The Little Prisoner (21 page)

But I knew that one day I would have to face my demons once and for all.

Chapter Ten

I
  had given birth to my second daughter, Sophie, a few months after going into hiding. Richard and Mum had never even known I was pregnant again and I liked the idea that they didn’t realize Sophie existed, that she never had to be connected to them in any way.

We were working so hard to create a nice family atmosphere for our girls, but the demons were still at work deep in my head, trying desperately to push me off the rails with the memories and the confusion and the anger and the guilt and everything else that had become entangled in there over the years. As long as I had a small baby to look after, though, I was too busy to really attend to the thoughts and emotions that were cluttering up my mind.

The things I’d told him must have been playing on Steve’s mind all the time, however. I know a lot of his friends got fed up with him going on about it when they all went out together and were trying to have a good time.

On the first New Year’s morning in our new house, after Steve had had a heavy night’s drinking with one of his friends, I came downstairs to find them both looking very furtive. I didn’t think it was just because they’d been so drunk the night before, because that wasn’t such an unusual event.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘Nothing,’ Steve assured me, unable to look me in the eye.

The phone rang and the colour seemed to drain from his face. It was his dad, telling us he’d had a call from my mum saying that I had to contact her, that it was really serious.

‘What could that be about?’ I wondered. ‘Maybe she’s going to tell me Richard’s dead.’

‘I’m really sorry, Janey,’ Steve said, realizing he had no option but to confess. ‘We had a bit to drink last night and we rang your mum and I gave her a piece of my mind.’

‘You told her you knew?’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This was my worst nightmare come true. Now my stepdad would know that I’d told other people, that I’d broken his golden rule. ‘You stupid git!’

That call, coming out of the blue, must have been a hell of a shock to my stepdad, when he’d always been so confident that I would never find the nerve to disobey him. We heard through other friends of Steve’s, who still lived in the old neighbourhood, that my mum was going round all the houses the next day saying that I was making accusations against my father (they were still keeping up the pretence that he was not my stepfather) and that they wanted to make sure no one said anything.

‘Janey’s spreading rumours,’ she was telling them, ‘and we don’t want to hear anyone talking about them.’

I knew that anyone who had had a visit from my mum would be anxious not to do anything to upset her or my stepdad.

When my anger at Steve had subsided enough for me to be able to talk straight, I gave Mum a ring, my heart thumping, wondering what would happen next.

‘Is it true?’ she asked.

‘Is what true?’

‘You know what. Is it true?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘You wouldn’t have believed me, and if you had, he would have ended up killing both of us. Where is he now?’

‘He’s out. He’s going fucking mad. He’s looking for the person who made the call.’

‘He knows who made the call,’ I pointed out. ‘He’s just looking for an excuse to do some damage. Don’t ever let on that you believe it’s true.’

For years after that I had dreams that the police had come knocking on my door to tell me that they’d found my mother dead in a pool of blood because she’d let Richard know that she believed what I’d said about him.

Very soon afterwards Richard and Mum moved to the other end of the estate.

From the moment he’d learned the truth, Steve had thought I should go to the police and report what had happened to me. His parents were the same and I had to tell them that it was never going to happen, that I was never going to be able to find the courage to stand up in court and accuse my stepfather openly of the things he’d done to me, that the repercussions would be too terrible. They could all see that they were putting me under more pressure by going on about it, so they stopped, but I knew they still believed it and in my heart I knew they were right.

When I looked at my two girls, I wondered what I would say to them if they came to me one day and told me someone had attacked them. If I said they must go to the police and they turned round and said, ‘But you never did’, what would I say to them?

It’s terrible to know that you should be doing something but not be able to find the courage to do it. It makes you feel bad about yourself every day. Not that I needed any new excuses to feel bad about myself. My relationships with any new friends I made were all going wrong and the pressures were building up. On top of that we had terrible money problems. Steve’s salary only just covered the mortgage repayments and there was the cost of the petrol needed to get him to and from work. When Sophie was born, she had to be dressed and equipped completely from car-boot sales or with hand-me-downs from friends and Steve’s family. We could hardly afford to feed ourselves properly. For Christmas we were only able to give Emma six
Caspar
videos, which we’d been able to get for a pound each. She was so excited about them that it was one of the best Christmases she ever had, but we felt terrible. ‘Another
Caspar
video!’ she exclaimed in wonder as she unwrapped each one.

As soon as Sophie was sleeping through the night I took a job as a cleaner to try to help with the money. I would work from seven in the evening to three in the morning, scrubbing toilets and everything else, but the strain, along with everything else, was too much. I had to give it up after a few weeks.

One of the things I was fed up with was all of us having different names. If we were going to be a family, then we should do it properly.

‘Let’s get married,’ I said to Steve one evening and he happily agreed. ‘The girls can be our bridesmaids.’

I always found life easier to cope with when I was busy and had things to plan. A wedding was a great distraction from the clouds forming in my brain, even if we couldn’t invite most of the people who were important to us, but once it was all over I was back in the same life, with the same problems.

Once Sophie was old enough to start going to playgroup, there were a few hours a day when I had nothing else to do other than brood. Although the house we had moved into was nice enough, it was almost exactly the same layout as every council house I had ever had to live in with Silly Git, and when I was inside it I still didn’t feel I had really escaped. So many things could trigger a bad memory or a panic attack – something the kids might say or a smell I recognized from my childhood – and pictures would come flooding back, reminding me of the things I’d fought so hard to forget.

Over the next couple of years my drinking grew worse whenever I felt low. Every morning after dropping Emma at school and Sophie at playgroup, I would buy a couple of bottles of wine and another packet of paracetamols, some from this shop, some from that shop, and would spend the morning drinking and staring at the tablets, trying to pluck up the courage to take them and end it all. Every day I would bottle out and just get drunk instead.

I found the drink allowed me to have a cry and feel sorry for myself. When I was stone cold sober I would tell myself that there were plenty of people in the world who were worse off than me and I would force myself to get a grip. Once the wine had taken a hold, however, my grip would loosen, the tears would flow and I would weep for everything that had been taken away from me. I would become convinced that I was ruining everyone’s lives, including Steve’s and the girls’, and that they would all be better off without me.

I regularly considered all the possible methods of suicide and on more than one occasion crossed a busy road with my eyes closed. It seemed as if I had a guardian angel, however, because not only did the traffic miss me, but the various implements I used to try to slash my wrists never seemed to hit the right spot. Sooner or later, though, I was in danger of succeeding and Emma and Sophie would be without a mum.

One day I had all my hair cut off. When Steve left the house in the morning I looked as I always had, with long hair, when he came back in the evening it was all gone and I had shorter hair than him.

‘Yeah,’ he said, swallowing back his urge to say what he really thought, ‘no, I like it. Yeah, it looks great. No, really.’ It was a long time before he plucked up the courage to tell me just how shocked he had been by the transformation.

All the strain of propping my failing sanity up was now falling on Steve’s shoulders, with a little support from a few friends I had made in our new location.

Steve’s parents were always so kind to me, but it must have been a terrible shock to them when their son first brought home a girl from the sort of family background I’d had. I’m sure they were relieved when we split up for six months, but once Steve had made his mind up that I was the one he wanted, they always backed us both up in every way possible and treated me just like a daughter.

Now they were under relentless pressure from my family, who were making threatening phone calls in the night and doing a lot of other stuff they wouldn’t tell me because they didn’t want to upset me. They were not the sort of people to be easily intimidated, but it was making their lives unpleasant and confirmed that we had made the right decision in not putting that same pressure on anyone else who might have buckled under it.

With Sophie’s arrival, there were three people who needed me to get better in order to be able to cope with our family life properly. Finally, after spending a year on the waiting list, I was given an appointment with a clinical psychiatrist at the local mental health centre. She talked to me very nicely, explaining where I was on the scale between depressed and euphoric – and I was pretty near the bottom.

I kept begging her to section me. I just wanted a rest and to be looked after by someone else.

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘If you didn’t have a family then I would, but if I take you away from them there’s a danger you’ll simply give up.’

Many times when I was in her waiting room over the coming weeks I would hear people crying and screaming because they had been sectioned when they didn’t want to be and I was envious of them.

She prescribed me tranquillizers, anti-depressants, vitamins and sleeping pills, some of them so strong they could only be dispensed by the hospital, and referred me on to a psychologist.

‘You’re a man!’ I said when I first walked into his office. Not only was he a man, but he also looked about my own age, which I thought was going to be a bit embarrassing.

‘Is that a problem?’ he asked.

‘I think so. I want a woman. How do I know you aren’t doing these things to your own kids?’

‘Since you’re here, why don’t you try me?’ he suggested. ‘Because it could be a long wait if you ask to go to someone else.’

I did as he suggested and immediately knew that I had found the right person. It was as if a lead weight had been lifted from my shoulders from the first moment I started talking to him. I poured out everything that had happened to me since the age of four, sparing him none of the details, and he listened and understood how I felt. Someone was actually paying attention to me and not getting angry or being shocked or telling me to pull myself together or to go to the police or anything, just listening.

Often as I talked his eyes would start watering up. ‘It’s me who’s meant to be crying,’ I would joke, ‘not you.’

When I showed him some poems I’d written during my bleakest moments he asked if he could take them home to read as he found it a bit much with me in the room. He later told me that everything I had written was classic for someone who had been through what I had.

Over the coming months he did a brilliant job at making me feel better about myself. For the first time I began to believe that everything that had happened to me hadn’t been my own fault and I started to feel my courage growing. I still didn’t feel strong enough to go to the police and start the long battle to have Silly Git put away, but a number of things were falling into place in my head. I actually began to think that perhaps I didn’t have anything to feel guilty and ashamed about. I truly was the wronged party here.