A House Without Windows Read online

  I ask Mummy what trains and cars are. She says they get people from one place to another faster than if they had to walk. I’d like to see a train and a car.

  I want to go to Craggy-Tops with Philip, Jack, Lucy-Ann and Kiki the parrot. I don’t want to stay in my boring house any more. I want to see my daddy who looks after children. I want him to look after me. Mummy always says I want too much, and that want doesn’t get.

  CHAPTER 4

  When I get too tired to read any more Mummy tells me it’s time to clean my teeth and have a wash at the sink. The Man gives us toothpaste, soap, and clean flannels and towels. My towel is white with a green edging all the way around it. Mummy says she misses having a bath every day. I’ve never had a bath, but she says there’s lots of water in it like the sea so I wouldn’t like to have one in case I drown.

  I get into bed and in my head I can hear the sea splashing all up the windows of Craggy-Tops. There’s a picture of it in the book. Aunt Polly lets the boys sleep on a mattress in the tower room, and Jack looks out of the window over to the Isle of Gloom and sees all the birds flying around outside.

  I look around and I can’t see any windows. When I ask Mummy why we don’t have any windows she says that the house wasn’t built with any. I really want to see what’s outside, but Mummy says Edwin wouldn’t like us to go out, and it would make him really angry if we tried to leave the house.

  I lie on my back in the bed and look up at the light bulb. It flickers a little bit and I’m frightened in case it goes out. Mummy strokes my hair and says she will always be there and that I’ll never be alone. I close my eyes and pretend I’m in the tower room at Craggy-Tops, looking over the sea towards the Isle of Gloom. Joe the servant told the children that nasty things happen on the island and that they mustn’t go there.

  They’re not allowed to go to the island, and I’m not allowed to go outside.

  Suddenly I’m awake and I sit up and panic because I can’t see anything. I need a wee and I’m blind. Mummy wakes up next to me in bed, hears me crying, and puts her arms around me. She says that the light bulb has gone out and that Edwin needs to bring another one. I tell her I need a wee badly and she takes my hand and very slowly we climb out of bed and stand up.

  I can’t see where to go. Mummy says to hold her hand because she knows where the toilet is. I shake with fear. We walk very slowly in the dark and Mummy finds it. I feel the cold seat and lift up my nightie with one hand and clutch Mummy’s hand with the other. It’s hard to wipe myself afterwards, but I manage it.

  As we creep along back to bed I wonder where the toilet is at Craggy-Tops. Are the corridors dark at night with no electricity? Does Jack have to wake up Philip and ask him where it is? Does he have to take an oil lamp with him to the toilet? Does Lucy-Ann know where the toilet is? What if there isn’t a toilet? How did they flush the toilet when the water had to be drawn up from a well in the yard?

  I cuddle Mummy and I fall asleep again. When we wake up it’s not worth getting out of bed because we can’t see anything. I reach under the bed and grab my book. We have to wait for The Man. I listen for the bolt being pulled back on the other door, and his keys in the door to our house. When he comes in Mummy asks him for another light bulb and he goes out and locks the door again. We wait for him to come back and I clutch my reading book to my chest in the dark, feeling its thick pages. It’s nice to hold the book, even though I can’t read it.

  The Man comes back with a torch and some food and changes the light bulb. Mummy asks if we can keep the torch. The Man smiles at me when the light comes on, but I look away. I feel The Man’s eyes staring at me, and he says that if I smile at him I would be able to keep the torch.

  I don’t know what to do. I look at Mummy but she has a smile that’s fixed on her face. I want to keep the torch in case the light bulb breaks again, so I clutch my book and smile at The Man, and he reaches out and gives me the torch. Mummy asks have I forgotten my manners, so I thank him and look down at the torch, which is still warm from where he’d been holding it.

  The Man goes away and locks the door. We eat our breakfast without really saying much. I’m worried in case Mummy is angry because I smiled at The Man, but when I ask her she says that I did the right thing. We have a torch to use now if the light bulb goes out again.

  The Man pulls the bolt back on the other door again soon after we’ve eaten. Mummy tells me to go and sit on the toilet, and I grab my book and run when I hear his keys jangling outside. I feel safe on the toilet with my book, even though there isn’t a door, because he doesn’t usually try and find me.

  This time I don’t want to look around the corner. I can’t hear anything, just the rustling of material, grunting, and the noise of the bedsprings. When I hear his footsteps going towards the door I hear Mummy asking him for towels and nappy bags because she says her period is due. The Man doesn’t say anything.

  What’s a nappy bag? When she comes to find me I hold up our towels and tell her The Man brought us some. She shakes her head and tells me that she wants a different kind of towel, one that I’ll have to use when I’m a bit older. She says all girls have to use them once they get to about twelve or thirteen years of age. I ask her if I can see one, and she says I’ll have to wait until Edwin brings them and then she’ll show one to me.

  CHAPTER 5

  Mummy has a tummy ache. She lies on the bed and clutches at her stomach. I ask her if she’s eaten something nasty, but she shakes her head and says she has a period. I don’t know what she means, so she explains about girls’ bodies making eggs that either turn into babies or they don’t. If they don’t, then the body gets rid of the unwanted egg. It comes out when a girl does a wee, and there’s a lot of blood but it’s normal. Sometimes there would be a lot of pain and other times there wouldn’t be, but all girls keep getting rid of eggs from about the age of twelve until they grow really old at about 50.

  That’s a lot to think about. I’m about 7, 8 or 9, but I don’t think I’m going to get any periods. I don’t really want them because they don’t sound very nice, and I’m sure that Dinah and Lucy-Ann don’t have periods because they never talk about them, or towels or eggs. Mummy took a towel out of the packet that The Man brought and showed me. It’s long and thick, and you have to put it between your legs and then put your knickers on. Ugh, it’s horrible.

  Mummy has to keep running to the toilet when she has a period. I see that she puts the towels she has used into babies’ nappy bags and puts them in the rubbish bin. She ties the handles of the bags really tightly together. After a few days she smiles again and says her tummy ache has gone, and then I’m happy because I have my normal mummy back again.

  When Mummy has a tummy ache she doesn’t do any exercises, and The Man doesn’t come down and creak the bedsprings. When her period goes she says I have to keep using all my muscles, and she shows me how to do sit-ups and handstands and shoulder stands. We have to jog on the spot for ages and it’s boring. I can hear my heart beating fast and she says that’s good, but I say it’s bad because I’d rather sit down with my reading book or add up lots of numbers in my head. My head is full of numbers and words that I have to write down before I forget them all.

  I know The Man will soon be coming back again and I’ll have to sit on the toilet and try to read my book. I don’t know why I have to sit on the toilet when the bedsprings are creaking, but I think next time I’m going to have another look. I hear him pulling back the bolt on the door outside.

  Jack wanted to have a closer look at The Isle of Gloom, even though Joe had told him that bad things went on there. He knew the seabirds would be tame because nobody lived there now and the birds were not used to seeing people. He wanted to go to the island and see if there were any rare birds and take photos, but Joe wouldn’t lend out his boat.

  I wonder if it would be fun to go on a boat? I wouldn’t want to go to the Isle of Gloom though, because it sounds too scary. One day I’ll get Mummy and Daddy to take me on a boat ri
de.

  The book is really exciting and even though The Man came in and started to creak the bedsprings I didn’t care, and I couldn’t wait to see what was on the next page. I took the torch into the toilet and shone it on the pages. The boys had fallen through a hole in the floor of a cave into a secret tunnel, and had lit a candle because like me they couldn’t see anything. Kiki didn’t like the dark. My torch picked out the words as they crept along the tunnel that ended at a wall and a trapdoor above their heads. Philip climbed up on Jack and got through the trapdoor, and then he hauled Jack up. Then Philip recognised they were in one of the cellars at Craggy-Tops; one he hadn’t been in before. They can’t get out because the door is locked, and then they have to hide because they hear Joe’s footsteps coming towards the cellar door and opening it.

  Mummy comes into the toilet looking sad and says that she needs a wee. That was annoying because I was in Craggy-Tops’ cellar with my torch. Mummy takes the torch away and says it’s time for my lessons and that we have to save the battery in case the light bulb goes out. I go and sit on the bed and pretend I’m in the same cellar as Philip and Jack, and that The Man’s footsteps are Joe’s. He’s just as nasty as Joe anyway, so I’m going to call him Joe now. I have a look around my house, but Joe’s gone.

  CHAPTER 6

  Mummy’s had a wash and she’s smiling again. I plait her hair because Joe, The Man, had undone it. I think I’d like to do algebra like Philip, so I ask Mummy if she knows how to do it. She says yes and I learn about x being the variable and then I have to find out what x is in a sum. Sometimes I can do it, and sometimes Mummy makes the sum too hard, but then she shows me how to find the right answer.

  I get bored with algebra, so Mummy teaches me about my body. I learn the names of bones and muscles, and how the muscles and ligaments will move my bones to where they want to go. I ask if my quad muscles can move my femurs so that they are outside the house, but Mummy says Edwin has to unlock the door first and then leave it unlocked, because femurs, tibias and fibulas can’t walk through closed doors.

  I try and think of my heart pumping all the blood around my body. I can feel it sometimes if I jump up and down, but I can’t see it. It pumps away even before we are born. Mummy says that if you listen with a special instrument you can hear a baby’s heart beating while it’s still inside its mother’s womb.

  How does the baby get out from the womb? Does it climb out? Does all the climbing out make its heart beat faster and faster? I ask Mummy if I climbed out of her womb. She says that it took many hours for me to come out, and at the end she pushed me out onto the bed we’re sitting on with her pelvic floor muscles. I didn’t feel her pushing me though, so I must have been asleep. I asked her if anybody caught me as she pushed me out, but she said that she pushed me out on her own and caught me herself.

  She says that sometimes babies can’t be pushed out and that the mother has to go to hospital for the baby to be cut out by a doctor. I want to know where the babies are pushed out from, and Mummy says they come out from the hole where you do a wee, which can stretch to be as big as a baby’s head.

  I don’t understand hours because there are no clocks in our house. Mummy draws clocks sometimes and says that they usually have three hands that move around, but I’ve never seen one. Do the hands move slowly? I want to see one, but all I get told is that want doesn’t always get.

  When is it daytime? Mummy says it’s when the sun shines brightly and it’s light outside and you can see everything around you. At night it becomes dark and you have to turn the lights on to see. We don’t have daytime in our house, so probably that’s why we don’t need a clock.

  I need to find out what happened to Jack, Philip and Kiki.

  Joe comes into the cellar where the boys are hiding, but Kiki makes a sound like Joe coughing, and Joe gets really frightened and runs, touching the boys by accident in the dark on the way out and getting even more scared, and then he gets told off by Aunt Polly in the kitchen. Jack and Philip laugh a lot to think Joe was frightened of them, and find he was so scared that he left his key in the cellar door. They take it and go through the door into the part of the cellar that Philip knows, to find boxes were in the way that had hidden the door, and Philip hadn’t known the door was there. He felt excited about finding it.

  How can I make Joe frightened of me? The light is always on in our house because it’s never daytime, so he can always see me. If he can’t see me he knows that I’ll be sitting on the toilet.

  Perhaps when I hear his footsteps I can run and turn off the light and then run out of the door when he opens it, but where can I turn off the light? I get up and walk around our house, looking for something to turn it off with. Mummy asks me what on earth am I doing, but I just say I’m going for a walk.

  I can’t find anything that turns off the light. I look up and there’s a wire that goes from the light bulb up into the ceiling. I can’t reach up to the ceiling and there are no trapdoors up above like Jack and Philip found. It’s not fair; how is it that they can find a trapdoor and I can’t?

  I’m going to have to think of another plan….

  CHAPTER 7

  Jack and Philip creep up the cellar steps into the kitchen, but nobody’s about so they go to the outer door and run down the cliff path again to the cave where Dinah and Lucy-Ann were still waiting for them to come out of the tunnel. Philip creeps into the cave and throws a starfish at Dinah and makes her jump.

  Dinah hates her brother. I wish I had a brother or sister; I wouldn’t hate them at all. Mummy says she doesn’t want another baby, because I’m quite enough for her to look after, and anyway the house isn’t big enough. I ask her if we can have a house as big as Craggy-Tops, but Mummy says no.

  I hear the bolt sliding back and Joe’s footsteps coming to the door. Mummy gives me that look so I slide off the bed, grab my book, and run to the toilet as keys jangle in the lock outside. We haven’t long eaten, so I think Joe wants to take Mummy’s hair out of its plait again and spread it on her pillow. Mummy stands up to wait for him.

  I wish I could read in the toilet, but if I try to it hurts my eyes. I hold the book against me and listen, and wait for Joe to stop making the bedsprings creak. When the noise stops I hear him say that something has split, but that’s all he says and there’s no reply from Mummy. I hear a zip being done up and I clutch my book to me, hoping he’ll go straight out.

  He doesn’t. He comes to the toilet, the place where I try and hide, and stands in front of me. I hate him. He fills the toilet with his great body and looks down on me. I pretend to like him and smile. I can see Mummy standing behind him with her hair all loose and hanging down, and I want him to go away. He asks me if I like the reading book, and I nod.

  He says he wants me to call him Daddy. He says if I don’t call him Daddy he’ll take my reading book away. Behind him I can see Mummy nodding as though she wants me to say yes, but I remember her saying that my daddy is called Liam. She’s nodding really hard and looks as though her head is going to fall off. I want to laugh at Mummy’s head going up and down, but then look at Joe and the bubbling laughter inside dies away.

  I can see that the only way to make him go away is to give him what he wants. I tell him I will call him Daddy, and Mummy’s head stops nodding. He turns around to Mummy and takes some of her hair in his hands and strokes it, before unlocking the door and going back out.

  Mummy says she needs a wee and that I was a very good girl, but I tell her how can I be good when I’ve told a lie? She smiles and says that sometimes in life you have to tell little white lies that aren’t as bad as actual lies so that people don’t get angry and hurt you. Thinking about what might happen if Daddy gets too angry, I see that Mummy is probably right and I’m glad I lied to him.

  Daddy’s gone and I can sit on the bed and read again. There’s a wet patch on the duvet that smells funny, so I move away from it and sit on the other side.

  CHAPTER 8

  Jack lies in the grass at t
he top of a cliff looking through binoculars at the Isle of Gloom. He sees somebody rowing near Craggy-Tops in a boat and thinks it must be Joe, but on his way back to the house he sees that Joe’s boat is still there. He tells the others he’s seen somebody with a boat, and Philip says they should try and find the owner of the boat and make friends.

  That night they look out of the window of the tower room and see Joe sailing his boat towards the shore with some cargo on board. They creep down to the harbour where Joe’s boat was heading and jump out at him, making him fall into the water in fright. He comes out of the water very angry and hits Jack, but Philip charges into Joe’s middle and makes him gasp for breath. Then the boys run along the beach with Joe chasing after them and disappear down the secret tunnel in the cave, but they have to find their way back to the cellar in complete darkness. Joe doesn’t know about the secret passage and waits outside the cave for them, but wonders if it was Jack and Philip on the beach when they appear at breakfast the next morning as if nothing had happened.