I Remember, Daddy (14 page)

By the time I was in my early teens and my mind had begun to lock away the appalling memories it couldn’t process or make sense of, I felt worthless, dirty and unlovable – and I didn’t know why. Once I’d forgotten the aspects of my childhood that had been most important in moulding the person I was becoming, I couldn’t understand why I was so unhappy and so full of undirected anger and sometimes hatred – both of myself and of anyone who bullied or treated me badly. I just assumed there was something wrong with me and that, as my father had told me for as long as I could remember, everything was my fault.

Then, as the memories began to return, it was as though my life had been shattered into pieces, like a mirror smashed with a hammer. I managed to reassemble part of it, but I was still searching frantically in the dark for the tiny shards of glass that would make the mirror whole again and that would enable me to see a clear reflected image of myself. Every time I saw my father – which wasn’t often during that period of my life – I’d feel an anger and resentment towards him that I didn’t fully understand. Somehow, though, I always knew that he was the person who’d wielded the hammer and smashed the mirror in the first place.

Eventually, I decided to write a letter to him, telling him about the things I’d been remembering and demanding an explanation for what he’d done to me. I don’t know what I thought he was going to say, and whether I really believed that he might admit to the things he’d done – particularly because I knew that he was a supremely arrogant man who never apologised or explained himself to anyone. But I wrote the letter anyway, and gave it to someone who I knew was meeting my father the next day for a meal at a restaurant.

I didn’t tell the bearer of my letter what was written in it and, apparently, when he handed it over, my father read it without a word. Then he folded it up again, replaced it in its envelope, tucked it into the inside pocket of his jacket and said, in a wounded, incredulous tone, ‘Well, I can’t believe it. She called me a bully. I’m not a bully!’

It was the one thing he’d taken exception to. I’d catalogued his sexual abuse of me and asked him, ‘What sort of man takes a child into his bath, pushes her head under the water and makes her do what you used to make me do to you? And what sort of man takes his daughter into his bed and does the things you used to do to me?’ But none of the accusations that he was a paedophile who’d sexually abused and prostituted his own young daughter seemed to have upset him. What had really annoyed him and struck him as being unfair was the claim that he was a bully!

Looking back now, I realise I was very ill when I wrote that letter to my father, and although everything I accused him of was perfectly true, most of what I’d written probably sounded pretty crazy. He answered it anyway, though – and in writing, which was a very unusual thing for my father to do, because he never wrote letters. He had too much to hide, both in his personal and business lives, and he was always careful not to leave a paper trail of any sort. Even in the letter he did write to me, he was too clever to admit to anything. It was full of phrases like, ‘If you want to talk to me about things that have happened in your life, just contact me’ and ‘I know your mother put lots of ideas into your head.’

I think he must have been a bit nervous, however, because he could just have ignored the letter altogether – like he ignored everything else he didn’t want to have to deal with. It was obvious that he wanted me to contact him so that we could talk. But part of his job – which he did so well, with such acclaimed success – was to twist and spin and disguise reality to make things appear to be different from the way they actually were. I’d heard him out-talk and out-smart people with far sharper wits than I had, and without the debilitating, destructive emotional baggage that I was carrying. So talking to him face to face was something I was never going to try to do.

A
fter Tom and I split up, it took me a long time to pay off my share of the debts and to get back on my feet financially. I tried to rebuild a life for myself, both for my own sake and so that Sam wouldn’t grow up feeling that his mother lived on the edge of society, defined by her illness and her inability to cope. I just kept plodding on, making sometimes painfully slow progress towards achieving my aim of ‘being normal’.

It was as though there was an invisible line between the well side of me and the ill side, and I was trying to traverse along it, like a tightrope walker, balancing precariously as I edged my way, one careful step at a time. The tightrope constantly swayed beneath my feet, and sometimes I’d wobble and lean too far towards the ill side, and sometimes I’d fall and would have to struggle to climb back on to it again. Then I’d wait until the worst of the swaying stopped and I was steady enough to be able to continue my cautious progress – until the next time I missed my footing and fell again. The trouble was, though, that it took a huge amount of effort just to stay on the tightrope at all, and even when I seemed to be balanced and relatively safe, I knew that at some point not too far ahead, I’d fall again.

This time, though, I remained ‘normal’ long enough to be able to buy a small one-bedroom house and, for a while, things seemed to be going well. But then the tightrope swayed and I couldn’t keep my balance, the cycle of illness started again and I had to give up my job, which meant that I didn’t have enough money to pay my bills, and everything began to come crashing down around my ears once more.

When nothing else worked, drinking seemed to block out the images and silence the voices in my head – for a while, at least – and I’d begun to drink heavily. This time, though, not even alcohol succeeded in stopping the endless, exhausting whirring round and round of thoughts in my mind. I was weary of struggling repeatedly to get back on my feet; there didn’t seem to be any point in it, particularly when I knew that it was only a matter of time before I’d be right back where I started. And then I began to hear one clear voice in my head saying, ‘Why not just give up?’

During the periods when I was ill, I’d sometimes be almost consumed by hatred for my father, and I’d sit hugging my knees to my chest and thinking about him. I had friends whose fathers had always done everything they could to make their sons’ and daughters’ lives easier for them, whereas my father had taken every imaginable and unimaginable step to ensure that my life would be as difficult as it could possibly be.

One night, after drinking a couple of bottles of wine and finding they’d done nothing to blot out the dark thoughts that stopped me sleeping, I took an overdose – a cocktail of paracetamol and the anti-psychotic medication I was supposed to take but that I’d been hoarding for several days. I didn’t really intend to kill myself; I just wanted to sleep. But maybe it was because I was afraid I might have taken too many tablets and would die all alone and not be found for days that I phoned Tom.

Tom and I had been apart for a few years, although we saw each other regularly when I went to pick up Sam or dropped him at home again. In the early days after we separated, I used to phone Tom when I was low, and he’d talk to me and do what he could to help me. However, he had a fiancée by this time, and she was asleep in the bed beside him when I phoned.

‘Jesus Christ, Katie.’ Tom’s voice was muffled by sleep. ‘What time is it?’

He was quiet for a moment and I could imagine him reaching out his hand to pick up his watch from the table beside the bed.

‘I just wanted to talk to someone,’ I told him, wiping tears on to the sleeve of my dressing-gown.

‘Well, I don’t want to talk to you. Not now. Not at this time of night,’ Tom said in an angry whisper. ‘Just go to bed and go to sleep. And don’t phone me at 3 in the morning again.’

There was a click as he replaced the receiver, and I sat for a while, holding the phone on my lap. The next thing I knew, I was in an ambulance and my brother Ian was sitting beside me.

Ian stayed at the hospital until I’d stopped being sick and they’d found me a bed and admitted me for what remained of the night. Then he stood looking down at me and said, ‘Tom phoned me. You were unconscious by the time I got to the house. So I had to break down the door to get in.’ He shrugged as he added, ‘Sorry.’

‘You know why I did it, don’t you?’ I asked him. ‘You know what Dad did …’

Ian took a step backwards away from the bed and said, ‘I don’t want to talk about our childhood – ever. It’s in the past, Katie. It isn’t relevant to anything any more.’

‘But it’s relevant to me,’ I told him. I tried to lift my head from the pillow to look at him, but it felt as though someone had removed all the muscles in my neck. ‘It affects every minute of every single day of my life. I wish I could forget it. I wish it hadn’t ever happened and I wish I’d never remembered it. But …’

‘I’m sorry, Katie.’ Ian pushed his hands into the pockets of his jacket and hunched his shoulders as though against an imaginary wind. ‘I’ve got to go. Take care of yourself. It isn’t the answer you know – taking an overdose.’

And then he left, and a few seconds later I drifted at last into a deep sleep.

I’d never been very close to my brother. He was married by that time and had a young child, but we rarely had much contact. However, he must have realised that I was approaching rock bottom and he apparently told my father, ‘We’re going to lose Katie one of these days. She self-harms, she’s taken an overdose and tried to kill herself, and she’s desperate for money so that she doesn’t lose her home again.’

As a result – and much to my amazement – my father agreed to make my mortgage payments until I could get back on my feet. Nothing my father did was ever simple and straightforward, though, and giving me the money proved to be a characteristically complicated process. Every month, he would give the cash to Gillian – who, by this time, had become the third Mrs Matthews – and she’d put it in an envelope, write my name on it and give it to my brother’s wife, who would then give it to me. At least, that’s what happened for three months, until my father lost interest and the envelopes stopped arriving.

When my next mortgage payment became due and I didn’t hear anything from my brother or his wife, I waited a few days and then phoned my father.

‘I didn’t get the money for my mortgage this month,’ I told him.

I hated having to ask him for anything – although, God knows, he owed me more than he could ever repay. So the feeling that I was begging him for a favour made me angry and, without waiting for him to answer, I shouted, ‘Couldn’t you be a proper father, just once? Couldn’t you help me when I need help? I’m going to lose my house.’

I should have known that I was wasting my time trying to appeal to any sense he might have of paternal duty. Like so many things that didn’t directly provide him with amusement and some sort of personally positive payback, the idea of ‘being a father’ to me held absolutely no interest for him at all. Although he’d helped me for a while because my brother had asked him to, in reality he was completely indifferent to my problems. So he didn’t send me any more money, and I lost my house.

I seemed to be trapped in a vicious circle that often made it impossible to see any point in trying to struggle on. I’d be ill and have to give up work, and then I’d get (reasonably) well again, so I’d get another job and be able to pay for somewhere decent to live; then I’d get ill again and have to give up work … However much I tried, there didn’t seem to be any way of breaking out of the cycle, or any realistic possibility that I might one day be able to live a normal life.

For years, I’d lived with a deep sense of despair I hadn’t understood, until I’d been ill for the first time, after Sam was born, and the illness had triggered memories that had provided an explanation for the way I’d always felt. The trouble was, though, that those memories, once recalled, could never be forgotten again. Which meant that, in some ways, all that had really happened was that I’d swapped unhappiness I didn’t know the reasons for for unhappiness whose reasons were more awful than anything I could ever have imagined.

Sometimes, my father would get Gillian to phone me and tell me he wanted me to join them for a meal at their home or at a restaurant. Then I’d sit and watch him eating good food, drinking expensive champagne and telling funny stories that made everyone laugh. It was clear that his friends admired and even envied him; whereas I sometimes felt a hatred for him that was so intense it made my hands shake.

One day after I’d lost my house, I walked out of the front door of my rented flat, down the dingy communal staircase, and through town to the large, impressive Victorian building where my father worked. The man at the reception desk recognised me and said ‘Good morning’ as I walked past him and up the wide, curved staircase to the first floor. But instead of going directly to my father’s office, I slipped, unnoticed, into the oak-panelled library.

The room was suffused with a golden-yellow light that threw sharply defined images of the tall arched windows on to the polished wooden floor. I sat down for a moment, perched on the edge of one of the over-stuffed, high-backed leather armchairs, clutching my handbag to my chest and breathing in the smell of the old musty books that lined every wall. Then I took one deep breath, stood up and walked out of the library, along the red-carpeted corridor towards my father’s office.

As I opened the door, his secretary looked up with a professionally friendly expression, which turned to surprise as she recognised me. She was older than all my father’s previous secretaries – in mid-middle age, at least. Her hair was a mousy brown and she had a pronounced gap between her front teeth, which showed when she smiled, which she did again, although this time more warily, as she said, ‘Hello dear.’

Her tone was briskly patronising, but perhaps she was just taken aback by the intrusion of the unexpected into her well-organised and well-ordered day.

‘Are you looking for your father?’ she asked, adding before I had a chance to answer, ‘I’m afraid he isn’t here at the moment. He’ll be out at meetings all morning. He wasn’t expecting you, was he?’

She turned the pages of a large leather-bound desk diary, as if searching for some missed note of my appointment, while at the same time managing to convey the fact that she was looking only in order to humour me, because nothing in her domain was ever missed.

‘No. No, I was … I was just passing,’ I told her. ‘Never mind. I’ll come back another time.’

I turned towards the door, fumbling with the handle in my haste to get out of the room before she tried to stop me, and then I fled back along the corridor, down the sweeping staircase and across the marble-floored lobby to the real world outside.

When I was at a safe distance from the building, I paused and looked over my shoulder to see if anyone was following me. Then I darted into a phone box, still clutching my handbag to my chest. I jabbed at the numbers on the phone with my index finger and listened as it rang twice, three times.

‘Please be there; please pick up the phone,’ I whispered into the receiver. And, at that moment, the ringing stopped and Jenny’s voice said, ‘Hello.’

‘Jenny.’ I began to cry silently. ‘Hello.

Who is this?’ Jenny sounded irritated, but her tone quickly changed as she said, ‘Katie? Is that you, Katie? Say something. Are you all right? What’s happened? Speak to me, Katie.’

‘Can you come and get me?’ I said, in the voice of an unhappy child.

‘What’s the matter?’ I could tell she was trying to sound calm. ‘Has something happened? Where are you?’

‘I’m near my father’s office,’ I told her. ‘I’m in the phone box round the corner. I’ve … I’ve got a knife.’ I sobbed one loud choking sob and tightened my grip on my handbag.

‘Listen to me, Katie. Can you hear me?’ Jenny spoke slowly, as if to a rather slow-witted – or very frightened – child.

‘Yes,’ I whispered.

‘I want you to stay exactly where you are. Can you do that? Don’t go anywhere. Do you understand, Katie? Promise me you’ll wait at the phone box until I get there.’ She paused and then said again, ‘Promise me, Katie.’

‘I promise,’ I said, and immediately the phone line went dead.

I don’t know how long I waited in the phone box, crouched on the floor with my handbag still pressed against my chest, until Jenny came and found me and took me home to her house.

She made me lie on the sofa, covered me with a blanket and told me to try to sleep. And neither of us mentioned what we both knew: that if my father had been at his office that day, I’d have tried to kill him.

It wasn’t the only occasion when I set out to kill my father. I was at Jenny’s house for supper one evening when I suddenly jumped to my feet, knocking over my chair and stumbling against the table. I’d been feeling light-headed and detached all day, and although I was on heavy medication at the time, I’d been drinking, and while we were eating our meal, I’d begun to talk about my father.

Sometimes I’d become obsessed by him. It might be triggered by a casual comment or even a smell that evoked some half-formed memory, and then it would gradually escalate into a fixation, so that I could think of nothing else. It had started that evening, and Jenny and her husband Neil had tried repeatedly to head me off and change the subject. However, it was a process I simply couldn’t stop once it had started, and it was already too late.

As I stood up from the table, Neil got to his feet too. But by the time he’d followed me into the kitchen, I’d already snatched up a carving knife, which I waved in front of me as I swung round to face him.

‘I want to go to my father’s house,’ I told Neil.

He took a cautious backward step away from me and put his hands out, palm downwards, in a placating gesture.

‘Come on, Katie,’ he said. ‘Put the knife down. You know you don’t really want to hurt anyone, not even your father. It’s just not worth it.’

‘I don’t care!’ I shouted, like an angry child. ‘I’m going to kill him. He’s ruined my life and taken everything away from me. I’ve got nothing, while he sits there in his big house, having a great time and being admired by everyone for being so wonderful and so clever. If I can’t have my life back, then he doesn’t deserve to have one either.’