Porky by Deborah Moggach

Author:Deborah Moggach [Deborah Moggach]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2004-11-04T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

YOU’RE PROBABLY FEELING less sorry for me by now. I can’t help that. In fact I couldn’t help anything. When you’re young it’s obvious that you’re helpless, isn’t it? But when you’re older it doesn’t show, and people don’t know how to be sorry for you because you don’t let them. By the time I was sixteen you wouldn’t have liked me so much, not if you’d met me. Somebody said I had a ‘blank look’; this was helped by the thick black eyeliner I used then. Another man, who I met at the Holiday Inn, said I was dead from the waist up . . . But then his pride was hurt and he was saying all sorts of things. None of them guessed that I was so young. Most people took me for twenty-one, which is what I told them if they asked.

If I’d had a stronger personality, who knows, I might have overcome my past. But misfortune doesn’t just happen to people like that; it doesn’t choose people who can cope. In my Golden Book of Bible Stories there was a tale about a man who’d lost his sheep, and his ass, and his children, and his house, and still managed to forgive everyone and become a nicer person. He knew that God was waiting to reward him. On the opposite page there was this beautiful painting of a staircase into the sky and masses of clouds, all molten, with the steps leading up through them, through a golden gap. When I was small I loved that picture. But soon I stopped believing in God, and later I even stopped believing the picture, which was more of a wrench. Unlike that man, I didn’t become a nicer person.

By now I was clued-up, of course. I’d read magazine articles and I knew it was called incest, and I knew that it happened to other people too. This was the most wonderful relief, you can imagine, as if doors inside me had opened to let in the fresh air. But it was also disturbing, because the people were described as ‘cases’; they were separated off from the human race. Even more worrying, they’d all gone to court to tell the grisly details. I read those details, you bet, with an echoing sense of belonging. But what happened if someone found me out? In the photos their faces were blocked out, like criminals.

Things with my Dad had changed. I wasn’t so frightened of him now, you’ve probably seen that. I knew he couldn’t hurt me any more than he’d already done, it wasn’t possible, and I knew that he wouldn’t tell. But he was never sure about me, so I grew more powerful. There was this uneasy conspiracy between us, though we never put it into words. I’d realized by now that he was stupid, and pitiful – oh, I’d come to see so many things about him – but I was in too deep to stop it.

In too deep.

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