with small pearl buttons, elegant and feminine, her perfume clinging to everything. Brendan would be dressed as usual in his suit and tie, sitting awkwardly in the living room, his cup of tea balanced on his thigh, snapping biscuits and brushing away the crumbs as he tried to make small talk over my uncle’s hostility and laughed anxiously at anything at all; a teetotaller and a near alcoholic eyeing each other across the room. Looking back now, I can understand that my uncle was furious at being made a fool of in his own home. But as a child I had no such understanding.
    I dreaded Kathy’s visits because everyone was always reminding me that she was my real mother, and because up to the moment of them my uncle would usually be threatening that this time he would see to it that she would take me away with her. I convinced myself that I hated her because my uncle said she was a ‘whore’, and Mummy got into such trouble for me being left there. And because Mummy couldn’t look like her or spend all her time doing her hair and make-up or walk around in high, clicky heels, when she was ‘working her fingers to the bone’ for all of us.
    Mostly I made myself hate her because I already had my mum and my family and I didn’t want another one. I just wanted everyone to forget that she was the one who had given birth to me, and for her to go away and leave us alone. I wanted to belong where I was.
    Sometimes, though, I would forget to hate Kathy. Her soft, smiling, gentle Irishness would sneak up on me and I would feel tricked when I caught myself liking her. I always had to keep my guard up.
    Before her visits, my brothers and sisters led by my uncle would mimic and ridicule her: the way she walked and talked; her gentleness and dainty ‘put on’ manners, as my uncle called them. I laughed shyly along with everyone else, always trying to fit in, to be accepted. I thought that if my uncle could see how much I hated her, then maybe he wouldn’t say