Can't Anyone Help Me? (9 page)

It was not much longer before they found me hunched in a corner of my bedroom, thumb in mouth, eyes tightly shut, rocking back and forth.

They called to me, but I didn’t hear them. They touched me and my eyes flew open as I cringed away from them. But, locked in another world, I stared blankly into space.

At school things were no better. The headmistress contacted my mother to tell her that again I had run out of the classroom, screaming with rage, and thrown myself against the outside wall. When, fearing I would hurt myself, the teachers had tried to restrain me, I had hit out furiously at them until my panic was spent.

When I was picked up and carried to the headmistress’s office, I started to cry, that long, high-pitched, desolate wailing, continuous and piercing. And even when I had calmed down there was, my parents were told, a detachment about me, as though I did not recognize either my surroundings or who was with me. There was talk then that maybe another school, one that catered for problem children in a residential environment, might be better for me. But my mother, unable to accept the stigma of an unstable daughter, had persuaded the school that I should stay at home.

Another visit to the psychologist followed, but again no conclusions were reached as to
why
my behaviour had deteriorated to such an extent. ‘Regression,’ they said, but they were wrong: it was not as simple as that, for I had no memory of those brief times when I became my toddler self. I read about it much later when the psychiatrists helped me understand my condition and what had happened. I had not just regressed: I was conjuring up the toddler I had been before everything that happened, happened. And once I had done that, I felt safe and could slip back into being her.

It must have been around then that my mother started to question if I was ever going to get better. I sensed fear in her – fear of my actions and fear of the disgrace that a mentally ill child might bring to her family and her own standing in the community.

But even she could not visualize exactly what the following years would make me capable of.

My mother, I knew, looked forward to the weekends when the house no longer rang with my tantrums and despair. Uncle was so kind, so good and so helpful, she told me. And every Friday she and I waited for the person who still said he loved me to come and take me away.

It was then, faced with my mother’s despair, the school’s opinions and the inability of the psychologists to diagnose me, that my father decided they should take me away. Then perhaps something might change.

‘We’re going to northern Spain for our summer holiday,’ he announced, a few days before school was due to break up. He had bought a cottage there after falling in love with the area on one of his many business trips.

Not for him an apartment near the popular beach areas, which were only just beginning to be fashionable, but a large old stone
finca
where lemons and avocados grew in the garden.

‘The real Spain,’ he said.

I had already gleaned from conversations I had overheard that my mother was disappointed at not being near the beach.

‘Oh, Dora, you wouldn’t like it there. Where there are decent beaches there are tourists all summer long. Cheap package tours from Ireland and Manchester,’ he added, for greater emphasis, to my class-conscious mother. ‘Factory workers all booking into self-catering accommodation and bringing hordes of noisy children with them.’ My mother capitulated. ‘No, we’re going to stay in the real Spain,’ he said.

‘When are we going?’ she asked, with a smile that excluded me. ‘We have to make arrangements for Jackie.’

‘That’s the whole point, Dora. Jackie’s coming with us. This holiday is for her.’

I guessed that arrangement had not pleased my mother. From other conversations I surmised that my father thought taking me to a completely different environment for the whole of the summer might help me. That was the reason he had taken more than two months off work. Being away from home so often might be a factor in my bad behaviour and he wanted to try to help. ‘I know everything has been your responsibility, so I thought it was time for me to see what I could do for her, Dora,’ I heard my father say.

Peeping round the door, I heard my mother, with a glass of wine in her hand, say she didn’t know what she would do if this didn’t work out.

‘It’s all right for you,’ she said. ‘You’re away so much, but I’m here with her all the time. The other parents pity me. Me! There’s never been anything like this in our family.’

I heard the glug of more liquid being tipped into a glass as another drink was poured. Then her voice started to rise: ‘I just don’t know what’s wrong with her. And, what’s more, I don’t think those damn psychologists that the school keeps telling me to take her to do either. She just sits there and looks blank when they ask her questions and I can’t read her mind.’

My father made some sounds that were meant to comfort her but my mother had burst into floods of tears. ‘I just don’t know what to do any longer,’ she said.

‘She’s too young to diagnose, Dora,’ my father said quietly. ‘They’ve told us that. We can’t just give up on her.’

I knew from his tone that whatever was wrong with me was making him sad, and that worried me. I had heard the mutters at school and seen children raise a finger to the side of their heads – I knew they meant I was crazy. At six I had just known that school scared me, but as I became a little older the fear that there was something wrong in my head began to torment me.

I heard my mother protesting. That was not what she’d meant, she said, but she was at the end of her tether – more wine sloshed out of the bottle. Wine, I had learnt, was something to be drunk when an adult was at the end of her tether, or after a bad day at his office. But then again it seemed to be equally popular on evenings when everyone had a good time. It was a discrepancy that puzzled me.

‘Come on, let’s try this, Dora. Maybe if we’re all together away from here, it might help.’

‘You’re right, of course you are. I just thought a holiday without her would give me a rest.’

So she doesn’t want me to go, I thought angrily and, fearful of being caught listening, I tiptoed away.

My father waited until the next morning to tell me his news. We had finished breakfast and the plates had been cleared away. He leant forward and said, ‘Jackie, your mother and I have got something exciting to tell you.’ Pretending I knew nothing about it, I looked enquiringly at him.

‘We’re going to Spain,’ he said. ‘For the whole of your summer holidays.’

Spain was a word. That was all it meant to me at that age. But it did not take my father long to paint a picture of what it was like, and he told me how much I was going to enjoy myself.

He told me about the village where we were going – it had not changed for a hundred years – and how friendly the people who lived there were. He described the old cottage he had bought and how, from the windows, we could see the lemon groves. He talked about the mountains and the sparkling streams that ran down them and the rivers that flowed to the sea. ‘There’s even a stream running right through the land our cottage is built on and just a short distance away there’s a forest full of pine trees. The air is perfumed with their scent. We can smell it from the bedroom windows.’ He told me enthusiastically about how we were going to go on the ferry, then drive through France into Spain as soon as school broke up for the summer holidays. I could feel him trying to get a spark of interest out of me as I sat expressionless at the table.

‘We’re not going in a plane, then?’ I finally asked, because I knew some of the other children in my class had travelled to other countries in one. That was something I did think might be exciting.

He laughed. ‘No, Jackie, we’re going to drive. You’ll see a lot more that way. You only get to see clouds when you fly and a tarmac strip when you land. Remember, I do it all the time on business and it isn’t very exciting at all. Anyhow, we couldn’t take your bike on a plane, could we? And I thought you and I could do some exploring.’

‘But you haven’t got a bike,’ I said, with a child’s logic.

‘Well, Jackie, I’ll get one.’

I knew by my mother’s silence that exploring was not something she was going to join in with but, hearing my father’s words, I felt something like a warm glow. The holiday plans had captured my mother’s and my imagination and from then on my father was bombarded with questions.

‘But do they speak any English where we’re going?’ my mother asked, and was told he didn’t know because he had only spoken to them in Spanish.

My father was fluent in French and Spanish. He did business in South America, and had learnt the language from a box of self-study cassettes.

‘It’s not difficult to learn, Dora – I still have the tapes,’ he tentatively told her. Curtly she replied that she had no intention of going back to studying at her age, so she would just have to rely on him; that idea seemed to please him.

For once I looked forward to school breaking up, and the day after term ended, our large family car was loaded with cases and we were ready to set off. Shorts, sandals and cotton T-shirts, plus a couple of warm jumpers, were all we would need, my father said. But this was something that my mother appeared to have forgotten when she put her things ready to go into the car. I saw a large suitcase, a makeup bag almost as big as the case she had packed for me and a box of glossy magazines and books.

I was allowed to bring Paddington. I had been given some swimming trunks for him one birthday, and with a pair of children’s sunglasses, he was ready for a summer holiday too. I also packed his little flowered pyjamas – a duffel coat and wellington boots would be too warm in that climate.

‘Bring some books as well,’ my father had said. I brought colouring ones only – I still found reading difficult.

I have only a fuzzy image of that long drive and finally entering the village. We had stayed overnight in France, but by the time we reached the end of our journey I had fallen asleep on the back seat, surrounded by luggage.

I drowsily opened my eyes to see dark shadows move across the sky as the clouds shifted through the silvery light of the moon. It splashed on to the long, single-storey building that was going to be our home for the next few weeks. It was very silent and still. I could smell the sharp perfume of the lemon trees and the pines, as my father had promised.

He carried me inside. ‘Let’s put her straight to bed,’ he said. I heard him say softly to my mother that I’d looked so peaceful when I was asleep that he hadn’t wanted to wake me, and for once I smiled up at him and allowed myself to be carried into a bedroom.

My mother helped me pull on my nightclothes, covered me with a blanket and left me.

I woke the following morning to piercing sunlight shining through the windows and a feeling almost of well-being. Impatient to see what was outside, I leant out of the window to inspect my new surroundings.

During the night a light wind had chased away any lingering clouds, leaving a vast expanse of clear blue sky. The brightness of the morning lured me into wanting to leave the house.

I could see small trees with their bright yellow fruit, and in the distance, there were fields of lush green grass. Scattered with the red and yellow of wild flowers, they covered the ground all the way to the lower slopes of the green and grey backdrop of the mountain range.

The morning warmth and the view from my window began to uncoil the knots of fear that constantly tightened in my stomach. The remnants of the nightmares disappeared as I pushed the window wider and breathed in the smells of jasmine, pine and fresh air. Suddenly the sunlit morning whispered to me of being a free child again – of playing in those fields and of not being afraid.

My father came into my room, smiling to see me enjoying the view. He told me to get dressed, and that as soon as I had had breakfast, he was taking me to buy groceries while my mother had a lie-in.

We walked down a path that took us through the orchard of lemon trees to the village, which was just a few cobbled streets lined with whitewashed houses. It was so different from our village, with its stone houses where net curtains hid the interiors from view. Here, window-boxes, blazing with bright pink and red geraniums, adorned every freshly painted sill. The combined scent of garlic, herbs, freshly baked bread and coffee floated out of every kitchen.

All around us I could hear speech I couldn’t understand. Round-hipped matrons chatted in the streets as their children played with homemade toys. Old women sat in open doorways, their legs hidden by long black skirts, knitting needles clicking as busy fingers turned balls of soft wool into garments. Their faces broke into smiles as they saw us. ‘
Hola
,’ they said, and my father smiled back as he greeted them in the same language.

We stopped at the bakery and bought rolls, then walked on to another shop where my father piled his basket high with spicy chorizo sausage, thick slices of ham and a dozen freshly laid eggs. Then he took me to a small café. ‘We can have our morning coffee together, Jackie,’ he said, and I rewarded him with a sudden smile.

‘Dos café con leche, por favor
,’ he said to the man who came out to greet us.

‘What’s that mean?’ I asked.

‘Oh, nothing complicated,’ he said. ‘I just ordered two white coffees. I think you’re old enough to try coffee, don’t you?’ And sitting outside at the small pavement café, with the already hot sun high overhead, my father beside me in an open-neck shirt and denim jeans, I drank my first ever cup of the strong milky brew. With each sip, I thought I had never tasted anything so delicious.