I Remember, Daddy (13 page)

As I pushed the trolley towards the open inner door of the supermarket, an image flashed into my mind: Sam was floating, face upwards, in the bath, his eyes open and staring, while my father stood beside him, calmly removing his own clothes. I stopped beside the racks of magazines and untidy piles of newspapers, wiped the sweat from my hands on to my jeans, and then turned and walked out through the door without a backward glance.

It was almost like a blackout. I didn’t plan to do it, or even realise what I’d done, and I don’t know what I was thinking at the time – if anything. But when someone found me a little while later in the staff area at the back of the shop, I was deeply distressed and in the midst of a panic attack.

Someone had already found Sam, apparently abandoned and all alone by the magazines, but still smiling cheerfully at everyone who came in through the doors. So it wasn’t long before they put two and two together and realised we were connected. When he was finally able to get some sense out of me, the manager of the supermarket phoned Tom at work and he came to pick us up and take us home.

I don’t know what came over me on that day, or on any of the other days when I abruptly became unable to cope. Sam was never a moment’s trouble; he was the most good-natured, easily contented child anyone was ever blessed with, and I loved him with all my heart. So my reason for abandoning him and walking away had nothing to do with him. Something had triggered a memory, and once I started to panic, I was totally incapable of rational thought.

I’d sometimes wake up in the morning and it would slowly dawn on me that I felt all right. I’d lie in bed thinking, ‘This is fine. I can do this,’ and decide to go out somewhere. But when I got there, it would suddenly seem too much to cope with. I’d look around me at all the people behaving normally – talking to each other, pushing children in prams and buggies, and walking in and out of shops – and my heart would begin to pound. Within seconds, I’d be soaked in sweat, my whole body would be shaking and I’d feel a tight sensation across my chest that made me struggle to breathe. I’d think I was suffocating, that I was about to have a heart attack or lose my mind completely in the middle of the shopping centre, or wherever else I happened to be when the fear and terrible dread overwhelmed me.

There aren’t really words to describe the way it feels to have a panic attack, or what it’s like to live constantly with the anxiety of never knowing when it’s going to happen. It didn’t matter how much sleep I had, I was tired all the time. And what was even worse than the exhaustion was the fear: I was scared of what was happening to me and of never being able to cope again, and I was scared of being a mother to Sam.

Although I loved Sam, I didn’t feel the way I imagined a mother should feel. It was as though I was watching him from a distance and he wasn’t really connected to me. In fact, everything about my life was surreal. Sam was mine, and yet he didn’t seem like mine; I loved him, but I was numb. I had no feelings about myself, so how could I feel anything for anyone else, even my own child? I was an adult woman, the mother of a little boy, and yet in my head I was a child myself, sometimes cowering, terrified, in the corner of a room, watching in case my father walked through an open door.

Perhaps the daze I was living in was caused by the medication I was taking, at least in part. Some of the drugs were supposed to help calm the chaotic perpetual motion in my mind and blot out the voices and memories that were constantly assailing my senses. So it would hardly have been surprising if they’d blurred not just the past but the present, too.

When Sam was two years old, we finally lost our house. For months, Tom had juggled his roles as father of a young son, husband of a crazy wife and sole provider. But it had been clear for some time that we wouldn’t be able to go on paying the mortgage.

When the house was sold, we moved into a housing-association house in quite a nice part of town, and at last some of the pressure was lifted off Tom’s shoulders. We were lucky, too, that his parents, brothers and sisters were so good to us and, particularly, to Sam; I don’t know how we’d have managed without them.

Gradually, though, as the months passed, the medication that sometimes made me feel so detached from life began to stabilise the wild pitching and rolling of my mind, and eventually I was well enough to be able to go to night school to study human resource management. I couldn’t drive, so it meant travelling an hour each way on the bus twice a week. But it was well worth the effort, because each bus journey seemed like a visible sign of the progress I was making. I was proud of myself – for the first time that I could remember: not only could I travel to college and back on my own without succumbing to panic attacks, I could also absorb and understand everything I was being taught.

I really did begin to feel as though I might one day live a normal life. Although I knew I could never close the lid on the Pandora’s box that had been opened, releasing horrific memories of my childhood, perhaps I could learn to see those memories as belonging to the past and, in time, be able to live with them.

Even when I was in hospital, I hadn’t told my mother what I was remembering. But I decided that the time had come when she needed to know, if only so that she could understand what was wrong with me. I knew that it would be a very upsetting discussion, for both of us, and I thought that if we were in a public place, we’d be forced to control our emotions. So I asked her to meet me in a café in town.

We sat together at a table for two in an alcove at one side of the main room, drinking our coffee, and eventually my mother said, ‘So … What is it you wanted to tell me? I must say, I’ve been feeling a bit nervous since you phoned.’

‘I wanted to tell you what’s really wrong with me,’ I told her, taking a deep breath and clasping my hands together tightly on the white damask tablecloth. ‘I mean, what it is that’s made me ill.’

My mother reached out a hand towards mine across the table and said, ‘I know you’ve never really been happy. Not since you were a little girl. But the way you were after Sam was born was something completely different. I did wonder if it was just post-natal depression or if something else had happened to make you so ill.’

‘Dad abused me,’ I told her, blurting out the words in an angry whisper. ‘He did it for years, from the time I was about two years old. But I’d forgotten until Sam was born.’

‘Abused you?’ My mother withdrew her hand and began searching through her handbag, which was something she often did when she was distressed. After a moment, she looked up at me again and asked, ‘What do you mean “abused you”? He abused us all. Surely you hadn’t forgotten his rages and the way he used to …’

‘Sexually abused me,’ I interrupted her. ‘He did it to me, and his friends did it to me too.’ I named a couple of my father’s friends and for a moment I thought my mother was going to pass out.

The shock on her face was clearly genuine, and so were the fat tears that rolled slowly down her cheeks as the true horror of realisation and understanding began to dawn on her.

‘My God! Oh my God,’ she kept whispering, and then, eventually, ‘It makes sense. I never knew. Oh Katie, you have to believe me. I never knew. I’d have killed him with my own bare hands if I’d even suspected he’d laid a hand on you in that way. The baths … the naps … Oh my God!’

And I felt bad for her, because I know that guilt is a terrible thing to have to live with.

C
ompleting my course at college gave me a huge boost. I felt proud of myself, and even prouder when I applied for and was offered a job in the human resources department of a local company. Sadly, though, things between Tom and me weren’t going so well, and we separated not longer after I started work.

We’d known so little about each other and we’d been together for such a short time when I became pregnant with Sam that it was surprising we’d made it as far as we had. It must have been really hard for Tom: within 18 months of our meeting and falling in love, I’d gone from apparent chirpy confidence to extreme mental illness, and his whole life had changed virtually overnight. Not only did he have a baby son and all the responsibilities that normally come with being a father, but he also had a very sick partner who needed constant care and attention, as well as never-ending worries about money. When I first became ill and was no longer able to work, he’d had to carry alone the financial burden of feeding, clothing and caring for three people and of trying to pay a mortgage we’d barely been able to afford on both our incomes.

We’d never actually got married in the end, despite Tom’s intentions that day when we went to see my father at Christmas, and I knew how lucky I’d been that Tom had stuck by me when I was so ill. I was hugely grateful to his parents too, because, without the help and support they gave us, Sam would have been taken into care – and that would have been both terrible for Sam and an additional source of guilt for me that I don’t think I could have lived with.

However, when I was well enough to work again and was coping better than I’d done for three or four years, Tom felt able to move on. It was one of the saddest days of my life when we went our separate ways, although we stayed friends and I knew I could rely on him to help me when things went wrong.

Even when I was well enough to work, I still had to take medication – and I remained dependent on it for the next 20 years. So, although I could hardly bear to think about it, it was clear to Tom and to me that Sam would be better off living with his father.

I sometimes felt as though I was swimming in the sea, trying to keep my eyes fixed on a horizon I couldn’t really see and my head above water, and every wave that washed over me made me start to panic. Then, every so often, a really big wave would come along, my heart would start to race and I’d thrash about so wildly that, instead of saving myself from drowning, I’d actually make things much worse. I didn’t want Sam to have to live like that too, buffeted and made anxious by every wave that I encountered. The only thing that really mattered was what was best for him, and in my heart I knew he needed to be with Tom. I couldn’t look after him properly on my own; but if he lived with Tom, he’d always be safe and well cared for and I’d be able to see him whenever I wanted to, or if ever he needed me.

It was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make. I cried myself to sleep night after night as I tried to come to terms with it, and I was full of hatred for my father for having done things to me when I was a little girl that made me unfit as an adult to look after my own child.

Sam was always pleased to see me, although it was clear that he was very happy living with Tom, and for a while everything seemed to be okay. The demons in my mind were apparently under control and I was feeling better than I’d done for a long time. I was really enjoying my job, and enjoying the thought that I was leading a ‘normal’ life again. At the weekends, I often went out with my friend Jenny and sometimes we’d run into a friend of my father or even my father himself.

Whenever we did meet my father, he’d chat up Jenny in a way that infuriated and disgusted me. Quite apart from the fact that he was more than twice her age, he knew that I’d been remembering things about my childhood, and if he’d stopped to think about it – which he probably didn’t bother to do, as he was self-engrossed as well as thick-skinned – he’d have realised that Jenny must have known about at least some of those things. Perhaps he simply didn’t care.

A couple of times on our nights out on the town, I bumped into a woman called Irene, who I sometimes used to see when I was in my teens at a pub frequented by my father and some of his work colleagues. I’d always thought Irene was a strange woman. She had a very pronounced squint in one eye and used to wear men’s suits, and I’d assumed she was a lesbian. So I was particularly surprised when someone told me one day that she was pregnant.

I barely knew her, though, and I didn’t think any more about it, until I was in a pub one evening and saw a friend of hers who said, ‘Did you hear Irene had her baby? You do know it’s your father’s child, don’t you?’ I almost laughed out loud. Although I could easily accept that I might have been wrong about Irene’s sexual identity, I knew that my father’s choice of sexual partners tended to be teenage girls and attractive young women in their twenties. So I dismissed the claim as nonsense and forgot about it.

Then, one day, after hearing nothing from my father for months, I had a phone call from him.

‘That bitch Irene is trying to take me for maintenance,’ he shouted as soon as I picked up the telephone.

‘I’m fine thank you, Dad,’ I answered. ‘And how are you?’

He ignored me and bellowed, ‘Get that cow off my back. Or you’ll get nothing.’

My irritation at his complete indifference to everything and everyone except himself and his own problems made me bold and I said, ‘Well, that’s not really much of an incentive, because I don’t get anything anyway.’

‘I’m warning you.’ I could tell he was trying to control his fury and I began to enjoy his frustration – being bullied down a telephone line was quite a different thing from being shouted at face to face. ‘I’ve got enough to deal with without this,’ he snapped. ‘She’s your friend. Get her off my back.’

I laughed. ‘I don’t know why you say that,’ I told him. ‘I barely know her. She’s not my friend at all. But it does sound as though she’s been yours! If it is your child, pay for it.’ And I put the phone down.

Then I sat for a while, half-expecting it to ring again, waiting for my body to stop shaking and trying to absorb the extraordinary new sensation of having answered my father back. I don’t know what had possessed me. Perhaps it was just the realisation that I’d had so many really serious problems over the last few years, which had almost exclusively been caused by the unforgivable things my father had done to me when I was a child, and he hadn’t cared or tried to do anything to help me. So his stupid, self-induced problems – which weren’t real problems at all – just seemed like self-important melodrama. It was nice to feel as though I’d been able to frustrate him though, and that I’d dared to argue with him, even if it had been for just a few moments.

I heard later that Irene’s child was proved to be my father’s. Irene took him to court and he was ordered to pay maintenance for the child’s support. Apparently, though, he swore she’d never get a penny, despite the court order, and I never did find out whether she did. I hope so. The money aside, however, she was lucky that my father didn’t want to be involved with her child, because he caused nothing but harm to the children he did have contact with.

I met Irene’s child, my little half-sister, a few years later, when she was about seven years old. But the thought of keeping in touch with her when our only real connection was my father – who I didn’t want to be connected with in any way – was too painful, and I never saw her again.

In fact, from what I was told subsequently, we both had quite a few half-brothers and half-sisters. I don’t know if that’s true, although I can believe that it is, because my father had a very casual attitude towards sex – anything goes and the kinkier the better – and a very large number of sexual partners over the years.

There were often porn films running at his house when I visited him as a young teenager, and I’d sometimes see a flash as a photograph was taken of me when I was in bed with his friends as a little girl, although I didn’t realise what was happening until much later. However, it seems that I wasn’t the only one who was having my picture taken.

Before I was with Tom and had Sam, I was at my father’s house one day. He was at work, Gillian had just popped out to the shops and I was cold – my father didn’t believe in spending money on heating the house when he wasn’t there – so I decided to look in the bedroom to see if I could find one of Gillian’s sweaters to borrow.

It seemed like a reasonable enough thing to do when I thought of it. But, as I opened the bedroom door, I began to feel uncomfortable. It was before I’d started remembering that my father had sexually abused me, so I couldn’t think why there was sweat on the palms of my hands and why my heart had begun to beat so fast. I decided it was probably just the thought of being in my father’s bedroom, invading the inner sanctum where he and Gillian did things together that no one would ever want to try to imagine.

I laughed at myself, wiped my hands on my skirt and pulled open a drawer. Suddenly, it felt as though I was snooping, and I found that once I started, I couldn’t stop. I looked in a couple of drawers in the polished-oak chest and then pulled open one of the small, half-width drawers at the top. It was full of photographs, all jumbled together in an untidy heap. I picked up a few, holding them on my open palm as I turned them round slowly with the fingers of my other hand and tried to work out what they were. And then I almost threw them back into the drawer as a feeling of sick disgust shot through me like a pain and I realised that all the photographs were of men, women, young girls and boys engaged in horrible, lewd sexual acts.

I slammed the drawer shut, automatically reaching out a hand to steady a vase that wobbled precariously on top of the chest. I kept swallowing, trying to get rid of the sharp, burning sensation at the back of my throat, and then, with the sound of my heart thumping loudly in my ears, I ran out of the room, having completely forgotten about my intention of searching for a sweater.

However hard I tried, I never managed to block out from my mind the images I saw that day.

Later, when the memories of being sexually abused as a child had begun to return, I wished I’d scooped up a handful of the photographs and taken them with me, as evidence of the fact that my father was not at all the man he might appear to be. I thought that no one would ever believe me if I told them the truth about him. And then, a few years after Tom and I split up, it began to appear as though I wasn’t the only one who knew more about my father than he’d have wanted anyone to know.

I was at work one morning when the phone rang and a man’s voice I didn’t recognise said, ‘Is that Katie Matthews?’

‘Yes, this is Katie,’ I answered.

‘Katie Matthews, daughter of Harold Matthews?’ he persisted.

There was something about his tone and the emphatic way he said my father’s name that made me feel uneasy. I hadn’t seen my father for some time and my first thought was that this man was phoning me to tell me he’d died – and I didn’t know how I felt about that.

‘Who is this?’ I asked.

‘I’m a journalist,’ the man answered, and he said his name and the name of the newspaper he worked for. ‘I was hoping you might answer some questions about your father.’

‘Why? What sort of questions?’ I tried not to sound as panic-stricken as I felt.

‘Questions about the accusations that have been made against him of being a modern-day slum landlord,’ the man said, and then added as if it was an afterthought, ‘Oh, and about his liking for having sex with underage girls and young boys.’

His tone was incongruously chatty, and I gave a bark of laughter, which I hurriedly tried to cover up by coughing and clearing my throat.

‘Young boys?’ I repeated incredulously, although in reality nothing would have surprised me about my father when it came to sex, because I knew he was happy to try anything and everything, at least once.

‘Ah, so you’re surprised to hear about the boys, but not about the accusations that he’s had sex with under-age girls.’ The journalist made it sound as though I’d made a statement rather than asked a question, and I began to feel nervous as I realised that by saying anything at all, I was giving him the opportunity to ‘quote’ me.

‘There’s going to be an article in the paper,’ he continued, in a friendly, confiding sort of tone. ‘So I just wanted to give you the chance to comment ahead of time, in case there was anything you wanted to say in defence of your father – or otherwise.’

It was clear that what he was really hoping for was for me to say something ‘otherwise’. But it wasn’t the journalist I was afraid of; it was my father.

‘I didn’t say that I was surprised about the boys. I … What I mean is … Look, I’m sorry, I don’t have anything to say,’ I told him, and I could still hear the metallic squawking of his voice as I replaced the telephone receiver on my desk.

I sat for a moment with my arms crossed in front of me in a subconscious gesture of self-protection. I felt sick and my whole body was shaking, but I wasn’t sure precisely which aspect of what had just happened was making me feel so ill.

For a while, there were stories in the media, but I knew that however terrible the revelations that were made about my father, he wasn’t ashamed or remorseful about a single one of all the dreadful things he’d done, including almost destroying the life of his own daughter. And despite the media interest in him, I’m sure he still felt invincible, because he sometimes told me, ‘If I ever go down, I’ll be taking a lot of people with me. As I’ve always said, I plan to have the last laugh.’

I was still taking medication to enable me to function more or less normally. Sometimes I was well and sometimes I had to have time off work and go through yet another series of appointments with my psychiatrist. I wanted to leave the past behind me and get on with my life, but there was so much to try to come to terms with and so much I still couldn’t even begin to understand.

Throughout most of my childhood, my father had bullied, beaten and sexually abused me and, perhaps worse than that – although it’s difficult to draw up a scale of ‘bad, worse and worst’ in relation to a man’s sexual abuse of his own daughter – he’d encouraged his friends to abuse me too. None of the people who knew him could ever have said that he wasn’t a great host at the many parties he threw: at how many other parties would you be offered not only cigars, drugs and the best champagne, which flowed like water, but also the chance to have sex with your host’s little girl?