Punished. Vanessa Steel

usually fabric shops and she said I might touch the rolls of fabric with my sticky fingers and get her into trouble. I remember being very scared on these occasions, with so many strange adults milling around, and sometimes she seemed to take hours.

      During the Easter holidays after my sixth birthday, I got a huge fright on the journey into town. Nigel wasn’t with us because he was playing at a friend’s house. Mum and I got on the train at Bentley Heath as usual. I was being as good as possible but I could sense she was in a testy mood. I’d already had a clip round the ear for dawdling as we walked to the station. We got on board and sat down in a carriage of our own. Soon after the train started moving Mum got up, saying ‘Back in a moment. Stay right there.’

      I sat neatly as I’d been told, with my hands on my lap, feet swinging back and forwards without reaching the ground. I looked out the window then glanced back at the corridor to see if Mum was returning. There was no sign of her. The train pulled into the next station and more people got on but still Mum didn’t come back. I was so little and everyone else was so big. With mounting anxiety I got up and went to look up and down the corridor, but there was no sign of her. What if she forgot all about me and got off the train without me?

      I began to hear voices in my head. ‘You’re lost, Vanessa, what are you going to do?’ ‘Tell someone where you live,’ came another voice. I could remember our address – 39 Bentley Road – so I decided that if Mum didn’t come back I would have to approach a guard at Birmingham Station and tell him I was lost. The voices continued, sometimes a mass of whispers like a breeze blowing through the leaves on a poplar tree, so indistinct I couldn’t make out the words, then one voice would get through: ‘Don’t worry’, or ‘You’re lost’, or ‘It’ll be OK’. I had no idea who or what they were but I was getting used to hearing whispers in my head, usually when I was upset about something, and they didn’t scare me any more.

      The journey took around 45 minutes and by the time the train pulled into Birmingham New Street, where it terminated, I was tearful and shaking. I realized that I didn’t have a ticket and the guard might shout at me for being on the train without one, as we’d seen happening to a boy some weeks earlier. I waited until all the other passengers had got off then I climbed down the steps on to the platform and looked around for a guard I could talk to. I’d just identified one and was nervously walking up to him when all of a sudden Mum appeared and grabbed me by the arm, her fingers digging in and bruising me.

      ‘There you are! How dare you go wandering off when I told you to stay still!’

      My eyes full of tears, I looked up at her face and I could see that far from being angry, she thought the whole thing was a huge joke.

      ‘I thought you’d forgotten about me,’ I said, the tears spilling over.

      ‘If only I could,’ she said spitefully. ‘If only I could.’

      She had obviously left me on my own just to give me a fright, and it certainly worked.

      The guard came over to us. ‘Is everything all right?’ he asked.

      ‘I don’t suppose you’d like a little girl?’ Mum said. ‘You can have this one, but I warn you that she’s very naughty. Maybe you can send her to work in the coal mines.’

      ‘She’s got pretty blue eyes.’ The guard looked down at me sympathetically.

      ‘Nonsense. Look at her! She’s ugly as sin!’ Mum marched off with me trailing in her wake, trying to grab hold of the fashionable swing coat she was wearing. I begged her to lift me up, scared of losing her again, but she ignored me. A tearful, snotty little girl trying to cling on to her favourite coat must have wound her up no end.

      * * *

      I wonder if she might have liked a pretty, sociable daughter she could show off to strangers like a fashion accessory, or if she would have preferred not to have had kids at all? All mothers have their days when the kids drive them crazy, with whining and being clingy and getting in the way. However, for some reason my very existence seemed to drive Mum crazy. She just couldn’t bear me being around. At least once a week, usually more, God would tell her about some crime I had committed and I would be beaten and locked in the spider cupboard until bedtime.

      * * *

      When Nigel and I had been out at school all day, mealtimes became a flashpoint, an opportunity for Mum to take out the frustrations of her day. She played a despicable trick one night when I’d just finished eating a stew she’d made for dinner.

      ‘Did you enjoy that?’ she asked.

      ‘Yes,’ I said warily.

      ‘Was it delicious? One of your favourite meals ever?’

      ‘Em, yes.’

      ‘That’s interesting.’ Mum’s eyes glinted. ‘Do you realize you’ve just been eating Whirly? I made a rabbit stew.’

      Nigel reacted first, spitting out the last bite in his mouth. ‘Ewwwuuh, that’s disgusting.’

      I jumped to my feet to run out into the back garden but Mum extended a hand to stop me. ‘What do you say?’

      ‘Please may I leave the table?’ I mumbled, and she gave permission. I rushed straight out to the rabbit hutch and was devastated to find it empty. There was just a hollow in the straw where Whirly had been sleeping when I looked in on him that morning. The stew rose in my throat and I retched violently, and began to cry. Mum came out to watch, and Nigel followed close behind.

      ‘How could you?’ I demanded through my tears.

      ‘You silly girl. It was only a stupid rabbit.’

      ‘You shouldn’t have done that, Mum. It’s wrong. That was Nessa’s rabbit, not yours,’ Nigel complained.

      ‘Shut up! I’m fed up with both of you. Get out of my sight. Go to your beds now.’

      I lay in bed wide-awake, thinking of the bits of Whirly in my stomach and feeling utterly sickened. I remembered his twitchy nose and trusting eyes and the way he liked his head being stroked and I burst into a fresh wave of crying. I hoped against hope that Dad would come home that night so that I could tell him – he had bought Whirly for me after all – but he didn’t appear. I hardly got a wink of sleep and crawled out of bed the next morning weighed down by grief.

      I was sitting at the breakfast table unable to swallow a morsel of my cereal when Nigel burst in the back door looking excited. ‘Nessa, guess what? Whirly’s back. Come and see.’

      We ran out to the hutch and sure enough, there he was, nose twitching, looking up to see if I had brought any carrot tops.

      Mum was laughing her head off when we trooped back indoors. ‘Got you!’ she crowed. ‘You should have seen your face when you thought you’d eaten him. That was hilarious!’

      She was triumphant after each malicious victory of this kind. Far from infuriating her in the way I used to as a pre-schooler, I got the impression that she couldn’t wait for me to get home from school so she could inflict her next sadistic punishment on me. Caning didn’t give her the same satisfaction because although it still hurt, it didn’t inspire the abject terror in me that it used to when I was younger. When she locked me in the spider cupboard now, I knew that the spiders weren’t going to eat me up. I could just sit quietly, listening to the voices in my head while thinking my own thoughts. It took more ingenuity on Mum’s part to make me cry.

      But her next punishment would be the worst one she had ever inflicted on me.