Read Online Abandoned by Anya Peters - Free Book Online

blink away the image of the two of them I’d seen. I was still trying to work out what I’d done wrong.
    We sat on a bench in front of the post office and waited for it to open so that Marie could collect the money that I had to take back in my sock.
    ‘What’s gonna happen?’ I asked eventually.
    ‘Nothing,’ she snapped. ‘Try not to think about it.’
    Her sharpness surprised me and made me cry again. Marie never shouted at us.
    ‘Please don’t let me get sent away, Marie…I didn’t do anything…What’s gonna happen?’ I cried.
    ‘Just keep out of his way. Stay in the bedroom when he gets home and try not to make any noise.’
    ‘I don’t.’
    ‘I know. It’s not your fault. It’s him, he’s an animal.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘He just is.’
    Nobody ever knew the reasons for things in our house. But the why’s never stopped. ‘That’s what school’s for, and books,’ Mummy would say. ‘Ask your teachers all those questions.’ But the questions just piled up and up in my head like a tower that would one day come crashing down. Marie left school at fifteen to work, and wasn’t good at school work, and we knew not to ask her too many questions.
    Neither of us had mentioned what had happened that morning and I was still waiting for her to explain it. I sat on one of my hands like I always did when I was trying not to feel anything, watching her as she read the words on the back of her bus ticket. Sandra always said Marie couldn’t read properly and that she used to go to a ‘special’ school because she was ‘backward’, but she wasn’t, and anyway it wouldn’t matter because we all wanted to be like Marie when we grew up—beautiful and quiet and kind.
    I could smell my uncle’s stale, peppery sweat on her shoulder. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the blood crusted in her right nostril and had to fast-blink through the memory of the chaos that had happened in the room after he saw me looking, the way he sprang across as I tried to pull the blankets over my head, ripping me from the bed, with Marie throwing herself in between us the way Mummy did.
    ‘Do you hate him?’ she asked.
    I shrugged, frightened of having opinions or being ‘ungrateful’ in case I got sent away.
    ‘I do,’ she said, and I stared up at her. Until then I thought what I’d seen that morning meant that suddenly she didn’t. But I was glad that she still did; just the way Mummy still hated him. Hate seemed safer the more people who did it.
    ‘Mummy would get really upset if you told her what happened.’
    I felt my head lean against her arm and left it there, hoping she would put her arm tightly around me to stop the shake inside, but instead of pulling me towards her she pulled away from me as if I’d given her an electric shock. ‘She’d get really upset, wouldn’t she? And I don’t like seeing her like that, do you?’
    I shook my head. She knew I never wanted to upset Mummy.
    As soon as the post office opened and Marie had watched me fold the money down inside my sock I wanted to go. I lied, saying Mummy had forgotten to give Liam the note telling my teacher I was going to be late for school. She rustled the large bag of sweets she’d bought with her part of the money and asked me to wait with her until her train came. I shook my head as the tears continued to stream down, but she cried at my crying, and put an arm around me and said, ‘Please.’
    She pulled the bag open and the scented, sugary smell of Jelly Babies burst out between us into the cold air. We stood in silence on the platform, biting the heads off the Jelly Babies, chewing loudly as we watched people bundled in winter clothes hurrying through the turnstile into the station.
    Marie told me how she wouldn’t have to hate my uncle for much longer because she’d met a boy at work and they were getting engaged, and were going to live together. I couldn’t tell anyone about that either, she said; that was another secret that only she and