Helpless Read Online Free PDF Page A

look bestowed on my brother was absent when their eyes fell on me.

    I would watch my mother stroke his rosy cheeks and his neck, and blow kisses on his round little stomach before wrapping her arms around him.
    I tried to be good then, offered to help with feeding and changing him, but all the time I asked myself a question repeatedly. If she was capable of feeling so much love for my brother, why wasn’t there enough left to give a small slice of it to me?
    When our meal was finished I would slide off my chair and pick up the chipped china plates and anything else my small hands could hold. Then, with my brow furrowed in concentration, for I knew not to drop anything, I would take them to the sink.
    Sometimes I would be rewarded by a smile from my mother as she ran her fingers through my hair. ‘You’re a good girl, Marianne, aren’t you?’ she would say, and on those occasions just those few words of praise were enough to put a smile on my face.
    Apart from my brother’s existence emphasizing my parents’ indifference to me, the biggest change his presence made in my life was that for several months before he was born my mother no longer took me to school. ‘Marianne, I’m too busy and you’re big enough to go alone now’ was all she had said by way of explanation.
    So instead of sitting on the seat behind her with my arms wrapped around her body, I had to walk alone for about half a mile to the bus stop and take myself there. That added to my difference, for I was only too aware that I was the only child in my class who walked into the playground alone without a mother to wave goodbye. And when the final bell rang, I was the only one not collected.
    At the end of the school day all the children in my class rushed to the gates to receive hugs and kisses and tender enquiries as to the events of the day. Larger ones held their small hands tightly and they left without even a glance in my direction. I felt as though I was invisible, a feeling that grew when after a few months I arrived home to see my brother sitting on my mother’s knee.
    Those days I felt an overwhelming need for something in my life, without knowing what it could be.

Chapter Six
     
     
    I t was the second photograph that made me smile. It also had been taken when I was around six, but this time there was an expression of delighted surprise on my face and I clearly remembered the day when the button on the camera was pressed, capturing that moment for ever.
    I knew that my father’s family had no affection for my mother and very little for me. On the rare times they called on us I had seen the expressions on their faces as their eyes slid around the dirty room before alighting on me.
    ‘She takes after you in looks,’ my grandmother always said to my mother and I understood it was not meant as a compliment. So what my father did was surprising.
    He was the eldest of four children and, despite his forced marriage to a woman his family disapproved of, was still his mother’s favourite. His father had died while I was still a toddler, so when his sister announced that she was getting married she asked my father to give her away.

    He in turn asked two things of her. His wife was to be invited to the wedding, and I was to be bridesmaid.
    Neither my mother nor I was present when he made his request. All I knew was that my aunt had said yes and that I had been taken to my grandmother’s house to be measured for my dress.
    If it is love that makes a child pretty and parental affection that puts a bloom in small children’s cheeks, then my lack of either explained why I was an unprepossessing pale-faced child; one dressed in badly fitting cast-offs from charity shops and one who seldom saw the inside of the tin bath. The expressions on both of my aunts’ faces left me in no doubt of their opinion of me.
    ‘Going to take more than a few minutes to get her ready,’ the elder one had said, after taking one look at me.
    ‘Bring her over the