I Remember, Daddy (12 page)

One of the men who came to stay at the house for a few days was a man called Bernard, a friend of my father who I couldn’t stand. He was an alcoholic – like most of my father’s friends – and it was alcohol that killed him not long afterwards. In fact, the only ‘normal’ people staying there were a very nice elderly couple, who seemed a bit overwhelmed by it all and who went to bed early every night. Everyone else was loud, self-absorbed, chauvinistic and just vile.

One evening, when I was having a bath, three of my father’s friends broke down the door and came crashing into the bathroom, drunk and giggling like schoolboys. I screamed and tried to cover myself with my arms, shouting at them to get out. And eventually, still laughing and cracking lewd jokes, they left, stumbling and falling over each other as they staggered out through the doorway. I was 18 years old and the men were in their forties and fifties, at least; but, afterwards, it was me my father was furious with.

‘These are my guests,’ he bellowed at me. ‘How dare you complain about them? You will do whatever they want you to do. Do you understand?’

Basically, what my father was telling me was that if any of his friends wanted to sleep with me, it was not only okay with him, but he’d actually be angry if I refused. It was several years before I was to remember what he’d allowed – and encouraged – his friends to do to me as a child, so I was totally shocked by what he was saying. But I was too frightened of him to argue. Instead, I made a silent promise to myself that I would never, ever, let any of his disgusting drunken friends lay their hands on me, however angry that might make him.

It soon became clear that there was one particular man my father was trying to pair me off with. His name was Tony and he was in his forties, rich and ugly. It was obvious he liked me, and one evening at dinner my father told him, conversationally, ‘You know, you can have my daughter if you want her. It’s fine with me.’ He was completely serious, and Tony was delighted as he turned to leer at me drunkenly and said, ‘Ooh, yes please!’

I stared back at him coldly as I muttered, ‘I don’t think so,’ and the men around the dinner table laughed. Later, though, my father followed me out into the kitchen, leaned towards me until his face was just a couple of inches away from mine and hissed, ‘You’ll bloody well do whatever it takes to please Tony.’

It was the way he’d always treated me: I didn’t matter, and what I wanted didn’t matter, because the only thing that was important was what my father wanted. As he stood there, breathing alcohol fumes into my face, I felt my heart sink, because I knew that I was still too afraid of him to fight back. Fortunately, though, I was saved from being prostituted out to my father’s friend by another man I met while I was staying in the house – a German called Karl.

Unlike my father’s sleazy friend Tony, Karl was lovely. And because he was rich and well connected, my father allowed him to come to the house to ‘court’ me, as he called it, and to take me out for walks. Karl really was a nice man, and as we talked and laughed together, I felt grateful to have someone to keep me company who wasn’t one of my father’s old drunken friends.

During that week, we’d sometimes all go out to restaurants, and at the end of the meal my father would pick up the bill. He never had bank accounts – or, at least, the money he used for day-to-day expenses, which had been paid to him in cash, never went into a bank account. Gillian used to carry around for him in her handbag a large padded envelope full of £50 notes, and sometimes it would be tossed casually on to a table and he’d wave his hand towards it and tell me, ‘Help yourself. Take what you want. Go and buy some champagne.’ But he only ever did it to show off when someone else was there, because in reality he never gave me anything. In restaurants, though, he’d put his hand into the envelope and start pulling out notes to pay the bill, and on at least a couple of occasions during that week he happily paid £600 or more for everyone’s meal – which was a lot of money in the early 1980s. And then all his friends laughed and raised their glasses to drink his very good health.

The only effect his ostentatious open-handedness had on me, however, was to make me feel irritated and resentful, because when I was a child and my mother couldn’t afford to buy me clothes, he wouldn’t even give her enough money to pay for a pair of shoes for me. And, a couple of years after that ‘holiday’, when I was destitute and asked him for £20, he refused to help me and shouted at me, ‘I have no money.’ To him, money was the means of getting what he wanted, as well as a reason for his friends – and total strangers – to admire him. So what was the point of giving it to his daughter when there was no one there to witness his generosity?

My father didn’t watch much of the cricket during that week – and nor did most of the people who stayed with us. It was really just an excuse for him to be seen to be the host of lavish entertainment.

Everyone drank champagne, so I drank it too and my father seemed happy for me to do so. Then, one evening we went to a pub and he told me to sit outside.

‘But, Dad,’ I told him, ‘I’m 18. It’s okay. I can go inside a pub.’

‘No,’ he said, in the sort of firm, clear voice you might use to instruct a potentially naughty child. He pointed towards a table and a solitary seat in the garden. ‘You will sit there until we come out.’

Like most of the things he did, it was designed to control and humiliate me, and I knew there was no point arguing. So I sat alone in the pub garden, waiting and wondering why I’d ever thought anything would have changed.

Over the next few months, as my father acknowledged his true relationship with Gillian, he gradually re-modelled her in the image of my mother – with short, sculpted, chestnut-brown hair (dyed, in Gillian’s case), smart, well-cut clothes and understated but expensive jewellery. Gillian was young and quite attractive, and I simply couldn’t see what she saw in my father. So, one day, I asked her. She looked terrified and glanced anxiously behind her as though she was afraid we might be overheard. Then she just shrugged and changed the subject.

I suppose, though, that he could be charming and good company when he wanted to be, and he had money, which meant she was leading a life she couldn’t otherwise have afforded – living in a lovely home, eating meals at good restaurants, holidaying in expensive hotels and rubbing shoulders with some of the city’s most influential men. Perhaps, in exchange for all that, she was prepared to put up with my father’s bullying and depravity – although, to me, it seemed to be far too high a price to pay, whatever the perceived rewards. But maybe she’d already heard the door of the trap snap shut behind her and felt unable to get out. Or maybe she simply loved him and, like my mother had done for so many years, felt that one day, if she tried hard enough, she might actually please him.

I didn’t see my father very often after that week I spent with him and Gillian and all his drunken friends. In fact, the next time I saw him was a few months later, when I was working in a bar in town and he came in one evening and asked if a friend of his was already there. He spoke to me as though I was a total stranger, and I realised he hadn’t recognised me – or perhaps he was just pretending not to have done so, for some stupid, theatrically childish reason of his own.

‘Dad, it’s me!’ I said, trying not to sound irritated. ‘Your daughter.’

He looked at me, raised his eyebrows and shrugged as he said, ‘Oh, yes … Well, is he here?’

I was hurt, even though part of me realised he’d said it for dramatic effect and because he enjoyed being spiteful. I always felt as though I had to try to prove myself to him, to show him I wasn’t the useless failure and waste of space who couldn’t do anything right that he’d always told me I was when I was a child. I always hoped that one day he’d notice me and like me. It was never going to happen; but it was that same need to prove myself that eventually became the driving force behind my success at work.

Working in the bar was just a stopgap, to earn some extra money. I also had a job as a junior assistant in a shop, and within a couple of years I’d become its manager. With an annual salary of £7,000 – which was good money at the time – I was able to buy my first flat when I was 21.

But, however well I did, I still felt like an imposter – as though I was acting the part of someone who had a good job and their own home, while in reality I was waiting for the inevitable moment when something would happen to make everything come crashing down around my ears.

Very occasionally after I bought the flat, my father would make contact with me, and one day he came to see me and noticed a bill that was open on my kitchen table.

‘What’s this?’ he asked, picking it up and glaring at it.

‘It’s a bill from my solicitor – to do with buying the flat,’ I told him.

‘Why haven’t you bloody paid it?’ he shouted, flap-ping it in front of my face angrily. ‘I’m not just anybody, you know. I’ve got a reputation in this town, and I can’t have my daughter owing money to solicitors.’

‘I don’t owe money to solicitors,’ I snapped, reaching out to try to take the bill out of his hand. ‘I owe one solicitor £400, which I’m going to pay as soon as I can. I just don’t have it right at this particular moment.’

Still holding the bill, he stomped into the living room and picked up the telephone, and a few seconds later I heard him say, ‘Oh, yes, good morning. This is Harold Matthews. My daughter Katherine is a client of yours. Yes, that’s right. Well, I’ve just discovered she has an outstanding bill with you and I wanted to assure you that it will be paid. I’ll be paying it myself, within the next few days.’

And he did pay that bill. He hadn’t been able to give me £20 when I’d asked him to help me out; he hadn’t given my mother money to house, feed and clothe me when I was a child; but he managed to pay my £400 solicitor’s bill. And he did it because he knew the solicitor – or, at least, knew of him – and, more importantly, because he thought that the solicitor would know about him, and he was anxious not to sully his own carefully cultivated reputation as an affluent local businessman and pillar of society.

My father knew a lot of people, including almost everyone of any consequence in the city. To his friends and colleagues, he was ‘good old Harry’, fun, witty and good company, and he could certainly captivate people with his eccentric charm and entertaining stories. But what they never saw were his outbursts of rage and his apparent need to lash out and hurt the people who should have been closest to him, and who he should have done almost anything to protect.

Lots of my father’s clients – and friends – were crooks and criminals, whose backhanders and dubious under-the-table payments filled and refilled his padded envelope many times over. To my father, almost everything in life was just a game. All that really mattered to him was feeling that he was someone – someone important and significant and cleverer than everyone else. And I suppose, in some respects, that’s what he was, and that’s why he got away with so much for so long, and why still, to this day, he hasn’t had to answer for the many dishonest and terrible things he’s done.

Unlike my father, though, I was determined to make my way in life honestly and without cheating, so that I could feel proud of anything I managed to achieve. Unfortunately, however, although I was doing well at work, I’d been too emotionally damaged by what my father had done to me to be able to have the same success in my love life.

I was with one boyfriend – my first love – for almost three years. But he cheated on me repeatedly, telling me that I was frigid and that because I wasn’t always willing, he had to satisfy his sexual needs with someone else. And it was true that, for reasons I didn’t understand at the time, I didn’t really want to have sex. When that relationship broke up, I started going out with Dale. We got engaged almost immediately and were together for six months; and then I was with Mickey for a year.

I was looking for something, although I didn’t know what it was, and every time I thought I’d found it, I’d fool myself into believing I was happy. Then, after a while, it would all go wrong again and I’d be heartbroken. I desperately wanted to be loved, but if someone did seem to love me, it just proved that they didn’t really know me, because I knew I was unlovable.

I seemed to be constantly on edge, always waiting, and never able to relax and accept things as they were. I never knew why I felt like that, or what it was I was waiting for. Perhaps it was just the inevitable effect of having spent almost every minute of my childhood anxiously anticipating the next frightening thing that was going to happen.

Looking back on it now, it was a miracle I was able to find anyone who was prepared to go out with me at all! But when I met Tom, who was patient and good to me, and who loved me and was my best friend, I knew I’d found the person I wanted to be with for ever. And then Sam was born and I began to remember the terrible things my father had done to me when I was a child, and my life fell apart.

I
’d been very ill after Sam was born. Nothing could erase the horror of the things I’d been remembering; but knowing that the psychiatrist believed them did help me in my battle to sort out what was real and what wasn’t in the peculiar Alice-in-Wonderland world I seemed to have woken up in

Even when I left the hospital, after being there for six months, no one was under any illusion that I was really well again. I knew that recovering was going to be a long, slow process, although I had no idea just how long it was actually going to take.

However, I was better than I had been, although I wasn’t fit to go back to work. I was taking medication and needed a lot of support, from social services as well as from Tom, his parents, my mother and good friends like Jenny. Despite all the help I was getting, though, I was still balancing on a knife’s edge between just about coping and not coping at all.

Then, not long after Christmas, when I’d been at home for about three months, Sam was rushed into hospital with a collapsed lung and pneumonia. As I sat in the ambulance beside him, I felt as if I was in a dream, watching the events that were unfolding around me but unable to do anything or influence what was happening in any way.

The siren of the ambulance as it sped through the streets towards the hospital sounded muffled, as though it was coming from somewhere far in the distance, and I felt completely numb. I couldn’t bear to look at Sam’s waxy grey face and see his blue lips or watch his tiny fragile chest going up and down, up and down, so fast that he seemed to be panting, although he was barely taking in any air at all. The paramedic moved around him, turning dials and looking at monitors with a sombre expression on his face, while a voice in my head kept whispering, ‘Sam might die,’ and I had to grip the edge of my seat to stop myself screaming out loud.

Sam spent his first birthday in an oxygen tent, and I sat beside him throughout that day – and throughout all the other days he was in the hospital – watching helplessly as he fought for his life. I couldn’t stay with him at night, though, because I wouldn’t have been able to keep up the appearance of being normal during the night. I knew that the nurses didn’t approve when I went home; they thought I was leaving Sam alone at the hospital so that I could sleep in the comfort of my own bed. But it wasn’t that I didn’t want to be there with him, or that I didn’t care enough. It was just that I was afraid of the night-time and I knew I simply couldn’t do it. Even during the day, I constantly had to fight the urge to bawl like a baby.

It was clear that there was a very strong chance Sam was going to die, and I thought his death would be my fault. I’d always lived with a sense of guilt, for reasons I hadn’t understood until the memories of my childhood had started to return. But, instead of making it better, the things I was remembering had made it worse, and I was convinced that Sam’s death would be my punishment: bad things happen to bad people and, clearly, Sam himself wasn’t bad.

By some miracle, however, Sam survived, and as soon as I knew he was going to live, I let go and started to slip over the edge of reason again into a total breakdown.

Although I wasn’t aware of most of what I was doing at the time, people told me afterwards that I’d often appear to regress to childhood. One minute I’d be talking normally and seem fine, and then something would trigger a half-formed memory – even a smell or a word or phrase could do it – and I’d curl up in a ball on the floor in the corner of the room, or sit on the sofa with my knees clutched tightly against my chest, rocking backwards and forwards and talking baby-talk in an eerily childish voice.

All I was aware of was that I was frightened. I knew I had to try to protect myself, but I didn’t know what from. So, if anyone came near me at all, I’d lash out and shout, ‘Keep away from me! Don’t touch me!’

Tom was frightened too – both for me and of me, I think. He wasn’t afraid that I’d hurt anyone, except perhaps myself; but I was unpredictable and my episodes of regressing to childhood were unnerving for anyone who witnessed them. It must have been awful for him. He’d had so much stress during the past few months that my being ill again must have seemed like the last straw. He’d been worried about me when I was in the psychiatric hospital, and about Sam when he was ill, and about how we were going to manage to live on just his income and pay the mortgage while I wasn’t able to work. Now he had to worry about me again and about what I might do to myself. And then, one day, I tried to stab him with a knife.

It was late morning and Tom and I were in the kitchen. I was cutting bread and Tom was standing at right-angles to me, just a few feet away, leaning against the sink and glancing occasionally out of the window as he talked. Suddenly, a half-remembered image flashed across my mind. It was of my father in the kitchen of the house where we lived when I was a small child, leaning against the sink and drinking from a crystal glass of whisky. Instantly I was a child again, and as I turned my head to look towards Tom, I saw instead my father’s coldly sneering face.

My whole body began to shake violently. I gripped the edge of the work surface and tried to breathe and Tom took a step towards me.

‘Are you all right, Katie?’ he asked.

He sounded concerned, but the voice in my head was mocking. I raised the knife and lunged at him.

‘Jesus, Katie. What the hell are you doing?’ Tom twisted his body sideways and the blade narrowly missed his chest.

I shut my eyes, trying to focus my mind on something that might anchor me to reality. When I opened them again, Tom was standing directly in front of me, white-faced and holding the knife in his hand.

I’d been suffering from mild obsessive–compulsive disorder for months – if not for years – but it became much worse after Sam came out of hospital. I’d started to clean the house constantly, scrubbing and bleaching and vacuuming as though our lives depended on it – which, in fact, I believed they did. At least, I was haunted by the fear that if Sam touched something that wasn’t clinically clean, he might become ill again – and it was my responsibility to prevent that happening.

I got through bottle after bottle of bleach. But when I looked at the surface of a just-cleaned table or the worktop in the kitchen, I imagined I could still see germs – tiny, filthy, toxic bacteria that were already multiplying into lethal colonies that could kill my son. So I’d scrub and clean everything again and I’d often get up in the night – some nights as many as 15 times – to vacuum the entire house. The sound of the vacuum cleaner would wake Sam up and he’d cry, and Tom would plead with me to stop. But I couldn’t; I simply had no control over what I was doing. And the more exhausted I became, the more delusional I was.

One evening, before Tom was home from work, I started to get Sam ready for his nightly bath-time ritual. While the water was running into the bathtub, I peeled off his clothes, dropped them into the laundry basket on the landing outside the bathroom door and lifted him into his bath seat. He’d become almost too big and too mobile to sit in the seat any more, but he loved it and he was laughing excitedly as I manoeuvred his legs into the space on either side of the central strut. Sam’s enjoyment was infectious and for a moment I laughed too. Then I knelt on the floor beside the bath and handed him his carefully disinfected plastic dolphin.

Suddenly, I felt a familiar rush of anxiety and an image of one of the worktops in the kitchen flashed into my mind. I’d already scrubbed it with bleach half a dozen times since giving Sam his tea. But my need to clean and clean and then clean again was a compulsion that had nothing to do with rational thought. As soon as it started, I’d begin to sweat, my heart would beat so quickly it hurt, and I’d feel as though something was constricting my windpipe so that I couldn’t breathe.

It was like a terrible, panicky fear that grew inside me until it blotted out everything else and became the only thing in the world that mattered. I gripped the side of the bath and tried to ignore it. But it was just a couple of seconds before I stood up and almost ran out of the bathroom, no longer aware of Sam splashing bathwater as he kicked his legs and gurgled with contentment.

In the kitchen, I took a new scouring pad out of the packet in the cupboard, poured bleach on to it and began to rub it, backwards and forwards, across the spotlessly clean work surface until the panic subsided enough to allow me to breathe again. And that’s when I remembered Sam.

I called out to reassure him as I ran up the stairs, and then I stood in the doorway of the bathroom staring at the empty bath seat, not able to take in what I was looking at. Sam was lying face down in the water, but it was a few seconds before I managed to focus on his limp body. I screamed and lunged towards him, grabbing his arms and dragging him out of the bath while I shouted his name over and over again. I threw myself down on the floor and held him tightly against my chest, and then lay him across my knees, put my hands on his shoulders and gave his little body a firm shake.

Suddenly, he spluttered and struggled and began to cry. And, at that moment, I realised just how close I’d come to being responsible for the death of the one thing I loved more than anything else in the world; and I knew that I was really ill.

I wrapped Sam in a towel and held him on my knee while I phoned Tom at work and said, ‘I nearly let Sam drown in the bath. I can’t cope anymore. You’ve got to come home. I need you to help me.’

The next day, Tom rang the social worker who was already involved in monitoring things for Sam’s sake. He told her what had happened and she said she’d come and see me as soon as she could during the day. Tom didn’t go to work and, later that morning when a friend came to visit with her baby, we sat in the living room while the baby lay in her car seat and Sam played on the floor beside her.

The next thing I was aware of was being curled up in a ball in the corner of the room and looking up into the concerned face of my doctor. I had no memory of what had happened, but apparently I’d suddenly begun to sob hysterically and had run into the kitchen, snatched a knife from the drawer and tried to stab Tom again. I’d been shouting at him and calling him ‘Dad’ and then I’d thrown myself down on the floor and begun to babble wildly in the voice of a little girl.

The doctor tried to persuade me to go to hospital, but I refused, and eventually it was agreed that I could stay at home as long as I wasn’t left alone with Sam, took the medication I was prescribed and spent every weekday at a day hospital. Sam was put on the Child Protection Register and Tom dropped him off at the house of a foster carer on his way to work every morning and picked him up on his way home in the evening. Tom’s parents were upset about the arrangement, because they wanted to look after Sam themselves. But I was afraid that if he didn’t come home every night, I’d rarely see him and then, after a while, he’d settle with his grandparents and wouldn’t recognise me any more.

Over the next few months, I made slow, sometimes erratic, progress and there were many days when I doubted whether I’d ever be well again.

I felt proud of myself when I was finally allowed to take Sam to the foster carer’s house in the mornings and pick him up in the afternoons, just before Tom got home from work. After that, Sam gradually began to spend less time with the foster carer and more time at home with me, until, when he was two, he started going to a nursery.

The things I had been – and still was – remembering about my father’s sexual abuse and about the way he’d used me for the perverted, disgusting entertainment of his friends were too much for my mind to cope with. Although I listened to the psychiatrist’s rational explanations about why I felt the way I did, and to what he told me about all those things having happened to me, and how I was a young child at the time and they weren’t in any way my fault, I couldn’t really absorb what he was saying. And, until my mind could accept it, it couldn’t begin to repair the damage that had been done to me in so many ways.

I tried to be ‘normal’ and to think ‘normal’ thoughts. But, over the years, all the connections and ideas that had formed in my mind had been abnormal and, as they were the only connections and ideas I’d ever had, it felt as though I’d been left with no basis for making sense of anything. It was as if there were tens of thousands of tangled, cut wires hanging in useless confusion inside my head, and I had to start the seemingly impossible task of examining each one and trying to find and then link it to its correct counterpart. So I suppose it wasn’t really surprising that every so often everything degenerated again into a crazy mess of disconnected chaos.

For Tom, the burden of all the worry must have been phenomenal and for a long time, when I was very ill, we couldn’t have managed without all the help and support we were given. I was seeing the psychiatrist regularly, and eventually I began to feel as though I was starting to make progress on the difficult and often very distressing journey from despair to recovery.

There were still days when I slipped backwards, though, such as the day when I went on the bus with Sam to a supermarket just outside town. Although it wasn’t very far away as the crow flies from where we lived, the bus went all around the houses on what began to seem like an endless route. I started to feel trapped and panicky, but I kept taking deep breaths and looking out of the window for things I could point out to show Sam, and finally we arrived at our stop.

As I carried Sam towards the supermarket, the light-headedness I was already experiencing got worse. Everything around me seemed unreal, as though I was on the outside of my life, watching myself through a window or acting on a stage. I stood still for a moment, trying to force myself to breathe slowly and waiting for my heartbeat to return to normal. Then I carried Sam into the glass-walled lobby of the store and pulled a trolley from the end of one of the long, interlinked rows, smiling at an elderly woman who stopped to help me. Sam’s feet dug into the tops of my legs as he reached out excitedly towards the trolley. I held his arms to steady him as he stood on the red plastic flap of the child seat and then guided his chubby little legs through the holes until he was sitting down.