Can't Anyone Help Me? (14 page)

There was always the bright light, which caused her uncle and the camera to merge and become one menacing, misshapen shadow, and the men who twisted her body into whatever position they wanted before forcing that thing into either her mouth or between her legs. And all the time she lay there silently, not protesting. Of course I could feel it inside me, but I was separate from what was taking place.

There were the men who eagerly swapped places and took their turn behind the camera, snapping photos. Then it was their chance to be the observer, the one who watched through the blinking eye of the lens. Some of them I grew to recognize, for they visited several times; others came once, then disappeared. I would like to think that perhaps my body had reminded them too much of a loved daughter or grandchild, and shame had driven them away. But in fact I believe they moved on to pastures new.

Then there were the occasions when, with a new device my uncle had purchased, the camera could be operated remotely and closer to where I was lying. That was when he was asked to join in, which he rarely refused to do.

It was a few months after my eleventh birthday that my periods started and my body began to change. My uncle began to lose interest. However, my new shape had the opposite effect on some of his ‘friends’. They came to his house when his wife was at work, men I had not seen before.

There were the ones whose guilty eyes avoided mine. They did what they did, finished quickly with me, said little, dressed hurriedly, and left. While some leered at my nakedness. And then there were the others, hard-faced men who handed over the cash and demanded speedy delivery from my uncle’s darkroom, stating that they had clients waiting for the latest pictures.

Sometimes they were finished within a few minutes, but however long they took, they were never in that room longer than an hour. But I talk as though their pleasure only lasted while they were there. The photographs extended it for days or even weeks, until the men came back for more.

It was those pictures, hidden in dark, secret places, of themselves or another man abusing a child, which enabled them to play out their fantasies or relive that illicit time. It was the thought of those men relishing every detail in private, as much as what they had done to me, that caused my worst nightmares. Looking at those sordid pictures, they could again feel the excitement of being completely in control and of wielding their power over a person too small to fight back. Instead that child could only turn a frightened face to their tormentor: they knew there was no escape and no one to turn to.

I learnt over the time I spent with my uncle that the men who molest children fall into two categories. Some have the arrogant belief that the children, however much they deny it, like what is being done to them. They watch a small crumpled form crying, hear the protests and the whimpers, yet still they want to believe that three-, four-, five-, six- and seven-year-olds have dormant sexual feelings hidden in their defenceless bodies. When those men look in the mirror, the reflection they see is not of an evil man, but of a man who loves children and whom children love. That man manipulates his victims by brainwashing them into believing that what has been done to them was partly of their own making. It is never ‘my’ secret when he tells the child to be quiet, but ‘ours’. Never him who would get into trouble, but ‘we’. He plays on a child’s emotions and gains acquiescence with barely disguised threats and reassurances of love. My uncle was such a man.

The second type sees children as having been put into the world purely for his pleasure. With crafty, calculating knowledge, he understands that a child who is merely made to feel pain might talk. But when the humiliation is so complete, a small child’s agony is overridden by shame. Then that man knows the child never will say anything.

The Chubbys of this world belonged to the second type and, at eleven, I was to meet the worst of them.

There had been occasions when two men had performed sexual acts on me at the same time, and there had been times when pain was inflicted clumsily. But as my body started to develop, my uncle decided to add another dimension to what he would allow.

This time, a group of four men rang the bell. Earlier he had turned the settee into a bed that dominated the workroom so I knew he was expecting company. He had given me the drink that made everything hazy before he led them into the room. I could hear them talking in the hall, rough, deep male voices that sounded more businesslike than excited.

As they entered I made that part of myself, the part of me that they could never touch, leave my body. Almost devoid of feeling, I rested somewhere above them, watching as they spoke to the young girl sitting on the bed. I could not make out the words and when they did not receive a reply, they ordered her to remove her clothes. She swayed slightly as she stood up and undressed, but no gentle hand steadied her. That group just watched through narrowed eyes.

I could see her long plait hanging down her back, her slight shoulders hunched, the beginning of tiny breasts, still not large enough for a teenage bra but showing all the same, and a white, white face wiped clean of any trace of animation or even apparent awareness of what was happening to her.

She laid her jeans and T-shirt over a stool, then sat down again on the bed-settee, where she thought they wanted her.

‘Not there,’ said one. ‘Move, girl.’ He pointed with a nicotine-stained finger to a hard wooden chair. Dazed, she looked at him, as though the words made little sense. With an impatient snort he yanked her to her feet and sat her down by pushing her shoulders hard so that the bottom of her spine crashed against the seat. Before she could realize what was happening, another man had pulled her arms back and tied them behind her. Her head flopped to one side with dizziness as the men circled their captive. She was not fully developed, that girl, but already her waist tapered above her small sharp hip bones and her skin stretched tautly across her stomach. I could see a faint shadow between her legs, proclaiming that her body was changing from child to woman as, wraithlike and invisible to them, I watched those men and observed from above what they did to her.

Large rough hands stroked those small budding breasts, then one squeezed her nipple hard. The sudden pain made her body twitch and a faint groan escaped from her pale lips. They smiled then, gloating, leering smiles.

They took out bulldog clips, the big ones used for keeping piles of paper tidy, placed them on those tiny breasts and, forcing her legs apart, somewhere between her legs. I knew they were hurting her for I also felt a sharp stabbing pain shoot through my body, as though in sympathy with what she was enduring. Her eyes closed, but behind her lids I saw them fluttering.

They had oral sex with her. With as much care as a man urinating, they unzipped their trousers, held her head and jerked their fluids into her mouth, but still she did not stir. Then, bored with her passivity, they wanted something else.

They untied her, threw her on the bed and climbed on top of her.

Two of them could not get a second erection and, watching, I breathed a sigh of relief, for those men were big. I thought then that if all of them stuck those purple engorged things in her they might damage her small frame beyond repair. It was the third, who I saw had become rock hard, who suddenly flipped her over, spread her slender child-legs wide, then entered her.

I think I lost consciousness then. I felt that unimaginable pain going through her body and I knew flecks of blood were spotting the tops of her legs. I saw her struggle to regain awareness, but her eyes as they flickered open were dull from whatever had been given to her. She watched as the men zipped themselves up and straightened their clothes and she saw the thick wad of money passed to her uncle.

I felt no pity for the girl and the pain I knew she was suffering. Instead it was anger that coursed through me; anger not at the men or even the man who had once professed to love her, but at the girl and her acquiescence. How could she have just accepted what had happened without putting up any resistance?

She was calling me back to re-enter her body; the body that was so dirty, so defiled. I wanted to stay where I was, in the air, looking down, but a stronger force compelled me to return.

That was nearly the end of the first part of my story, the one I waited more than twenty years to tell.

‘It wasn’t then,’ I said to the woman sitting quietly opposite me. ‘It should have been, but it wasn’t then that my uncle lost me, lost his control over me. It was a few weeks later.’

‘Take your time, Jackie. When you’re ready, tell me what happened next,’ said the sympathetic voice of the person from whom I had been seeking help.

I paused, for it was that part more than any other that still fills me with shame and had finally driven me to seek professional help. I needed the movie in my head to stop. It played continuously, on a loop. The characters were the child, my teenage self and many others. The therapist waited patiently, as she always did, for me to continue, understanding what it must have cost to reveal that part of me.

‘That was the day I met the man,’ I said haltingly, my voice barely a whisper. ‘The one my uncle was afraid of. He had a whip. He wanted to lash me with it, I knew that. But it was the other strap he carried that frightened me even more, for that was the one he would tie round my neck. The one he would pull tighter and tighter to cut off my air while he had sex with me. In the photos it would look as though I was dying, and I was scared then that I might. Might die, I mean.’

Years had passed since that day, but my body still shook at the memory and my voice dropped until I was mumbling so quietly that, even leaning forward, she struggled to hear me. I felt the old shame again, not the emotion where heat flushing through the body sends a telltale crimson wave to stain the face, but a blackness I wanted to disappear into. Not wishing to meet her eyes, I averted my head, but she wasn’t going to allow me to avoid her.

‘And then, Jackie? Tell me what happened then,’ she said, more urgently, perhaps sensing a breakthrough in my therapy.

I gulped, dug my nails into my hands and, for the first time, I was able to blurt out what I had wanted to say for so long.

‘I climbed off that bed,’ I said, in a loud, determined voice, ‘grabbed the whip, tore it out of his hands. Yes, I stopped him. And then – then I just walked out of the room.’

‘Very good, Jackie,’ she said, and smiled warmly at me. ‘You’re progressing.’

It was two years since I had started therapy. Two years in which, gradually, my life had, like a huge tangle of knotted string, been unwound, strand by strand, and examined. Over that time I had begun to cover each scene in the film of my past with a new one: one in which I was the winner.

It was only when that was done that I had the power to look again at the truth and deal with it.

It was when I came to understand that the memories of my past had become too much for me to carry any longer that I had decided to seek out a therapist. I was an adult, and I looked for the right person as selectively as another woman might have looked for a lover.

When I finally found her she did not try to allay my fears that she would be the same as the others I had met. Instead she said, ‘Let’s just take it one session at a time, Jackie,’ and I had agreed. Each week I turned up and revealed to her, piece by piece, those parts of my life that I had been unable to deal with.

To begin with there were times when I could tell her no more than what could be contained in a few short sentences. When you have been so down, so destroyed, you are careful. Talk, yes, that’s allowed, but always with a little bit held back. The little bit that might just expose the real person hiding behind the mask. It takes both time and courage to allow all defences to be stripped away until what is left behind is just a vulnerable, needy person. The therapist, understanding that, had made no demands. She just waited for me to trust her enough to allow her to help.

It had taken nearly a hundred visits before I could tell her the new version of what happened when I met the man with the whip.

By then she had learnt nearly everything there was to know about me. Every week she had sat calmly in her chair while I stumbled over the randomly selected sections of my story that I felt I could talk about that day.

Her questions were always small ones, for it was me who had to talk, not her, and me who had to come to my own conclusions. Her job was only to lead me to the place where I could do that.

But I knew that there were parts of my story that she couldn’t leave in her file when she went home: the parts that had moved her. It was then that she would fire an unexpected question, and her eyes betrayed the compassion behind her professionalism.

She knew without me telling her again what had really happened on the day I broke free from my uncle, for I had already told her.

It was when he brought the whip man round, the man he was scared of, that my ties with my uncle were finally severed.

What was so frightening about that man? I don’t know. It was just that, on seeing him, my legs turned to jelly and my body shook. There was nothing outstanding about how he looked. He was of average height and average appearance. He was a nondescript man – if I had passed him in the street, he would have gone unnoticed.

Maybe it was his aura of coldness. With him there was not even a hint that he was in that room for anything other than the reason he gave. But even that seemed different: there was no furtive excitement about him. He handed my uncle money, not discreetly as the others did, so I wouldn’t see it, but as though I was of no importance at all. ‘Get undressed,’ he ordered.