Hope's Vengeance by Ricki Thomas

she’d tell my father when he got home, standard stuff. So if I was naughty, I got to see my Dad, that’s the way I saw it.”
    “Bad attention is as good as good attention.” Dawn leant back, relaxed, and interested.
    “I started school, I was too young, but they started me early because I was quite bright, they used to do that in those days if the parents pushed hard enough. I missed being home, and there was a boy who used to call me names, it always made me cry, and then I’d wet myself. When Mum dropped me off at school, I’d walk along the inside of the railings when she went home, crying because I didn’t want her to leave me. She always told me to stop being silly, to go and play.
    About the same time I noticed that however badly I behaved, Mum stopped threatening me with Dad, and I thought I’d been so naughty he’d gone away, and I didn’t want that, I just wanted him to love me. I still do.”
    “So he’d left your Mum?”
    “Not yet. He’d gone to work away from home, we were staying back until the house sold, we were away from him for six months.” Hope smiled wistfully, she took a sip, and finished the water, wiping her mouth before putting the cup down. “I didn’t understand it when we moved to Exeter, where Dad’s job was, we started going to the pub with Mum and Dad all the time, there was a playroom, and sometimes I looked through the door and Dad would have his arm around this woman we later knew as Sandra.”
    Dawn’s eyes widened. “Your Mum was there?” Although the story was obviously painful, Dawn was intrigued that Hope wasn’t tense, or angry. She seemed resigned to this experience, as if she’d mulled it over so many times she couldn’t be bothered any more.
    She expelled slowly, her shoulders low. “Dad had met Sandra as soon as he’d moved to Exeter. She was married, two kids, and she got pregnant during their affair. Her husband, Sam, said the baby was Dad’s, Dad said it was Sam’s. I don’t know how it happened, I’m an adult now, and I wouldn’t tolerate the situation, but Sam and Mum just accepted the affair, and life went on, we just all spent lots of time together, the four adults, the five kids. I got on really well with Sam and Sandra’s daughter, Pen, we became best friends for that period of my life.”
    Dawn smiled gently.
    “Well, the baby, Felicity, she was born, and it all carried on, then I don’t know what happened, but Sam walked out on Sandra, he just disappeared. I never saw him again.”
    “Did you like him?”
    “No, he was a revolting alcoholic, he’d get pissed and throw up really noisily in the bathroom. It used to make my stomach churn just hearing it.”
    Dawn sat up straight, the bitterness bringing her to attention. Something about that last sentence had made Hope’s teeth grit, her pale hands were fists, the knuckles whitened. It was brief, but significant. She was relaxed in an instant, the episode over, but Dawn wondered if this was where the suspected sexual dysfunction came from. For a moment she debated asking, deciding not to after the previous outburst.
    “It happened really quickly. Sam was gone, then Dad moved into Sandra’s house, in with Pen, Fred and Felicity. We moved to Reading, into a tiny house, it was a dump, stank of damp, mould, it was dark, dingy, horrid.”
    “So that was your Mum, you, and your two older sisters, right?”
    “The way I saw it, Dad didn’t want us any more, he wanted Sandra’s kids. That’s the way Charity and Faith saw it too, but Charity was especially angry because we’d gone from being wealthy to poor. We had to go to the new school in our old uniforms because Mum couldn’t afford to buy us new ones, so right from the start all the other kids teased us. I just used to stand by the wall and cry, I just couldn’t understand what we’d done wrong.”
    “You understand now, though, don’t you, that it wasn’t your fault?”
    Hope stepped lightly to the water cooler, her