Mummy’s Little Girl: A heart-rending story of abuse, innocence and the desperate race to save a lost child. Jane Elliott

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      Silently Dani got down from the table, left the kitchen and trudged up the stairs. ‘And when your Auntie Rose comes round, you make sure you don’t have that surly bloody look on your face!’ Mum’s voice carried up the stairs.

      ‘Dani never eats her dinner, does she, Mum?’ she heard Rebecca saying from the kitchen.

      ‘Shut up, Rebecca,’ the little girl was told.

      Mum wasn’t her real mum. Dani had known that for as long as she could remember. But she hadn’t always been like this. In Dani’s earliest memories, things had been happier. There had been a man in the house, for one thing – the man she called Daddy. He had been kind to the children, and to Dani in particular. One day, however, he wasn’t there any more. Dani asked any number of times where her Daddy had gone, but she never received a straight answer from her mum. It was left to her to piece things together from half-heard conversations between grown-ups not intended for her ears. Conversations about things she didn’t really understand.

      Dani opened the door to her bedroom. The other two children shared a room, but having a room to herself was not intended as a treat for Dani – she knew that well enough. It was because Rebecca would rather share with James than with her. Their room was nice and big; Dani’s was tiny, with room for only a small single bed and an old chest of drawers. But she didn’t mind. No one ever really disturbed her in here. It was the one place she could go and be sure of being by herself. She sat on the bed, hugged her knees and rested her head against the wall. The wallpaper was pink; her dad had put it up for her before he left and nowit was looking a bit old and tatty – in one corner it was coming away from the wall. There wasn’t any point mentioning it to Mum, of course, any more than it was worth mentioning the trouble she’d had at school that day. She would probably just shout at her, so she kept quiet about it.

      Downstairs, she heard the television being switched on. Dani would have liked to have gone down to watch it with the others, but she chose not to – not with Mum in the mood she was in. Much better, she had learned, to keep herself to herself. She put her thumb in her mouth, closed her eyes and gently rocked herself. It would be bedtime soon. Bedtime was all right. When the lights were out, she could lose herself in her own little world and pretend things were better than they really were.

      In truth, she knew, they could hardly be worse.

      It had been several months ago that Mum had first told her she didn’t want Dani to live with them any more. Her words rang in the little girl’s head more clearly than anything anyone had ever said to her. At first she had persuaded herself that it was just a joke, that she didn’t really mean it; but when she kept repeating it in moments of anger, Dani wasn’t so sure. The arrival of the social worker had confirmed it for her. She was a nice lady called Kate, who had come to talk first to Mum and then to Dani herself. The grown-ups didn’t know that Dani had listened in on their conversation, however; they didn’t know she had heard her mum beg the social worker to take her away. ‘I can’t cope with her any more,’ Mum had said. ‘She’s going off the rails, always fighting other kids and bullying her brother and sister.’

      Dani had blinked. She didn’t recognise herself in that description at all. But she knew that she would have to try very hard to make her mum want her again. It was difficult, though. Dani never seemed to be able to do anything right. Anything at all. She was always being shouted at, complained about. One time, Mum had even hit her – not hard, but hard enough to bring those tears to her eyes that always seemed to enrage her mother even more.

      The very thought of it made her want to cry now.

      She was woken from her reverie by the ringing of the doorbell and a little fluttering of apprehension in her stomach. That would be Auntie Rose. Dani couldn’t decide what to do. If she stayed here in her bedroom, she would be told off and accused of being unfriendly; but if she went downstairs, no doubt they would find something to complain about. Dani sat still, paralysed by indecision for a few minutes, before finally deciding to leave the safety of her bedroom and venture back downstairs. She grabbed the little pink and blue teddy bear – the one that had been hers ever since she was a baby, which was now worn and tatty and was still deeply loved – and went down.

      At first, nobody noticed her standing in the doorway of the front room. Mum was in the kitchen, for a start, while James and Rebecca stood around Auntie Rose. Dani’s aunt – her mum’s sister – was a chubby lady. In her private moments, Dani had always thought that she looked a bit like a toad – a fat, poisonous toad with jowly cheeks and flat eyes that would sit there, hardly moving, waiting to be fed. She looked particularly toad-like today, sitting on the comfortable sofa with a wide, indulgent smile on her face. In her hands there was a large, dark green plastic bag. Not the sort of plastic bag Mum brought back from the supermarket: this was thicker and altogether more exciting – you could tell just by looking at it that it contained something more fun than food shopping. James and Rebecca could tell that too. They stood excitedly on tiptoes, waiting to see what their aunt had brought them.

      James’s present came out first – a shiny metal car in a bright yellow box. ‘Thank you, Auntie Rose,’ he gabbled automatically, before taking his gift off to a corner of the room to unwrap it further. Meanwhile, Auntie Rose was removing something else from the bag. Rebecca looked a little crestfallen when she saw what it was: a magic wand, with a star at one end and a little button at the other. She pressed the button and the wand lit up, a sparkling golden colour. There was a tiara too, which Auntie Rose placed on Rebecca’s head before pinching her affectionately on the cheek.

      ‘Auntie Rose,’ Rebecca said in a quiet, whingey voice. ‘I’m too old for toys like that. I’m not a baby.’

      Auntie Rose bristled slightly, and looked as if she was about to tell Rebecca off for her ingratitude; but at that moment she noticed Dani, and the indulgent smile fell from her face. ‘Dani,’ she said abruptly, as though greeting a grown-up she didn’t like very much. Her voice was lower than that of most of the women Dani knew.

      ‘Hello, Auntie Rose,’ Dani replied politely. She glanced at Rebecca’s glowing wand and the plastic bag. She didn’t really expect there to be anything in it for her, but she couldn’t help feeling a whisper of hope.

      Auntie Rose looked away. ‘You’re too old for toys like that, Dani,’ she said by way of explanation that the bag was empty.

      Dani felt a tiny crush of disappointment. In her mind she searched for the words to explain that Rebecca was only a year younger than her; but it wasn’t in her nature to answer back, and anyway, before she could say anything, she felt her mum pushing past her into the front room.

      ‘You spoil them, Rose,’ she said perfunctorily. ‘They’ve got enough toys as it is.’ She handed her sister one of the glasses of wine she was carrying, and then took a hearty swig from her own.

      ‘I like to spoil them, Tess,’ Auntie Rose replied. She also took a sip from her wine, and the awkwardness with Dani seemed to be immediately forgotten as they started chatting. Unobserved, Dani took a step backwards, and then silently climbed back upstairs to the refuge of her bedroom.

      It had always been like this. Even before Dad left, Dani had always felt second best. Mum made no secret about it – about the fact that after Rebecca and James came along, she had wanted Dani to move somewhere else. It was Dad who had insisted on her staying, but now he had left. ‘Run off’ was the phrase everyone used. And since then, Mum had seemed increasingly bitter towards the little girl, as though she had been left with a burden she had long since lost interest in but couldn’t get rid of.

      It was just the way things were. But that didn’t stop it hurting СКАЧАТЬ