I Remember, Daddy (15 page)

‘Katie, please. Put the knife down.’ Jenny was standing in the kitchen doorway behind Neil.

I ignored her and shouted at Neil, ‘Take me to my father’s house.’ Then I stepped towards him, the knife held out in front of me.

‘Okay. Okay.’ Neil reached around the side of me with exaggeratedly slow care to pick up his car keys from the kitchen work surface and, as he did so, I caught a glimpse of Jenny’s anxious face behind him.

As soon as we pulled up outside my father’s house, I knew he wasn’t there. There was no car in the driveway and the large outer double doors were shut, which only ever happened when the house was locked up and empty. Neil turned the car around and took me back to stay the night with him and Jenny, and it was only some time later that I realised he’d never have let me do anything to my father anyway. He’d driven me there because he was afraid that if he didn’t, I’d find some other way to get there, or might turn the knife on myself instead, and because he was hoping – rightly, as it turned out – that if he could buy some time, it would give me the chance to calm down.

I think I was just searching for some way to do something that might make the torment stop. I’d been having counselling for years, since I’d first started to remember; but I was still having horrible nightmares. It seemed as though I’d always been afraid of the nighttime – as a child, when I used to hide in my wardrobe with a sheet over my head, praying that when my father opened the door he wouldn’t see me; and then as an adult, too frightened to close my eyes because of the dreams, invoked by memories, that haunted my sleep.

After my parents divorced and the court ordered my father to pay maintenance, he’d declared himself bankrupt every time it had looked as though he was going to be forced to pay up, and he’d put almost everything he owned into someone else’s name, latterly Gillian’s. So, on paper at least, he appeared to have nothing of any value at all.

My mother hadn’t ever pursued him for the money he’d been ordered to pay her. She knew that his determination not to pay was far stronger than her own desire to get from him the money she was due, and that she wouldn’t be able to cope with the long, difficult battle it would involve. After I told her about how my father had abused me, however, she changed her mind. It was as though she felt that because she hadn’t done anything to protect me at the time – although she hadn’t known what was happening – she needed to act in some way and do something now. And, this time, she was absolutely firm in her resolve to fight for what was rightfully hers.

It must have been shortly after my father received a letter from my mother’s lawyer informing him that she was taking him to court that he phoned me.

‘You’re not going to get a single penny out of me,’ he shouted as soon as I picked up the receiver.

The unexpected sound of his voice sent a shudder through my body and my eyes snapped shut in an involuntary twitch. Then, for some reason, something made me press ‘Record’ on my answering machine.

‘That bitch of a mother of yours is getting nothing. Do you hear me?’ His voice had risen to a frenzied scream. ‘Nothing! No bloody court in the land is going to be able to make me give her any money. She can forget it. If she’s got money to spend on lawyer’s fees, she doesn’t need anything from me. You’re just the same, both of you: lazy and worthless. You think you can sponge off men and that we’re here to provide you with money while you sit back and do fuck all.’

It was an accusation that was unfair on both counts: my father had been legally obliged to pay maintenance to my mother while I was a child, which he‘d failed to do; and I’d never asked him for anything other than to help me keep my home during a period when I’d been too ill to work – with an illness that had been caused by what he’d done to me. I was upset, as I always was, by his nastiness and threats. But this time I felt a sense of satisfaction at the thought that I’d outsmarted him, because I had his rant on tape, as proof of what he was really like.

As the pendulum that ruled my life swung back towards ‘normal’ and I began to feel well again, I landed a good job selling advertising space for a magazine. I really enjoyed it. I liked the people I worked with and I was good at what I was doing, and it wasn’t long before I was promoted. Then, one day, my father contacted me out of the blue – although, in fact, it was actually Gillian who phoned me.

‘Your father wondered if you’d like to come up to the house for dinner,’ she told me, trying, unsuccessfully, to make it sound like a casual suggestion, despite the fact that I hadn’t seen my father for some months.

‘Really? Why?’

Surprise and mild suspicion were evident in my voice, and Gillian sounded embarrassed as she said, ‘Well, we’ve heard about how well you’re doing in your new job and I think your father wanted to catch up on your news – and to see you, of course. We haven’t seen you in ages.’

‘Okay,’ I said, and I think she could imagine the shrug that expressed my lack of enthusiasm at the prospect.

A few days later, I arrived at my father’s house at the appointed hour and he greeted me, as he always did unless he was angry with me, by proffering a cheek for me to kiss. During dinner, he talked a lot of inconsequential rubbish that served only to deepen my bewilderment about why he’d asked me to come. My father had never in his whole life wanted to see me, and I knew he must have a reason this time for pretending that he did. There was something going on, although I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was.

At one point during the evening, while Gillian was clearing away dirty plates from the dining table, my father leaned back in his chair, folded his hands in front of him and said, ‘Now then, why don’t you tell me all about your childhood.’ Then he laughed a nasty, sneering laugh, as though he was daring me to say something.

‘I don’t want to go into that now,’ I told him, swallowing the saliva that had filled my mouth and praying I wasn’t actually going to vomit all over the table.

He laughed again, but he changed the subject, and we ate the rest of our meal and drank our wine while he held court, as he always did. Then, when we were eating our dessert, he asked me casually about some problems I’d had when I sold my house. When I’d bought the house, my lawyer hadn’t picked up on the fact that it had quite extensive damp, so I’d ended up having to sell it at a loss, and then I’d become locked in a half-hearted battle with the lawyer about compensation.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ my father said, flapping his napkin over the side of his chair. ‘I’ll get some of my legal friends on to it for you. They’ll sort it out.’

‘Yeah, thanks,’ I said, not really taking much notice, because I knew that his offers of help rarely materialised.

‘Well, it’s time you were going home,’ he said abruptly, dropping his napkin on to the table and pushing back his chair. ‘Gillian’s going to drive you, and I can see she’s getting tired.’

I stood up and lifted my handbag from where I’d hooked it over the back of my chair.

‘Oh, and before you go, just let me get a bit of paper.’ He walked over to the oak dresser that stood against the wall on one side of the room, rummaged for a few moments through its top drawer and then said, ‘Ah, here we are’, before turning and sitting down again at the table.

He unscrewed the top of his pen, wrote something in his flamboyant hand, and then pushed the piece of paper across the table towards me and handed me his pen.

I read the words he’d written: ‘I, Katherine Matthews’.

‘Just sign your name and I’ll fill in all the blah blah later,’ he told me.

‘Fill it in with what?’ I asked him. ‘I don’t know what you mean. What is it?’

‘I told you,’ he said, waving his hand dismissively. ‘I’ll see what I can do about sorting out the problems with the lawyer – about the damp. I’ll fill in all the legal jargon afterwards. All you need to do is write your signature and I can deal directly with your lawyer.’ Then he laughed spitefully as he added, ‘Have all the drugs affected your memory?’

‘But, I don’t …’ I didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t like my father to take any interest at all in my problems. The only times he’d even pretended to do so were when he was showing off to other people about what a wonderful, generous father he was. But, each time, he’d failed to see his promises through, and his good intentions – if he’d ever actually had any – had evaporated as soon as his audience had gone. So, this time, something didn’t seem right.

‘We haven’t got all night,’ my father said. He smiled a quick smile to try to cover up the impatience in his voice and added, ‘Poor old Gillian wants to get to her bed.’ He looked across the table at Gillian with a lewd, suggestive grin and she lowered her eyes.

‘Just sign there.’ He jabbed at the piece of paper with his finger, and I wrote my name with his pen.

Instantly, before the ink had even dried on the page, he seemed to lose interest in the subject. Smoothing the paper with his hands, he said ‘Goodbye’ and then left the room.

Gillian tried to hide her discomfort under a false cheerfulness as she drove me home, and 20 minutes later I was closing the front door of my flat and wondering what my father was really up to.

Before Gillian had phoned and asked me to dinner, he hadn’t contacted me for months. So I’d assumed that the real reason for his invitation had been because there was something he wanted to tell me, or, more likely, some information he wanted to prise out of me. But, as I went over the evening’s conversations in my head, I couldn’t think of anything that had been said that could have been of potential interest or importance to him. I decided he must just have wanted to find out about my new job at the magazine, so that he could assess whether there was any aspect of it that might prove useful – or potentially threatening – to him in some way. As usual, though, there was no point speculating about my father’s real intentions for doing anything. Only time would tell.

Three weeks later, I phoned my solicitor and asked if my father had been in touch with him.

‘Your father?’ the solicitor said. ‘No. Why would your father get in touch with me?’

‘About the damp in the house,’ I told him. ‘Although, actually, it might not have been my father himself; I think he was going to get someone else – one of his legal people – to contact you to try to sort it all out.’

‘I don’t really understand what you mean.’ The solicitor sounded bemused. ‘I haven’t heard anything from anyone about it.’

And that was that. My father never did step in to help me. So it looked as though the real reason he’d made me sign that blank piece of paper would remain a mystery.

R
emembering had provided me with an explanation of why I’d always felt as though, if people really knew me, there was something about me they’d be horrified and disgusted by. It had been a feeling I couldn’t understand, until the memories started to return and I realised why I’d always felt as though I was contaminated and somehow dirty. I suppose it was better in the long run actually to know what had made me feel that way, but knowing was also the reason I started to drink bleach.

The first time I did it, I drank just a couple of mouthfuls, in the hope that I might be able to cleanse myself and remove the dark, disgusting stain inside me. It tasted foul, and it burned my mouth and throat painfully as I swallowed it. That seemed like a good thing, though, because it was another way of self-harming; a new way to punish myself for … I didn’t really know what.

It felt like pure acid as it flowed down my oesophagus and then as though burning fingers were gripping my stomach. I crouched on the floor, panting and waiting for the intensity of the pain to subside, and then I began to retch and vomit up blood. But despite the pain and the horrible raw feeling inside me, I had a sense of satisfaction as I imagined it flushing through my body, dissolving all the filth my father had put inside me.

After that first time, I drank mouthfuls of bleach at least once almost every week for about 18 months. Although swallowing it was agonising and I was frightened by the blood that instantly filled my mouth and later came out when I went to the toilet, it made me feel better – cleaner – for a little while, at least. The physical pain somehow seemed to release some of my mental pain, although the effect was always disappointingly short-lived, and the bleach caused permanent damage to my insides, for which I still have to take daily medication.

The first time I’d taken an overdose, I hadn’t really intended to kill myself. But, one morning when I woke up, it was as though something inside me had died. Overnight, I seemed to have gone from weary to completely exhausted by the effort of constantly having to try, of always struggling and hoping that the future might be better, and I decided to end it, once and for all. For the last few weeks, I’d been spiralling down again into hopeless despair and I knew I couldn’t go on pretending everything was all right.

I cried when I thought about never seeing Sam again. I knew, though, that he was happy living with his father, whereas I felt I had nothing to offer him and he’d be better off without me. I thought about my best friend Jenny too, and how she’d stood by me and supported me ever since we were at school together. And although I knew she’d be angry with me for what I was going to do, it never crossed my mind that it might cause her actual distress. Mentally, I was, quite literally, in a world of my own. When I was ill, I was totally self-centred; everything around me contracted down to just the things that affected me, making me incapable of imagining how other people might feel as a result of my actions, particularly if I killed myself.

That morning, I was convinced that taking my own life was the only way out of the miserable, never-ending battle I had to fight every single day. The images of what my father did to me when I was a child were always with me. There didn’t seem to be anything I could do to block them out, although the medication helped, and sometimes the drinking too. Each time I began to get a bit better and could imagine that, one day, I might be able to cope and move on with my life, something knocked me back again. On this occasion, I’d been having vivid flashbacks, which were pulling me deeper and deeper down into a dark pit of hopelessness, and I was convinced that I was dragging down with me the people I loved.

It’s difficult to explain how the flashbacks – as well as all the other memories – affected me. It was partly their relentlessness that was so debilitating. Normally, if you look out of a window, you see what’s there: houses, fields, trees … But wherever I looked I saw what was already in my head: my father leaning over me as I lay in bed, or crushing me with the weight of his body until I was gasping for breath, or pushing my head under the bathwater and holding it there until my lungs pressed against my ribcage.

When I was ill, those images were always there, wherever I looked and whatever I was doing. And so was my fear – often a non-specific, undirected fear that was sometimes so strong it almost paralysed me – and my sense of self-disgust. All the images and emotions tumbled around constantly in my head, like physical objects in a perpetually spinning washing machine. I wanted to make it stop, to shut out for ever all the things I didn’t want to see or think about. And I didn’t know how else to do it.

I’d been stockpiling tablets for weeks – mostly paracetamol and chlorpromazine, which were the anti-psychotic pills I was supposed to take every day – and I went into the kitchen and started to swallow them, forcing them down, one by one, with sips of water. As I stood there, I could see my father leaning against the old butler’s sink in the kitchen of the house we’d lived in when I was a child. He had a glass in his hand and one corner of his thin lips was raised in a cruel sneer. ‘Useless’, I heard him say. Then he threw back his head and roared with laughter.

The room turned slowly around me and I began to feel dizzy and sick. My father was right: I was useless; I was a worthless, bad person who did nothing for the people I loved except cause them pain. I deserved to die.

I reached out my hand towards the knife block on the work surface beside the small kitchen window and closed my fingers around the wooden handle of one of the knives, sliding it out of its slot and holding it for a moment in front of me. Then I began to make small cuts on the underside of my left arm, slashing and slicing at the skin to release some of the pain that was always inside me.

A sudden wave of nausea washed over me and I reached out my hand to steady myself against the kitchen table, and at that moment the doorbell rang.

I stumbled to the front door and pulled it open and my friend Debs gasped as she took a step backwards, her eyes wide with shock, and said, ‘Jesus Christ, Katie! What are you doing?’

I followed the direction of her horrified stare and looked down at the knife that was still in my hand and at the blood trickling down my arm. And that’s when I must have fainted.

When I came round, someone I didn’t recognise was looking down at me and I heard a voice say, ‘Ah, you’re back with us. Come on now, love. Let’s get you into the car.’

A few seconds later, I was slumped in the back of a police car as it sped through the busy city streets to the hospital.

When the wounds on my arm had been cleaned, I was given an injection and then transferred by ambulance to a locked ward in a psychiatric hospital, where I was sectioned. Although I hated the thought of being locked up again, I didn’t resist. I’d tried to kill myself because I was useless, and so unhappy I couldn’t bear to live through another day. And I’d failed – which simply proved just how useless I really was. So I thought I deserved whatever happened to me.

In reality, however, being locked up was even worse than I’d remembered. When you’re as ill as I was, you’re afraid of everything, and I felt incredibly vulnerable. It was as though all the thoughts and images in my mind were on scraps of paper that kept blowing away out of reach every time I tried to grasp hold of one. The one thing I was sure of, though, was that I couldn’t trust anyone. I knew that everyone at the hospital was trying to get me to drop my guard – by giving me injections to ‘calm me down’ or by appearing to be kind and understanding – and that as soon I did, they’d … I didn’t know what it was they were planning to do; I just knew that I must never relax.

I’d beg everyone – the nurses, my mother and any other visitors who came to see me – to get me out of there. ‘Surely you can see that I shouldn’t be here,’ I’d plead with them, and I’d promise them anything if they’d help me to escape. Then I’d hate them when they all said, in the same nanny-ish voice, ‘You need to be here, Katie. You’re here for your own good, to help you get well again.’ And my fear and anxiety would grow stronger, because I knew that they, too, were part of the plot to keep me there against my will.

My mother did seem to agree with me, however, and one day when she came to see me, she broke down and cried and – as she’d done once before, on the first occasion when I’d been in the psychiatric hospital – she told a nurse I shouldn’t be there amongst all those crazy, sick people. And again I realised later that we were both wrong and that I did need to be in the hospital, because I was crazy and sick too.

It must have been horribly distressing for my mother to see me in that state, surrounded by patients who sometimes became angry and violent, but many of whom were no more deranged than I was. I didn’t think about my mother’s distress, though, or about anything outside myself. I was locked inside my own mind – and that was a very frightening place to be.

When it became clear that no one was going to help me get out of there, I started trying to run away. Just as I’d done before, during the six months I’d spent in hospital after Sam was born, I’d stand for hours near the locked door that divided the ward from the long corridor leading to the world outside, watching and waiting for the moment when I could escape. I’d got out of the hospital on a few occasions last time I was there, but I never did manage it this time. In the event, though, it didn’t matter so much, because I wasn’t there for very long.

The medication I’d been taking needed to be adjusted, and once they’d found the right dose and allowed time for it to take effect, I was pronounced well enough to be discharged. I couldn’t do paid work, however, and I didn’t work again for the next three years. Instead, I had regular counselling sessions and set myself the goal of getting through just one day at a time.

I was still having flashbacks and nightmares, which meant that my head was filled, waking and sleeping, with horrible images of the child that was me but didn’t seem to be me. I felt as though it was my responsibility to watch over that child and my duty to protect her. But I couldn’t protect her, because, however hard I tried, I could never reach her. So I was forced to watch the same reel of film playing over and over again, on a continuous loop in my mind, while all the time the hatred I felt for my father continued to grow. He didn’t love me and he’d never cared about me, and that knowledge was almost more difficult to try to come to terms with than anything else.

On some days, I couldn’t focus on anything for long enough to get a grip on reality at all. Sometimes, I’d sit on the sofa in my flat, holding my hands out in front of me, palms upwards and with their edges touching, and imagine I could see my life slipping away like water between my fingers. I was frightened and tearful, and whenever I tried to visualise my future, all I could see was a dark, empty room.

In time, though, having tumbled, like Alice in Wonderland, to the very bottom of a deep hole into a world of chaos and craziness where nothing made sense, I began to crawl my way up again towards the barely discernible light. I’d often miss my footing and, as I started to slip backwards and was reaching out for something to hold on to, I’d think of Sam and of how, if I killed myself, he might grow up thinking I hadn’t loved him. And it was that thought that gave me just enough energy and incentive to keep going.

Gradually – almost imperceptibly at first – I started to feel better. The new dose of medication I was taking helped to suppress the images in my head and, as it did so, it freed up enough space for me to think about other things until, eventually, I was well enough to start doing voluntary work. I became a mentor to young people with learning difficulties – someone they could talk to and go out with – and that’s when I realised what I really wanted to do was work with children who’d been abused.

I’d always hated the fact that when I was ill I couldn’t think about anything or anyone except myself: the vivid, powerful images in my head simply blotted out everything else. But, as soon as I was well again and could think sensible thoughts, it suddenly seemed really important to me to be able to make a difference.

I became convinced that if I could come to terms with all the terrible things that had happened to me, I could use my own experiences to help children who were suffering in the way I had. Then, one day, I had a sudden flash of understanding and I realised there was no point wishing my childhood had been different and that my father had loved me in the way a father ought to love his daughter. My childhood was over and, however much I might want to do so, I couldn’t go back and try to put things right for myself. What I could do, though, was help children who were currently going through the sort of things I’d gone through, because I could recognise the pain of abuse when I saw it in their eyes, and I could understand how they felt.

The other blinding, simple truth that came to me at that time was that to be able to help those children, I had to stay well myself. I would never be any use to anyone if I remained a periodically gibbering wreck who had to be carted off from time to time to a psychiatric hospital. The children I wanted to work with needed someone they could trust enough to talk to, someone who could give them hope that they could recover from what had been done to them and lead normal lives.

When I was a teenager, some people – including my mother – used to tell me I was mad, a lunatic, and that only a crazy person would behave in the way I was behaving. And I used to think they were right. It felt as though my actions and reactions were being guided by something that was beyond my control. When I was in my teens and was drinking and partying every weekend, it must have looked to other people as though I was thoroughly enjoying myself. Whereas, in fact, I felt as though I was in a runaway train, which was gathering speed at an alarming rate while I desperately searched for the brake.

I hadn’t known what was wrong with me – although I knew without any doubt that something was – and I’d longed to have someone I could talk to. But once I understood why I’d been so unhappy and why I’d pretended I didn’t care about anyone or anything, I was certain that I could use my own experiences to do some good. Although it was a daunting prospect, I felt that if I could help just one young person not to have to go through what I’d gone through – and what I was still struggling to come to terms with every day as an adult in my thirties – everything would have been worthwhile.