Helpless: The true story of a neglected girl betrayed and exploited by the neighbour she trusted. Toni Maguire

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      ‘Yes, in the skirting boards,’ he would reply, laughing at my inquisitiveness.

      ‘Why does my mum get angry when she sees them?’

      ‘Women don’t like them’ was his only answer to that.

      Other times he would make shadow pictures of rabbits, dogs and even a horse on his walls. Then when I begged for more he took off his brightly coloured neckerchief which, apart from Sundays when it was exchanged for a tie, he always wore knotted around his neck. Once off he somehow twisted it so that it cast shadows of birds against the wall.

      Peter and Paul, he called them, as they flew up and down the walls. And before they disappeared out of sight a wing would gently caress my cheek. Those days I smiled happily back at him as I felt a glow spread through me at his attentions.

      From my bedroom window I could see the man next door’s workshop. Sometimes he had a car he was repairing sitting outside it. I would wait for him to appear, then clatter down the stairs.

      ‘Shall I take Stevie out, Mum?’ I would ask, pointing to my brother.

      ‘Yes, you do that, Marianne. Keep him from getting under my feet,’ was her standard reply, so grabbing the toddler’s podgy little hand I would take him into the garden and wait hopefully to be noticed.

      I never had to wait long. As though he could sense my presence his head would turn in my direction and a wide smile would light up his face.

      ‘Marianne,’ he would call, ‘come and give me a hand with this car, will you?’ and, delighted to feel needed, I would drag my unprotesting brother along as I flew to his side where I would importantly hold a spanner, pass a tool or even help polish the chrome.

      Luckily my little brother was a sunny-natured child whose good behaviour could be bought with a biscuit or sweet.

      ‘Give the back seat a good wipe, will you, Marianne?’ he would often ask and, intent on my task, I would obediently crawl over the front seat.

      ‘Good girl,’ he would breathe in my ear as his hand patted my bottom.

      ‘You’ve got a little marvel there,’ he told my mother each time she appeared to see what I was up to. Ignoring the fact that he had taken up time when I could have been helping her, she gave him an answering smile.

      ‘Yes, she’s always been a good child, has Marianne. Never given me any trouble.’ And her naive complicity in his attentions was what sealed my fate. Maybe a worldlier woman might have questioned his motives. But he was our neighbour, the one who had helped my father find his job, while Dora had given my mother something she had craved: friendship, and with it the end of lonely days. So if there were any beginnings of doubts my mother did as so many mothers have before her and will do in the future: she doused them firmly down.

      And finally I had someone in my life who thought I was special. He told me I was pretty, gave me sweets and endlessly listened to my chatter, and that was all it took to capture my seven-year-old heart.

Chapter Twelve

      The tiniest thing can often change the course of our lives, and mine was changed the day the little white cat found her way to our house. It was after that that the fear I felt of my father turned to mistrust and my love for my mother faltered as I saw her weakness.

      I had reached that age when I wanted a pet of my own; something I could hold and cuddle, something that I could look after, take into my bedroom for company and tell my childhood fears to. Somehow my doll was no longer enough.

      ‘No,’ my mother said when, with all memory of the one that had killed the bird forgotten, I asked her for a kitten. I knew better than to ask my father. There might have been a whole colony of cats at the farm where he worked but they were only tolerated because they kept the population of rats and mice at bay. But still I looked wistfully at them. It was them, not the big black and white dogs who jumped up and frightened me, that I wanted as my friends, even though they seemed to view the human world with lofty disdain.

      I first saw the little white cat when my mother and I had gone to the farm to buy fresh eggs. She was sitting in the shadows of the farmyard fastidiously cleaning her fur. My eyes met her bright-green ones and I knew she was not the same as the feral cats that lived there. I went to her side and gently stroked her, and to my delight, instead of spurning my affection, she purred with contentment as I ran my hand over her silky fur.

      Maybe it was knowing that she was different that made her search for another home to give birth to her kittens, and she found it at the back of our house. Outside there was a lean-to where we stored logs and a small shed for coal. As logs came free from the farm and coal cost money, that shed had become my playroom, and it was there that the little cat decided was a suitable place for her to make her home. I smuggled food out to her and told her she had found a safe place to stay and made a nest out of papers and sacking for her.

      I begged my mother for saucers of milk. ‘Don’t let your father see you,’ she told me time and again. ‘She belongs to the farm – she’s not a pet, Marianne. She has to go back there. If you keep feeding her she won’t go.’

      ‘But she’s hungry,’ I protested.

      My mother sighed. ‘Her job is to catch mice and if she’s not hungry she won’t do it.’ But she still pretended not to notice when I smuggled scraps out.

      I would place the saucer down and watch with delight as her little pink tongue lapped at the milk. I loved the dainty way she cleaned herself, even the way she stretched, and best of all I loved the feeling of her fur under my hand and the sound of her loud purring.

      I christened her Snowy and it seemed in no time at all she recognized her name and came when I called it.

      ‘She’s an outside cat,’ my mother said sternly, ignoring the fact that Snowy slept in the small shed.

      Snowy grew plumper. ‘She’s having kittens,’ my mother told me. She shook her head at my plea to let the little cat come into the warmth of our kitchen to give birth.

      The kittens were born in the middle of the night. I found them when, as I did every morning, I waited for my father to leave for work, then slipped out of the house and made my way to the little shed. Snowy lay on her side, with the four tiny kittens, two tabby, one ginger and one, like her, pure white, suckling on her teats. Every day for the next week I watched the tiny bundles of fluff with growing delight.

      ‘When will their eyes open?’ I wondered. I never found out. I had grown careless in my haste to watch the small family. I had forgotten that on Saturdays, although my father left for work early, he returned for his breakfast. I was not in sight playing in the garden nor was I in the house and he, seeing my mother’s nervousness when he inquired if I was still in bed, went in search of me.

      I was crouching by the white cat stroking her, blissfully unaware of him approaching until I heard his voice and looked up into his furious face.

      ‘What do you think you’re playing at?’ he shouted.

      Without waiting for a response, he continuned. ‘Well, they’re not staying.’

      Tears rained down my cheeks as I pleaded for him to leave them alone.

      This just enraged СКАЧАТЬ