All of Me (33 page)

So I wasn’t an alcoholic – that was another diagnosis that had been wrong – and neither was Judy overweight (although pictures from when we were fifteen do show us plumper than I remember – so that’s obviously where her paranoia is rooted). But she did have a problem: she was the one who was eating and then running off to the toilet to throw it up again. She was the one with bulimia.

She was the reason we were under lock and key in the Maudsley.

Judy was also the one who’d tried to break out of the Maudsley. No wonder we were caught – she probably thought she was too overweight to run!

When I learnt about Judy I assumed she must be the reason I was accused of anorexia as well. Not so, it turned out. Anorexia was suffered by a girl called Sonia. Whenever I felt hungry it was because Sonia had turned down another meal. She was the one who the Cassel had been trying to feed eggs.

The bigger picture is so much clearer. It’s just such a shame the others couldn’t see it. What often used to happen was that Sonia would appear and reject her food – then she’d disappear. So, as far as she was concerned, she was not eating. She might make a big fuss of this and leave the room, anything.

But Judy would appear and she would devour everything in sight, feel guilty and go and get rid of it.

If it weren’t so tragic, if it hadn’t ruined large chunks of my life, I could laugh.

Another way of understanding DID, I learnt, was to picture peeling an onion – and not just because it leaves you in tears. I’m told I could excavate layer upon layer for the rest of my life and still never reach the bottom. Living with multiple personalities is not something you just wake up fully understanding. For months, maybe years after I first accepted the diagnosis, I was still discovering new nuances, fresh areas I hadn’t considered. Infinite questions, infinite problems – some more palatable than others.

Like: sex. Men. Strangers.

The moment this aspect of a shared body occurred to me I felt such nausea I thought I would faint. It was one thing imagining poor Judy stuffing her face on the body’s behalf but this was serious. Had other people touched me without my consent?

I felt the bile rising in my throat just thinking about it. According to Dr Laine – yes – some of the older ones had been interested in having a partner and might have had physical moments.

I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me sooner. Men, strangers, touching my body, being intimate with me, doing things to me that only my lover should do – the very idea made me retch. I can understand it better now and empathise, and knowing it would have been consensual is the most important thing. But my initial reaction to hearing my body had been touched without my knowledge was instinctive.

It’s disgusting.

I still don’t know how many personalities were – or are – sexually active, although since things have calmed down a lot since I became the dominant one, I think the chances for others these days are few and far between. About five or six years ago, however, a new personality with hopes of finding a partner was discovered – quite by accident. One of Bonny’s friends had asked her why she was advertising on an internet dating site. Bonny had denied it of course, then at the first chance she’d gone to the site and clicked through the various members. To her horror there was a photograph – and the profile – of someone who could only be her. But since Bonny knew it wasn’t her, it had to be one of the personalities. At that point, I think, she went through the horrible thought that I was experiencing now – that moment when you realise someone else is using your body for sex.

Bonny had gone straight to Dr Laine, who in turn had visited the site and sent a message to the personality, called Abi, via her profile. The next day she received a wonderful reply:

‘Hello, Evelyn, thanks for getting in touch but I should make it clear – I’m looking for a man. I’m not a lesbian!’

Poor Dr Laine. She eventually managed to persuade Abi that she wasn’t a stalker and to come into one of her therapy groups, but it wasn’t easy. Abi seems headstrong, to say the least, although I know she has been given all the information she needs about DID for when she is ready to ‘hear’ it. For now, though, she doesn’t accept the diagnosis and, to be frank, that’s why I have a mistrustful feeling about her. If I’d met Abi before I learned about DID then we’d probably have gotten on like a house on fire. But I’m a mother now – and, of course, so is she. I’ve put a large part of my life on hold to concentrate on bringing up Aimee. There’s so much more to take into account with every decision than ‘do I fancy doing that?’

It took a while to come to terms with this other, physical side of my body’s life. Of all the things I’d had to contend with so far, the moment this dawned on me rocked me hardest of all. It was one thing envisioning another personality eating – as long as I was the one doing the drinking, who cares? – but another entirely to have let my body be subjected to God knows what.

I had a sudden flashback to being in a man’s flat one morning. He’d spoken as though we’d known each other and we’d arranged to meet that night. At the time I’d made my excuses and left. But now …

My God, had we just had sex?

Was it possible that another personality could have a partner I did not know about?

There are only so many times your head can spin. I sat on the floor, beaten and hurt, and picked through the mess. How I wanted to scrub every inch of my body. To sand my tongue, disinfect my skin and spit out every last drop of moisture from my mouth.

What good would it do?

I realised it wasn’t just my problem. It was the body’s problem.
Our
problem.

After months of resistance I obviously began to embrace the truth. I didn’t notice it happen, but suddenly I was talking about my body as ‘our body’, and myself as ‘us’. It wasn’t planned, it just happened. Gradually, I was joining my other selves. I was accepting them.

By accepting them, however, I had to accept certain other things. And how I wish I never had.

It was Hayley who had gotten us the driving job. For all I know it was her who had passed the driving test – I’d never taken a proper lesson. She was the one who applied, using the Green Card, took the interview and was handed the company uniform. She was the personality who dragged us out every morning and, I assume, did most of the work. I say ‘assume’ because at this point I didn’t know better. I knew from Dr Laine that it wasn’t Bonny and it certainly wasn’t me. I popped up for the fun times – I wasn’t dumb.

There could have been other personalities, Dr Laine told me. At this stage she hadn’t met many. Of the ones who had made themselves known, several were children and incapable of driving.

Of course, even those who could drive had their moments. Our car crash – the episode where I’d been told I’d crashed into five parked cars – that was Julie. As far as we know, Julie had never tried to drive before. (Nor has she since – the body won’t let a non-driver have control of a vehicle.) But for that moment Julie had believed car number plates were communicating with her. She believed TV antennae were beaming her instructions.

And she truly believed she could steer with her eyes closed.

Julie was the reason we were diagnosed with schizophrenia. I don’t know if she suffered from this or not. Most likely she was just scared and confused – her mind didn’t protect her from the blackouts as well as mine had. Whereas I had come up with the catch-all defence of alcoholism, hers had gone for a more extreme – and dangerous – option.

Learning about Julie I discovered things I’d never known. Crashing the van hadn’t been the end of her adventures. Travelling on a bus one day she’d pulled out a canister of fly spray and started showering the other passengers in insect-killer. She honestly thought they were in danger of being stung. From what, who knows?

It’s funny to recall that now. It has nothing to do with my life – I may as well be reading about a boy in Berlin doing it, that’s how much of an impact it has on me. And yet, it was our body that did it. There were people terrified out of their minds because of things we did. That doesn’t feel nice. What if I ever run into one of those travellers? You wouldn’t blame them if they got some revenge, would you?

You might think that what happened to Julie, and the things that she made happen to us, should have had a greater impact on me. That would make sense. It’s the same body, after all.

The truth is, my alter egos and I may as well be on opposite sides of the Earth for all the influence we have on each other. I know that my car crash would have befuddled the others. I was the one who suffered the collision, who injured my arm and face. My alters would have had to explain those pains away to others and themselves just as I’d done so many times.

The greatest impact my alters’ behaviour had on me was not in the acts themselves but in the telling. And some of those tales I just was not prepared for. Opening my mind to DID was like opening Pandora’s box. The demons that emerge could not be put back again. They were out forever.

Success at the driving job that Hayley had fought so hard to win had seen us promoted to an office position. I remembered working that out when I found myself at a desk.

What I never worked out was what had happened to make work so difficult.

Hayley had informed police of being a witness to a recording of a film involving child pornography. I read all of this years later in police papers. I could barely comprehend the words.

For the first time I cursed my DID. How dare it let me witness something so hideous and let me do nothing about it.

Perhaps if I had stepped forward then I wouldn’t be here now to tell the tale. By blowing the whistle on this depraved paedophile ring, Hayley had angered some very dangerous people, people in authority who had too much to lose to go quietly. As the court case drew closer, the suspects’ acquaintances were getting more and more desperate that we shouldn’t testify. I couldn’t believe how far they were prepared to go: one day we’d been attacked on our way home from work, resulting in a black eye and twisted arm.

That was nothing. Our local newspaper received threats for giving the case coverage. Other witnesses were cowed into walking away. Hayley had refused – and we had all paid the price.

One day she had answered the front door at home to be met by a man holding something. As soon as the man was confident it was us, he’d thrown something into our face. It was acid. I can’t imagine anything worse. Obviously we ran inside and threw water over our face but the damage was done. To this day I still have papery-thin skin as a consequence. I’m lucky to have any face left at all.

On hearing this, part of me wanted to just scream, ‘Stop making this up!’ It was too horrific to be true.

It sounds like something from a crime novel.

But I remembered the long blackouts from about that time. I remembered discovering my face was a giant scab and not daring to look in the mirror, not daring to enquire why lest I discovered something I didn’t want to. I remembered all that and knew it was true.

That, however, had only been an attempt at intimidation. Our assailants’ next move was designed to shut us up once and for all.

It was a Saturday night, early 1995. Hayley was at home alone. It must have been late because she was in bed, sound asleep. It was the dampness that woke her, from deep sleep to deep discomfort in seconds. Then as she roused, the unmistakeable stench of petrol assaulted her senses. That was what was soaking through her duvet.

Then she saw the man standing at the foot of her bed. It was so unreal, she couldn’t move. Not when he struck a match, not when he flung the flickering flame towards her bed, not even as he thundered back out of the room. Only as the match hit the duvet and burst into a terrifying ball of fire did Hayley leap out of bed.

What to do now? Hayley was frozen with fear. The man might be out there on the landing. Could she risk it? Then the heat from the fire told her she had no choice. A crack of wood splitting in the darkness sent her diving out of the room. By the time her television exploded against the wall, she was tugging at the front door, which slammed shut immediately afterwards – trapping our dog, poor Alfie, inside.

Firemen later revealed the man had broken in via the back door. More importantly, they rescued Alfie. In the end no one had been injured although the house would take months to fix.

It was a horrific tale, made worse by the later discovery that the police had eventually dropped the case – due to evidence going missing and witnesses changing their stories. All that suffering for nothing. Whatever the outcome, though, hearing it was like being told it had happened to a friend of a friend. The thing that connected most with me was the memory of the charred house. All our clothes had been destroyed and we’d been forced to flee to, first, the women’s shelter and then Arbours. At least now I knew why.

Thanks to my mind’s unique defence mechanism, I’d missed the abuse of our body and at least two murder attempts. Believe it or not, however, that wasn’t the worst of it.

Although I’d gotten to the bottom of the anorexia accusations, I realised there were several other loose ends as far as my hospital history was concerned. I didn’t know why it took me so long to ask about it – although obviously it was that self-defence mechanism again – but one day it suddenly came to me: