I Know Who You Are(17)

Fourteen


Essex, 1987

I’m stuck halfway up the longest staircase in the world, and I’m crying because I think my daddy is dead. I don’t know why else a strange man in a strange place would say he was my new dad. He keeps talking, but I can’t hear him anymore, I’m crying too loud. He doesn’t sound Irish like Maggie and me, his voice sounds strange, and I don’t like it at all.

“Get out of the way, John, give the child some space,” she says when we reach the top of the stairs. I can see four wooden doors. None of them are painted and all of them are closed. Maggie takes my hand and pulls me towards the door that is farthest away. I’m scared to see what is behind it, so I close my eyes, but this makes me trip and stumble a little. Maggie holds on to my hand so tight that my feet just have to catch up.

When I open my eyes again, I can see that I am in a little girl’s bedroom. It isn’t like my bedroom at home, with the patchy brown carpet and gray curtains that used to be white. This room is like something I’ve only seen on TV. The bed, table, and wardrobe are all painted white. The carpet is pink, and the curtains, wallpaper, and bedspread are all covered in pictures of a little red-haired girl and rainbows.

“This is your new room. Do you like it?” Maggie asks.

I do like it, so I’m not sure why I wet myself.

I haven’t had an accident in my pants for a really long time. I think maybe the walls made of corks, the tall stairs, and the man with the gold tooth might have frightened the pee right out of me. I feel a hot trickle of it run down the inside of my leg, and I can’t seem to make it stop. I hope Maggie won’t notice, but when I look at the pink carpet, there is a dark patch between my shoes. She sees it then, and her smiley round face changes into something cross and pointy.

“Only babies wet themselves.” She hits me hard across the face. I’ve seen Daddy hit my brother like that, but nobody has ever done it to me before. My cheek hurts and I start to cry again. “Grow up, it was just a slap.” Maggie picks me up, holding me as far away from her as she can with straight arms. She marches back out into the hall and through the door nearest the top of the stairs. It’s a small kitchen. The floor is covered in lines of strange, squishy green carpet, with words written on it, and the cupboards are all different shapes and sizes and made from different-colored wood. Another door at the end of the kitchen leads to a bathroom. Everything in it is green; the toilet, the sink, the bath, the carpet, and the tiles on the wall. I think Maggie must really like the color. She puts me down inside the bath and leaves the room, then comes straight back, with a big black bin bag. I worry that she wants to throw me away with the rubbish.

“Take your clothes off,” she says.

I don’t want to.

“I said take your clothes off!”

I still don’t move.

“Now.” It sounds as if the word got stuck behind her teeth. She seems awful cross, so I do as she says.

When all my clothes, including my wet pants, are in the bin bag, she picks up a little white plastic hose that is attached to the tap in the bath. “The boiler is on the blink, so you’ll have to make do.” She hoses me down. The water is freezing and it makes me gasp for my breath, like when I fell out of the fishing boat once at home and the cold black sea tried to swallow me. Maggie squirts shampoo on my head and roughly rubs it into my hair. The yellow bottle says No More Tears, but I’m crying. When I am covered in soap from my head to my feet, she sprays me all over with cold water again. I try to keep still the way she tells me to, but my body shivers and my teeth chatter like they do in winter.

When she is finished, she dries me with a stiff green towel, then she marches me back to my new bedroom and sits me down on the bed covered in rainbows. I don’t have any clothes and I’m cold. She leaves the room for a moment, and I hear her talking to the man who said he was my new dad, even though I’ve never seen him before.

“She looks just like her,” he says, before Maggie comes back in with a glass of milk.

“Drink it.”

I hold the glass in both hands and take a couple of sips. It tastes chalky and strange, just like the milk she gave me in the house that was for holidays.

“All of it,” she says.

When the glass is empty, I see that she is wearing her smiley round face again, and I am glad. I don’t like her other one, it scares me. She opens a drawer and pulls out a pair of pink pajamas. She helps me to put them on, then makes me stand in front of the mirror.

The first thing I notice is my hair. It’s much shorter than it was the last time I saw myself and stops at my chin.

“Where has my hair gone?” I start to cry, but Maggie raises her hand so I stop.

“It was too long and needed cutting. It will grow back.”

I stare at at the little girl in the mirror. Her pink pajama top has a word written on it made of five letters: AIMEE. I don’t know what it means.

“Do you want a bedtime story?”

I nod that I would.

“Has the cat got your tongue?”

I haven’t seen a cat and I think my tongue is still inside my mouth, I wiggle it behind my lips to be sure.

She walks over to a shelf stacked with colorful magazines and takes the top one off the pile. “Can you read?”

“Yes.” I stick my chin out a little without knowing why. “My brother taught me.”