I Remember, Daddy (5 page)

I allowed Tom to put his arm around my shoulders and lead me out to the car, where I sat beside him in the passenger seat, rocking gently, no longer able or willing to try to reach out and grasp hold of reality.

Tom parked the car in the hospital car park. I don’t remember getting out of it, but I must have done so, because I do remember walking with Tom towards a set of double doors that were set in the centre of a large, red-brick Victorian building. Inside, he spoke to someone at the reception desk, who walked with us down an echoing, lino-floored corridor and knocked on one of the many identical grey doors.

The psychiatrist who questioned me gently had grey eyes and darker grey hair, and I remember wondering if greyness was one of the conditions of employment, so that all the people who worked in the hospital would blend in seamlessly with the almost colourless décor. He was kind, though, and he showed none of the irritated impatience I was half-expecting as he explained to me that I would have to be admitted to the hospital while they made a proper assessment of my mental state.

‘No.’ I spoke the word loudly, with a conviction I didn’t really feel. I was no longer sure about anything and I had a terrible, growing feeling that I might be quite mad. But it seemed important not to do or say something that would give anyone else grounds for suspecting there was anything wrong with me. Otherwise, they might lock me up inside this soulless labyrinth of corridors and ill-health with its smell of floor polish and sickness. And then how would I ever get better?

‘No,’ I said again, shaking my head as if to emphasise the determination I was trying to summon up. ‘I don’t want to stay here. I want to go home.’

‘I’m sorry, Katherine. But I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist.’ The doctor smiled a small, sympathetic smile. ‘Just for a few days, while we sort out what the problem is.’

I stood up, still shaking my head, and he said, ‘Please, Katherine. You must stay. I would far rather you agreed to come in voluntarily, because I don’t want to section you. But I will do so if I have to.’

I’d forgotten Tom was in the room, until I felt his hand on my arm. ‘Please, Katie,’ he said. ‘Just stay here for a couple of days. Let them take care of you until you’re feeling well again. Please.’

Suddenly, it was as though someone had pulled out a plug in my body and I could actually see all the energy draining out of me. I seemed to have been struggling to act normally for so long that I’d finally run out of steam and I was too weary and defeated to argue any more.

‘Well, okay,’ I conceded at last, sitting down heavily in the chair. ‘But what about Sam? Who’s going to look after Sam if I’m in here?’

‘Don’t worry about Sam.’ Tom’s voice was loud with relief. ‘My mum and dad and your mum will help me take care of him. You know how much they’ve been dying to get their hands on him.’

‘No one must touch him!’ I leapt to my feet and shouted the words in Tom’s face. He took a step backwards and I could see the shock and the distress in his eyes. And then, just as quickly as the unidentifiable fear had overwhelmed me, it faded again, and I tried to smile at him as I said, ‘Okay. But look after Sam.’

Then I allowed myself to be led from the room and through one locked grey door, down a long grey corridor to another.

I
didn’t stay in the hospital for just a couple of days, as Tom had thought I would. I stayed there for almost six months, because I was far more ill than he, or anyone else, had realised.

I was put on medication, which eventually quietened, but didn’t silence, the clamour of voices in my head, and I was given sleeping tablets every night. I still found it difficult to sleep, though, because although I was frightened all the time, what I was most afraid of were the images I saw when I closed my eyes.

After Sam was born, I’d started to have flashes of half-remembered scenes: being in the bath with my father or lying in bed next to him – or, even more bizarrely, next to one of his friends – and feeling sick. They were images that had gradually become more detailed, until, by the time I was admitted to the psychiatric hospital, what I was remembering was too horrific for my mind to process it at all.

I hated the hospital. I was terrified of most of the other inmates, particularly the ones who’d suddenly start to shout and try to hurt themselves, or someone else, and who had to be wrestled to the ground by nurses and given injections that turned them – for a while, at least – from ranting, arm-flailing lunatics into limply passive, dead-eyed zombies.

Some of the other patients were suffering from schizophrenia, and they could be the most alarming of all. One moment they’d be talking to you quite normally, and then, suddenly, they’d fly into a rage and accuse you of saying something you hadn’t said. You’d stumble away from them, your heart racing with shock, and then you’d begin to wonder if you actually had said it after all. And that was even more frightening than the uncontrollable fury you’d just witnessed, because it meant that you never knew what was real and what was in your imagination, or whether perhaps you were crazier than they were.

One day, I was sitting in the day room with a woman who was telling me how much she hated the hospital and the doctors and nurses. She started talking about her family and about how she longed to be at home, and then she suddenly stood up, took a knife from inside the sleeve of her cardigan and tried to slit her throat. I don’t know how she’d got hold of the knife, but, fortunately, it was too blunt for her to be able to sever the artery in her neck and kill herself. She made a good attempt, though, and I can remember hearing the sound of what were actually my own wild-animal-like screams as I jumped up from the table, knocking over my chair in my haste to get away from the blood that had started to pour from the wound in her throat.

One of the reasons I was frightened of the other patients was because they weren’t like me. And then sometimes I’d be even more afraid because I began to think that perhaps they were, and that I’d be locked up with them for ever. I felt as though I was drowning, looking upwards from just below the surface of the water as I struggled to break through into the air and breathe, but never quite managing to do so.

Because of the medication I was taking, everything seemed blurred and unreal. I felt detached from what was going on around me, as though I’d turned in on myself and was living inside my own head, looking out. I was being dragged back to my childhood because of everything I was remembering and, like a child trying to comfort herself, I’d often sit on the floor in the corner of a room, curled into a ball and rocking backwards and forwards. Sometimes I’d hear the sound of someone crying, and it was only when I stopped rocking for a moment so that I could listen that I realised it was me. Great sobs of despair would rise up from somewhere deep inside me, where they’d been locked away for years. But, no matter how much I cried, I never felt any better.

I’d never forgotten my father’s violence towards me when I was a child, and how brutally he used to punish me whenever I did anything ‘naughty’. Often over the years, though, when I thought about my childhood, I could almost see something else – something dark and malignant that my mind didn’t want to remember. And, while I was in the hospital, those almost-thoughts became memories of the most terrible of all the things my father had done to me when I was a young child – memories that my brain had locked away when I was in my early teens, leaving me with an inexplicable sense of guilt and unhappiness that had underscored every aspect of my life for years.

I’d been desperately unhappy as a teenager; I’d hated my life and I’d hated myself, for reasons I’d never understood. I’d lived with a constant, inexplicable sense of self-disgust and a sometimes overpowering anger that would cause me to lash out and want to hurt people. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, and there was no one I could turn to for help. So I’d tried to hide my self-loathing and the turmoil of my emotions beneath a façade of bravado and bad behaviour.

Then, for some reason, the birth of my child had triggered the unlocking of some of those previously repressed memories. At first, they were just flashes of unfocused images; but, gradually, they became complete pictures that I didn’t want to look at but that I could no longer ignore. And, eventually, my brain had blown a fuse and I’d become so mentally disorientated and so uncertain of what was real and what I was imagining that my mind had been unable to process any thoughts or function on any level at all, which was when I’d ended up in hospital.

Luckily, though, I had a wonderful psychiatrist. Dr Hendriks was the first person I’d ever talked to about the things I was remembering, and I was reluctant to talk about them at all to begin with, not least because it was almost impossible to find the words to describe the images I was seeing. But Dr Hendriks always listened without judging me and, perhaps most importantly of all, he made it clear that not only did he believe what I was telling him, but that he didn’t blame me for what had happened to me as a child. Because, as well as beginning to remember what my father used to do to me, and what he allowed and encouraged his friends to do too, I remembered that he had always told me that all of it was my fault – and the responsibility of that belief was a burden I’d carried throughout my life.

I’d been at the hospital for just a few days when I walked out of the day room one morning and heard a commotion at the end of the corridor. There were often quarrels and scuffles of one sort or another – patients fighting amongst themselves or arguing with the nurses – and I’d quickly learned to be wary and alert to the signs that indicated something was kicking off. So, without looking overtly in the direction from which the noise was coming, I stopped and listened.

In every door along the corridor there was a small window, but it was only the one in the door at the end that looked out on to the normal, unlocked world outside. I glanced quickly towards it and could see part of what appeared to be an enormous bunch of flowers. On my side of the door – the locked, crazy side – there were two nurses. The smaller one of the two was on tiptoes, looking out through the window, while the other one stood at right-angles to her, glancing back down the corridor in my direction.

As soon as the second nurse saw me standing nervously in the doorway of the day room, she scurried towards me.

‘Go back, Katie,’ she said, looking directly into my face and nodding a couple of times, as if to encourage me to do what she was asking. ‘Go back in the day room. Please. It’s just for a moment.’

There was an urgency in her voice that made the muscles of my stomach contract, and I stepped quickly back into the room. The nurse closed the door behind me and I stood for a moment, my whole body shaking violently, and tried to breathe. Then I turned to look through the little window in the door. But all I could see were the neat brown curls at the back of the nurse’s head. So, instead of looking, I listened, one ear pressed against the wired glass.

I could hear the subdued murmur of a woman’s voice, which was interrupted periodically by a man saying something loud and angry. For a few seconds, everything was quiet, and then a different man spoke in a slow, authoritative voice. The first man shouted, a door slammed and then there was silence.

My heart was racing and, as I took a step away from the day-room door, I could see the damp imprint of my hand where it had been pressed against the glass of the window. At that moment, the nurse turned and smiled at me and then she opened the door.

‘Well done, love,’ she said. ‘You can pop out now.’

‘Who was it?’ I whispered. ‘Who was the man who was shouting?’ But I already knew the answer.

‘It was your father,’ the nurse said. She smiled a quick, apologetic smile.

Usually, the staff avoided any kind of physical contact with the patients, except when they had to restrain someone who had become violent and was threatening to hurt themselves or someone else. For some reason, though, the nurse touched my arm lightly as she added, ‘My word! Now there’s a man who knows what he wants and intends to get it.’

I pressed my hands against my stomach, trying to stop the sick feeling rising up into my throat, and then I asked, in a barely audible voice, ‘And what did he want?’

‘Oh, he wanted to see you. In fact, he demanded to see you. Apparently, he’s on the hospital board.’ Her laugh was scornful.

My father told me the same thing himself some years later, which is when I found out that it wasn’t true. He wasn’t on the board of hospital directors, as he claimed to the nurses that day, although I’ve no doubt he knew people who were. But twisting the truth – and telling outright lies – to get what he wanted was something he often did, and he must have been furious when his self-assured, bullying arrogance hadn’t had its usual effect and he’d been thwarted in his attempt to see me.

The other man’s voice I’d heard during the fracas with my father turned out to have been that of Dr Hendriks.

‘How dare you try to prevent me from visiting my daughter,’ my father had bellowed at him. ‘I demand to see her immediately.’

‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible, and I must ask you to leave – now,’ Dr Hendriks had answered. He always spoke in calm, measured tones, which I found reassuring, but they must have driven my father into a frenzy of fury – particularly in view of the fact that Dr Hendriks was someone my father would have referred to as ‘a bloody foreigner’.

I couldn’t begin to imagine how enraged my father must have been at being refused access to me, not to mention at being spoken to as if he was ‘just anybody’. He’d have heard on the grapevine that I was remembering things about my childhood, and he must have been anxious to find out what I was saying. I expect he wasn’t too worried, though, because, after all, who was going to believe the word of a crazy woman who’d been committed to a psychiatric hospital against that of a successful businessman, friend to the rich and famous, and well-known pillar of society? My breakdown must have seemed like a godsend to him.

After my father had stomped out of the hospital in a rage that day, a nurse handed me the huge, stupid bouquet of flowers he’d left for me. I rammed them into the bin, heads first, snapping their stems and scattering their petals on the floor around me.

I’d always been frightened of my father. Just thinking about him made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and my stomach start to churn painfully. But, for a moment, that fear had been replaced by hatred, and I felt a deep, childish satisfaction at the thought that, for once, he hadn’t got his own way. I was grateful to the nurses and to Dr Hendriks for standing up to him in a way I’d never seen anyone do before, and for making me feel, briefly, safer.

A few days later, Sally came to see me. I was surprised by her visit, not least because I was certain that sick-visiting of any sort wasn’t something she’d normally do. We sat together at a grey, plastic-topped table in the dreary, smoked-filled day room and she offered me a cigarette. A nurse was sitting in a low armchair in a corner of the room, reading a newspaper, and she glanced up occasionally to look at Sally with ill-disguised distaste. The bright, gaudy colour of Sally’s scooped-neck T-shirt and her carefully applied makeup were in stark contrast to the drabness of everything around her, and I noticed the openly interested stares of the other patients in the room, as well as the shock in Sally’s eyes as she saw how grubby, dishevelled and unkempt I’d become.

I was happy to have her there, though, if only because it meant that I could ask her the question I whispered repeatedly to everyone: ‘Can you get me out of here? I need to go home. There’s nothing wrong with me. Please, can you get me out?’ And Sally answered it as everyone did, by telling me that I was there for my own good and that I’d soon be better and at home again. Then she sat smoking her cigarette and making circles with her finger in the spilt water on the table, while I rambled incoherently.

Suddenly, she interrupted me, glancing up at me quickly and then looking away again as she said, ‘What is it that you’re remembering, Katie? What sort of things?’

I launched into an explanation that was really just a tangle of disconnected words, and she began to look impatient. I’d seen the same expression in the eyes of everyone who came to visit people at the hospital – a mixture of sympathy, distress and an almost palpable longing to be anywhere else in the world but where they were.

She interrupted me again, forcing herself to smile encouragingly as she asked, ‘Can you give me an example of something you’ve remembered?’

At that moment, the nurse stood up, folded her newspaper and said, ‘I think that’s enough excitement for one day, don’t you Katie?’ Then she turned to Sally and added, in a briskly terse tone, ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave now.’

Sally stubbed out her cigarette. Then she leaned across the table, patted my hand and sighed as she said, ‘Goodbye, Katie. Take care of yourself.’

She stopped for a moment in the doorway, turning to look at me with a rueful smile, and then she left.

It was only later that I realised the only reason she’d come to see me was because my father had sent her. Having been unable to gain access to me himself, he’d told her to come and grill me about what I was remembering and what I was telling the doctor. Looking back on it now, I’m glad he did that, because it meant he was afraid. But, at the time, I was too ill to gain much satisfaction from anything and too traumatised by all the things I was remembering even to think about how those memories might affect my father.