I Won't Forgive What You Did (27 page)

Gary, like every male from Grandpops backwards, on my mother’s side, was a drinker with a problem. Gary drank alcohol most nights and could out-drink pretty much everyone. He would drink with some of the men from one of the committees he was on, and one of the villagers told me he had a bit of a reputation for telling the filthiest jokes and singing the filthiest songs, which embarrassed and surprised me. How could someone be so admired and respected and yet so boorish and drunk and uncouth? It puzzled me how society seemed to operate.

What I should have known was that when someone was telling me something I ought to take heed. For a while one of the teachers at the children’s school was giving Alfie and Jennifer some extra maths tuition. They’d go to her house after school twice a week, and their treat, once they had finished the work she’d set them, was to go and feed the fish in her pond.

One day, as they finished feeding the fish, she suddenly said: ‘Be careful with the children. Watch them around Gary,’ prompting me to ask her what she meant. ‘I used to live next door to him when he was married to his first wife,’ she explained. ‘I saw how he behaved with those children.’

At the time I thought her comments a bit odd, and she didn’t elaborate. How tragic I didn’t heed her warning.

Joe came back into our lives when I’d been married to Gary for a couple of years. It was a weekday, and Gary was at work, when the doorbell rang and Joe was on the doorstep. He was apparently passing and thought he would stop by to introduce me and the children to his new daughter.

I knew Joe and his girlfriend had had a baby. His sister had telephoned me during the pregnancy to tell me, and the idea had really distressed me. I’d been particularly upset by the news I’d kept hearing about what a lovely couple they made.

Yet here he was, two years later, with the news that the mother had left them shortly after giving birth. As divine justice for Joe, had my mind worked that way, that situation couldn’t have been better.

But I gained no satisfaction, just felt great sorrow about another young life now in tatters. What I didn’t expect was the bombshell. I asked them in, and tried to speak to the little girl, inevitably asking what her name was.

‘Lee Jennifer,’ Joe told me. ‘We called her Lee Jennifer.’ And not for an instant did he express anything at all about how incredible a thing that was. How could he call this new daughter
exactly
the same name as his first daughter? All he’d done, after all, was to switch her first and middle names around. Did he just have a complete lack of imagination about names?

Joe didn’t hang on to Lee Jennifer for any longer than he’d kept in touch with his first daughter, Jennifer Lee. Shortly after his visit, the mother came back, and was reunited once again with her daughter. We saw nothing of Joe then, for years. Indeed, Alfie’s next meeting with the father he so missed wouldn’t happen until he was thirteen years old.

And when Joe was in prison.

Meanwhile, in the personal prison that was my marriage to Gary, life continued much as it always had.

By the early eighties, when Alfie was eleven and Jennifer seven, we’d bought a large house which we’d adapted so I could run it as a residential home for older people. Though desperately unhappy in so many areas of my life, at least one thing had given me purpose. One thing marriage to Gary had given me was time, and I’d been working hard at reclaiming an education. I’d passed my driving test, completed an O level in English language, and done courses in bookkeeping, shorthand and typing.

My mother’s life, though thankfully no longer so enmeshed with my own, continued as chaotically as ever. By now my father was pretty much a part-timer at home (the reasons for which would become all too evident) and though she functioned well as administrator of his haulage business, her weird behaviour had become ever more pronounced.

When cleaning her house – which I couldn’t seem to stop doing – I’d regularly find food tucked away in corners of the spider-filled larder, dating as far back as 1968. As well as hoarding food as old as I was, my mother had recently taken up collecting Avon toiletries. The kitchen cupboards and surfaces were now stuffed with lotions and potions, with the overspill hanging from door handles in bags. There was so much stuff piled high on the freezer that no one could access all the food stored inside, so that too just sat until it was inedible.

The whole house, in fact, was growing ever more packed. When Jennifer used to go over to stay the night – which she enjoyed; her grandmother, for all her eccentricities, being the only kind she knew – she’d wash before bed with my mother’s slimy old flannel, then go to sleep in the little third bedroom. As with everywhere else, it was chock-full of stuff: ornaments and crockery, suitcases, newspapers, coats, piles of bedding and old toys, and the only place to sleep was on the little camp bed, pushed as far into the room as it would go. Wedged between twin towers of ceiling-high clutter, it could only be accessed by climbing onto the foot end and crawling up it to get inside. She would, when grown up, liken the business of being in the bed to being in a valley, in the middle of two hills; a landscape of clutter so vast that she couldn’t see the walls, the hills of junk sloping from the ceiling to the bed, like snow in the corner of a window.

It was like being in a tunnel, she said, or the middle of a bonfire, and she’d fret, when lying there, reading her Famous Five and Secret Seven books, that the whole lot might come down and bury her alive.

For all that, however, she enjoyed being with my mother, her relationship with her comfortable and easy. My mother, who’d never touched me in tenderness from birth, was able to hug her and enjoy her company. She would rouse her at dawn and they’d leave for jumble sales at seven in the morning, so she could have the first pick of all the bargains. The bargains were invariably more carrier bags of rubbish, but she’d also do things like buy ten loaves of bread ‘for the birds’. She’d have Jennifer help her stir up big dishes of leftover fat for them, mixed up with bread and porridge oats. She had huge amounts of fat at her disposal, as she still fried vast amounts of food.

She’d also enjoy sitting watching videos with Jennifer, though as there had been no diminution of her obsession with sex and filth, many of these were entirely unsuitable for a child. One in particular – by a comedian called Jethro, I recall – would leave me horrified to think my nine-year-old daughter had been watching it. Yet, as ever, I felt completely unable to take action and tell my mother to stop. Nor did I when I’d watch her pull Jennifer’s pants down and smack her bare bottom, as if she’d been naughty – even traumatized as I was by the fact that as she did so she would sing songs to her at the same time.

I suppose my abiding memory of Jennifer spending time with my mother was that it was fine, despite everything I’d endured in my own childhood, because if Jennifer was spending time with her, it meant that she wasn’t spending time with me. I still so feared for my children whenever they were around me, and it never once occurred to me that one of the principal reasons for my own emotional frailty as an adult was the woman my daughter called Nanny.

My mother was still very close to Grandpops, who was now in his early eighties, and who still visited her with vegetables once a week. He became ill, though, quite suddenly, and she was terribly concerned, and insisted that the family – which included myself – take turns to stay overnight at his house, as he was too ill to be left on his own.

As was – and I think still is – the situation with my family, no one, least of all me, questioned this. And so, revolting as it was, I took my turn staying in the filthy, foul-smelling, junk-crammed house of the man who’d caused me so much anguish for my entire childhood.

A few days into this arrangement, which was fast becoming untenable, my mother was getting more and more anxious. And, as ever, feeling predictably concerned for her welfare, I suggested that he should come and stay with us. I didn’t think this through at all before suggesting it. Didn’t think beyond the fact that I hated – really hated – going to his house. And besides it was a home for old people, wasn’t it? What better place
was
there for him to go? So he came, and we put him in the only bedroom that was available, a bedroom which actually joined onto
our
bedroom, and which you had to pass through to get to ours.

I was almost thirty now, but however much I knew he couldn’t hurt me – indeed, I now saw him very little – the knowledge that he lay in bed, so close to me physically, made me feel unwell. I was unable to sleep knowing he was lying there so close, and after rushing around all day, looking after all the residents, I’d lie in bed listening out for him and getting in and out of bed. I was scared I wouldn’t hear him, and of what might happen if I didn’t, and I was scared that he might come into my bedroom while I slept . . . I basically felt sick all the time.

And over the coming days I was forced to be physically intimate with him too, which was something I hadn’t thought about before either. I had to help him to the bathroom, pull down his long pants, help him sit on the toilet, hold him so he didn’t fall off, and then steady him when he stood up again. I felt sick doing all this, dirty all the time, and chronically anxious about what might happen. I’d no idea what might happen, only that something was making me apprehensive, and that the sense of apprehension was making me feel guilty. Why did I feel like this? I was caring for my grandad. Why should doing that make me feel so dreadful?

I was still a long way from acknowledging and accepting the things he’d done to me in childhood, but what I
did
know was that I felt exactly the same cocktail of emotions I always had when around him. And I didn’t like that feeling at all.

And the feeling worsened, especially as he grew sicker and frailer and I had to empty the bucket when he vomited and put his penis in the bottle for him to wee. How had it happened that it was
I
who was dealing with all this? Somewhere deep inside I was screaming.

Finally, eight days later, when he could no longer eat or drink, I called the doctor out to see him. My mother was there and after examining him the doctor asked her if she wanted him to give Pops an injection to ease the pain for him – he was so obviously dying – but it might also make him unconscious. He explained this would be a very strong injection – one which, realistically, he might not wake up from.

My mother immediately turned to me, saying, ‘I can’t make that sort of decision. You decide.’

Floored by being given the responsibility, and seeing the doctor was waiting, I felt unable to decide what to do.

‘Yes, do it,’ I said, suddenly, not realizing when I spoke how much those three words would come to haunt me.

The doctor duly injected him and I took him downstairs and showed him out, leaving my mother sitting holding Grandpops’ hand and putting wet cotton wool in his mouth for him to suck on. By the time I returned he was already unconscious, giving me no chance to do the thing I desperately wanted, which was to apologize for doing what I now realized I’d done – I had killed him, just as I had my little brother.

My mother called the vicar and the rest of the evening was taken over with last rites and family prayers. I felt sure Grandpops could hear all the commotion that was going on but, because of my actions, was unable to communicate he wanted them all to shut up and go away.

He died later that night, at 3.45, having never, as predicted, regained consciousness. I felt completely drained and shockingly responsible for it all. I had ended his life. I was a murderer. I knew I was a murderer because I was glad he was dead now, and though it would be many years before I was able to acknowledge that what he’d done to me since I was tiny was abuse, I still felt this strong sense that I might have said no to the injection that killed him if I hadn’t felt so bad being around him.

The next day, my father, who’d been away somewhere, turned up, grabbed my hand and sat and wept like a baby. What was all that about? He had hated Pops, always. My grip on what was right and real and normal, always tenuous in recent years, felt completely skewed by this incredible display.

My mother bustled off then, to be comforted by my sister, leaving me, the murderess – stunned and emotionally exhausted – with the empty bed, the smell of Pops, and all my memories.

I sat down and started crying, and couldn’t stop.

The death of Grandpops plunged me into another downward spiral. I couldn’t seem to reconcile my completely conflicting feelings. I felt profound relief he had gone, but at the same time couldn’t understand why. I also felt loss and anger at the incredible grief everyone else seemed to be feeling.

Naturally, being so at odds with myself made me feel guiltier still. I remember watching my mother and sister sitting for hours with him after he died, as if he was sacred, and not understanding why I felt so much anger. It all felt so false; like my marriage to Gary, it seemed a sham – like they were pretending something that wasn’t true. I didn’t yet understand why I felt that so strongly. But I did. Which completely perplexed me.

I felt dead inside. It felt as if my marriage to Gary was killing me, and Pops’ death had brought it home to me there was no escape.
He’d
escaped now, but I was still trapped here, and I couldn’t see any way out except the obvious one – my own death. Seeing the contrast between how I felt compared with the other members of my family only served to reinforce the idea that I was wrong about everything; that I was constantly being judged and put down.