Helpless by Marianne Marsh Read Free Book Online Page B

me as I sat by the playpen watching my baby brother and her two playing happily together.

    I would beam at her praise, drink the orange squash she gave me and eat the shop-bought biscuits, but all the time I listened for his footsteps, willing him to arrive before I left.
    Suddenly the neighbours were the parents I would have liked to have. But for all Dora’s kindness to me it was he who in my imagination became the father figure I could turn to, and I became a daddy’s girl who followed him around like a small puppy that had only just found someone to give it attention.
    It was he who always had time to answer my little girl questions.
    ‘Why are there no mice in the skirting boards? Where have they gone? Mum says they will be back soon enough.’
    ‘Well, little lady,’ he would answer patiently, ‘in winter when it’s very cold they can’t find food so they creep into our homes and hide. When we are in bed asleep they run around looking for crumbs. But before we wake up they hide themselves away again.’
    ‘In the skirting boards?’ and I imagined the families of mice peeping through the holes just waiting for us to go to bed so they could have their midnight feast.
    ‘Yes, in the skirting boards,’ he would reply, laughing at my inquisitiveness.
    ‘Why does my mum get angry when she sees them?’
    ‘Women don’t like them’ was his only answer to that.
    Other times he would make shadow pictures of rabbits, dogs and even a horse on his walls. Then when I begged for more he took off his brightly coloured neckerchief which, apart from Sundays when it was exchanged for a tie, he always wore knotted around his neck. Once off he somehow twisted it so that it cast shadows of birds against the wall.
    Peter and Paul, he called them, as they flew up and down the walls. And before they disappeared out of sight a wing would gently caress my cheek. Those days I smiled happily back at him as I felt a glow spread through me at his attentions.
    From my bedroom window I could see the man next door’s workshop. Sometimes he had a car he was repairing sitting outside it. I would wait for him to appear, then clatter down the stairs.
    ‘Shall I take Stevie out, Mum?’ I would ask, pointing to my brother.
    ‘Yes, you do that, Marianne. Keep him from getting under my feet,’ was her standard reply, so grabbing the toddler’s podgy little hand I would take him into the garden and wait hopefully to be noticed.
    I never had to wait long. As though he could sense my presence his head would turn in my direction and a wide smile would light up his face.
    ‘Marianne,’ he would call, ‘come and give me a hand with this car, will you?’ and, delighted to feel needed, I would drag my unprotesting brother along as I flew to his side where I would importantly hold a spanner, pass a tool or even help polish the chrome.
    Luckily my little brother was a sunny-natured child whose good behaviour could be bought with a biscuit or sweet.

    ‘Give the back seat a good wipe, will you, Marianne?’ he would often ask and, intent on my task, I would obediently crawl over the front seat.
    ‘Good girl,’ he would breathe in my ear as his hand patted my bottom.
    ‘You’ve got a little marvel there,’ he told my mother each time she appeared to see what I was up to. Ignoring the fact that he had taken up time when I could have been helping her, she gave him an answering smile.
    ‘Yes, she’s always been a good child, has Marianne. Never given me any trouble.’ And her naive complicity in his attentions was what sealed my fate. Maybe a worldlier woman might have questioned his motives. But he was our neighbour, the one who had helped my father find his job, while Dora had given my mother something she had craved: friendship, and with it the end of lonely days. So if there were any beginnings of doubts my mother did as so many mothers have before her and will do in the future: she doused them firmly down.
    And finally I had someone in