Invisible (37 page)

Saturday 16

Last night I had a dream. I
was in the arms of a man who gently ran a finger along my jaw then said: ‘I
love you.’ Then I woke up. I’d forgotten how transforming the human touch can
be, how warming and
floaty
it is to know someone
loves you. Even though it was only a dream, it felt so real that I was in a
good mood for the rest of the day.

Sad isn’t it? But I don’t
care. It made a nice change, and now I’m starting to wonder…could I one day
have that feeling for real? It’s as though somehow the dream has melted part of
me. I feel…excited almost about the possibility of a future at some point.

Friday 22

Kim and Peter came over for
the last time tonight before they jet off to their new life in Oz. I can hear
them in the living room, whispering excitedly to one another as they lie on the
pull out sofa bed. They’re like a couple of kids. As for Henry, he can’t sleep
at all either and instead has spent the evening bouncing round the room as if
he’s eaten way too much sugar and E numbers.

‘I’m a bit worried he thinks
the streets are paved with sweeties or something, he’s looking forward to Sydney
so much,’ Kim confessed with a laugh earlier.

They’ve got their proper
leaving do tomorrow, so it’s a real flying visit, but I’m just grateful they
made the effort to come and see me – especially as I had decided not to go to
their official drinks.

‘Too many people…’ I’d
explained apologetically, wrinkling my nose.

They’d accepted it, because
they know I never go out. The thought makes me nervous, I’m scared someone will
recognise me, and then there is the thought of getting home…I know it’s stupid
but I worry a lot about bumping into someone like Daryl.

Peter and Kim though accept
me for who I am, no questions, and it’s one of the many things I love about
them. I can’t imagine them not being here for me, especially Kim.

Tonight though, she did at
one point put her hands on my shoulders and given me a stern look. ‘I
understand why you won’t come to our drinks, but you know at some point you’re
going to have to stop apologising for your existence and really join the world
again. Hell, maybe even have some fun.’

‘Fun?’
I
gasped in mock horror, my eyebrows shooting up.
‘Never heard
of it.’

But as I lie in bed, hearing
the gentle rustle of their excited conversation, I think maybe she has a point.
It’s taken me a long time to pull myself out of the quagmire of misery and
reach a point of neutrality in my life, and
I’m loving
the peace of it. Perhaps though, there is more I can expect than simple
steadiness. Perhaps I should take a look at how to be, dare I say it, happy.

Perhaps that should be my new
year’s resolution.

Thursday 11

I marched into the
counselling session as usual and settled down for a good chat. Marsha looked at
me and smiled.

‘I love the way you walk
into the room all confident, kick off your shoes, and make yourself comfortable,’
she said. ‘They are the actions of someone who is really at ease with
themselves. And you’ve done it since the very first time you’ve come here.’

I have? I thought about it
and nodded. ‘Yes, yes, I suppose I have,’ I laughed, not quite sure of the point
she was making.

She leaned her arm on the left
armrest of her chair and surveyed me for a moment. ‘You’re happy, relaxed and
at ease with yourself. Really, you always have been. I think our work here is
done…unless you can think of anything else we need to cover.’

Flummoxed, I opened my mouth
to argue but couldn’t think of a single reason why I should continue seeing
her.

‘You really think I’m ready?
That I’m okay, I’m not crazy and I’m not going to fall apart?’ I checked.

‘You’re as sane and fixed as
the next person,’ she said with a smile.

‘Blimey, that’s a scary
thought for everyone else out there,’ I joked. Then suddenly became serious. ‘I’m
still driving myself mad with “why”; why did Daryl do those things.’

‘But you have coping
mechanisms in place now,’ Marsha replied.

‘Yes, I’ve found a way of
blocking it now, when the thoughts whirl around my head like a tornado
threatening to uproot my sanity and smash it on the ground,’ I nodded,
mock-philosophically.

‘Sometimes
there is no “why”’
that’s what I tell myself. Now I’m aware
that it’s simplistic, maybe even a bit trite. But frankly I don’t give a toss
because it’s helping keep the madness at bay.

Sometimes there is no ‘why’.
What I mean by that really is that I’ll never get it. I’ll never understand.
Even if Daryl were ever to sit me down and explain his thought process and
feelings in mind-numbing detail I still wouldn’t comprehend why because I’m,
well, normal for want of a better word. And he isn’t, he’s got something in him
that’s broken, something that stops him being like other people.

Maybe he was born with it,
maybe it got broken at some point in his life, but I think it was too late for
him by the time he met me. I couldn’t have fixed him even if I’d realised he
needed fixing.

So yes, back to the why
(it’s always back to that). I’ll never understand it even if I’m told it,
because what explanation can there be for hunting women down, raping them, even
killing them. What could he tell me that will then make me have a light bulb
moment where I think: ‘Oh yeah, that makes sense. I can totally see it from his
point of view now.’

There may be reasons for it
– maybe he was abused him or something, I don’t know – but there are no excuses
for it.
So when the whirling ‘why’ comes along and threatens
to take control of me, that’s my new mantra.
Sometimes, there is no
‘why’.

I’ve taken another massive
step towards freedom. I feel…tranquil.

Sunday 28

One of the few things I decided to
keep when I left the house was my diaries. It might seem like an odd decision;
I’m sure most people wouldn’t want to revisit a terrible past like mine. Me
neither, really. But avoiding it won’t change the fact it’s happened, and maybe
I can learn some lessons from sometimes reading entries from when I lived in a
fool’s world of denial and blindness. I’ve had to forgive him so that I can
move on, and it’s worked a treat…but forgiving is not the same as forgetting. I
will never allow myself to be that person again.

This excerpt from five years
ago is a prime example. We’d had some kind of row and I was tying myself up in
knots about it.

I’m
struggling not to text Daryl. Wondered about ‘Are you ready to talk yet?’
That’s quite neutral. Shows the door’s open, that I’m willing to forgive him
his tantrum if he apologises. I hate being in limbo like this, I can’t stand it
when he disappears off the face of the earth just to punish me. What if this
time he doesn’t come back? Decides he’s had enough of the rows and wants a
fresh start. After all, sometimes he says ‘having a relationship shouldn’t be
this hard.’ I can’t imagine my life without him.
But if
that’s what’s going to happen then he needs to tell me, not keep me dangling.
I’m a ‘rip the plaster off’ kind of girl – if something’s got to be done and is
going to hurt, just get on with it, because prolonging it will only make it worse.
I’d rather be told the no holds barred, no shit truth than be messed around and
left dangling. And he knows it.
Which is why he does it…

In the end of course, I had
made Daryl a grovelling apology. It makes me sad to think of that young woman
being played; allowing herself to be played. But it also makes me happy, oddly,
because I know now that I can spot a manipulator from a mile away, and I am
stronger than that woman ever was.

At the start of the diary I
was keeping the year of the arrest, when life started to cave in, I wrote
something quite profound.
If you’re not
happy with something, change it; if it won’t change, get rid of it.

When I wrote it I’d claimed
I was going to try to live my life by that line. I wish I had, it might have
saved me a little heartache…but hindsight is a wonderful thing, and all I can
do about the past is vow to learn from it. So now I’m taking that piece of wisdom
from two years ago and this time I WILL live my life that way.

I’ll do it on my own too. I’ve
realised I rely on others too much. Growing up, all I wanted to do was keep my
parents happy because they are so lovely; when I became a teenager I became
friends with Hannah and I did my best to keep up with her, following her around
like a puppy, taking her lead; then came Daryl, who controlled me completely,
manipulating me so blatantly, yet it never occurred to me to mind, not really.
Even after him, I relied on Kim so much, leaning on her instead of standing on
my own two feet.

Now I’m learning how to live
for me and no one else, and to keep myself going rather than hand that
responsibility over to others.

I am not helpless. I just
act like I am.

That’s not to say I asked
for what happened to me. Good grief, how could anyone ask for that? A whole
lifetime of lies and horrific revelations… But I have to take responsibility
for my part in it. Not for the attacks because only with hindsight can I see
now what was going on there, but for what I allowed Daryl to do to me.

I knew something was wrong
in my marriage and I said nothing. I was unhappy and I did nothing to change
it. I realised I was being lied to and my strings pulled by a master puppeteer,
yet I told myself it was all in my head because that was easier than facing
reality. I told myself it was my fault and desperately tried to change my own
behaviour, instead of confronting Daryl for his failings.

I will never accept
behaviour like that again. I have to draw a line in the sand right here and now
and say ‘no more’. I refuse to accept crappy friends like Hannah (who I now
realise I never actually liked much, so what the hell was I doing trying to
please her and make her like me?!). I refuse to be in a relationship that makes
me contort everything that is me in order to make it work. I have to have the
confidence to say to people: ‘this is me, like it or lump it’, instead of doing
whatever it takes to be liked by people who aren’t actually likeable
themselves.

I never do that,
incidentally. I’ve realised I’ve never decided in the past whether or not I
like someone, instead I worry about making them like me.
Ridiculous.
No more making myself invisible to help others.

No more feeling guilty,
either, for my own suffering. I know what I’ve been through can never compare with
Daryl’s victims’ traumas, but
it isn’t a
suffering contest - if it
were, they’d win hands down. But I need to stop comparing myself, finding
myself lacking, and apologising for my existence,

Finally, I’m starting to
immerge, I think. I’m finding myself. I won’t be invisible any more. I’ll never
let myself disappear again.

Monday 5

As the shop is quietest on a
Monday, I’ve taken today and tomorrow off to visit my parents. They seem happy
in their new home too. At the time, I think they both felt like moving away was
something that was being foisted on them, because of everything that had
happened with Daryl. The silent phone calls had persisted, the odd threat, and
in the end they, like me, had recognised the need for a fresh start.

It’s the best thing they’ve
ever done. It’s given Mum an excuse to buy all kinds of new knick knacks, rugs,
cushion covers, and so on, while Dad has stoically agreed to everything she’s
requested because, bless him, all he really wants is for her to be happy again.

She’s definitely that. To
hear her talking, the old house was a real dump (it wasn’t, it was lovely) and
had all sorts wrong with it. ‘
Oooh
, the oven was in
totally the wrong place’, ‘the stairs were so steep, they hurt my knees, and so
awkward if you wanted to take any furniture up and down them’, ‘there was a terrible
draught coming from somewhere if you sat in the wrong place in the lounge’, and
so on…

Luckily, the new place seems
to have no such problems. Well, for starters it’s a bungalow, so she definitely
can’t complain about the stairs. She’s barely recognisable as the avenging
angel who kicked a bed apart in anger; so typical of her though that she didn’t
get that angry for herself, only for me. That’s how we are in this family
though; we love with all our hearts and always put the other person first.

Now though, my fierce
protector has been replaced by my good old mum again, never happier than
discussing which curtains would best suit the conservatory. Although there was
one interesting little result of Mum getting in touch with her anger – before
she moved she told her grumpy neighbour, who was always complaining about
leaves from Mum’s hanging baskets blowing into his
garden,
that
he really ought to get a life. Nice one, Mum! Seems neither of us
is as scared of confrontation as we used to be.

Dad gazes at Mum with
adoration as she talks about whether or not to have nets or muslin in the
conservatory windows. Funny, I never used to notice how in love they still are;
I never used to notice them as people somehow, I don’t think. After everything
we’ve been through together though we are more than simply daughter and
parents, we are friends too.

Still, for all
Dad
loves her, too much soft furnishings talk will send him
off to the garden, which he is passionate about. He spent ages today walking me
round it, telling me in minute detail all his plans for the beds and borders;
he has all the time in the world to perfect it now that he has retired.

Geraniums and buddleia here,
fuchsia there, a vegetable plot to grow their own tomatoes, carrots, lettuce…
As he talked a squirrel bounded quickly over the lawn to the big tree at the
bottom of the garden, and suddenly I remembered that weird obsession I’d had
before with the squirrel at their old place, longing for its simplicity of
life. I’ve come a long way since then.

At the end of Dad’s
gardening monologue, I flung my arms round his neck and gave him a big hug.
‘Love you,’ I said into his neck.

I could feel him smiling as
he hugged me back and patted me awkwardly.

‘Love you too. What’s
brought this on?’ he laughed.

‘I’m just happy,’ I replied.

I’m just happy.