I Remember, Daddy (4 page)

B
efore Sam was born, I did wonder if all those unhappy memories of my childhood had anything to do with the mild depression I’d begun to feel, and with the ‘baby-blues’ that developed almost immediately after I took him home from the hospital. I continued to go through the motions of feeding and looking after him, and most of the time I managed to hide – from myself as well as from everyone else – how depressed I was becoming. But when I went back to work, when Sam was 11 weeks old, I began to feel as though I was drowning. I didn’t realise I was ill; all I knew was that I was constantly anxious and afraid, and that I’d become incapable of making even the simplest of decisions.

The house Tom and I had bought when I was pregnant needed a lot doing to it. We knew from the outset that it was going to be a struggle to pay the mortgage – which we could barely afford even on both our incomes – and that I’d have to go back to work as soon as possible after our baby was born. But it seemed worth it to have our own place. We were happy there and when I was pregnant, despite all the fears and worries I had, I’d sometimes stand in the doorway of the room that we were painting and refurbishing as a nursery and allow myself to imagine my baby lying there, safe and warm, in the little wooden cot Tom and I had bought and brought home together so proudly.

For almost as long as I could remember, I’d felt as though I was acting the part of someone leading a normal life – getting a job, falling in love, buying a house and having a baby. Suddenly, though, the role I was playing had expanded beyond anything I had any experience of or could even understand. I was pretending to be someone who was calm and capable, whereas in reality I knew that I was useless and worthless – just as my father had always told me I was – and that I was not at all the sort of person who could look after a baby. There were so many terrible things that could happen to Sam. Many of them were real enough to any first-time mother, but some of them were things I couldn’t actually put a name to; and it seemed that I was the only person who stood between Sam and all those countless, awful, unidentifiable dangers.

I spent every waking moment of every single day in a state of panic. Just the thought of Sam’s defenceless little body lying in his cot was enough to make my heart race and the palms of my hands become clammy with sweat. The depression I’d already been suffering from was made worse by the fact that I knew I was supposed to be happy now that I was a mother. And I did love Sam, passionately. But, as well as being afraid for him, I was also, for some reason, afraid of him.

To begin with, no one seemed to notice there was anything wrong. Gradually, though, I could feel myself becoming more detached from Sam and from everything and everyone else in my life. It was as though I was on the outside looking in. I fed him and changed his nappies, but as soon as Tom came home from work I’d almost thrust Sam into his arms. And as soon as I knew that Tom had taken over the responsibility of looking after him, I could finally allow myself to relax a little as I concentrated on what I really wanted to be doing – cleaning the house.

I’d become obsessed by cleaning, to the extent that I eventually found it difficult to think about anything else. Even sitting with Tom watching television in the evenings became a form of torture, and I’d jump up after a few minutes and almost run to the kitchen to scrub the floor or clean a work surface I’d already scoured with bleach half a dozen times that day.

People began to notice how irritable I was becoming, and how often I cried. However, I think even those closest to me had only just begun to realise that something might be wrong, when all the fear and confusion that had been building up inside me finally erupted.

I’d been having terrible nightmares. They’d started at around the time Sam was born and almost all of them involved my father. Night after anxious night, I’d wake up in the middle of a vivid dream, frightened and sweating, with my heart thumping painfully, thinking I was a child again. In some of the dreams, I was hiding in a wardrobe, holding my breath and listening to the slow, heavy tread of footsteps as someone crossed the bedroom floor towards me. I had something draped over my head, so I could only hear the sound of the wardrobe door as it creaked open.

Sometimes, I’d wake up at that point in the dream, waving my arms wildly in front of my face and shouting ‘No, no!’ And at other times the wardrobe door would swing back on its hinges, the cover would be lifted from my head, and I’d see my father looking down at me. For a moment, I’d feel a sense of relief. But then I’d see that his face was ugly and his expression sneering, and as he reached down and lifted me roughly out of my hiding place, I’d feel a terror so powerful I’d think my heart was going to stop.

On some nights, I’d dream that I was in a bath and I’d stretch out my hand to touch the cool, shiny surface of the blue-tiled wall beside me. Then, suddenly, I’d feel cold and sick, and when I turned my head away from the wall, my father would be sitting in the bath facing me. Dressed in just the jacket of a pinstriped suit, he’d frown angrily at me and say, ‘It’s your fault, Katie. It’s – all – your – fault.’

Sometimes, I’d dream that I was in the bed I used to sleep in as a child and that I’d woken up to find my father leaning over me, completely naked except for a top hat. I’d try to scream, but he’d clamp the short, strong, thick fingers of his hand over my mouth and hiss at me, ‘If you say anything, I’ll kill you. It won’t be the first time I’ve put someone six feet under.’ Then he’d laugh a nasty, humourless laugh, and I’d wake up sobbing.

As the dreams became increasingly frequent, I began to be afraid to go to sleep at all, and before long, as each tiring day was followed by another restless night, I was exhausted.

Then, one morning, a couple of weeks after I’d gone back to work, I stood up from my desk, picked up my jacket and handbag and walked out of the office. As I passed through the reception area, heading for the door to the street, Jackie, the receptionist, called after me, ‘Katie! Is anything wrong?’ She sounded worried, but I didn’t answer her, and I didn’t turn around. I didn’t want her to see the tears that were pouring down my face and then have to try to explain what it was I was crying about – because I didn’t know.

For the next couple of hours, I walked through the streets of the town, wiping my steadily flowing tears on to the sleeve of my jacket, and going nowhere. Eventually, I found myself on a road I recognised; it was the road where Sally lived.

Sally had been my father’s girlfriend after my mother left him, when I was seven, and she’d become, briefly, his second wife. She moved into our house just a few days after my mother and I fled into the night, and she slept in my mother’s bed and wore the clothes my mother had left behind in her wardrobe.

Despite their apparently similar taste in clothes, though, Sally and my mother were about as different from each other as two people could possibly be. My mother was a neat, house-proud, quietly spoken, well-brought-up, attractive, twinset and pearls sort of woman; whereas Sally was brassy, untidy, chaotic, loudly raucous and hard-headed. But, apparently, my father had been happy to replace a wife who cooked his meals, catered for his parties and looked after his house and children for one whose talents lay in the bedroom.

However, perhaps equally importantly, as far as my father was concerned, was the fact that Sally knew a lot of girls and young women who were willing to go to parties at my father’s house and do whatever people wanted them to do in exchange for money. It wasn’t long before my father’s parties had become legendary, or before alcohol, cocaine and doing exactly what he wanted to do had begun to cloud his better judgement.

My mother had always been timid, and my father had bullied and abused her for so long that she’d eventually lost the ability to defend herself at all. So another way in which Sally differed from my mother was in having a mind of her own, which I think was at least part of the reason why her marriage to my father didn’t last. Their split appeared to have been a good deal more amicable than the ending of my parents’ marriage, however – which, I used to half-joke, was probably the result of the fact that Sally knew too much about the sexual preferences of my father and of his influential friends for him to have risked making an enemy of her.

Perhaps surprisingly, though, and despite everything, I’d got on quite well with Sally as I got older, and I’d sometimes have a drink with her if I bumped into her in a pub in town. But that didn’t explain why I found myself that day standing outside the little house my father had bought for her when they divorced.

Still snivelling pathetically, I rang the doorbell, and then turned immediately and started to walk away.

‘Katie! Is that you?’ Sally sounded surprised. ‘Good God girl, you look awful. Come into the house and hide yourself away till we can sort you out and make you presentable again.’

She stepped forward, placing a hand on each of my shoulders and spinning me round so that she could steer me through the front door and along the hallway into the kitchen.

‘You’re clearly in need of something a bit stronger than a cup of tea,’ she said, opening a cupboard and taking out a bottle of Balvenie Single Malt. She picked up a glass from the draining board beside the dish-filled sink, wiped it briefly on a stained, grey tea towel, and then reached for another. ‘Nobody likes to drink on their own,’ she added, shrugging her shoulders and smiling as she splashed liberal amounts of whisky into the two glasses. Then she led the way back down the hall and into an elaborately decorated living room that looked as though it had been recently turned over during a burglary.

‘Sorry for the mess,’ Sally said, tossing piles of magazines off the sofa on to the floor to make space for us to sit down, and not looking sorry at all.

I hadn’t uttered a single word since coming into the house. But as I took my first sip of whisky and felt the warmth of it spread down through my chest, it was as though it released something inside me, and the words began tumbling out in a breathless jumble.

‘I’ve been having nightmares,’ I told Sally, tears stinging my eyes again. ‘They’re always about Dad. They’re horrible. I don’t really understand what’s happening in them, but I always wake up feeling frightened and …’ I wiped the back of my hand across my forehead, pushing the damp, matted hair to one side, as I searched for the right word. And then I added, in a voice that didn’t sound like mine, ‘Dirty.’

Sally had never been one for sentimentality, and her straight-talking, humorously cynical take on life had often made me laugh. So I was surprised to notice that the expression on her face as she looked at me was almost one of sympathetic understanding.

‘You don’t have to explain,’ she told me, swallowing a mouthful of whisky and then taking a long drag on her cigarette. ‘I know something happened when you were a child. I know your father did something to you that haunted him in some way.’

‘Why? What did he tell you?’ I asked. My whole body had started to shake and I felt a mixture of trepidation and anxious excitement at the thought that I was about to hear some revelation that was going to make sense of all the non-sense that had been churning around in my brain for the last few weeks.

‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me,’ I told Sally. ‘I feel as though there’s something terrible hidden just below the surface of my conscious mind. I want to know what it is, but at the same time I’m afraid of it, because I think it’s something really bad; something that will affect the way I feel about myself – about everything. Something that proves I’m not a nice person.’

‘I don’t really know anything,’ Sally said, stubbing out her cigarette in a square glass ashtray on the coffee table and immediately lighting another one. ‘Except that your father woke up in a cold sweat one night, sobbing like a child and talking what sounded like a lot of gibberish. When I asked him why he was so upset, he said, “Because of what I did to Katie.” I didn’t know what he meant. He never mentioned it again and I never asked – well, you know your father.’

She looked up at me quickly, and I knew that she was lying – or, at least, that if she didn’t actually know what my father’s nightmare had meant, she had a pretty good idea.

Suddenly, for just a few fleeting moments, all my dreams made sense. I could see clearly in my mind what my father had done to me – and it was far worse than anything I could ever have imagined.

‘I know what he meant,’ I told Sally.

I watched as the glass fell from my hand – apparently in slow motion – and spattered splashes of whisky across the papers and magazines on the floor beside the coffee table. Then I burst into tears and the picture I had seen in my mind shattered and was gone, leaving me feeling heartbroken and bereft and not understanding the reason why.

I don’t remember what happened after that. I think Sally must have phoned Tom and he came to collect me. I found out later that everyone at work had been worried to death when I’d left the office without explanation that morning, and someone had told Tom, who’d been searching for me for a couple of hours before he received Sally’s call.

Tom took me home, and his parents came to collect Sam so that he could spend the night with them and I could sleep. But I couldn’t get rid of the fear, or of the sound of the voices in my head. I sat on the floor in the corner of the living room for hours, curled into a ball like a child, clutching my knees to my chest and mumbling as I rocked slowly backwards and forwards.

The next morning, Tom rang the doctor’s surgery to make an emergency appointment for me, and I told the doctor about the voices, about the terrible fear, and about how I wanted to kill myself because I couldn’t bear the flashes of images I kept getting, which were so real and so horrific they almost paralysed me with disgust and self-loathing.

‘We need to get you up to the hospital,’ the doctor told me. ‘Just for an evaluation. Tom can take you.’

He meant a psychiatric evaluation, but I didn’t care any more. It was as though there was a person in my head, running in random, chaotic circles of panic, and every time they thought they knew where they were, they found that they were looking down another dark, forbidding corridor to nowhere. I seemed to be outside my body, watching, and unable to do anything to help myself. My whole world had shrunk until nothing existed except a tiny, frightened little girl sitting in a chair, muttering and mumbling to the doctor and trying not to remember.