Chapter 41 – Story of a Little Girl
Anne had read through the next part of the diary several times, She had thought that, as time went by, she would get inured to the awfulness of the story that Cathy had told Mark and yet she had not. Each time she read it she felt fresh outrage rise at what had been done against an innocent child, in fact two innocent children.
She had never fully understood the word hate before. Now she inhabited in a totally visceral way as this story emerged. If someone did this to her child she would kill them like a person stepping on a cockroach. And she could feel this emotion well up inside Mark too in a way that was far more scary; to him killing was a thing of little moment that he was practiced at. She had a sense that if Mark had ever met the perpetrator of this horror his action would have been swift and fatal.
Now that she needed to tell this girl’s story Anne struggled to find a way to put into words what she read, it was too private, painful and intimate to add it directly from the diary into her book, the way she had done with many other parts of the story. And it was a secret that Cathy had been determined not to share with others. So it was impossible to tell this in a book read by others. Still she owed it to this person not to let the story be buried and slide away. In writing it out, almost word for word, it was clear Mark decided it must be recorded. Anne felt the need to be faithful to this too.
In the end she realised she needed two versions, a simple public version that told of this girl having a difficult childhood, with the devastating loss of her sister who was two years older when she was ten. The consequences of this catastrophe flowed through into her teenage and adult life, so that she became a person who kept almost entirely to herself, living a hidden life except for visiting her parents regularly.
Then Anne wrote out the private version, almost verbatim from Mark’s diary. It was a thing that should go to the UK police for further investigation, though in a highly sensitive manner she thought. She understood that the NT police had made some preliminary inquiries with their UK counterparts, but had not provided them with this transcript as yet, leaving it to Anne to pursue her own inquiries first.
In the meeting she had in England with Cathy’s parents she had given no clue to this story, their only observation was that they not seen Cathy’s Uncle since before he travelled to Australia, saying he hoped to catch with his niece. As he was in the military, often on secret special deployment into remote parts of the world for extended periods, they had not found it remarkable that a couple years had passed without hearing from him, though Cathy found it strange. She understood the NT police had made discreet inquiries with UK police as to this man’s whereabouts and they in turn inquired with the UK army without getting a clear answer back.
But this was not in a situation where charges were likely. Without Cathy to tell it or Mark to give first hand testimony, what he said was done to the child in the story in his diary was only hearsay.
So Anne wrote this story, word by word and line by line in separate file titled ‘Cathy’s Story’, an innocuous title for a house of horrors, was the way she thought of it. She saved it on a separate memory stick which David encrypted, to stop others unintentionally seeing it. Each night she read the part she had written to David, as a way of letting this piece of poison leave her mind. She wrote it as a third person narrative told by Mark:
Cathy told me how she had an uncle who was in his early twenties, and who seemed incredibly handsome when she was a little girl. He was always around at her place, seeing her and her sister, particularly her sister who was two years older. She would often sit in his lap as would her sister. It had always seemed good harmless fun.
But then, when she was about eight he had begun to touch her, first the lightest caresses that she could almost mistake for nothing more than his hand brushing past. But gradually these touches grew more and more intimate, and to her, as a little girl, they felt nice. Sometimes she would sit on his lap when no one else was around and he would slide his hand down under her panties and touch her and stroke her in that place, giving her body little shivers of pleasure. And she could feel a hard place in his trousers that rubbed up against her.
Her body was only that of a child. But he did not seem to mind, it seemed to excite him and he would then excite her. Sometimes he would take her for walks in the wood or mountains and then he would take all her clothes off and fondle her, putting fingers up inside her and showing her his red swollen thing. He never tried to do anything more. He made her promise never to tell about these things saying that other grown ups should not know about this stuff.
She thought he was probably doing the same things to her sister. Then she was Fiona and her sister’s name was Cathy, Catherine really, though everyone called her Cathy or sometimes Kate.
They would also both go off for walks with him at times and then nothing happened, but sometimes it was just one or the other, and that is when it happened to her.
When Cathy, her sister, turned eleven she could tell she was growing up, she started to get little bits of hair around her thing which she saw when they had a bath together, and there were bumps on her sister’s chest in places where her own chest was flat.
For a while her uncle was away overseas, in the army. But then when her sister had turned twelve and she was ten, he came back and for a few weeks he was coming and visiting them again, and was touching her some more. She was starting to feel awkward about it, having heard stuff about sex in school. But she did not know how to tell her uncle to stop and part of her liked it too.
One day, when she was on her way out to visit friends she saw her uncle taking her sister for a walk along the edge of the lake, heading towards the forest.
That afternoon her uncle was not there. Her mother said he was leaving to go away overseas tonight, this was his last visit for a few months. She stayed talking to her Mum for a while, eating fresh cookies she had baked. There was no sign of her sister, she wondered if she had gone out.
Her Mum said Cathy told her she had a headache and had gone up to her room after her Uncle had left. So she went up and tried to open the door but it was closed and locked. She could hear her sister in the bedroom crying and she would not let her come in. She said she had a still had a headache and wanted to be left alone.
The next day her sister was nowhere to be found, they searched all the house and surrounding fields but did not find her. They called the police and the police organised a search, but nothing was found.
People thought she must have run away, she sometimes got cross and moody, and a few times she had gone off to the next town, telling her she was sick of being at home and was going away.
But that was only normal older sister stuff, she would always say “Fifi, I am going off on my own for a day. Don’t tell anyone, I just need time out but will be back in a day.”
And she had always come home the way she promised. So the others thought that this must be what she had done and she would turn up the next day or the day after at most.
But she did not believe it because her sister had not said goodbye to her this time. She felt really worried, particularly after she had locked herself in her room the day before, crying.
They found her on the third day, or at least a fisherman did. She was floating face down in the middle of the lake, way out from the edge. She was only wearing a nightie with nothing underneath.
They would not let her look, they said the fish had been nibbling at her for three days, it had made a terrible mess, eating lots of bits of her face and skin and private parts.
They did a post mortem and said it was inconclusive, they thought she must have had an accident and fallen into the water from the jetty early in the morning, while still in her night clothes. The police called it accidental drowning, though that did not seem quite right to her, it was unlike her sister to go down to the lake before she got dressed, she had never known her to do this before.
That was when she took her sisters name.
The funeral was horrid, all those people standing there and saying nice things about her sister and her Mum and Dad standing there crying, so heartbroken. Her uncle was not there, he was over in the Middle East.
On the day of the funeral she decided she wanted to try and make her parents happy again, to become her sister and, in living the part of her sister, make them forget about that awful thing that happened.
So the next day she announced that from now she would be called Cathy and she tried to act like her sister. People had gone along with it and humoured her as if this was just a strange request from a little girl that they needed to accommodate. She heard people say a couple times that it was her own way of working through her grief.
It was a year until she saw her uncle again. Now she was starting to grow up herself, she had little bumps on her chest now and the place where he used to touch her between her legs was changing too, little hairs growing around the edges. One day her uncle was there when she came home from school.
Her parents were both out, but there was her uncle, sitting in an armchair, as if waiting for her. She ran and hugged him and he told her to come and sit on his lap. She did, but now felt self-conscious that he would see the way her body was changing. She was not sure she wanted him to see or touch those private bits anymore.
He asked where her Mum and Dad were. She said, “They have gone to a meeting in the town and then will stay there for dinner. They said they will not be back until late. They told me to fix my own dinner.”
At that her Uncle gave her a great big smile. “That is great. That means I have you all to myself for hours. I can’t wait to see how you have changed since I saw you last.”
He looked critically at her chest. I can even see little bumps growing where there were none before. Then he took her to her bedroom, telling he wanted her to take her dress off so he could have a closer look.
She did, feeling even more self conscious. He sat her back on his lap, wearing only her panties and he fondled the little pimples on her chest as he called them. It did feel nice and she could feel that hard lump in his trousers again. Then he picked her up and carried her over to the bed where he lay her down, pulling off her panties and saying he wanted to look at that place.
She let him and felt him put his fingers inside, much further than before. At first it felt nice but then it hurt as he pushed in further. Then he took his clothes and she saw him standing there with his huge red thing, she had seen it before but she had never seen it with all his clothes off.
He told her to stay lying on the bed and he was going to have a feel inside that place with his thing. She did not want him to do that, she knew now it was a thing that only grown-ups did and she was still a little girl. She shook her head and tried to say no. But he held her down on the bed and put his body on top of hers. He forced legs apart and pushed and pushed there with his thing. She started to cry, saying to stop, he was really hurting, but he would not listen, it was like he pretended not to hear her.
He just kept pushing and pushing and it hurt more and more. Finally something gave way and it went right inside her. Then he lay on top of her pushing it in and out, over and over again, until suddenly he gave a big shudder and lay still.
After, when he got dressed, he told her she must never tell her parents about this or they would both get into big trouble. She promised not to, she did not know what else to say.
Then she fixed him some dinner. He seemed in a hurry to go, even though she said he should stay to say hello to her parents. They ate quickly and she thought he would go after that. But, just as he was leaving, he said he had changed his mind and he could stay a bit longer.
He brought her back up to her room, saying he wanted to try it out with her one more time before he left. So he did it again. This time it did not hurt quite so much. Soon he finished again with another big shudder.
As he dressed to go he said to her. “I thought I would have to wait another year until you were ready. But, even though you are a year younger than your sister was when I first did it to her, you were ready too and I really liked it with you, just as much as with her. Soon you will learn to like it too.”
Now she glimpsed a terrible truth. She asked him, “What do you mean; you did it to my sister?”
He said, “Last time I was here, a couple days before she died, I took her for a walk in the forest, down by the lake. When we got there, I made her take her clothes off, just like with you. Then I made her lie down on a blanket I brought and I did it with her the same as with you.
“She was bigger and stronger and she tried to fight me off. But I held her down until I had finished. She was cross and crying afterwards saying I should not have done that.
“I told her she would soon get used to it and enjoy it, that we would do it lots more times until she learned to like it as much as I did.
“She ran away back to the house and I went back to the army base because I had to leave that night. I was sad when I heard she had died as I would not get the chance to do it with her anymore.
“But once I got back from overseas I decided to come and visit you to see if you were ready to try it too. It is lucky that I found you here all by yourself so I did not have to wait to try it with you. You even have her name now. So it is like one Cathy has gone away and I have the second Cathy in her place, just as good as the first one.”
Cathy stood looking at his gloating face. She could not understand how she had ever liked him. Now she understood what had happened on that day, that what he had done was the reason why her sister had died.
She felt white hot rage towards him. Despite her small stature she screamed at him. “Get out you murdering bastard. You raped my sister and she killed herself. You did not care that she had died. The only thing you cared about was doing the same to me as well. I will not tell my parents because I could not bear for them to know. But you will never, ever touch my again, if you do I will kill you, I promise you that.”
She ran to the kitchen and got the biggest knife she could find and stood in the corner waving at him lest he try to come near her again.
He looked at her, shrugged, then got in the car and drove away. When he was gone she felt so sick and disgusted with herself, even though she pretended she was happy to see her parents when they came home, determined they should never know.
Anne got to the end of her writing of this small part after three tortuous days, it was only five pages of printed text, but she felt she had lived a lifetime in writing these words, telling and reliving a monstrosity done by an evil man.
She placed herself in the mind of Cathy, in the circle of this man’s comfort and imagined how it might have gone. She felt Mark’s arms tighten around Cathy as she worked her way through the story, telling every intimate detail. When she had finished the most awful part he recorded she turned her face back to Mark and he said to her, “He deserves to die. One day soon he will.”
The diary told Anne that Cathy pushed her finger to Mark’s lips, telling him to calm down, she would never let her Uncle find her or touch her again and how she had watched unspeaking until Mark’s rage abated.
When Mark was calm again she continued her story; how her life had drifted out of control after that, with this terrible secret that she could not tell anyone about how this man destroyed both her childhood and her sister’s life. She was sure, though she could not prove it, that her sister went off in the night and flung herself into the water of the lake to wash away the shame.
She did not know if her sister planned to kill herself or if she had drowned by accident, but the end result was the same; her uncle had effectively murdered her. Cathy knew but there was no way she could tell her parents without destroying their lives as well. So she had borne a secret no child should ever have to carry and it had torn her own life apart.
All the time she spoke, recounting this later memory in detail, Mark kept an arm around her gently hugging her and running his fingers lightly through her hair to
comfort her as one would a child.
When she finished there were no tears in her eyes. Even though part of her anger remained she said she felt comforted for saying it to someone at last. Lastly she told him of the new letter, coming from her mother to Adelaide, telling of her Uncle’s planned visit and how she needed to escape. That was why she had asked him to bring her with him.
Mark hugged her tighter, saying, “If it will help I will go back to Adelaide and take him for a drive. No one will ever see him after that and he will never bother you again. I will put him where no one will ever find him. That is what he deserves for what he did to you.”
She shook her head. “Please do not do that. Killing him can never undo what he did, but it would hurt others. It is enough I have told someone. I have been trapped with this secret for far too long.”
It seemed that Mark had accepted her request and let the story continue but then again perhaps not. Marks wrote and underlined his own comment at the end of this section. It seemed a fitting close.
‘He deserves to die, very slowly and very, very painfully. Perhaps to burn that part slowly while he watches would be fitting.’
Anne felt a strange concordance with this man, she should abhor his use of violence to gain justice, but yet she applauded his sentiment, perhaps even his intent for action. She wondered if he had spoken these words aloud to Cathy and made her afraid he would really do this thing. But is seemed more likely he had written this later, perhaps after she was gone and at that time he said no more and let her story continue.
After this, as she lay beside him, she told him of her life as a prostitute, selling her body to men for money was the only way she knew to regain a measure of control, until finally she needed to end that too. So now she had come to Australia to start a new life as a completely different person.
When she finished she put his hand between her legs, holding it there and saying. “I have never done this with a person I really liked. But I am ready to try it with you.”
Mark shook his head. “No, I would be lying if I said I do not want that with you. But, for now, all that matters is that I am your friend. I would not be your true friend if I took advantage of you in this place. You have bared your soul and told me your most awful secret.
“Tonight I must tell you something of me just as dark and see if you can still like me the way I like you. I will tell you the story of Belle and how I killed her with my own hand, and how, in doing so, I killed the thing I most loved.”
Lost Girl Diary Page 44