Escaping the Darkness

by Sarah Preston

  I again made up my mind that I was never going to tell Sam about how Bill had used my young innocent body, violating it with his ejaculation. I wanted this to remain a tainted memory that only I knew about. At the time it had made me feel so dirty. I can remember thinking at one point that if he had urinated on me, the experience would not have been as bad as what had actually happened. I truly did feel worthless. I told Sam more about Bill that night, but kept my worst memories safe inside my head and away from his delicate sensitivities. He knew I was hurting more than ever that night, not just physically, but mentally too, and so he just listened. I think Sam knew that if he spoke, I would stop talking, and I’d never be able to visit my past in such a way again. That night seemed to be the hardest of them all.

  With every few words I spoke about Bill having intercourse with me, I cried more intensely than I have ever cried before. Every single tear stung my face and tasted saltier than the last. For each tear that Sam caught with his hand, six more slipped by. Every word I uttered, every word that slipped out, held images so clear I felt I had only just taken a photograph of them.

  And worst of all, Bill was there like a third person occupying our bed. I could almost feel his touch. He felt alive and very much a part of my life once again. I wished that he would just stay in the memory box, but instead he was like a huge Jack-in-the-box that had been unjustly squashed into a tinier container, desperate to explode into life each time one of my memories was relived. His image was far more upsetting to me than anything I could ever possibly imagine. I wished so desperately that I could get rid of him but I couldn’t. He was always there, as close to me on some days as my shadow.

  Bill’s memory hurts me more than the blade of any sword could, and there were days when I wished I had had a few of those weapons, newly sharpened and ready to use. If I had possessed a sword, I would have tried to cut away the badness once and for all from my body, and I know I would have ended up dead.

  I don’t know Sam’s true feelings about the things I told him then and what he knows now. He told me it didn’t matter to him, but of course my past matters to me. At first when I was with Sam, I wanted so desperately to enjoy a sexual relationship with him where I felt totally relaxed – and I still want this. Some days I kid myself into believing that I have a relationship like this, but deep down inside I know different.

  I am twenty-five years into my marriage with Sam and I have only just begun to feel relaxed about talking to him about my past experiences when we are in the bedroom. I discovered that this ‘talking road’ is very long and most of it is uphill, too; at the moment I find I am just cautiously stepping off the kerb to cross over to a safer side which I know exists somewhere quite close by. My previous life has had more to do with my future than I am happy with. I hope one day that a bright ray of red-hot sunshine will appear to incinerate the bad memories that shackle me to that previous life.

  As our holiday in Cornwall entered its last week, I began to feel happier about the details I had revealed to Sam, yet sad because I knew I had told him things that had made him sad, too. The one thing I loathed about that last week of our holiday more than anything was the fact that I had somehow tainted this beautiful part of the world with the bad memories I had relived.

  Those periods in my life could never be polished to look all shiny and new ever again. They were just memories I had to try to forget. I now knew that whatever I had said to Sam over the last week was all right. He didn’t hate me and he hadn’t stopped loving me either as I had suspected he might. I often wondered if he would still love me in the future. No matter how many times he told me that he would, I still wasn’t sure.

  I knew Sam would never lie to me if I asked him directly, but I tried to imagine what I would feel like if the roles were reversed, and I was a man whose wife had been abused. I know I would not have been the same strong person that Sam was. The man who today is still at my side, still giving me his smiles, his warmth, his support and his love. To the outside world Sam doesn’t seem anything out of the ordinary. In fact some people would look at him and say he was probably quiet and boring, but they don’t see the man I see.

  I continued to tell Sam the rest of my life story and let him into the world that had been exclusively mine for a very long time. He still cried with me, especially on the night I choose to tell him about my father’s abuse – something I had earlier decided not to tell him about. However, this was all part of my past and I didn’t want to keep any more secrets. There had already been far too many things in my past that hardly anyone knew about, and I decided that this would be the night that the hidden aspects of my father’s life were going to be told.

  Sam sat bolt upright in complete shock when I said I had been abused not just by one man but also a second. I made excuses for my father, telling Sam he had only abused me because my mum had walked out on him. As a girl of twelve it was what I had believed, and had continued to believe, until the moment when I told Sam. I knew this wasn’t what Sam had wanted to hear. He was even more upset by the fact that it appeared as if I was defending my father.

  ‘Even if your mum had been long gone, Sarah, it would not excuse his behaviour,’ Sam told me. ‘What did he think he was doing, especially with his own twelve-year-old daughter?’

  I listened to the words tumbling from Sam’s smooth lips and wondered whether or not he was blaming me, as I had blamed myself so many times before. I often thought that there must have been some signal I was sending out to these men that said it was okay to do the things they had wanted to do to me – and they did them, irrespective of the way I felt about it.

  Then I told Sam that my father had only abused me three times, but I knew that three times were three times too many.

  ‘Only?’ Sam replied in a loud whisper.

  I tried to think of a reason why, but like all the other unanswered questions I had inside my head, this new question slipped in beside them as if it had always belonged there. Tidied away to be forgotten on a dust-laden shelf.

  I hated what my father had made me: a victim. I recalled that I began to think of him as someone I didn’t know and wanted to shout to the waiting world, ‘Help there’s a strange man after me’, but I didn’t. I had loved my father and had trusted him completely until that morning when he had treated me like a wife, not a daughter. Suddenly this strange man who was playing at being my father stood before me. I despised the way that somehow he seemed to know, as soon as he had touched me, that I had been in this situation before. At that point, he could have stopped the next three years of bad memories attacking me. But he didn’t.

  He just scooped me into his arms in the early hours of that June morning and carried me to his bed, got on top of me and did what he needed to do. He ejaculated into me – after all there was no risk, it was safe and he knew it because I hadn’t yet started my periods.

  I was still a child.

  He wasn’t a caring father or a trustworthy man. I now know exactly what my father was: he was a coward, someone who belongs in a dark corner, hidden away with the vermin. I knew even that was too good for him. Why had he been so terrible? This question always remained unsaid and unanswered, because I never asked it and so he never answered. It was a question that I’d have liked him to take to his grave.

  All too soon our holiday in Cornwall was over and we had to leave to return home. I always hated leaving and felt as sad as I did when someone I loved had died and gone from my life forever. The worst point of the journey back home was crossing the last county line, which always made me feel like I was being delivered back to a world in which I did not belong.

  I knew that I was safe with Sam and that he would always protect me, but I dreaded returning home to the same town where my bad memories had been born and where they had been given all the strength they needed to grow.

  Chapter Nineteen

  FOR THE NEXT few months after telling Sam, I tried to feel differently about my father. I tried thinking about our family holidays in
Westmorland when we were small children, times when I knew we were happy and my dad behaved as a proper father. I wanted him to be like a normal father, loving and caring for his daughters. I was hoping that remembering those childhood holidays would make me feel better, because for me Westmorland was always such a special place, but it never did. When the boundaries changed in the seventies, Westmorland disappeared and the county of Cumbria was born. I still loved the area for its beauty and its warmth.

  I can’t remember when it was that I first forgave my father, but for twenty years of my life that was exactly what I did: forgive him. Not once did I speak to him about what he had done to me all those years before. Why? Because I was riddled with a strong feeling of guilt. I wondered what went through his mind each time I saw him and he kissed me goodbye, which happened after each visit home. But he never gave anything away. His face was harder to read than an antique book with an ancient language written on crumbling pages.

  During the last two years of his life, I found myself recalling the things that had happened between us, trying to make sense of them. There were many times when I wanted to say, ‘Dad do you remember that day when you came into my bedroom, scooped me up and carried me into your room and did what you should never have done?’ And I imagined him casually replying, ‘Oh yes of course I do, why?’ And it is at this moment, when I can see him grinning and smiling at me, that I want it to be me who killed him for being part of the team that ruined my life, not the cancer.

  When he lay in a coma for almost a week before he died I asked him again. ‘Why?’ But as usual he never gave me a reply. He just continued to sleep, each last minute of his unconscious life taking him into a deeper point of no return. I begged him to wake up just so that I could hear the answers I so desperately wanted to hear, but instead he just slept on.

  When my father died it was almost at the end of October, just days before Sam and I celebrated our eleventh wedding anniversary. Dad was cremated the day before our anniversary. The undertaker at first suggested we do the burial on the thirty-first, which was our wedding anniversary: our day. At that point my sister stepped in and told them no way. I remember the undertaker telling us that they were busy but that he would try to do what he could.

  When the undertaker left, I fell apart. My father had taken my life already; I wasn’t going to allow him to take another precious day from me, too.

  Even from his coffin he was still desperate to keep hold of my life, still trying to have me think about him and still trying to stand between us, just like the memories he had left me with. I try not to think of him now if I can. I stopped missing him a long time ago because I know my father died when I was eleven. The man that remained and lived in his body was a stranger to me. I now no longer visit his graveside, which is in one of the most beautiful, quietest, most tranquil places in the Lake District. This is because I feel that he taints the lovely surroundings with the evilness that lived in him when he was alive.

  However, after his death I visited his graveside often, full of sadness for the loss of the man I had once loved as my dad. After a few years my visits became less regular as my grieving subsided.

  The very last time I drove alongside the lake, getting closer to his resting place and the few remaining particles of his remains, which are becoming one with the earth they lie in, I felt a sense of sadness and guilt. I didn’t understand this guilty feeling that rose within me. All I knew then and know now is that I never want to feel guilty ever again. I haven’t been back there for more than ten years. After the first few years, when one of my sons suggested we should go, I would try to make excuses and say I couldn’t at the moment. Then, thankfully, another year would pass us all by and my boys would get tied up with more important things that were going on in their lives.

  During his lifetime my sons had adored their grandfather, and they still tell me they miss him – he still has a hold on me through each of them. They often talk fondly of times they spent with him here by this beautiful lake, and I have to take part in those conversations. During each one I feel sick with worry about what they would say if they knew anything about what their grandfather had done to me. I kept my secret hidden very well; no one would ever know from looking at me what my past held or the things I have lived through. To the outside world and those who know me I am quite simply, Sarah.

  Many of the days, months and seasons that followed held much the same for me as they had always done. I lived a busy life as a mother, wife and friend. I continued to bring my sons up in a way I thought was fitting, and as always, Sam and I were truly blessed by the love we shared. We had a bond that grew stronger than anything I had ever known in my life before. As each new day was lived, each new season passed us by more rapidly than the last.

  I loved to see the seasons change. Spring was one of my favourites, a time when I could watch things uncoiling and blooming into life. A different, more unique and exquisite picture seemed to evolve each day. No two days were ever the same. Summer brought the end of the school term. We went on camping holidays, and did lots of walking and saw all those beautiful sunrises and sunsets that all seemed to be in a competition to be better than the last. I have seen many sizzling sunsets during our time spent in Cornwall, and just when I think they don’t get any better, they always do. I don’t know what it is that entrances me so about them, but I always feel as if I am safer at that time of day. That may not make sense to most people because over the years I have dreaded going to bed in case the dreams start. Yet a sunset seems to bring such calm into my life, and lifts my spirit to a point where I truly feel I can relax.

  I used to love autumn and its rich tapestry of colours, but there was a point where, as each tired leaf fell from the trees onto the ground, I was transported back to when I was eleven again. It was autumn when Mum and I first used to walk past the old cemetery to get to the bingo hall she frequented. I would run through the leaves that lay on the ground. I used to imagine that each leaf was telling me to kick it up high so that it could reattach itself to the branch it fell from, and thus live a little longer. I never quite managed to kick those leaves high enough, and as I ran through them expending all my stored energy on a kick, each leaf fell back onto the ground behind me, quietly accepting its fate to the mercy of the elements.

  Winter was a season when the boys waited in anticipation for the snow to fall so, if they were lucky, they could build snowmen. I always had to make sure a carrot was available, and that I still had the right sized pieces of coal in the coalhouse for eyes and buttons. I specifically remember one coal delivery just before Christmas when every piece of coal was like a boulder; perfect for fires but not much good for buttons on a snowman. If we weren’t lucky enough to have snow to build snowmen, at least they all knew that the arrival of Christmas was a true certainty. As each Christmas knocked on our door, a perfect real Christmas tree graced our lounge and the scent of pine lingered in the air. Having a real Christmas tree was a tradition I have carried with me since I was a child, when my granddad would always bring one for us from his home in Westmorland. Sam and I watched the boys’ eyes light up with bewildered joy, as parcels containing presents they had only ever dreamed of were opened up. I remember one year when Sam and I decided to buy the boys a bike each.

  Five shiny new bicycles were wheeled into the lounge one by one. Even Timothy, who was only four, got one. He loved that bright yellow-and-red bike, with its little yellow stabilisers. He continued to ride it until it fell to pieces many years later, when he had long outgrown it. Michael had his first racing bike whilst James, Andrew and William were given mountain bikes.

  They spent most of the day circumnavigating the patch of grass that lay in front of the row of houses we lived in. As the day grew colder, damper and darker they all wanted to stay out, but after a while Sam and I managed to rein them all in by promising them all they could go out again as soon as possible on Boxing Day.

  As the New Year began, I started thinking about our last trip to Cornwa
ll. Sam’s questions and his quest to know the truth had stirred up emotions and memories I was desperate to forget. I had lived with the secrets and lies for a very long time and had wanted to keep them buried. I tried to forget everything: the conversations in Cornwall, the memories recurring and the visions of Bill in my home. I remembered each one had been as clear as the glass in a new mirror. I felt I had reached a point of no return and knew that if I didn’t do something soon, then my past would interfere with my future.

  As the years passed us by and the older boys grew up and left home, we decided to leave the people we knew and the familiarity of the town I had lived in my whole life and move closer to the coast. We headed towards a new start and a new beginning, moving into an old Victorian house that was our own. This place was perfect: it had space, huge windows that let light fill the rooms and, more importantly, it felt like I was home, really home. Life by the sea was idyllic, un-rushed and carefree. The only downside was that my memories had moved in, too.

  One late summer’s night I sat up writing all my thoughts down on paper. I wrote in the tiniest handwriting for two solid hours and then folded the paper up tight and put it inside my dressing gown pocket. The following morning the sentiments behind the words woke me at six, and I knew I had to go to the beach and bury the piece of paper in the sand. It was a beautiful morning, the sun was rising, and I could see the tide had already been and gone a good few hours earlier. In my heart I knew I needed the tide to be in. I didn’t want anyone digging up, or accidentally discovering my piece of paper and knowing my secrets.

  I convinced myself that I had done a good job with the burial, and that the only thing that could uncover my piece of the past would be the new incoming tide. I wanted to wait around and see my paper get swept away out to sea, but after I had walked down to where the tide table was displayed I realised I would have to wait eight hours for the tide to return. I had more pressing things to deal with. I had to get home – I remembered that I hadn’t left a note for Sam, and I knew he would worry if he woke up to find me gone.