“Cands, you’re going to love him.”
But I won’t, I’ll hate him. I’ll hate him because I already know him. He will be dark with brown eyes and dark hair, Portuguese, Italian or Greek, some Continental fuck who seduces my mom and makes her feel good, too good, the lie good.
At sixteen I’ve learned about the lie good.
Examples of the lie good:
When a boy I don’t care about tells me I’m sexy, I feel good, but it’s fleeting and soon I’ll feel like my chubby self again.
When a boy I don’t care about kisses me, I feel all giddy and excited, but as soon as he stops I feel guilty, bad and once again back to my chubby self.
So that’s the lie good and I’ve learned I have to find the truth good: the good that’s good just because it’s good. Brett was the truth good but he wasn’t the one for me.
I’m watching my mom’s excitement, all her desire wrapped up in this man. This Giovanni, the new man I now hate.
Things move quickly. Mommy sells our house, as she needs the cash. When money goes, it goes fast. We move five minutes away from the house of Joe into a small, pretty house, but with this house comes Giovanni, and the pretty disappears in my eyes.
I have lost:
Dad.
Dale.
My mom.
It feels like Mom has gone far, far away. We don’t speak the same language anymore, we are from different parts of the world. I’m angry with her for everything, even though she never meant for any of this evil to happen. I have a burning in my heart and her new man brings out a rage in me, a war in my world. I openly refuse to be a part of my mom and Giovanni’s team. I don’t eat his food, which is easy to do considering I prefer a don’t-eat buffet in any case. I won’t talk to him, acknowledge him or look at him. I pretend he is not here and I am a ghost in my own house.
“Candice, why can’t you be nice to Giovanni? He’s in my life and you have to accept it.”
My mom doesn’t know that I don’t have to accept anything. Joe gave me an internal angry tool and I know how to use it.
“I hate him, I’ll never accept him and you can’t make me.”
What more is there to say? I’m sixteen, in the “comfort” of my teenage years, I have my period and I’m pissed off, so pissed off I am about to explode and splatter angry body parts all over my mother’s floor.
Somehow the prosecutor has managed to get me off having to stand in the dock and face Joe, to tell everyone how he unhooked my bra a million times and knew the ins and outs of my youthful vagina.
The psychologist and prosecutor will talk for me, and they believe it will be enough to put him behind bars. I have mixed feelings. I am relieved, but there is a part of me that wanted to face Joe, to tell him how much he hurt me, make him face my damaged goods. But this is not to be. So no more court dates, no more court buildings and no more seeing Joe. I just have to wait and see what the judge decides.
My life seems to have been one big build-up, followed by an explosion, and now silence is the end result. All my anxiety and all my stress are in a puddle under me. I know it’s a good thing that I didn’t talk on behalf of the broken me, but my lingering worry is that I’ll have to carry this with me forever.
For now I will sleep, a peaceful sleep, a sleep that I lost out on growing up because Joe kept prodding me every night. For now I will put this feeling away, maybe never to be revisited.
Mom’s moved on with her life, hurt, bruised but intact. Romy and her rucksack are overseas, and she is driving a tractor on a kibbutz in Israel. This is really a man’s job but if a girl’s in pain, manual labour is a good antidepressant. She left as soon as she finished school; I don’t think she could look our life in the eye. I don’t blame her: if I were old enough, I would run as far away as I could.
Jodi is on her way to being a big shot in advertising, climbing the ranks fast and furiously. Perfect for a young woman running away from the shackles of a hurt family. She is afraid of chaos and wants balance; moving out is the best way to move forward. Kim’s living in Durban and working as a personal trainer, eating chicken and rice and perfecting her already perfect body. Outward perfection never shows the scars of a past; what a perfect way to show the world you’re one up on it. She has a boyfriend, has created a new truth and is doing well, considering.
So my lovely life at home is just Mommy and Giovanni. Daily fights with him because my “I don’t see Giovanni” technique isn’t working. I bombed with that one.
“I hate you!” Tears streaming down my face, doors slamming.
My only option is to move in with my real dad.
“I’m moving out.”
“Fine, but don’t ever come back to this house again,” my mom retorts with her clenched jaw.
“I’ll never come back. I hate what you’ve done to our lives. I hate the way you need men.”
More tears, more slamming doors, uncontrollable anger, rage.
Things I’m angry about:
Everything.
I pack my short life into suitcases and boxes, and put my heart away. Scared of nothing, scared of everything, I move in with my real dad. He tries to discipline me but I’m not having a father who hasn’t raised me telling me what to do. He can use his father skills on my toddler stepsister.
I’m disruptive, I feel out of place, I’m hurt and he can’t fill the emptiness in me. Living with him is no place for a post-abuse teenager. My dad and stepmom struggle to understand me and I struggle to understand them. My bedroom only has space for a mattress and there is nowhere for me to hide my constantly falling tears. They fight a lot and I know I’m the cause of their arguments. They get strange calls at all hours of the night telling my dad to castrate Joe, shouting at him for doing nothing. This sets a tone of unease in this fragile family home.
My list of how I think my dad should be looking after me:
Show he cares.
Be loving.
Tell me he’s so sorry that I was hurt.
Create meaningful moments.
Take me to the movies.
Give me a bigger bedroom.
I’m naughty at school, naughty at home and I’m in trouble a lot. Maybe I like the attention, maybe I like not being liked. I do know I don’t like living with my dad. He has his new family and I’m not part of that. I’m his daughter from the other side of the tracks, the black sheep, the unwashed, the used.
Another option opens up: become a weekly boarder at the School of the Arts. I am so excited to be away from both my parents, those adults who don’t understand me, adults who look at me with pain in their eyes.
So boarding school here I come.
still sixteen
I’m enjoying boarding school, even the rules and regulations. I like the school bell that acts as a strict parent. I like having no eyes on me: no vulnerable mother looking at me with guilt and sadness, no strict father trying to raise this grown-up me.
This is my new daily routine, without chaos, secrets or Joe’s shadow over me:
06:30 Wake-up bell. Shower. Get dressed. Make bed. Clean room. Room inspection.
07:30 Breakfast.
08:00 Walk to class.
12:00 Dining hall. Eat lunch. Socialise with friends.
13:00 Back to class.
14:30 Home bell. Back to my room. Off with my uniform. On with my casuals.
15:00 Homework bell. Out with my books. Thinking cap on.
16:30 Teatime.
18:30 Dining hall. Eat dinner. Socialise with friends.
19:30 Drama rehearsals. Perform.
21:00 Finish rehearsals.
21:30 Back to my room. Communal shower. Pyjamas on. Get ready for bed.
22:00 Lights-out time, or not. Some rules are meant to be broken.
After the lights go out, my friends and I sneak into one of the bedrooms and chat about all things drama and gossip.
I’m trying hard at school. I’m still behind academically, but I’m pushing myself to study and understand c
oncepts that don’t matter to me. I’m really a part of something and I’m loving my life, loving my friends. My moments of fear only visit for short intervals, because I am too busy being the happy me.
I stay with my mom at weekends and it’s going well. We are still unstitched but getting on. My burning anger is not as fiery anymore and only a small flame still flickers. I love my mom and I don’t want a life without her.
At last things are going well. I am trying hard to be clever, succeeding at being nice and working to forget my unfitting past. I truly want to succeed at being me.
I am sixteen and filled with the wisdom of life.
My wisdom list:
Make the right choices.
A man cannot take away a woman’s pain.
Sweets make you fat. Don’t eat crap.
Adults don’t have the answers.
I’m in drama class when my name is called out over the intercom. I go to reception and see one of Mommy’s friends (or not?). She used to date Joe and somehow became a part of our lives, which I’m happy about because I like her.
“Hi, Candice.”
“Hi, Cecile.”
“Let’s go into the playground and talk. I have something to tell you.”
I inhale. I use my skill of holding my breath, afraid of what may happen if I exhale. We walk through my creative, beautiful school past one hall with ballet dancers who perform the most graceful moves and another with musicians playing sweet, melodic music.
Cecile and I walk past all this creative hope into the green and blue day, grass so very green and sky so very blue. No music, no dancers, just Cecile, some tweeting, happy birds and me. We walk and don’t talk, our shoes swish through the grass. Cecile stops. I stop. She talks.
“Joe has been sentenced to two years in jail, and may only serve six months with good behaviour.”
The tweeting of the birds fills my ears. I didn’t want to hear that. I wanted to enjoy the hope of this day, hold onto the beauty of Johannesburg, hold onto moving forward and living a good life. The birds stop tweeting but Cecile’s still talking.
“Your mom’s a wreck and I thought it was best that I came to tell you about Joe. I know this must be so hard for you.”
Cecile’s now hugging my frigid body.
I’m not sure how to respond; I don’t know how I’m feeling.
Joe tried to break my spirit, he made me grow up too quickly. I’m not a virgin, I’ll never have a first because Joe was my first. Oh my G-d … that thought hits me and tears come tumbling down. This man who broke my family, who made us unstable, who taught us fear, only gets two years. This man who violated me on every level only gets two years and I, Candice Derman, am sentenced to a lifetime of being a victim, of being a child of abuse. Oh my G-d, oh my G-d, I am never going to be normal. I will always carry Joe in my veins, he will always walk through my thoughts and crush my hopes of a normal, happy life.
I can’t hug Cecile back; my body won’t accept comfort in another one of my broken life moments.
Cecile lets go of me and just stares at me. What can she say? What can she do?
“I’m sorry, Candice.”
“Yah, me too.” My secret weapon has taken over; numbness knows my body so well, it infiltrates all of me. Joe still has the power to make my life’s colour fade to black in an instant.
I go back to class, detached. We’re playing trust games. You have to close your eyes, fall backwards and let the other person catch you.
My checklist of an abused girl:
Fear. Tick
Panic. Tick
Weight loss (thank G-d). Tick
Confusion. Tick
Lack of concentration. Tick
Moodiness. Tick
Self-doubt. Tick
Suicidal thoughts. Tick
Life is so difficult. The moon is full and I see no beauty in that. I cannot connect the dots and sort out my life. I can’t spell, add or subtract. I hate geography, I don’t care about stalactites and stalagmites. I am distracted and restless. My tummy rumbles with hunger and sadness, it rumbles because I ignore it. I am a skeleton of a person. My mind is scrambled, a messy ramble in my head. I’m a little girl lost, but physically I am positively glowing. I win Miss Empire, boarding school beauty queen, and now I’m wearing yet another sash. I want to stop being so up and down; I want my heart to stop racing and learn to beat regularly.
My sixteen-year-old life is so confusing, even more than is usual. A big part of my struggle is the normality of my life. Sometimes I feel good, have a sense of being lucky to be alive, to see a full moon with eyes that aren’t blind to its beauty, to eat fresh fruit, watch a good movie, lie in a bubble bath, chew bubblegum and put mascara on my lashes.
I like feeling good, good about myself. I want the sunshine, the calm, I want a mother and not a friend, a father and not a lover, I want a boyfriend. I’d like to share my life with a person who’s bright, who wants to play and laugh, live in a world where we travel our own path, create our own happiness, and more than anything else I want to see myself happy. My greed for a good life is insatiable.
I pass standard eight. My marks are low but good enough to get me through to standard nine. People tell me I should work harder and I’m thinking, “You have no idea how fucking well I’ve done.” Just a few more years to go and I’m out of school, footloose and fancy-free. I need to learn to stay afloat. This may be a lifetime of work. I’m sixteen and I have a long road to travel.
Things I learned from my mom:
Never open up to strangers.
Avoid bad boys.
Don’t let a man control you.
Don’t rely only on others.
Trust very few people.
Things I learned from Joe:
Fear.
Guilt.
Insecurity.
What it feels like to be an object.
How to fly above myself.
My two greatest influences growing up taught me many things, but the things that I have to teach myself will heal me the most:
Never be a victim.
Be strong in my head even if my body isn’t.
Love hard and have meaningful relationships.
Play in the moment and be grateful for every day.
Believe deep down that I deserve good things.
epilogue
Abuse is like an unnatural disaster: everything that is lost must be rebuilt, and I have had to rebuild all of me.
After Joe went to jail I struggled to see in colour. I floated in and out of numbness, sadness and happiness. Believed that I was talented, special, attractive and invisible, untalented and unattractive. Food became my secret, as I ate almost nothing some months and the entire contents of my fridge in others. Doing something to myself that no one knew about made me feel stronger.
Romy visited from time to time and we would watch soapies and sleep together in spoons. I passed matric, got an acting agent and started waitressing, moved back to live with my mom and stayed until I was twenty-five. At times we walked hand in hand and at other times we lived in separate universes.
I carried her pain as if it were my own, wanted to bandage her wounds and take away her past. But I couldn’t. So I tried to heal my own pain, bandage my own wounds and leave the past behind.
I loved some men with everything I had, enjoyed and hated my sexuality and found solace in being complicated, walking into walls and making mistakes so that I could feel something.
I carried my abuse with me because I didn’t know where else I could put it. It burned like acid, and pain would come to me from the shadows. Joe never visited me in my nightmares; he stopped being a person and became a cancer. He became my very own private illness.
I succeeded as an actress in South Africa, but realised that hiding behind my characters didn’t make me happy. I acted to forget but my body wanted me to remember, and carrying my secret diminished me.
A month after my twenty-fifth birthday, I met and married my perfect man. He asked me t
o be his wife after only two days; I said yes and we eloped. That was nearly eleven years ago.
I have been blessed to find my lifetime friend, a man who pushes me to be brave, never feels sorry for me and sees my sunshine when I don’t see any.
For the first few years of our marriage, when I wasn’t dancing in happiness, I cried about my past. I ate too many muffins and felt fat. I dabbled in an eating disorder but became bored with not looking after the body that had worked so hard to protect me. I taught myself to eat with love and look after the physical me.
I faced good and bad, and both welcomed me and offered me great emotion. I wasn’t able to run away from the bad, so I learned to accept it, and that forced me to love the good harder. I played with more enthusiasm than was required, made an ice cream no longer just a sweet taste but a taste of healing, Romy’s hand no longer my sister’s but a hand of hope, and a bubble bath more than a bath of bubbly water: it became a cloud of what a moment of happiness could be. I created magic for myself, and that helped me live my life.
I have been through psychologists’ doors and out again ten minutes later. I told Jonathan that only I could heal my pain. I was right. Eventually I stopped crying for the child in me and embraced her, and we became a team. She lives with me every day now and has helped me to remain childlike.
Sometimes I slip back into my old habits, floating between Candice the brave, who can take on the world, and Candice the terrified, who is swallowed by the world. When I was a child, my anaesthetised strength and my body’s ability to dissociate itself helped me survive. The numb calmness helped me to function in my dysfunctional world. As an adult I find that this false power has at times made my body weak, and even though my head no longer needs to hide behind the secrets, my body continues to hold on to the Candice who would dissolve into nothingness.
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