Helpless by Marianne Marsh

Author:Marianne Marsh [Marsh, Marianne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, General
ISBN: 9780007320288
Google: dmcKDhrjVjgC
Amazon: B002RI9R16
Publisher: Harper Element
Published: 2009-03-05T16:00:00+00:00

Against my will I felt the force of the past transport me back nearly three decades until I came face to face with the image of my frightened thirteen-year-old self.

Chapter Twenty-five

I was standing in my parents’ living room where the once pretty walls were now stained with damp and the smell of stale food and musky sweat mingled with the sharp ammonia stench of dirty nappies piled high in a metal bucket.

My belly protruded from my slight form, my body ached and my head was full of just one emotion: fear. In front of me stood a steely-eyed social worker, a woman in her early thirties wearing a navy-blue duffel coat and a grey pleated skirt who, alerted to my condition by the school, had knocked on the door just a few minutes earlier.

A grimace of distaste that she did not bother to hide crossed her unmade-up face as her gaze took in the room.

The breakfast dishes had not yet been cleared away. Egg-smeared plates and crumpled grease-stained newspaper still lay on the table and there was a drift of bread-crumbs scattered on the floor around it.

All the kitchen work services were hidden under the remnants of many congealed spillages. Clumps of dry tea leaves clung to the sides of the tannin-stained sink, while on the draining board, next to some chipped cups left to dry, dark hairs clung to a grubby pink plastic comb.

My eldest brother and my sister were at school while the youngest child, a red-haired boy of nearly three, still dressed in the grubby pyjamas he had slept in, was sitting on the floor. Paying scant attention to our visitor, he continued playing with what passed for toys: a grubby rag, a broken doll and a rusty toy car. Clutched in one of his plump hands was a crust of bread that he was gnawing in preference to the aged teething ring lying on the floor.

My mother, her belly larger than mine with her fifth child, watched the social worker and me with eyes that the years of hardship and disappointment had sucked all life from. Childbirth and lack of care had thickened her once slender body, a body that before her hasty marriage had attracted more than its share of male admiration. Unsupported breasts hung slackly under a stained jumper, thickened veins drew blue marks on the white skin at the backs of her legs, while her swollen feet were pushed into worn carpet slippers.

As I watched the social worker’s gaze take in the squalor that we lived in, with a sudden painful clarity I saw what she saw: a filthy room, a pregnant teenage girl with a slut of a mother and a drunkard for a father; just another sad, sordid case, one of many, in the files of an overworked social worker.

She could not see all the bruises on my mother’s body of yet another beating. But she recognized the signs and drew her own conclusions.

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