Coming Undone by Terri White (ebook reader with highlight function .TXT) 📗

be taken. When I slept, I’d dream that they were violating and breaking my body under their yellow glare. Long, lumpy fingers jabbed at my skin, pushed inside into my bones, pulled them out to stare at and snap.

I heard that he was looking for us. He turned up at Nana’s house. He cried. Cried. I tried to imagine him crying, my face scrunching in concentration. I saw him sitting in my nana’s front room, on her green two-seater sofa. On his face were cut-out tears on white paper, coloured in blue felt-tip, stuck on with Sellotape folded into small squares.

Then one day, several weeks later, just like that, we were going home. He’d gone, apparently. We’d be ‘safe’. But he knew where we lived; he had keys. I didn’t feel safe.

The first day we got back, the neighbour next door shouted up from the path by her back door.

‘We would hear you all screaming,’ she said, then paused. ‘We thought about calling the police. But we didn’t want to interfere.’

One unremarkable day, years later, when he was long gone, she found it: the one place I’d committed the truth to record – my diary. I wrote every day, confessing, sharing all of the things that would no longer fit in my head, in my body, which was overwhelmed, unwilling. I told it everything.

She called me downstairs. She’d been drinking. I’d been sloppy in hiding it. I’d described the nights, the magazine, the slap, slap and the white specks. She asked me, is it true? I told her yes, it’s true.

The next day, I came home from school and she was hoovering the front room. When I walked in, she turned it off with her foot. She asked if I wanted to go to the police about what we’d talked about the night before, or just forget about it. I said I just wanted to forget about it.

She nodded, kicked the hoover and it roared into life once more. We never spoke of it again.

CHAPTER 9

I knew from a very young age that we were poor. Not just struggling, or skint, but poor. A knowledge that instilled fear, insecurity. Hope, optimism was not a familiar taste. I was anxious, constantly. There were the days not answering the door, the phone. The muttered comments at school from parents and their kids.

‘Scrubber,’ said my best friend. ‘Their house is disgusting.’

A house her mum and dad didn’t want her to come to. They laughed at our yellow teeth, our dirty clothes; they knew, somehow, that we only had one bath a week.

There was the sometimes-empty pantry and fridge. The food that we did have didn’t always stretch. The hunger. The fresh milk in the door that was to last through tens of cups of tea, that we absolutely weren’t to drink on its own. I sipped it out of the bottle after dark, in the light of the fridge, and then replaced it with water, the level monitored and marked.

But still we needed, wanted stuff. And stuff cost money. Thankfully, there were always solutions for families like ours. Solutions that cost money, in a way that it didn’t for those more fortunate.

The man from Shopacheck came by every Friday night, through our front door into the front room. He wore a beige suit, a camel shirt, a fat brown tie, had thick bifocal glasses and a parting kept in place with what he said was pomade but looked like gel. He’d hold his book, the one in which he marked down all the money Mum owed, the smaller amounts she paid back, and a key. The key was for our telly, which had a coin-operated meter on the back (all your entertainment needs! 50p a go!).

Every week, he emptied the slot, the clatter-clatter of coins falling out into the palm of his hand. He placed them inside his deep pockets, alongside a thin pile of notes from Mum’s hand. She flirted with him as she handed over the cash, laughed at his jokes, presumably thinking that one week she might need to rely on his previously unseen generous nature. Meanwhile we sat on the sofa, watching this man warily. Another man who looked at Mum like they were eyeing meat swinging on a hook.

We never had quite enough 50ps. The TV was practically all we had for entertainment, so the tick-tick-tock of the timer counting down was particularly taunting. There were very few books in our house, bar tatty thrillers and bodice-rippers. There were no cinema trips, museums, parks, play centres. There was just a bare bedroom, the green outside the house or the patch of carpet in front of the telly.

When there were no 50ps left, and therefore no TV, I fled to the trees, inched up them, hands scraped by the bark, the fear at my back pushing me to climb higher. Branch to branch to branch until I was hidden in the canopy, finding safety under the leaves that tickled my scalp. I looked over the houses that sat snugly side by side up and across the estate and imagined I lived in one of them. I envisioned pulling up a chair at a table in these strangers’ home, being one of their children they loved so much. They brushed my hair gently, smoothed down stray damp strands each time the comb was pulled through. Swallowed me up in a smothering hug, the soft perfume of my non-mother filling my throat as my non-father smiled at us across the warm room.

When I hid in the leaves, I was hiding not just from the real but from the imagined. And I couldn’t honestly tell the difference between the two. There was a raised bump – or was it a lump? – in the middle of my head, just on the back to the right. I was twelve when I first noticed it – why hadn’t I before? I examined it constantly, fingers probing. It was hard