Can't Anyone Help Me? Read online

  Why did my aunt not question why I was wearing my nightclothes in the late afternoon when she returned from work? And why did she not notice how sleepy I was and how pale? But if she did, she didn’t comment and just bustled around as always, making supper and talking about her day at work.

  That evening we sat down to chicken and vegetables but the white meat looked dead and the vegetables slimy. I put small morsels into my mouth and forced myself to swallow them slowly, but before I had made any noticeable inroads, I pushed the plate aside. I knew I would vomit if I tried to eat any more.

  ‘What’s wrong with you, Jackie? Aren’t you hungry?’ my aunt asked.

  ‘Oh, leave her alone,’ my uncle said quickly, to prevent me replying. ‘She’ll eat when she’s ready.’ But I couldn’t eat anything else, even when she placed my favourite dessert of apple pie and cream in front of me.

  I think we watched television later, because we always did, until it was time for me to go to bed. It was my uncle who tucked me in and placed Paddington in my arms. Clutching my bear, I fell asleep.

  It was not long afterwards that my uncle, seeing I had survived the chubby man, told me he would show me what those acts would be like if they were done by someone who cared for me and loved me as much as he did.

  Each time my uncle removed my clothes and ran his hands over my body, he whispered endearments before he molested me. I heard his groans of pleasure, followed by his apologies when he knew he had hurt me, and the reassurances that I was loved.

  When I was given more of the sweet drinks, I gradually learnt they contained more than lemonade. I saw something from a smaller bottle being added to the fizzy liquid. Whatever was in it made me feel light-headed and woozy, but it took away the pain and the fear.

  And every time it happened, the feeling grew that what was taking place was unreal. It took some time but gradually I perfected the process of detaching my mind from my body. Then I, like my uncle, became another observer. That made it seem as though what was happening was happening to someone else.

  My nightmares told me otherwise. The disturbing dreams started to visit me more and more often. The images even appeared when I was awake, pictures of writhing adults taking part in grotesque acts, their faces featureless. I would hear a jumble of noises, as though an old cracked recording was playing in my head, issuing instructions. To begin with I couldn’t make out what the noises meant, but gradually they turned into voices telling me to run, urging me to escape.

  There were times when, as soon as food was placed in front of me, I felt as though something was growing in my throat, restricting it and preventing me from swallowing. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t dislodge it until I had retched and retched. That was when fear, then anger filled me and threatened to burst through my skin.

  In the playground I got into fights with other children. I screamed and punched with little or no provocation. It was only when the teachers came running and pulled me away that I calmed down. At six I was still small enough to control so it was my own safety that concerned them, not their own or even the other children’s.

  It was when my urge to run became too strong to resist that they became even more worried. Out of control, my arms swinging and my feet moving as fast as I could make them, I would take off like a sprinter until I reached the school wall, then hurl myself against it with full force. I had realized that physical pain was the only way to stop the inner torment that the nightmares caused. Screaming, I would throw myself against the rough bricks, and the pain of impact would at least stop my thoughts.

  Time and again the teachers caught me and I, distraught with tears that streamed down my face, had no memory of who or where I was. As I was held tightly, a high desolate wailing, continuous and piercing, echoed in the school grounds.

  10

  More little snippets of memory come back to me.

  The school strongly recommended, if not insisted, to my parents that I was taken to see a doctor because of my violent outbursts. He would probably refer me to a psychologist, the headmistress explained. There was another serious issue that she wanted to discuss with them: my excessive retching and vomiting. She explained to my mother that, when presented with food or after lunch, I would often be sick. There were no signs that it was self-induced – although I’m sure those adults did wonder. An urgent visit to a doctor was essential, she said. So they arranged to take me first to the local GP, who referred me to a consultant at a hospital in Manchester.

  The waiting room was crowded with people – arms in slings, legs in plaster, wheezing and coughing. My mother and I were shown to another room.

  ‘You’ll have to get undressed, dear,’ the nurse said.

  The lights were bright in the small room and I trembled. All I could think of was that somewhere in that room, tucked out of their sight, there was a hidden camera and, behind it, eyes that would watch me.

  I shook my head.

  She, thinking I was shy, tried to set my mind at rest. ‘There’s nothing for you to worry about, dear,’ she said kindly. ‘There,’ she said, opening a door, ‘is the changing room. I’ll be outside with your mummy so no one can see you.’ When she noticed that I was still looking at her with distrust, she pointed to something hanging on the inside of the door. ‘Look, Jackie, here’s a dressing-gown,’ she told me – it was a child-sized cotton garment with ties down the back. ‘You just slip that on once you’re undressed, then knock on the door to tell me you’re ready, all right?’

  She left me then and, unable to see any sign of camera equipment and reassured that I had something to put on, I hastily undressed and pulled on the dressing-gown.

  But I hesitated before I knocked on the door. What were they going to do to me?

  Eventually the nurse called me and I walked out. ‘That’s a good girl,’ she said, as she took my hand and led me back to my mother. ‘There,’ she said brightly, pointing at a chair. ‘You sit down and the doctor will see you soon.’

  I obeyed, and through the thin fabric of my dressing-gown I could feel the hardness of the plastic chair. I wriggled, trying to get comfortable, and received an irritated look from my mother. ‘Keep still, Jackie,’ she said curtly, and without replying, I slid down in the chair.

  Eyes lowered, I glanced at my mother, wanting her to say something to reassure me that everything was going to be all right. I wanted to hear her say that no one was going to hurt me, but instead she just looked stoically ahead.

  The silence seemed to stretch for a long time. I watched the hands on the wall-mounted clock as they moved slowly round and wondered how long we would be kept waiting. At last the nurse came back and said the doctor was ready to see us. We followed her into the room where he was sitting. It was my mother who did all the talking and to her that his questions were directed. There was a brown file in front of him and I saw that my name was written on it.

  First he wanted to take my temperature. ‘Open wide,’ he said. ‘I just want to pop this under your tongue.’ Instead of complying I pressed my lips tightly together and looked at him fearfully. ‘Come on, Jackie,’ he said, ‘we’re only trying to help you!’ But still I kept my lips firmly shut. ‘Well, Nurse, if she won’t let us she won’t,’ he said, with an exasperated sigh. ‘Pop it under her arm, please.’ As my pulse was taken and my chest listened to, he and my mother talked over my head. Words like ‘hysterical’ and ‘difficult’ were bandied about and the look of sympathy on the doctor’s face was directed not at me but at my mother.

  ‘There doesn’t seem to be anything physically wrong with her that would cause the vomiting,’ he said to my mother, after he had completed the examination. ‘I’ll write a prescription for something that should calm her.’ He took out a pad on which he scribbled something before passing the sheet across the desk to my mother.

  Then he looked at both of us and said gravely that he thought he should refer me to someone else. ‘Someone who may be able to help her more than I can,’ he said, and I heard my mothe
r agree to another appointment being made, this time with a child psychologist.

  The next thing I remember is being back in the changing room, getting dressed, and then we were outside, my mother walking briskly and me trotting behind her as I tried to keep up.

  I could see her puffs of breath in the cold air as angry words were muttered. ‘I just don’t know what to do with you, Jackie,’ was all she said, once we were in the car.

  Being sick, she had decided, was all of my own making, as were the nightmares and my panic attacks.

  A week later I was taken to see the psychologist, who composed the first report that is in my file; the one in which it is written that my mother said I had always been a difficult child.

  11

  I can’t remember what the thin man wearing glasses asked me. I only remember that I sat down with a woman he said was his assistant in a room where little plastic shapes were given to me to fit together. After I had done that, I was shown cards with pictures and others with words and asked to put the matching pairs together. Then I had to place bricks with numbers on them in order.

  After he had seen what I had done, he left me with his assistant again while he talked to my mother. My reading skills were poor, he wrote, and I was unable to concentrate for more than a few moments. He also wrote that my parents were both concerned and supportive. Between the lines, he summed me up then as a difficult, ungrateful child.

  He was the first of the experts I was taken to and he, like those who followed, never looked at the possibility that maybe, just maybe, there was something wrong with my life and not with me. The other doctor had not asked himself why a child should be frightened to open her mouth for a foreign object to be placed in it. Why not? Did many of his other young patients refuse to open their mouths for the thermometer?

  Instead they told me how lucky I was, how privileged. I had everything a little girl could want – toys, pretty clothes, a lovely home and loving parents.

  That I do remember because, over the next few years, it was repeated to me time and time again.

  12

  I have read books about other children, who had been abused by their stepfathers, family members, friends who were in a position of trust, and in some cases even by their own parents. Through their words I learnt how they had coped when a member of their family, whom, until then and often after, they had loved, was their abuser. Often unable to deal with the terrible reality of what was being done to them, these children created two people in their minds: a nice daddy and a nasty one was the most common. The nice one cuddled them and gave presents. The nasty one did unspeakable things.

  I did something different: I split the child. Those things were not happening to me, they were happening to her; I only watched and observed. She called to me, that little girl, asked me for help, but I turned away.

  It was then that Florence, my imaginary friend, appeared more often. It was she who slid into my bed at night, wrapped her soft arms around me and told me she would stay with me until I went to sleep. In those early years my five-, six- and seven-year-old fantasies did not stop what was happening; they just made it easier to bear.

  Through the haze of the world I had retreated into, my mother’s voice berated me. She told me she was ashamed of how I behaved: I was an embarrassment to her and my father, and the village was talking about her family. Why was it that I gave my uncle no trouble? Obviously, I could be well behaved when I wanted to be. What had she done wrong? What had she done to deserve such a difficult child? On and on the list of her grievances went. I shrugged and gave her no answer.

  ‘You’ve been too busy with your life to see what’s wrong with mine,’ the voice inside me shouted, but my mother didn’t hear it. Instead she sighed with relief when Fridays came, knowing she was free of me until Sunday night.

  And I? What did I feel when my abuser took me off in his car and my mother, thinking of the neighbours, dutifully waved us goodbye.

  Numb acceptance – for whatever he did, wasn’t it him, only him, who also loved and comforted me?

  13

  As an adult I have asked so often of the child I once was the same question: ‘Why did you not talk?’ but the child is silent, and I’m left searching for the answers.

  When I had read all the books that told me I wasn’t alone, that other children had also kept quiet about their abuse, I used the Internet to learn more. I tapped in the words ‘abuse’ and ‘children’: page after page came up on my screen.

  It was as I read article after article on the subject that I began to understand why children do so little to help themselves. I learnt about how kidnap victims side with the men who have taken them. I read about Stockholm syndrome: it was named after hostages were taken in a bank raid and, after being held at gunpoint for hours, tried to help their captors when they had been freed.

  And the more I read, the more I found that when a person guilty of causing pain and distress shows a scrap of kindness, their victim begins to care for and identify with them, that what might have been in the beginning the victim’s strategy for survival turns into reality. And when it does, their psyche is warped as they become genuinely sympathetic towards their tormentor.

  The most famous of those cases is probably Patty Hearst’s. The daughter of a wealthy American family, she was kidnapped by a group of terrorists. She was blindfolded for fifty-seven days, deprived of food and water and sexually assaulted. Yet not only did she try to protect her captors, she later joined them. The pictures of her taking part in a bank raid shocked the world. At her eventual court case her defence was that she had been brainwashed.

  As I read those articles, some of my childhood began to make sense: my uncle, over time, had not only created a bond between us but had reinforced it. Although I felt at worst intense hatred and at best a detached indifference towards his friends, he was successful in controlling my feelings towards him. Until I reached my early teens, even though I feared the things he did to me, he could manipulate me into feeling guilty when he pretended I had hurt him.

  In my confused mind it was him I needed – for wasn’t he the one who comforted me?

  After all, I reasoned, as I read the many cases of abuse, if they can control the mind of an adult, what can grown men do to the mind of a child? Certainly after the experience with Chubby, my uncle managed to make a little girl believe that in some way she was to blame, that instead of her being drugged and molested, she was willingly participating in the sexual acts he and his friends were performing on her. But even as I rationalized, I still felt anger towards that little girl, the child who had kept quiet.

  For a while after Chubby had raped me, it was just my uncle who molested me and took photo after photo of my naked body. I think he was frightened by the state of shock I had been in after Chubby had left, and that was why he refrained from handing me over to his friends for some time. Instead, he used that time to train me in obedience until he was confident of my silence and compliance. It was then that he constantly reinforced my belief that he was my protector, the one who cared for me most, not my parents.

  14

  There were two days out of the year that, whether they fell on a weekend or not, I stayed at home. One was my birthday, when I dressed in something new, sat on a chair and waited for my mother’s friends to arrive. In a flurry of perfume, air kisses and ‘Oh, goodness, how you’ve grown,’ they entered the house bearing brightly wrapped gifts. ‘Happy birthday, Jackie,’ they said, as they handed over their parcels.

  Small sandwiches, their crusts carefully cut off, were passed around, pale sherry was poured into delicate crystal glasses, and orange juice was given to me before I was told to unwrap my presents. Adults, their faces expectant, would watch me carefully. There were books I could not read, dolls I had no interest in, and clothes that were added to my wardrobe. Each item was placed on a tidy pile and the paper they had come in was neatly folded.

  ‘Oh, how lovely,’ my mother would exclaim, each time she saw a parcel’s
contents. ‘What do you say, Jackie?’ As expected, I would dutifully thank the person who had brought it.

  Later the birthday cake was brought in with tiny candles. Not for me something made by my mother with a wobbly ‘Happy Birthday’ iced on the top, but some magical creation from the speciality cake shop. One year the cake was a blue lake with a small girl skating on it, and another, icing and marzipan were twisted into a bouquet of flowers. I always thought it was a shame when the knife sliced through the cake, scattering crumbs and breaking up the beautiful pictures.

  ‘Blow out the candles, Jackie,’ my mother said each year. ‘Then you must make a wish.’ And I would inhale as deeply as possible, hold it for a second, then blow in one big whoosh. Everyone clapped when the last flame flickered and died, and my reward was being allowed to have the first slice.

  Of course, my parents had always given me either the biggest or the most expensive present. I received it as soon as breakfast was finished, and I kept it downstairs to show to the assortment of middle-aged aunties later. The unanimous collective thought always expressed was that indeed I was a very lucky little girl. Before I was ten there was a large wooden doll’s house in the corner of my room that I had long ago become bored with; a small gold locket in a drawer of my dressing-table; an eight-track cassette player on a shelf alongside books and videos; a collection of music; more toys than a single child could play with; and an overflowing wardrobe of the latest designs.

  The only present that did not have to stay in my room was my bicycle. It was my favourite present, but other than the first day, when it was brand new, it had to be kept in the garage.