‘That was the day I met the man,’ I said haltingly, my voice barely a whisper. ‘The one my uncle was afraid of. He had a whip. He wanted to lash me with it, I knew that. But it was the other strap he carried that frightened me even more, for that was the one he would tie round my neck. The one he would pull tighter and tighter to cut off my air while he had sex with me. In the photos it would look as though I was dying, and I was scared then that I might. Might die, I mean.’
Years had passed since that day, but my body still shook at the memory and my voice dropped until I was mumbling so quietly that, even leaning forward, she struggled to hear me. I felt the old shame again, not the emotion where heat flushing through the body sends a telltale crimson wave to stain the face, but a blackness I wanted to disappear into. Not wishing to meet her eyes, I averted my head, but she wasn’t going to allow me to avoid her.
‘And then, Jackie? Tell me what happened then,’ she said, more urgently, perhaps sensing a breakthrough in my therapy.
I gulped, dug my nails into my hands and, for the first time, I was able to blurt out what I had wanted to say for so long.
‘I climbed off that bed,’ I said, in a loud, determined voice, ‘grabbed the whip, tore it out of his hands. Yes, I stopped him. And then – then I just walked out of the room.’
‘Very good, Jackie,’ she said, and smiled warmly at me. ‘You’re progressing.’
It was two years since I had started therapy. Two years in which, gradually, my life had, like a huge tangle of knotted string, been unwound, strand by strand, and examined. Over that time I had begun to cover each scene in the film of my past with a new one: one in which I was the winner.
It was only when that was done that I had the power to look again at the truth and deal with it.
It was when I came to understand that the memories of my past had become too much for me to carry any longer that I had decided to seek out a therapist. I was an adult, and I looked for the right person as selectively as another woman might have looked for a lover.
When I finally found her she did not try to allay my fears that she would be the same as the others I had met. Instead she said, ‘Let’s just take it one session at a time, Jackie,’ and I had agreed. Each week I turned up and revealed to her, piece by piece, those parts of my life that I had been unable to deal with.
To begin with there were times when I could tell her no more than what could be contained in a few short sentences. When you have been so down, so destroyed, you are careful. Talk, yes, that’s allowed, but always with a little bit held back. The little bit that might just expose the real person hiding behind the mask. It takes both time and courage to allow all defences to be stripped away until what is left behind is just a vulnerable, needy person. The therapist, understanding that, had made no demands. She just waited for me to trust her enough to allow her to help.
It had taken nearly a hundred visits before I could tell her the new version of what happened when I met the man with the whip.
By then she had learnt nearly everything there was to know about me. Every week she had sat calmly in her chair while I stumbled over the randomly selected sections of my story that I felt I could talk about that day.
Her questions were always small ones, for it was me who had to talk, not her, and me who had to come to my own conclusions. Her job was only to lead me to the place where I could do that.
But I knew that there were parts of my story that she couldn’t leave in her file when she went home: the parts that had moved her. It was then that she would fire an unexpected question, and her eyes betrayed the compassion behind her professionalism.
She knew without me telling her again what had really happened on the day I broke free from my uncle, for I had already told her.
27
It was when he brought the whip man round, the man he was scared of, that my ties with my uncle were finally severed.
What was so frightening about that man? I don’t know. It was just that, on seeing him, my legs turned to jelly and my body shook. There was nothing outstanding about how he looked. He was of average height and average appearance. He was a nondescript man – if I had passed him in the street, he would have gone unnoticed.
Maybe it was his aura of coldness. With him there was not even a hint that he was in that room for anything other than the reason he gave. But even that seemed different: there was no furtive excitement about him. He handed my uncle money, not discreetly as the others did, so I wouldn’t see it, but as though I was of no importance at all. ‘Get undressed,’ he ordered.
I reached for the glass, the drink that made everything blur.
He knocked it out of my hand. ‘You won’t need that,’ he said. ‘Now clean it up.’ Without looking at him, I fetched a cloth, knelt and did as he’d ordered.
I heard my uncle say something.
‘Don’t want pictures of a zombie, now, do we? Like the last ones you sent me. They don’t sell to my people. She’s old enough – time she enjoyed it anyhow.’
He looked at me then. I was standing, clutching the cloth, uncertain what to do next. ‘Let’s have a look at the goods, then,’ he said. ‘I told you to get your clothes off, girl, so do it.’
Looking into his face, terror overcame any other feelings. Under his cold gaze, I stepped out of my jeans, pulled my skimpy jumper over my head and stood there in my cotton pants. His hand gestured impatiently for me to remove them.
‘Now you,’ he said to my uncle, having stripped himself. And that was when I saw the first signs of fear on my uncle’s face. He might have joined in before, but this was different. This time another man was giving the orders.
‘We’re going to make a nice little movie here,’ he said. ‘You’re good in them, aren’t you, Jackie?’
He told my uncle to lie on the floor.
‘Now, Jackie, open your mouth wide.’
Knowing what was expected of me, I obeyed. It was as I lowered my head towards my uncle’s flaccid penis that I felt the leather belt go round my neck.
‘I’ve got another one, girlie,’ he told me, and a searing pain went through me as the second belt swished down. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘each time you stop you get this. Understand?’
I did.
He entered me then. His nails dug into my legs as he pushed himself roughly into me. This time was different: without the drink that dulled my senses I could not leave my body. No, this time it was me who felt the pain and me who gasped with it. The leash tightened and the whip came down harder. ‘Told you what would happen if you stopped,’ he said.
There was blackness in front of my eyes.
‘It feels like dying, doesn’t it, Jackie? Well, I’m not going to let you die too fast.’
Another pain shot through me from his thrusts and the belt tightening on my neck.
I heard his voice asking me over and over, ‘Don’t you want to know what it feels like to die, Jackie?’ Each time I gasped the whip descended. I thought every time was the last because he moved his body slightly away from me. But I was wrong: it was just so there was enough bare flesh available for him to mark. I heard my uncle protest. His voice was shaking with fright for I think he believed then that the man was capable of killing me. But while that thought might have terrified him, all I wished was that it would happen.
When he had finished, I lay on that mattress in too much pain to move. It was the man who rolled me over. My uncle was sitting with a look of horror on his face, too scared to move or speak.
‘Hey, Jackie,’ the man said, and jerked hard on my hair.
I looked up into his face again.
He grinned at me. Then he stood up, put his foot on my chest and pissed on me. Holding that thing in his hand, he aimed it towards my face, and before I could move, a stream of hot yellow liquid rained down on me. I shut my eyes tight, trying to block out what was happening. It was warm and sticky, and I felt it running down my neck and into my hair.
I didn’t look at my uncle when the man lef
t. I could hear him crying but I didn’t look at him. Instead I got up and walked on unsteady feet to the bathroom. I poured in bubble bath and ran the taps until the bath was almost full and the room was full of steam. Then I climbed in. I submerged myself in the hot suds, washed my hair and let it float around me. Then I soaped my body, scrubbed every bit of it, even the places that were sore. I could smell him, the rank stench of sweat and the other nameless fluids that had been smeared on my body. I let the water out, then refilled the bath.
I lay there for a long time. I could see the slight ripples as the water moved in time to my heartbeat, but that was all. It cooled around me but still I did not move. All I could think was that if I let my head go under the water I would die. I tried: I closed my eyes, sank under the surface, but then I found I couldn’t. The will to live betrayed me; it was stronger than I had believed.
I cried then, fat tears that rolled down my face in a silent torrent until I thought there could be no more moisture left in me. That was the last time I cried. That was the day my tears dried up. Not one, either of happiness or sorrow, has run down my face since then. Oh, there have been many times when I have wanted them but the comfort of tears has deserted me.
Instead I found comfort in pain. Razors became my secret friends. Droplets of blood that leaked from those little slashes high on my legs – my tears. Then the burns: candle wax was the best. The wheals it raised stung all day but left no lingering marks. And hadn’t so many men shown me how that was done, dribbling wax first over their chests, then mine? They were wrong when they said I would come to enjoy it. I came only to endure it, but they had taught me one thing: that the longer pain lasts, the longer the escape from reality.
That day was my first lesson in inflicting physical pain upon my body to anaesthetize mental anguish. When I was dry I picked up a candle and lit it. Then I dribbled the hot wax over my chest. This time there were no men watching with their lecherous stares, no drooling mouths or excited, greedy eyes. This time it was only me I was doing it for. Only me.
Concentrate, I told myself, and gradually it worked. As the burning became the only thing I could feel, so the grip of the memories that had been eating into my mind weakened.
With that pain the string of my uncle’s control was finally severed.
My focus shifted and I no longer saw the man who had exercised his power over me for so long. Instead I saw a weak, greedy man.
When I walked down the stairs to face him I felt contempt – pure contempt. With it came my freedom: freedom from him ever touching me again. I was not to know that although I was free of his control it would be many years before I could escape from the damage he had done.
‘How old were you then?’ my therapist had asked, the first time I had told her that part of my story.
‘I was twelve,’ I replied.
28
She had thrown questions at me then about what had happened next, for she knew from my medical records that my story had not ended there; that I had not just walked away and returned to normality.
‘I stopped being a child,’ I replied.
My aunt was told I had a sore throat because it was two days before I could talk. A scarf covered my bruises and my eyes burnt into my uncle’s head as they followed him.
‘Are you in hell?’ were the first words I spoke to him when I had recovered my voice. ‘I hope you are.’
Knowing he had lost me, he drew away.
I threw other words at him – ‘pictures’, ‘police’ and ‘prison’ – and for a while he believed me. I demanded money for my silence.
‘Fuck you,’ I said. ‘Not such a big man now, are you?’ I felt satisfaction at the expression on his face, where fear mingled with defeat. ‘I want twenty pounds,’ I said. ‘I’ve earned it.’ Those words betrayed, if nothing else did, that I was still a child for to me that was a vast sum. To him, it was a negligible amount of what he must have earned from me.
Without protest he went to a drawer and took out a roll of notes.
I believed as I took it that that was the start of my rebirth. But, of course, that was not what it was: it was a further descent into misery.
I was just a child alone in the dark who, never knowing happiness, was now determined to be bad.
29
She had made no comment when I had told her that part. Instead she asked me about something quite different – or maybe in a way it was not. ‘Were you never able to talk to one of the psychologists you saw?’ she asked.
An image came into my head then of a small, dark-haired woman, who had looked at me kindly. I felt, the day I met her, that she saw me. Not the child with a file full of notes about her bad behaviour, but me.
‘There was one,’ I told her. ‘I was about ten, perhaps a little younger but not much.’
She had insisted she wanted to talk to me on my own; that my mother could drop me off for that hour’s session. When I went into her room she told me to take a seat next to her. With its armchairs and soft lighting thrown by several small lamps, it felt more like a sitting room than a doctor’s office. I almost felt as though I was visiting her in her home. She told me her name but I can’t remember what it was.
‘You don’t seem a happy little girl, Jackie,’ was nearly the first thing that she said. That was when I thought she saw me. Really saw me, not the child described within the pages of a brown folder, the one who behaved badly. She looked so kind that just for a moment I wanted to go to her, climb on to her lap, tuck my head under her chin and feel the comfort of arms holding me.
I paused then and my therapist waited for me to continue.
‘I couldn’t bear to meet her eyes,’ I said, as I remembered that day and the woman waiting patiently for me to speak. ‘So I did what children do when an adult is about to ask them a question they don’t want to answer. I ducked my head, crossed my arms and rested my hands on my shoulders.
‘ “I’m all right,” was all I had said then, and I knew she didn’t believe me.
‘She asked me if there was anything I wanted to talk to her about, anything I wanted to share with her. But that fleeting moment when maybe I could have confided in her had gone.
‘I had passed the six-year barrier by then,’ I said ruefully. For a moment a look of puzzlement flitted across my therapist’s face before it was followed by understanding, mixed with compassion.
It is those moments when our eyes meet that we are just two women in a room. One with a sad story she needs to tell the other, who is both moved and appalled by what she is hearing. Then the professional’s mask slips back on before a crack appears in the wall that separates patient from therapist. It is important that both women remember their roles and why they are together. Sometimes it is not easy for me to remember that. After all, until just a short time ago it was only my therapist who had ever really got to know me, who had listened to me telling her of my secrets and my fear to which not even my closest friend was privy.
‘The six-year barrier,’ she said, with a sigh.
As both of us knew, that was an expression used by social services and psychologists about children who have been in long-term care. It is said and no doubt has been proved that, after six years in the system, the damage is done.
Like me, they will insist they are all right when asked. It is tactfully suggested to couples wanting to adopt an older child that first they try fostering. After all, should that arrangement not work, the child can be returned. But to hand back an adopted child would be, to say the least, frowned upon. So, in foster care they were shunted around from home to home. Some, of course, are lucky, but many are not.
Damaged children who see the adult world as having betrayed them often become incapable of accepting kindness. Deep down, they may want to but when it is offered it is often met with aggression. By the time I met the psychologist with kind eyes I had been sexually abused for more than six years. I would never willingly have taken a hand held out to help me.
‘She was the first one I ha
d liked so she was the one I had to get rid of.
‘I played up all week, said I didn’t like her and didn’t want to see her again,’ I told my therapist.
‘And?’
‘I didn’t.’
There was nothing to add to that. There was not even a report in the file with her name on it.
30
Of course, my uncle, over the following weeks, asked for my forgiveness with tears in his eyes. ‘I love you so much,’ he blubbered. ‘You know I do.’
‘Wanker,’ I said, pleased that at least I had some new words in my vocabulary to unleash on him.
‘Jackie, I swear to you, I will never let those men in again.’ Then, over and over again, he told me how much he cared for me, his eyes pleading with me to believe him.
When that got no more response from me than a disgusted and disbelieving look, he changed tactic. The thinning of the lips and the narrowing of the eyes altered his expression. I watched it change from pathetic and miserable, to sour and defensive.
‘It was your fault as well, you know, Jackie,’ he said, and a spiteful tone entered his voice. ‘It’s the sort of girl you are. Yes, that’s what it was.’
I noticed it had transformed again, this time to the hectoring tone of self-righteousness. Something inside me, something I should have recognized as pride, told me to go, not to listen and just leave that place. But his voice held me there, just for a few seconds longer.
‘You’re no little innocent, Jackie. Men can see that you know what it’s all about.’
I wasn’t going to argue with him but I couldn’t stop myself at least responding to his taunts. ‘You fucking wanker,’ I said, just in case he hadn’t heard me the first time. ‘Anyhow, I’m out of here. I’m going shopping. Oh, and, Uncle …’ He looked up at me through red-rimmed eyes. The glimmer of hope in them faded at my next words. ‘Better get yourself tidied up ready for Auntie, hadn’t you?’
Can't Anyone Help Me? Page 11
