Escaping the Darkness (16 page)

As the stars became brighter and the night sky grew darker, we sat outside the tent looking up into the firmament for the first signs of the meteor shower that was due. It was beautiful and oh so exquisite. As always, just as in previous years, we weren’t disappointed. The celestial show was quite simply, amazing. We saw at least fifty shooting stars that night. Each one left a trail of sparkling dust, gently disappearing as the star became dimmer the closer it came to the night sky’s horizon. Some time after one that morning, Sam and I made our way to bed. It was late and every muscle of my tired body was aching.

Once we were lying in bed, we spoke about the pleasures of that day, and then I moved on to reveal more of my shattered past to Sam, knowing full well that my history was what he really wanted to talk about. I wanted to pre-empt him, tell him about it before he started to
ask, because that way I knew I would be in control of the words that I spoke.

It often felt like what I would describe as a shattered past. I pictured the broken fragments of my life just lying around me in pieces on the floor. These fragments were desperate to be swept away once they had escaped from the box in which they had been trapped in for so long. I found I even had pieces clinging on to the sides of the box, and these were the worst nightmares imaginable: nightmares of a past I tried so hard to forget. But it didn’t matter how small each piece was, they all went back into the box, and each one formed a part of my past life. The abuse from my father and the things that Bill had done to me were far more degrading than anything else that had ever befallen me in my life.

I again made up my mind that I was never going to tell Sam about how Bill had used my young innocent body, violating it with his ejaculation. I wanted this to remain a tainted memory that only I knew about. At the time it had made me feel so dirty. I can remember thinking at one point that if he had urinated on me, the experience would not have been as bad as what had actually happened. I truly did feel worthless. I told Sam more about Bill that night, but kept my worst memories safe inside my head and away from his delicate sensitivities. He knew I was hurting more than ever that night, not just physically, but mentally too, and so he just listened. I think Sam knew that if he spoke, I would stop talking, and I’d never be able to visit my
past in such a way again. That night seemed to be the hardest of them all.

With every few words I spoke about Bill having intercourse with me, I cried more intensely than I have ever cried before. Every single tear stung my face and tasted saltier than the last. For each tear that Sam caught with his hand, six more slipped by. Every word I uttered, every word that slipped out, held images so clear I felt I had only just taken a photograph of them.

And worst of all, Bill was there like a third person occupying our bed. I could almost feel his touch. He felt alive and very much a part of my life once again. I wished that he would just stay in the memory box, but instead he was like a huge Jack-in-the-box that had been unjustly squashed into a tinier container, desperate to explode into life each time one of my memories was relived. His image was far more upsetting to me than anything I could ever possibly imagine. I wished so desperately that I could get rid of him but I couldn’t. He was always there, as close to me on some days as my shadow.

Bill’s memory hurts me more than the blade of any sword could, and there were days when I wished I had had a few of those weapons, newly sharpened and ready to use. If I had possessed a sword, I would have tried to cut away the badness once and for all from my body, and I know I would have ended up dead.

I don’t know Sam’s true feelings about the things I told him then and what he knows now. He told me it didn’t matter to him, but of course my past matters to me. At first
when I was with Sam, I wanted so desperately to enjoy a sexual relationship with him where I felt totally relaxed – and I still want this. Some days I kid myself into believing that I have a relationship like this, but deep down inside I know different.

I am twenty-five years into my marriage with Sam and I have only just begun to feel relaxed about talking to him about my past experiences when we are in the bedroom. I discovered that this ‘talking road’ is very long and most of it is uphill, too; at the moment I find I am just cautiously stepping off the kerb to cross over to a safer side which I know exists somewhere quite close by. My previous life has had more to do with my future than I am happy with. I hope one day that a bright ray of red-hot sunshine will appear to incinerate the bad memories that shackle me to that previous life.

As our holiday in Cornwall entered its last week, I began to feel happier about the details I had revealed to Sam, yet sad because I knew I had told him things that had made him sad, too. The one thing I loathed about that last week of our holiday more than anything was the fact that I had somehow tainted this beautiful part of the world with the bad memories I had relived.

Those periods in my life could never be polished to look all shiny and new ever again. They were just memories I had to try to forget. I now knew that whatever I had said to Sam over the last week was all right. He didn’t hate me and he hadn’t stopped loving me either as I had suspected he might. I often wondered if he would still love me in
the future. No matter how many times he told me that he would, I still wasn’t sure.

I knew Sam would never lie to me if I asked him directly, but I tried to imagine what I would feel like if the roles were reversed, and I was a man whose wife had been abused. I know I would not have been the same strong person that Sam was. The man who today is still at my side, still giving me his smiles, his warmth, his support and his love. To the outside world Sam doesn’t seem anything out of the ordinary. In fact some people would look at him and say he was probably quiet and boring, but they don’t see the man I see.

I continued to tell Sam the rest of my life story and let him into the world that had been exclusively mine for a very long time. He still cried with me, especially on the night I choose to tell him about my father’s abuse – something I had earlier decided not to tell him about. However, this was all part of my past and I didn’t want to keep any more secrets. There had already been far too many things in my past that hardly anyone knew about, and I decided that this would be the night that the hidden aspects of my father’s life were going to be told.

Sam sat bolt upright in complete shock when I said I had been abused not just by one man but also a second. I made excuses for my father, telling Sam he had only abused me because my mum had walked out on him. As a girl of twelve it was what I had believed, and had continued to believe, until the moment when I told Sam.
I knew this wasn’t what Sam had wanted to hear. He was even more upset by the fact that it appeared as if I was defending my father.

‘Even if your mum had been long gone, Sarah, it would not excuse his behaviour,’ Sam told me. ‘What did he think he was doing, especially with his own twelve-year-old daughter?’

I listened to the words tumbling from Sam’s smooth lips and wondered whether or not he was blaming me, as I had blamed myself so many times before. I often thought that there must have been some signal I was sending out to these men that said it was okay to do the things they had wanted to do to me – and they did them, irrespective of the way I felt about it.

Then I told Sam that my father had only abused me three times, but I knew that three times were three times too many.

‘Only?’ Sam replied in a loud whisper.

I tried to think of a reason why, but like all the other unanswered questions I had inside my head, this new question slipped in beside them as if it had always belonged there. Tidied away to be forgotten on a dust-laden shelf.

I hated what my father had made me: a victim. I recalled that I began to think of him as someone I didn’t know and wanted to shout to the waiting world, ‘Help there’s a strange man after me’, but I didn’t. I had loved my father and had trusted him completely until that morning when he had treated me like a wife, not a daughter. Suddenly
this strange man who was playing at being my father stood before me. I despised the way that somehow he seemed to know, as soon as he had touched me, that I had been in this situation before. At that point, he could have stopped the next three years of bad memories attacking me. But he didn’t.

He just scooped me into his arms in the early hours of that June morning and carried me to his bed, got on top of me and did what he needed to do. He ejaculated into me – after all there was no risk, it was safe and he knew it because I hadn’t yet started my periods.

I was still a child.

He wasn’t a caring father or a trustworthy man. I now know exactly what my father was: he was a coward, someone who belongs in a dark corner, hidden away with the vermin. I knew even that was too good for him. Why had he been so terrible? This question always remained unsaid and unanswered, because I never asked it and so he never answered. It was a question that I’d have liked him to take to his grave.

All too soon our holiday in Cornwall was over and we had to leave to return home. I always hated leaving and felt as sad as I did when someone I loved had died and gone from my life forever. The worst point of the journey back home was crossing the last county line, which always made me feel like I was being delivered back to a world in which I did not belong.

I knew that I was safe with Sam and that he would always protect me, but I dreaded returning home to the
same town where my bad memories had been born and where they had been given all the strength they needed to grow.

Chapter Nineteen

FOR THE NEXT few months after telling Sam, I tried to feel differently about my father. I tried thinking about our family holidays in Westmorland when we were small children, times when I knew we were happy and my dad behaved as a proper father. I wanted him to be like a normal father, loving and caring for his daughters. I was hoping that remembering those childhood holidays would make me feel better, because for me Westmorland was always such a special place, but it never did. When the boundaries changed in the seventies, Westmorland disappeared and the county of Cumbria was born. I still loved the area for its beauty and its warmth.

I can’t remember when it was that I first forgave my father, but for twenty years of my life that was exactly what I did: forgive him. Not once did I speak to him about what he had done to me all those years before. Why? Because I
was riddled with a strong feeling of guilt. I wondered what went through his mind each time I saw him and he kissed me goodbye, which happened after each visit home. But he never gave anything away. His face was harder to read than an antique book with an ancient language written on crumbling pages.

During the last two years of his life, I found myself recalling the things that had happened between us, trying to make sense of them. There were many times when I wanted to say, ‘Dad do you remember that day when you came into my bedroom, scooped me up and carried me into your room and did what you should never have done?’ And I imagined him casually replying, ‘Oh yes of course I do, why?’ And it is at this moment, when I can see him grinning and smiling at me, that I want it to be me who killed him for being part of the team that ruined my life, not the cancer.

When he lay in a coma for almost a week before he died I asked him again. ‘Why?’ But as usual he never gave me a reply. He just continued to sleep, each last minute of his unconscious life taking him into a deeper point of no return. I begged him to wake up just so that I could hear the answers I so desperately wanted to hear, but instead he just slept on.

When my father died it was almost at the end of October, just days before Sam and I celebrated our eleventh wedding anniversary. Dad was cremated the day before our anniversary. The undertaker at first suggested we do the burial on the thirty-first, which was our wedding anniversary: our day.
At that point my sister stepped in and told them no way. I remember the undertaker telling us that they were busy but that he would try to do what he could.

When the undertaker left, I fell apart. My father had taken my life already; I wasn’t going to allow him to take another precious day from me, too.

Even from his coffin he was still desperate to keep hold of my life, still trying to have me think about him and still trying to stand between us, just like the memories he had left me with. I try not to think of him now if I can. I stopped missing him a long time ago because I know my father died when I was eleven. The man that remained and lived in his body was a stranger to me. I now no longer visit his graveside, which is in one of the most beautiful, quietest, most tranquil places in the Lake District. This is because I feel that he taints the lovely surroundings with the evilness that lived in him when he was alive.

However, after his death I visited his graveside often, full of sadness for the loss of the man I had once loved as my dad. After a few years my visits became less regular as my grieving subsided.

The very last time I drove alongside the lake, getting closer to his resting place and the few remaining particles of his remains, which are becoming one with the earth they lie in, I felt a sense of sadness and guilt. I didn’t understand this guilty feeling that rose within me. All I knew then and know now is that I never want to feel guilty ever again. I haven’t been back there for more than ten years. After the first few years, when one of my sons suggested we should
go, I would try to make excuses and say I couldn’t at the moment. Then, thankfully, another year would pass us all by and my boys would get tied up with more important things that were going on in their lives.