Escaping the Darkness

by Sarah Preston

  Bess asked me to try and talk through my thoughts as I sat there, once again unable to speak. At first the words all seemed to be trapped in my throat, lodged fast, not sounding out when I tried to make them form in the open spaces that were being created between my lips. If Bess could read lips, she would have been able to make sense of the words I’d formed, but instead she sat and looked at me, puzzled, unable to understand my silent voice. I shocked myself from within, trying to pull myself together. These sessions with Bess were getting harder and we hadn’t even touched the surface yet; so much was still hidden. The only thing we’d done was to move a little of the settled dust on the lid of my ‘bad memory box’.

  Inside, locked away, were still the memories of having intercourse, oral sex and Bill ejaculating over my body. How would I ever draw the strength I desperately needed to tell Bess about all of these inexcusable nightmares I had lived through as a child, especially with Bill’s ‘ghost’ now sitting in the room with me? His presence was so real. It was just like it was all those years before. He was here now, patiently waiting. I felt cold. How could a memory ghost make me feel this way? Would I ever feel free from all of this? Bess sat across from me as the minutes of our session drifted hurriedly by.

  All at once the hour seemed to have been used up. I had wanted to get further on this time, but the painful memories had all been too much. Even Bess’s words of comfort had had little effect and had not brought with them the same feeling of reassurance as they had done in past weeks. I had wanted to tell Bess far more, be more open and honest; for instance, talking about the first time that Bill had used his penis when he had abused me. For the very first time since my sessions with Bess began, I felt a trust between us.

  But time had run out. Bess’s voice became more audible in my ears as she spoke to me. I stared at her and she gave me a look that reassured me that I was doing the right thing. Her expression told me that I had to carry on, to keep talking about the nightmare that was once my past – a past that had no meaning in the world of happy memories that I had been creating.

  Now, however, instead of talking, I had to keep this memory locked inside my head for yet another week. Another week that would inevitably hold sleepless nights and nightmares I couldn’t control. I never confided in Bess about the dreams. I was worried she would ask me to go back and see the doctor, and the last thing I wanted was a prescription for pills. I needed to do this my way.

  I thanked Bess for her time and showed her to the door. She promised to phone me later in the week to see how I was getting on, knowing all too well how traumatic today’s session had been. I sat gathering my thoughts for ten minutes or so after Bess had left. I knew that I had to find a way of blocking things out sufficiently for them not to affect the new memories I had created with Sam and the boys. I tried to plan a way of separating the two events. But how could I? I had already lived my past and now I was living my present. I was Sarah, one person. The past I had talked about today, and the future I wanted, belonged to me too. They were both ‘my’ times. My past had once shaped my life, just as the future would too.

  At that moment I wanted so desperately to be woken up from the bad dreams; to find myself in a warehouse, putting my ‘bad memory box’ safely onto a high shelf, way back in the storage area, where it would sit until the container fell apart with age, and then light would shine on the contents inside, making the memories fade into nothingness. Yet I knew that would never happen – it wasn’t that simple. These painful memories were mine and mine alone. I had to face them full on to rid myself of them, and I could only do this if I was brave. Courage was a quality I lacked, but inside I had an inkling that it wouldn’t be long before the bravery I so desperately sought would find me.

  Chapter Ten

  MONDAY NIGHT CAME and went, Tuesday was as busy as usual, and there were always lots of things to do and not enough hours in the day to complete them. I had a mountain of ironing that was overflowing from the wicker basket that lived in a corner on the bedroom floor. The pile was so high you could quite easily have filled five other baskets with its contents.

  Usually I was quite focused and always did enough ironing to keep it below the rim of the basket, but over the past two weeks ironing just wasn’t part of my plans. Each morning I looked at the un-ironed clothes as I got out of bed – Sam too had noticed it was at a record high. We both looked at each other and made a commitment to ‘share’ it on Saturday morning. I’d do half an hour then he’d take over and do it for half an hour. This was how we’d approached it last time it had got out of hand. We’d get into a routine, music would be playing on the stereo, the boys content on the floor doing jigsaws together or playing in the garden, and away we would go – ironing bliss!

  Sam was so wonderful. I was lucky not only to have this fine caring husband, but also to have a guy who knew how to iron!

  My husband had always been practical and self-sufficient around the house. He had lived alone since leaving school and had started working when he was eighteen, which meant he could turn his hand to most domestic tasks. Thankfully on that day my mind had been so occupied with domestic tasks – as well as organising the boys – that I was left with little time to think about my memories and the events that had unfolded during my session on Monday with Bess.

  I knew that once the boys had gone to school and Sam had left for work, I would have to start facing the reality that was my past. I had to think about it. If I didn’t gain enough courage and strength to face my fears, then Bess’s visits would all have been pointless. I had to face my demons no matter how troubled my mind had become.

  Another week was speeding by. After dinner we all went off and had a game of cricket for an hour. The weather was particularly warm and it hadn’t rained at all, so the field where we played was dry. It was a good game. The boys were all thoroughly absorbed by their competitiveness to score more runs than each other. Later, once the boys had been bathed and had their stories read to them, Sam and I settled down to spend time together.

  I loved the hours we shared alone. It was always so perfect. I wanted to tell Sam everything that night but my head was ruling my heart. I knew that the secrets I held were powerful. Powerful in that they could seriously upset a happy, balanced person, and I didn’t want that. Sam was a warm, caring, gentle man – a man who would do anything for anyone. It wasn’t that my secrets would have been so much of a burden that he would have had his own contentment compromised – that wouldn’t have mattered to Sam. It was that he would have been devastated knowing that the woman he loved and shared his life with had all these terrible memories, and that he couldn’t do anything to stop them from hurting her.

  Sam always wanted to make things better – that was just his way. He would want to cleanse the horrid memories from my life forever. I knew that he would have wanted my life to be free from painful memories. In reality, I knew that not even Sam could achieve that.

  For the previous forty minutes, as the thoughts had whirled at top speed on the roller-coaster track inside my head, I had closed my eyes to protect anything that was worrying me from showing. I knew that Sam had always, from the moment we met, had a knack for looking into my eyes and seeing my worries, and I didn’t want to spoil our moment by letting anything bubble to the surface.

  As I drifted into a light sleep, Bill was there once more, invading my mind, taking up the space he had no right to take. I needed so desperately to expunge him from me, so that at least he could do no more harm. But getting him out of my head and far away from me was a tricky manoeuvre, and one that on my own I knew I would never achieve.

  I woke about an hour later, feeling sleepier than I had before I actually fell asleep. Sam was still at my side reading a book. I loved Sam so much that my insides hurt. I was so blessed to have him. I couldn’t believe it was Sunday again already – the rest of the week had sped past at record-breaking speed, and I couldn’t recall the last few days. Everything was lost in a memory blur.

  My �
�monster’ was working overtime inside my head, and the memories were becoming harder to ignore. I wanted to fall asleep and wake up to find that my dreams and the consequences that had been unfolding within them had only ever been one vicious terrifying nightmare…

  Yet I knew that wasn’t so. My dreams were all still real. Seeing Bill in town was still real. Making the appointment with the doctor was real and Bess’s visits were more real than I felt I could cope with.

  It was Monday again. As usual Bess showed up at 10 am. As usual I remained cynical. I longed to be in a position to believe her, but all the sessions seemed to be doing at the moment were giving my nightmares the fuel they needed to come alive. Each session felt as if it were laced with a flammable accelerant just waiting for a match to be struck. As each dream unfolded from within my memory, the way in which they were portrayed back to me was becoming increasingly crystal clear. My old memories shone out like new ones, such as the last word I spoke, or the last movement I made.

  Bess told me that day during our session that this was just part of the healing process. A process that had longed for the right time to begin within me. This process of remembering and ordering would, in time, help me. It would not help me forget, but would enable me to move on and experience the new life I had already begun with my family, without any of the bad memories getting in the way.

  As Bess and I sat and talked, she asked me to continue to tell her about Bill. I remembered the point where we had left things the last time she called and took it slowly from there:

  ‘He used to wash me every time he took me to his flat, I felt I must be dirty, not just dirty, really dirty, because he always insisted on doing this. Then without warning one day he said he wanted to make me into a real woman. I had no idea what he meant but I knew I would soon find out. The next thing I knew he was taking out his penis and playing with it to make it hard. The only thing was, back then I didn’t know that’s why he’d played with himself. I used to think at first it was all part of his ‘touching and washing’ game. The next twenty minutes lasted years.

  ‘He knelt in front of me, on his knees, fully clothed apart from his trousers and underpants, pushing inside me. The fact that I asked over and over again for him to stop just seemed to excite him further. He grunted and groaned as he moved inside me then suddenly he pulled away sharply. I hated every moment I was made to go with him, Bess.

  ‘I hated the times when Mum said, “Yes she’ll come with you and help you make the sandwiches Bill”, because helping make sandwiches signalled the beginning of yet another session of abuse. Alone, unloved and trapped with him in his miserable little flat. It’s these memories that haunt me the most, not so much the abuse, well not at first, but the fact that I was trapped and he wouldn’t let me go, no matter how hard I pleaded with him. He never listened and he certainly never cared. It was as if there was another person inside of him, driving him from within. I often wonder, Bess, if it was his daughter being abused by an old pervert and he found out about it, would he still have abused me?’

  I sat up and breathed a sigh of relief, glad at last that this chapter of my relived memory was over. I knew it would take time to put the memories away, but I hoped that one day I would be able to do just that. Recalling these incidents always made Bill more real somehow.

  And I remember that as I spoke to Bess about him, telling her about him kneeling in front of me, I saw him so clearly, each strand of Brylcreem-ed hair neatly in place. It was almost as if I could have put out my hand and touched him. Bess spoke to me once more, telling me I wasn’t to blame, that I was the victim and that he was the perpetrator. He was the one stealing someone’s childhood. It was he that should be ashamed and not I, but, beneath these words of comfort, I thought I heard words that spoke to me when Bess wasn’t there:

  Why, oh why, didn’t you run or refuse to go?

  Running or refusing to go with Bill was never an option for me. He was there, always there and escape was never possible. I tried so hard to evade him, but when I started to gain a little of the strength I needed to escape Bill, my courage packed a bag and headed out of town. So many times I sat on the edge of my bed late at night thinking of ways to break free, but as the idea entered my head, Bill’s warning always stood out like a great wall, blocking my strength.

  As each weekly session with Bess began and ended, I somehow felt lighter inside. I don’t know or can’t recall when I first began to feel that the burden of abuse was slowly moving off me; it was just what happened. Inside my body the weight of time was uncoiling itself, but even though my body was lighter, my mind still felt buried in a sandstorm of the worst kind imaginable.

  I had had a number of sessions with Bess so far, but even though I felt this new lightness inside, I didn’t feel we had actually made any real progress. I don’t mean that unkindly. Bess was a wonderful woman, who had her own special way of making you feel comfortable as she listened to the nightmares the people she visited told her about.

  And of course I was one of those people. Just another number on a file in an overfilled filing cabinet in a social worker’s office somewhere on the edges of a busy, bustling town. I wondered if my past was something that had been talked about in planning meetings, or whether everything I had told Bess remained as confidential as I had wanted. Released, but yet still buried and hidden from the waiting world.

  I had always wanted to talk to someone about my past, but I waited for many years before I actually took the steps and did so. A new kind of strength was developing inside my body that had helped me escape Bill and his evil ways thirteen years ago, but that strength had not been powerful enough to take me to the next level. I suppose that what was really happening was that I was trying to heal myself. Trying to keep my past hidden. Instead of living with it, I had buried it. Now, finally, Bess was helping me come to terms with its emergence from deep within, to the waiting world outside.

  Chapter Eleven

  AFTER BESS HAD departed, I realised that I had to tell Sam about this nightmare. Again the more I thought it through, the more I became upset at the thought of hurting him. Sam had always been there for me and was not just my husband; he was my loyal friend, too. We shared dreams of travelling together, of walking up even bigger mountains than the hills we had already climbed once the boys had grown and left home, continuing the ‘love affair’ that began the first day we met.

  It wasn’t really a love affair all those years before on that cold November night when I was just sixteen. It was more an appreciation of how drawn and attracted we were to one another. There was just something there as our eyes met that told me we would always be connected in one way or another.

  All of me knew that Sam would understand, but it was just too hard to make the sounds appear as coherent words, as I stood in front of him that night, accepting the welcoming hug he gave me.

  The day had been filled with indecisions about the past. Yes, it was true. I had already decided to share my experiences with two people, but it still felt wrong to tell Sam the details of my abuse, even though he was the most important person in my life. As we spoke late into the night once the boys were all sleeping, I tried to find the courage I needed but, as usual, I just couldn’t. As Sam looked at me through his spectacles, his eyes shone with warmth and love, and I was desperate not to jeopardise the moment. I felt so safe and protected.

  Instead of talking, we just sat folded in each other’s arms, curled up on the settee listening to our favourite music on the record player. We must have fallen asleep together because at midnight we woke when we heard Timothy crying upstairs. We both went to see to our baby, and then once he was settled and we had looked in and checked on the other boys, we went off to bed, still desperately tired, even though we had slept earlier.

  I didn’t sleep well at all that night; my memories wouldn’t let me. This time they were far more real than they had ever been before, and at 4 am I found myself sitting up in bed, shaking and sweating profusely, with Bill apparently s
itting in front of me. I rubbed my eyes trying to rid them of sleep and of Bill’s image, but he was still there smiling, looking at me through the diseased eyes of a paedophile.

  As I rubbed my eyes harder, I tried again to make him go away. He slowly began fading, drifting back into my memory box where I knew he didn’t belong, but where he couldn’t physically hurt me – at least not at this moment in time. I slowly eased myself up out of bed; it was only 4.04 am. I couldn’t believe that four short minutes could cause me so much pain and anguish. I should really have known better than to think that memories hidden so deep wouldn’t hurt me, because I had always known that everything to do with Bill – ‘and the memories he gave me to save’ – was filled with torment.

  I went downstairs, filled the kettle and leant against the kitchen cupboards waiting for it to boil. Once it had, I made a cup of tea. I sat in the lounge on the settee, where just a few hours before I had been safely held in Sam’s comforting arms. I tried to put things into perspective as I sat wrestling with my thoughts, but this time I found it more difficult to do than ever before. I couldn’t figure out why this dream was any different to the others; it contained painful memories and Bill. It just wasn’t different in any way, apart from the moment when I woke and found a vision of Bill sitting on my bed after he had escaped.

  This really was what had unsettled me. I looked at the clock: 5 am. I was desperate for the next four hours to pass so I could ring Bess. I knew that I couldn’t tackle this particular nightmare on my own, and that I needed to share it right now, today, rather than sleep on it until Bess came to visit next week. I stood up and went into the kitchen where I started to busy myself with the chores that were waiting patiently to be dealt with.