Living With Evil by Cynthia Owen (ap literature book list txt) 📗

She told me I couldn’t take my sisters’ things again, because they paid for them with the money they earned in their factory jobs.

‘Tear up some old rags and put them in your knickers,’ Mammy told me, and never said another word on the matter ever again.

I was only ten-years-old, and every month I felt frightened and upset when I started to bleed, because I had no idea when my ‘things’ would come or how long they would last.

I went rummaging under the stairs for old towels and jumpers to cut up, and I walked around feeling dirtier than ever. Though Mammy never talked about my ‘things’, she seemed to know when I was having them, and every time I was bleeding, she woke me up in my bed at night quite unexpectedly.

The first time it happened, I thought she was taking me to the building, because that was usually the reason she woke me up at night. I immediately started trembling and gasping for air in a panic, but Mammy didn’t drag me out of bed. She raked at my face with her fingernails and bellowed, ‘You’re a whore! You’re a prostitute! You’re a dirty bitch.’

I did feel dirty, but I didn’t know what a whore or a prostitute was. I knew they were bad words, but I didn’t know why I was so bad. Mammy did the same thing every time I was bleeding, and it just became part of my routine. ‘Things’ to me meant panicking at the sight of the blood, tearing up old rags and feeling more filthy and uncomfortable than ever, and expecting Mammy to wake me in the night to claw at my face with her fingernails and insult me.

The blood didn’t seem to bother Daddy or anybody else, as the men still touched me down below and carried on hurting me. But it seemed to send Mammy mad.

Maybe she didn’t want me to be a big girl like my sisters. I couldn’t understand her, but I could tell I was growing up.

One day ran into the next. Nothing excited me or surprised me any more. Every day was like a survival exercise. I had to get through it, and then I had to get through the night.

Some days I felt very groggy, too groggy. Mammy was giving me lots of tablets now, and I was even starting to get scared of the food she gave me, in case it was my sandwiches that were making me so groggy I couldn’t remember anything at all. I tried to make my own food, or throw the sandwiches away when Mammy wasn’t looking.

I wondered why I couldn’t be like everyone else. I wanted to grow up faster. I didn’t like being a little girl. The only time I liked it was when I spent time with Granny. I still loved to sit by her legs and listen to her ghost stories.

Sometimes I pretended I was sick just so I could have the day off school and go round to her house, or I would play truant if Mammy wouldn’t let me stay off. Aunt Ann worked during the day, so it was the perfect opportunity to spend uninterrupted time with my lovely, kind Granny.

She told me terrifying stories about the devil sometimes. I sat wide-eyed and open-mouthed with fright as she told me how the devil haunted St Patrick’s Road, which ran alongside her street.

‘A priest used to walk up and down St Patrick’s Road at midnight saying prayers to rid the devil from the roofs of the houses,’ she told me. ‘But the priest mysteriously died on the road one night, and now his ghost walks up and down St Patrick’s Road! If you’re really lucky, Cynthia, you might see the devil and the ghost of the priest!’

I lapped up her stories hungrily, even though they scared me, because at least they let me escape the horrors of my own life for a while.

Chapter 12

Mammy’s Friend

Something snapped in me one night.

I was feeling more angry than terrified when I went to bed. The night before, I had got so sick of what Daddy did to me I had gone downstairs when he finished and told Mammy plainly I didn’t like what Daddy was doing to me ‘down there’. The pain had got so bad I just couldn’t take it any more.

I pushed aside the scary memories I had about what Mammy did to me when she changed the beds, and what she did to me in the building. Whatever she did, she was still my mammy, wasn’t she? So maybe she might just help me after all.

‘Mammy, I have something to tell you. I don’t like what Daddy is doing to me “down there”,’ I said. I had rehearsed what I was going to say about twenty times in my head. I was too embarrassed to talk about ‘private parts’ and, anyway, Mammy was always saying they were filthy bits of my body. But I was sure she would know what I was talking about this time.

She hesitated for a moment, as if thinking about what to say. I willed her to tell me she would stop Daddy hurting me, that she would make sure Daddy never touched me again.

‘Oh, Cynthia!’ she said finally. She had a half-smile on her lips, but her eyes were dead. ‘He’s just rollin’ over drunk in his sleep. Haven’t I already told you that before?’

‘Yes - but that was when I told you I didn’t like what he did in bed,’ I stammered. ‘What I really mean is I don’t like what he does to me...down below.’

‘Rollin’ over drunk,’ she repeated casually. ‘Stop complaining. You’re makin’ trouble.’ My heart went thump. That was the end of the conversation, because Mammy immediately shooed me back up to bed, where I lay fretting and crying, feeling trapped and totally alone.

Now it was the next evening, and I was in the back bedroom, sensing I faced