Chapter 1 How I came to hate my Uncle Zak
My name is Anika, pronounced the same as silica without syllabic emphasis, (at least that's how I prefer it). I am twenty-six years old and happily married ... with just the tinniest wrinkle. This is how the 'wrinkle' started, at least I think it is, and how I came to hate my Uncle Zak.
Uncle Zak is my mother's elder brother. Early forties. A big out-doorsie type. Huge hands, broad hairy chest. He thinks he's handsome, in a rough manual worker sort of way, but I think he's disgusting. He is staying with us now: David, my husband, and Tracy, who's two. God knows why I let him.
My Uncle Zak 'discovered' me, I think is the term he would use, when I was eighteen. In earlier times he had the habit of taking me onto his knee, or so I was told. Since I was a toddler I guess. But then he went overseas for a time. He is something or other in government. When he came back I was ten years older, just turned eighteen, yet he seemed to think we would pick up where he'd left off.
"Come sit on my knee like you used to, little poppet," he chirped from my father's chair in the front room, patting a broad thigh with a thick hand. I was almost as tall as he was! When my objections to this manifestly inappropriate behaviour failed – I was grown up, for chrissake – and he succeeded in getting me into his lap – with cluckings from my mother of, "Oh, how sweet," – I discovered that my Uncle Zak's hands had a pretty clear agenda of their own. My mother (obviously) had no idea what this guy, her brother, was like. And I'm not sure my father would have cared even if he did. (My father and I have never got on particularly well. I think he wanted a boy.) So there I sat, embarrassed, yet uncomfortably in a position of mild compliance, as he took the excuse of my being on his lap to check out my shape, with his hands.
I lifted them off, of course – either one, or in one case both – when they strayed too far from where they ought to have been in the circumstances. Although exactly where 'ought to have been' was, appeared to be moot when applied to a long lost uncle! My mother had immediately taken to calling him this. And, on account – I am guessing here – of the added licence that being referred to as 'long lost uncle' appeared to give him (where his niece was concerned) he pretty quickly followed suit and called himself that too! "Come and sit with your long lost uncle," he would say, at every opportunity, patting an ample thigh with a broad coarse hand.
On more than one occasion on the first two days of his visit I found myself back in his lap when unable, or too slow, or too dumb to think up a valid excuse as to why my 'long lost uncle' should not be allowed to 'get to know me better', and why my 'being snug as a bug in a rug in his lap,' was not – clearly – the best way of conducting this exercise. How my parents failed to interpret this as an over-sexed older man wanting to get as close he could to a shapely younger niece he had taken a fancy to, I have no idea. But they didn't. So I was left to my own devices. And defences. As his mouth motored off in one direction – he could talk about anything, and usually did – has hands wandered off in other. Detours and wanderings and side trips all over me. And under me. Anything and everything he'd try.
The reason I guess he persevered at this particular form of behaviour, despite the barrage of resistance I placed in his way, was that in the end he invariably tended to wear me down. In the end I got bored with thinking up reasons why he couldn't touch me where he wanted to, or stroke me as he wished, or caress a showing piece of flesh as deeply as he cared to. It was as if he knew that if he worked on me hard enough, and for long enough, eventually I would give up the fight. As if he knew, too, that soon after I gave up the fight, he would start to get me aroused despite myself, and despite the fact I hated the creep.
The first time I found myself losing control like this, was at the dinner table. He'd squeezed his chair between me and Sam, who at the time was thirteen. There wasn't a lot of room our side of the table. I said there'd be more room the other side, where grandpa and grandma sat, both of them thin as rails, but Mum told me not to be rude. So there he was, squeezed between Sam and me, pressed real close. When everyone was talking up a storm – all except me, that is, because of what he was doing beneath the table – his fat hand was stroking my leg. At one point he leaned towards me and ask me a question, while under the table his hand went right on stroking my leg. It was as if what he was saying to me, and what he was doing to me, were unconnected. I'm not sure if Mum knew what he was doing. Maybe she thought it was just him being 'fun'.
I'd bring his hand out now and then, of course. But he was so darned persistent, and talked so darned much. I was unschooled, back then, with what men liked to do. Men like him. To girls like me! Pretty soon I had his hand well established between my legs. And after a few more half-hearted rebuttals from me – but the hand kept coming back, further up my leg each time – the finger-tips started to caress the sensitive skin on the inside of my legs. This was interspersed with silent, and growing more frustrated, attempts on my part to push his hand away, or give it back to the lug-head, or otherwise get the ox offa me. But he was persistent, as I've said.
Eventually I gave up, and let him be. If he hadn't got the message by now that I didn't welcome the attention he was giving my legs, then he never would. I decided, I think, too exhausted to continue my seemingly futile resistance, to let matters take their course. He'd get bored with my legs eventually, was the way I figured it. I would ignore him, get on with my meal. Trouble was, he didn't get bored with my legs. And what he was doing wasn't easy to ignore!
