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

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СКАЧАТЬ with a thump on my back and sent me sprawling.

      ‘Are you telling me what to do, eh? You need a lesson, you do, Marianne.’

      He stomped off into the house and for a moment I thought I had won.

      But when I saw him return with a sack in his hand I realized what he had in mind.

      His large hand scooped the kittens up and threw them mewing pitifully into it.

      ‘This is your fault, Marianne,’ he said as he grabbed my arm and propelled me into the lane, across a field and to where a pond was.

      Reaching it, his arm swung back then forward and he released the sack. It spun out across the water then fell, and as I watched it sink my ears filled with the pitiful wail of the kittens’ cries; a sound that rang in my ears hours after they had drowned.

      I put my hands over my ears, trying to block out the sound. My mouth opened as a desperate howl of disbelief and grief left it. Tears rained down my face, blinding me, and snot trickled from my nose as I screamed ‘No’.

      ‘You can stop that noise right now,’ he said angrily to me, giving me a quick swipe across the top of my legs. I ran from him, then back to where the white cat had been. I wanted to tell her how sorry I was, how I had loved her babies, but as she saw me approach her green eyes glittered before she turned and slunk away.

      She never visited me again.

      My mother just looked helplessly at me when we returned, and I blamed her almost as much as him. Why had she not stood up for me just once? I asked myself.

      That night as I lay in my bed with tears coursing down my cheeks, all I could see was Snowy’s little face staring unblinkingly at me before she disappeared. I felt something akin to hatred for my parents then. I was never praised, never made to feel special no matter how good I was. All I had asked for was to feed the cat. I thought of that one day, the day I had felt so happy and leant over my bed to pull out the cherished dress from the paper it was wrapped in. Holding it to my face I smelt the lingering scent of happiness. But that night its magic failed to work. Instead I felt sadness, almost a foreboding of what was to come.

      Still crying, I fell asleep with the thought running through my head that there had only been one person since the wedding who had said I was special.

      The next morning I went in search of the man next door.

      He listened patiently to my tale of woe but said very little of how he felt about my father’s actions. Instead he knelt down so that his eyes were on a level with mine, rested his hand gently on my waist and told me all about the fairies that lived near the pond. They watched over tiny creatures like the frogs and baby ducks and they would not have let the kittens suffer.

      He explained that they would have been carried on fairy wings to cat heaven where the streams run with milk, the mice were their friends and the sun always shone.

      His words and the pictures he drew with them comforted me but I did not forgive my father and the man next door never suggested that I should.

      He already had my affection; now the way was clear for him to gain control. His acquiring of power over me was a gradual thing, an insidious dominance that eventually sapped my will power, until pleasing him became of paramount importance.

      Once he knew that, he also knew that I would never talk, and once confident in my submissiveness he would change towards me. But I was not to know that then.

Chapter Thirteen

      When I heard the children at school talking about their weekends, their bicycles, their games and even the books they had started reading, I knew I could not share what I liked doing the most. Nor could I write an essay on it when the teacher asked us to write down what we had done in our free time.

      So I never told them that, when I managed to escape from watching my brother or helping my mother with the chores, my feet would take me through the gate and down the country lane into the fields where treasures lay hidden from the casual eye, but not from me.

      Once there I carefully searched the hedges hoping to see a nest of tiny speckled eggs or even another one filled with tiny fledglings. And when I found them I would be as quiet as I could so as not to scare off the mother bird from returning. I knew never to touch them, for if I did the nest would be abandoned and the chicks would starve to death.

      At school I heard the boys boasting about the birds’ eggs they had collected. I wanted to tell them that they were killing baby birds but I knew that if I did they would laugh at me or even worse pull my hair and call me stinky. So I never told them that either.

      On warm days when nothing disturbed the drowsy peace of the countryside I would pick handfuls of tiny wild strawberries that grew under the hedgerows. I would lie on my back eating them as I sleepily watched brilliantly coloured butterflies and bees searching for pollen. Once I forgot the minutes slipping by as I watched the activity in an anthill. I marvelled at the business of the thousands of ants living in that colony and wondered how anything so minute could build, compared to their size, such a vast home. But my favourite place was the pond.

      It was the man next door who, a few days after we had moved in, showed me how to make a net from a piece of muslin and a twig. He then showed me how to scoop up some of the frogspawn and gave me a bowl to put it in. He explained that I could then watch it turn into tadpoles that in turn would, after a few weeks, become frogs.

      ‘You can keep it in my shed,’ he had said, thus forming an alliance that added to the gulf between my parents and me. ‘Watch the tadpoles grow until they are a decent size and then we’ll release them.’

      I added pond plants and small stones to the bowl and over the next three weeks watched as the tiny black dots lengthened and became recognizable shapes.

      It took until after the end of the Easter holidays for the miniature eel-like things to become tadpoles, complete with wriggling tails. Wanting them to feel at home and have room to grow, I exchanged their small bowl for a larger one and placed more plants from the pond in it.

      When we thought they were big enough to be safe from the fish we took them back to the pond. Over the warm days of early summer I saw them change again from black wriggly tadpoles into browny-green froglets that jumped, swam and lay basking in the sunshine on the stones or hidden by the long grass around the pool. As I watched them, I wondered which were the ones that we had helped turn into those little creatures.

      At first, after the kittens had been drowned, I had not been able to bring myself to go there. I could picture them all too clearly in their watery grave, but after the man next door told me about cat heaven and said that the kittens would not want me to be sad any more I felt better about it.

      And that was another thing I never told my teacher: about the times he would be waiting for me there.

      When the summer holidays finally arrived and I knew there was no school for six weeks, all I could think of was the days I could spend with our neighbours.

      As though reading my mind, my father quickly let me know that, whereas I might not have to go to school, I need not look upon those six weeks as holiday time.

      ‘You are to help your mother,’ he told me sternly the moment he saw me move to the door on my first morning of what up to then I had believed was freedom. ‘You’re in СКАЧАТЬ