Can't Anyone Help Me?
Read Can't Anyone Help Me? Online
Authors: Toni Maguire
JACKIE HOLMES WITH TONI MAGUIRE
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London
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, England
First published 2011
Copyright © Jackie Holmes and Toni Maguire, 2011
All rights reserved
The moral right of the authors has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-196673-1
When I wrote my own story,
Don’t Tell Mummy
,
I thought there couldn’t be one that was worse. Sadly, I was wrong. Since I wrote it, I have had many letters and emails telling me of distressing, damaged childhoods. Three of them I turned into books.
But nothing had prepared me for Jackie’s story. When I received her email telling me the bare facts of her past, I was more than just upset. Horrified, moved – there are no adequate words to describe what I felt.
Phone calls followed and several emails, and a few months after the initial correspondence, Penguin agreed to publish her story. I caught a train to the north of England to meet her.
She was waiting for me at the station, a small, pretty woman with bright blue eyes who beamed at me as she introduced herself. I felt like hugging her. To have gone through what she had and be able to give me such a warm, welcoming smile – I was simply amazed.
That evening, armed with notebook and pen, I sat down with her to fill in the blanks that her email had not covered. It was I, not Jackie, who needed to take breaks as I listened to her story.
We spent two days together. At the end, I’d filled two notebooks, my arm ached, and I felt drained and relieved: drained from hearing more graphic descriptions of horror than I have ever written about before, and relieved that Jackie had been able to overcome the trauma of such a terrible childhood. And, above all, I admired the strength she had found to do so.
I believe that stories like this one have to be told, so that no abused person will ever feel that it only happened to them. Until children feel free to talk, and free of shame for the actions that are not of their making, child abuse will never be eradicated from our society.
So, thank you, Jackie, for being brave enough to tell me your story. You are truly remarkable and I hope I have done it justice.
Toni Maguire
An image has haunted me for thirty years. It comes to me when I am only half awake and have no control over my thoughts. But it also surfaces when I am eating, watching television, or drifting off into what I hope will be a dreamless sleep.
It is of a room where a small naked child is standing. She is so still and quiet, that little girl, so dazed. I know she is trying to think of something, anything, that will take her away from the bleak space where she is trapped. Outside the sun is shining, its warmth penetrating the brick walls of that room, but still she is shivering. She wraps her arms around her small body, raises her bony shoulders so they are almost touching her ears as she waits for what she knows is to come. For a few moments all she can hear is the pounding of her heart. Then the silence is broken by the sound she has grown to hate.
Click-click, it goes, followed by a flash that illuminates the room, exposing its bare walls and ugly metal chairs.
The little girl squeezes her eyes shut against the sudden glare.
‘Open your eyes, Jackie. Open them wide for Uncle,’ says the voice she recognizes. Knowing what she will see, the child unwillingly obeys and finds she is looking into the cold, blank eye of the camera’s lens.
Over the years that spanned the time I have always called ‘when everything that happened, happened’, she has called out to me, asking for help – but, in denial of what I see, I have always tried to push aside her desperate need.
There are other pictures and memories that try to follow, but when the first comes I stop them in their tracks.
Except when I’m unable to.
There must, I think, have been times when I was a happy child. One who chortled with glee when her father swung her in the air; scraped out a mixing bowl; ate a cake still warm from the oven; made an innocent wish when she’d blown out the candles on a birthday cake; built sandcastles on the beach; hung up a stocking for Santa; helped put up decorations at Christmas and squealed with childish joy on opening a brightly wrapped present. My mother told me there were times like that, but I cannot remember them.
I visit friends with small children, hear the sounds that are the essence of a happy home: children’s spontaneous laughter, voices calling out to one another, morning sounds of teeth being scrubbed behind the bathroom door, and favourite songs sung softly along with the radio. Then I wonder if, once, my home had been like that too.
I watch curiously the joy on a toddler’s face when he or she takes their first steps, and the trust of a child who has fallen, raising their arms to be picked up and kissed better by a loving parent. I see the special smiles that mothers bestow on their children who, having known nothing but love, smile radiantly back. Was I ever a child like that? Somehow, I don’t think I was.
I want to think that as a baby my world was a warm, safe place where, lulled by my mother’s voice during the day, I felt loved and secure. And at night, when I slipped into sleep, it was perhaps to the silvery notes of the mobile that hung over my cot. There is something in me that needs to imagine that my sleep was dreamless, content. I hope that my mother cuddled me as she cooed into my little pink ears before placing me in the cot. But however hard I try to conjure that image, it evades me for, of course, I cannot remember as far back as that.
Often I try to peer through the tiny peephole in time to the years before I was five, when the bad things started, for a flash of my innocent past. Sometimes a memory I haven’t managed to suppress emerges and what I see makes a little sense. At other times it is too painful for me to give it more than a hasty glance before, cowardly, I push it away.
At night, dreams of hazy images or of darkness, with a feeling of being out of control, drift into my subconscious and force me awake. Those frighten me but there is one that is worse than all the others: the one that has come time after time for as long as I can remember; the one whose tendrils cling to me even after I have woken.
In that dream, there is a small child. I cannot see her tiny figure, only feel her presence. She is in a windowless room where she knows there is a door, but she cannot see it for the darkness has blinded her. Round and round she runs, her hands outstretched as, scrabbling at the walls, her fingers search desperately for a smooth surface or a crack where that door must be. She knows that if she fails to find it, something terrible will happen.
In my sleep, her panic and terror transmit themselves to me and I feel what she feels. I sense that someone else is there, someone intent on destroying her. Terrified, I open my mouth to scream. It is then that cold hands cover my mouth, smothering the sound. There is a weight pressing against my throat and I cannot breathe. Choking, I writhe with the effort of gasping for air. I hear a voice calling my name – and then I’m back in my brightly lit bedroom: in my house the lights always remain on. But still I clutch at my bedding as my mouth fills with that thick sour taste: the terrible taste of my childhood.
My eyes dart around the familiar surroundings and, for a few seconds, I fear that the creature that lived in my nightmare has followed me. But the bedside light illuminates every corner of the room and I see that it is empty – but even then I am not reassured.
