The Far Away Girl

by Sharon Maas

Genres: General Fiction; Coming of Age; Family Life; Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

She dreamed of finding a new life . . .



Georgetown, Guyana 1970. Seven-year-old Rita has always known she was responsible for the death of her beautiful mother Cassie. Her absent-minded father allows her to run wild in her ramshackle white wooden house by the sea, and surrounded by her army of stray pets, most of the time she can banish her mother's death to the back of her mind.



But then her new stepmother Chandra arrives and the house empties of love and laughter. Rita's pets are removed, her freedom curtailed, and before long, there's a new baby sister on the way. There's no room for Rita anymore.



Desperate to fill up the emptiness inside her, Rita begins to talk to the only photo she has of her dead mother, a poor farmer's daughter from the remote Guyanese rainforest. Determined to find the truth about her mother, Rita travels to find her mother's family in an unfamiliar land of shimmering creeks and towering vines. She finds comfort in the loving arms of her grandmother among the flowering shrubs and trees groaning with fruit. But when she discovers the terrible bruising secret that her father kept hidden from her, will she ever be able to feel happiness again?

Release date: March 2, 2021

Publisher: Bookouture

Print pages: 350

Sample

Dear Diary,

Hello. Now I am six. My name is Rita Maraj. I live at Number Seven, Kaieteur Close, Georgetown, with Daddy and Mildrid. Mildrid is the made. Daddy gave you to me today. He said You will be my Freind and I can write Things to You. I like the puppy on your cover. I also got a bisicle, its red, I can ride my bisicle almost alredy. I had a party with Polly and Dona and Brian Coolij and some others. And we played coloured girl in the ring and I chose Brian as partner but I didn’t kiss him. I had a cake with six candles and I blew them all out. I made a wish. I wont tell you my wish but I’ll tell you everything else about me. A lady gave me a dolly but I threw it in the rubbish. Georgetown is in Guyana. It used to be called British Guiana. It was a British colony then but now it is an Independent Nation. It is the only English Speaking country in South America, but it is a Carribean country but it is not in the Carribean. It has 701,718 people. I am one of them. It has 76000 square miles so it is bigger than England. It has only four people per square mile but they all live along the coast. It has three counties, Berbice, Demerara and Essequibo. It has many rivers. Guyana means Land of many Waters. I learned all that in History and Geography. I have 2 dogs and three cats. I fownd them by myself. I like watching ants. My Mummy dide dyd dyed when I was a baby. I love anamals and ants and Daddy says I can have lots of them. I like to read. Daddy didnt come home to read my Story for me tonight that’s why im writing to You. I learnd to read and write at the Mary Noble Primary School but I still make some speling mistakes but not meny. I like school but Im always getting into truble I cant help it. Janet Focks said I look like a black ragger Muffin so I throo her books out the window. Miss Lee made me leve the room. I wrote my name on the wall. She gave me a letter for Daddy. I read red it and throo it away. She told him to kome my hair before I go to school but Daddy sleeps in the morning so he cant so Mildrid komes it for me sometimes but she says it has got two many nots and it hurts when she komes it thats why I bit her hand today but I didnt mean to. I was going to kome it myself but I entirley forgot. Miss Lee said I look like a Sensa fowl that’s a fowl that has fethers growing backwards. Donna said I killt my Mummy but I don’t believe her so I pullt her hair. Sorry for my speling mistakes.

Goodbye, Rita

PS I hope you like me I hope we get to be best Freinds.

‘Either they go,’ Chandra said firmly on Doomsday, her very first day at Number Seven, ‘or I.’ She laid the silver knife and fork primly together beside the chicken bones on her china plate, daintily lifted the white damask napkin from her lap and pressed it to her crimson lips. The silver and the china and the damask were all her own: they were part of her trousseau, prime weapons in her war against the established disorder at Number Seven. She pushed the plate forward, placed her elbows on the table, rested her chin on clasped hands and stared at Rita across the table with the narrowed eyes of a cat. Rita was just about to say, ‘Then go,’ but Daddy leaned sideways and put his arm round Chandra.

‘It’s all right, darling. I’ll have a little talk with her.’ He looked at Rita and smiled and winked, and instead of speaking out, Rita stared at her plate and bit her top lip and pushed out her bottom lip, and Chandra said, ‘Look at her, she’s pouting again! That girl’s spoilt silly!’

That evening, Daddy came to sit on Rita’s bed and explained everything to her. ‘Chandra doesn’t like ants,’ he said. ‘And we need Chandra. You know why, don’t you? Because you need a mummy. I told you. Most people don’t like ants, you know, most people don’t have ant farms in their homes. So please be a good girl and don’t vex her, sweetheart. Let’s keep the peace, OK? Just do what she says.’ And he bent down and whispered in Rita’s ear, ‘My favourite little girl!’ Rita pulled away, sulking. He didn’t have any other little girls, and anyway, it wasn’t just the ants, it was the dogs and cats and everything else.

‘She kicked Frisky. I saw, I was hiding but I saw. And she called Dolly a dirty old bitch. She’s a bitch herself!’

Daddy chuckled. ‘Where you learn words like that, eh? Come now, go to sleep. Y’all going to get used to one another. You got a nice new mummy, soon you going to have a little brother, you going to have a real family again!’

‘Go ’way!’ Rita flung herself down upon her pillow, twisting in mid-air so her back was turned to Daddy.

Serve him right.

The very next day Frisky was dead. The day after Daddy married her and brought her home, the day after Doomsday. Frisky was the first sign of terrible things to come. Frisky had mange, and the vet had given Rita a solution to bathe him in and she had been doing so lovingly each day, but when Rita came back from school the day after Doomsday, Chandra said Frisky was no more.

‘Put to sleep,’ she said. ‘That mangy old thing!’ And Rita heard Chandra telling Daddy, ‘I’m not going to have any animals in the house and she’ll just have to get used to that. You’ve spoiled that girl completely; she’s running wild, like one of those children raised by wolves. What d’you call them?’

‘Feral children,’ said Jitty mildly. ‘You have to understand, it was very difficult for her, the poor thing, and if you’re just kind—’

‘Don’t make excuses. If you’re kind to a spoilt child, it just gets worse. I’ll have to take her in hand. I’m sure this place is full of fleas. She had that mangy old thing in her bed!’ That was the worst thing about stepmothers, Rita concluded after several weeks had passed: they hated animals. Especially stray puppies and kittens. Not to mention ants, tadpoles and caterpillars kept in shoeboxes with lots of green leaves. Daddy should have known that before he married Chandra. Now it was too late. Take ants, for instance. Rita loved ants. She could watch ants for hours, marching in straight lines along the windowsills, march march march, looking at them through a magnifying glass and wondering just what they were thinking. Did ants think? Or did they just thoughtlessly, wordlessly know, feeling what they had to do, follow follow follow, sugar sugar sugar? You could put a piece of pink sugar-cake on a table with no ants and in no time, one would be there sniffing, then two, and then an excited scurrying crowd crying look look look, come come come, sugar sugar sugar, then the marching ants carrying pieces of sugar-cake bigger than themselves, march march march, carry carry carry, back to their homes. They marched around the house, up and down the walls and doorframes and table legs, and Rita’s eyes followed them, knowing where they came in and where they went out; she kept them in jars filled with sand and watched them marching through labyrinths of underground tunnels, carrying the crumbs she fed them, carry carry carry, waving their antennae, singing their march songs. Rita gave them names, but mixed them up. She imagined herself small, ant-size, and marching and singing with them. She strained her ears to catch their cries of sugar and their march songs, sure that if she tuned her mind fine enough, she could hear. She had been running her successful ant farm for a good three months. Then Chandra, on her very first day, came pumping a red can of Flit and the ants were gone. Forever.

After that, Rita kept her pets in the yard. Under bushes, behind a heap of planks, on the back seat of the Morris wreck. A litter of kittens she found drowning in a trench. A kiskadee with a wounded wing that died. Polly Wong’s dog Rover for two weeks when the Wongs were in the Islands, Barbados, or Antigua, on holiday. She moved her Animal Clinic to Polly Wong’s garden. When she grew up she was going to be a vet, live in a big house and fill it with animals.

The second worst thing about stepmothers was they made you tidy up behind you. Wherever Rita went now, she had to be picking up this and that and putting it here and there. Walking and turning round to pick up whatever she had just dropped. In the good old days of just her and Daddy you could walk around the place in your underpants leaving a nice comfortable trail behind you: sweetie papers, comic books, bits of string you no longer needed; and nobody cared – least of all Daddy, because he did the same. Sometimes Mildred would pick up the things and put them in their proper places but in a house the size of Number Seven there were a whole lot of proper places, and you couldn’t find the things again when you most wanted them, so what was the use? Chandra put an end to all that. She brought a maid with her when she moved in and the maid was supposed to clean, but Chandra wouldn’t let her clean up after Rita. She made Rita wear clothes, and as for hair, she took her to the barbershop and had it cut down to an inch all over, like a boy.

‘That girl needs training,’ Rita heard her telling Daddy. ‘A real little ragamuffin you got growing up here. Nothin’ doin’, not in my house. What visitors goin’ to think? I didn’t become Mrs Maraj to let people call me a slattern.’

The third worst thing about stepmothers was that they didn’t fret quietly like other people, sucking their teeth and shaking their head. No, they yelled the place down if you did something wrong. Like when Rita made herself a pawpaw milkshake and not only used one of Chandra’s best heirloom silver spoons to scoop the pawpaw meat into the shaker, but left the spoon in the shaker and switched on the motor, which broke the shaker and bent the spoon. Chandra yelled so loud the whole neighbourhood came running, and Rita ran and hid up the backyard mango tree till Daddy came home.

‘That child better not touch a single one of my things again!’ Chandra shrieked at Daddy, and poor Daddy just smiled and said yes, yes, and took her in his arms and guided her upstairs to the bedroom.

The one good thing about stepmothers was that Daddy was home earlier each day. The trouble was, when he was home, he only had eyes for Chandra, cancelling out her one good point. In other words, Chandra was a catastrophe, in capital letters. Rita wrote it in her diary, two months after Chandra came.

Dear Diary,

Daddy said I’m getting a new mummy but all I’ve got is a CATASTROFEE.

There were poison-tongued people in Georgetown who would whisper, behind upheld hands, that Jitty Maraj himself was a catastrophe, that even the best of wives couldn’t settle him down.

People waited eagerly for the next catastrophe, which had to come the way the sun had to rise. Jitty had always liked his drink, not a fitting preference for a member of a devout Hindu–Christian family. This predilection was a curse, weaving its way through his life, causing a mishap here and a slip-up there, and little knots along the way, and no one in his family escaped its loops. The slip-ups sometimes had far-reaching consequences: Rita’s conception, for instance, had been such a slip-up. But perhaps Jitty’s entire eat, drink and be merry act could be traced back to an enormous slip-up, back when he was three and his mother, father and three siblings were killed by a drunk driver.

Jitty couldn’t be blamed for the accident, of course, but if he’d been a good little boy he’d have been killed too. After all, it was his very naughtiness that kept him home from church the Sunday they were killed, driving home from mass. He liked to pinch the bottoms of the ladies in the pew in front of him or crawl under his own pew to escape into the aisle, and so his parents finally left him at home with Granma while they all drove off in the grass-green Vauxhall that fatal day.

The two cars slammed into each other at the corner of Brickdam and Camp Street and nobody had the remotest chance. Jitty’s father never even had time to brake. Neither did the driver of the other car, packed full of fun-loving, rum-drunk young men back from an all-night party. Jitty’s mother lived a few hours in the hospital, and one of the young men survived to swear off drink for the rest of his life. Everyone else died on the spot. It was Georgetown’s worst accident that year.

Little orphan Jitty was left behind to be raised by Granma and Aunt Mary at Number Seven, Kaieteur Close, the Dutch colonial white wooden mansion round the corner from the Canadian Embassy in Kingston. Kingston, one of Georgetown’s greenest, breeziest neighbourhoods, just a stone’s throw from the Sea Wall, the 280-mile wall that runs along much of Guyana’s coastline, and all of the coastline. Built by the colonial powers that be between 1855 and 1882, it protected the capital city and the coastal settlements – six feet below sea level – from flooding. Kingston wrapped itself protectively around Kaieteur Close, this quiet oasis at its hub, and life there was a pleasant, mellow-paced affair, slow, good-natured, and not a little complacent. The accident was a shock to the community’s very nerve.

Kaieteur Close itself was a town planner’s miscalculation in a city of orderly grid-worked streets, for it was a cul-de-sac, jutting into one of the blocks with no other purpose, it seemed, than to lead up to Number Seven. Numbers One to Six and Eight to Twelve, on both sides of the leafy close, were pristine fairy-tale white wooden mansions decorously hidden behind well-trimmed hibiscus and bougainvillea hedges.

They stood sedately on stilts, orderly sentries gazing silently at each other across the short street, whispering primly to each other through jalousied windows over fragrant oleanders, reminiscing about the Dutch and French and British colonial lords who’d once lived in their spacious halls.

Number Seven stood aloof, displayed in brazen grandeur at the stub-end of Kaieteur Close, a two-storey misshapen matron with broad hips and several long spindly legs keeping watch over the street, making no attempt to hide behind foliage. An ugly matron at that. A monstrosity of a house, people said, put together higgledy-piggledy, as if the past generations who had lived there had each had different ideas as to how to construct more room for growing families, servants, maiden aunts and ageing crotchety grandmothers. Rooms sticking out here and there; stairs going up and down, some wood, some wrought-iron, some painted, some left in their original state turning silver with age and weather.

Most Georgetown mansions of its era, built in the Dutch colonial heyday, were objects of beauty, sedate and white and many-windowed, resting on tall pillars with long staircases leading to their front doors. You could get glimpses of them, nestled as they were in beautifully tended gardens where hibiscus bushes vied with bougainvillea towering up trellises and up walls to produce the flowers of the most vivid colours: pink and purple and red, yellow and orange and violet. Where butterflies, bees and hummingbirds flitted among those flowers, and jasmine and oleander and frangipani provided softer accents as well as fragrance.

These beautiful houses were not the only legacy of the Dutch. Central Georgetown itself was an oasis of quiet old-world charm. Its wide avenues with central walkways between grassy verges shaded by towering flamboyant trees, the atmosphere of timeless serenity, the Promenade Gardens at its heart and the Atlantic breeze that swept in from the coast: all of this earned it the title of Garden City of the Caribbean. Number Seven could have belonged to this collection of vintage architectural wonders, but it didn’t.

Many old Georgetown houses had towers – built by sea-captains, it was said, so they could keep an eye out for ships entering the Demerara from the Atlantic – but none quite like Number Seven’s, a single ugly tooth jutting from the roof of an upstairs room, with a ladder leading up to a quadrangle just large enough for one thin person to stand upon, doing nothing except perhaps holding a telescope to one eye to search the horizon. Hideous, naked and unashamed, its paint peeling, since Granma, hidden away in her upstairs quarters, never bothered to refresh it, Number Seven glowered in an oversized, unkempt yard. In no way could this be called a garden. No hedge to cower behind, no neat herbaceous border along her driveway, no false modesty, only an enormous mango tree rising from a tangle of weeds and dishevelled bushes on one side of the messy drive of sand and weeds, and a cluster of coconut trees on the other. And behind the house a veritable jungle, left to its own designs, with a star-apple tree, a genip tree, and another, smaller, mango tree next to Number Six.

Granma and Aunt Mary had both given up on gardening, given up on Jitty, and, at least in Aunt Mary’s case, given up on life itself, if life meant marriage, as it did for any well-brought-up Indian girl. Aunt Mary, almost in her forties now, worked for a British charity on a voluntary basis. She ‘sorted out’, as she put it, orphaned children, waifs and strays, and had little time for the waif in her own home, her own family.

The one thing she had done for Jitty was to have him secretly (for Granma would not have approved) baptised soon after the crash. So, Jitty, born a Hindu, was quite officially, albeit secretly, a Christian. Aunt Mary informed him of this when the time came for him to be confirmed; but he decided not to comply. And as he grew into adolescence, he found his own spiritual footing: ‘I’m an agnostic,’ Jitty said, and that was that.

At Number Seven Jitty had enjoyed a carefree, pleasant childhood. The lack of parents and siblings was no handicap, for Jitty had the gift of making friends, and among the boys and girls in numbers One to Six, Eight to Twelve, he was the undisputed king. They were always a wild lot, those Kaieteur Close children; their loyalty to each other was legendary, their unspoken ‘us-against-the-rest-of-the-world’ philosophy a fact of nature. But being born to Number Seven was at once a legacy, a responsibility, a challenge and an honour. Jitty shouldered that duty with good-natured insouciance.

Unlike Jitty, the children of Numbers One to Six, Eight to Twelve, were disadvantaged. They had parents. Parents who disapproved of insouciance in general and, in particular, of little Jitty Maraj and his two-woman Hindu–Christian household, of the doubly inept reins of guardianship held too slackly in the Maraj home, the lack of discipline therein: the lack, in other words, of a man. Disapproved in general of the country’s political confusion and the threatened end of colonialism. Disapproved in particular of their children’s association with a cooly. The problem was solved in various ways as the children entered puberty and the country gained, at long last, independence from Britain. A few children were sent to boarding school in England. Many of the remaining families did not remain long; they emigrated to England, America, Canada, places collectively known as Abroad, seeking a better life. The Kaieteur Close Band broke into scattered fragments, leaving Jitty behind.

The Maraj fortune was too much bound up in the country for them to leave: it lay in forestry and hardware. For generations the family had owned forestry rights of a large swathe of rainforest in the country’s Interior, founded by Jitty’s great-great-grandfather, Doodnauth Maraj, who had come with the first batch of Indian indentured servants; not as a labourer, but as a businessman, curious to make his fortune halfway across the world. And make his fortune he did, and built this house. To this day, the money flowed; Granma, in her enclave on the upper storey, kept an eye on the books, and was satisfied.

Jitty had grown up with the benefit of two religions. Granma was staunchly Hindu; but her daughter Rohini, under the influence of a dedicated English mistress at Bishops’ High School, not to mention daily Christian assemblies with hymns, prayers and Bible readings, had converted to Christianity at an early age and changed her name to Mary. Hinduism and Christianity had been practised with equal fervour in an uneasy yet peaceful coexistence in Number Seven. Both religions, and both of Jitty’s female guardians, Granma and Aunt Mary, were hostile to Jitty’s freewheeling predilections, but their hostility had absolutely no effect on the growing young man. Even as a schoolboy, Jitty liked his girls, his rum, and his loud music, in that order. He revered Ringo Starr, bought himself a drumkit and for six long months set his sights on becoming the drummer of one of Georgetown’s several bands. Number Seven and the whole of Kaieteur Close boomed and rattled at all hours of the day or night. But Georgetowners were a very tolerant people, and nobody ever complained, and Granma, who only wore her hearing aid when she had to, was oblivious to it all until, tired of the effort, he gave up drumming.

When Jitty was fifteen Aunt Mary married an older widower (an Englishman, inspector of the charity she worked for) of solid standing, who swept her off to London, leaving Jitty entirely in Granma’s morally upright but to all practical purposes incapable hands. Occasionally she emerged as a dragon from its lair, to lay down the law in no uncertain terms, and at such times Jitty quaked. She handed him money as if it grew on trees. It kept the peace. She hired a string of servants to take care of the boy and retired to her room up in the eaves beneath the tower, to her prayers and mantras, her ledgers and business files. Her business manager came to see her every day, keeping her updated. Her doctor came when called; she had heart issues. She had her own live-in Lady’s Maid, who lived in a small upstairs side-room and hurried up- and downstairs attending to her immediate needs. It was possible to ignore her very existence, for Jitty had his own room and a bathroom downstairs; he did, however, exert himself to visit her every Sunday afternoon, at her specific request. He kept those visits short.

Granma bought him, at his request, a motorbike, a 100cc Honda, for his sixteenth birthday. With his new wheels, Jitty was the star of the town. Girls giggled and flirted in his presence; he teased them and ‘followed’ them on his motorbike on their way home after school, which was, of course, strictly forbidden both by the headmistress of Bishops’ High and the nuns of St Rose’s and St Joseph’s. But the girls liked it, and so did Jitty. They hitched up their uniforms to inches above the knee, loosened their school ties (if their uniform required one) and put on lipstick after school and limed at Bookers’ Snack Bar and watched out for him. Life was good.

After walking out the school gates for the last time, aged nineteen and still slightly shell-shocked by the dramatic events of the last few months, Jitty worked at a variety of short-lived jobs. He helped out at a garage for three months, loaded and unloaded ships at the dock for five weeks, and did a stint at stacking shelves at Quang Hing’s Supermarket. But stacking supermarket shelves was simply not good enough.

A-level results came in, and he was relieved to find he had passed them all. Not brilliantly, but at least he’d passed. English Literature, Geography, History. He was all set to move up in the world, and fate played into his hand: the Daily Graphic advertised for trainee reporters. Jitty cut off his hair, stopped smoking, put on a clean white shirt and tie and new black trousers and shiny black shoes, applied for the position, took the test, and got the job.

And in journalism Jitty found, eventually, his personal professional niche. Journalism proved to be the ship that sailed him into respectability. He was a good writer, but even more so, he was a good interviewer; even the most cranky and reticent of subjects, charmed by his genuine affability, opened up to him and shared with him stories and secrets never before revealed. He became the Graphic’s star feature writer; whenever a personage of note came to visit the country, Jitty was sent to prise them open. He met the famous and the notorious. His feature on Mahalia Jackson was moving, on Muhammad Ali funny-serious, on Fidel Castro provoking. He was sent to meet the Beatles in Tobago; he couldn’t get much out of them, unfortunately: they were all high as a kite. It wasn’t much of a feature, but a good story to tell at the high-profile receptions and dinners he was invited to as representative of the press.

As a good-looking, well-dressed young Indian man, affable in temperament and always smiling, successful at his job and polite to everyone, Jitty had them all fooled. Nobody would suspect it was all a mask. If there was anything at all unpleasant, traumatic, guilt-inducing, shameful, hidden in Jitty’s soul, nobody would ever suspect it, for the face he presented to the world was one of unmitigated bonhomie. He was, as ever, the quintessential Sunny-Boy, but this time a mature, responsible one.

By the time Rita, aged five, moved into Number Seven, Jitty had reformed himself, pulled himself up by the legendary bootstraps, turned over the legendary new leaf: now a leading Graphic journalist with a fine reputation. Number Seven, meanwhile, had fallen more and more into disrepair. Granma had not renovated or repainted the house since the death of her only son, a result of her burying herself away in her upstairs bedroom; once pristine white, it had turned grey. All over the place, inside and out, the old paint was preparing to fall off, flaking away from the wall in smaller or larger slivers.

Soon after she first moved in, Rita proceeded to help peel the paint away from those parts of the wall she could reach, sitting on the front stairs or cross-legged on the veranda, sliding overgrown fingernails or even a knife under the layer of old paint and prising it away. It was like picking at a scab, but in a way that did not hurt.

She could sit for hours, scratching away at the paint. No one prevented her from doing so; no one cared, not Jitty, and certainly not Mildred.

For the entire first six months, Rita refused to speak to Jitty, or anyone, in fact. She just sat there, day after day, scratching at the peeling paint, or else wandering around the backyard, looking at things, sometimes touching. Never properly playing.

Jitty found he had no idea what to do with a little half-orphaned girl. There’d never been a man in his life, never a father figure, no father, grandfather, or even an uncle. Granma and Aunt Mary simply did not mix with men, apart from Granma’s business adviser, her solicitor, and Aunt Mary’s future husband.

Before Rita’s arrival, he had so looked forward to his role as father. He’d been sure he could be father and mother to her. He’d be a good father. He’d always liked children, and living on Kaieteur Close had proven it: the children there – and there were always children there – liked him back. He’d always stop to have a word with them, bought them sweeties and cricket balls and little knick-knacks he came upon. Once or twice, he’d played cricket with the boys. He’d once taught a little girl to ride a bicycle. He brought them gifts at Christmas, and once had dressed in a Santa costume to their delight. But all of these tactics did not work with Rita.

He bought her dolls and dolly prams and dolly houses, but she refused to even look at them. She would not wear the clothes he bought for her, lovely pink frilly dresses with matching shoes and socks, preferring the clothes she’d arrived in and brought with her, until they were literally too tight to fit. After which Mildred was sent to Stabroek Market to find similar things: simple shorts and T-shirts.

There was a private nursery-cum-primary school in Kingston, the Mary Noble school, which took children from four to ten, and, rather insecure by now, Jitty enrolled her. But the teacher said it was wasted on her, since she spoke to nobody, adult or child. She did not play with the children of Kaieteur Close. She played with nobody, preferring to roam about the backyard, inspecting insects and leaves and flowers, and sometimes putting them into jars. She climbed trees, and could spend hours up in the branches of the mango tree.

For this reason, she did not seem particularly unhappy, Jitty thought. One day she’d grow out of it. So, he let her be. She seemed so self-sufficient. She got herself up in the morning, washed and dressed herself, took herself to bed at night. Then, Jitty would come and read her a bedtime story. He wasn’t sure if she was listening, but always she was asleep by the time he finished. He’d kiss her, then, on her forehead, and whispered that he loved her. ‘I’m sorry,’ he’d also whisper.

Once, a few months after her arrival, two ladies came to visit, in their Sunday best, probably after church. They knocked on the door and Rita opened it to them and stared. The younger lady, who wore a powder-blue dress with a lacy bodice and smelled of Johnson’s Baby Powder, bent down so that her face was on Rita’s level and smiled. ‘Hello, darling!’ she’d said. ‘How you’ve grown! Remember me, Aunty Penny? And this is Aunt Mathilda.’

Rita only stared, frowning. By this time Jitty had rushed over, and now stood protectively over Rita. Just like her, he glowered.

‘What do you want?’ he said in his most threatening voice.

‘We just wanted to see her! We just want her to know us! After all—’

‘After all, nothing!’ said Jitty. He pulled Rita away and shut the door in their faces. Jitty was not normally a rude man – after all, they called hi