by Anya Peters
I moved out on a Friday. On Sunday it was Mother’s Day and I went back for lunch and to give Mummy her present and card. By then the girls had already swapped rooms with Mummy and my uncle, going back to the smaller room. A third bed wouldn’t fit in that room too, and as I walked in Liam and my uncle were carrying my mattress out to the garden. They were laughing, on their way out to throw it over the back fence to burn it. It all felt so final. I had been fooling myself all along. I would never belong there.
Chapter 33
Iwas always looking for proof that Brendan loved me. Although he always said he was closer to me than his other children, and loved me as much, I never trusted his words. So when I turned eighteen and he kicked up a fuss, saying I was too young to go on my first holiday with friends, I saw it as proof of how much he cared for me, and told my friends almost proudly that my Dad wouldn’t let me go.
Instead, he and Kathy planned a‘family’ holiday to America for the three of us. I’d been away with both of them before but never together, except when I visited them in Dublin—when I usually just transferred between their cars on country roads. This would be the first time the three of us had been abroad as a‘family’, and I was really looking forward to it. I was feeling very close to both of them by then, but particularly Brendan, who spoiled me whenever he came over, and who Kathy said I had wrapped around my little finger.
A few weeks before we were due to go, during one of his visits to meet a client in London, Brendan came with me to Somerset House to get a copy of my birth certificate so I could apply for a new passport. He waited outside while I went in. As I stood in the queue I saw a notice on the wall saying that fathers of children registered illegitimately could put their names to the certificate retrospectively. I went back outside to find him and asked him, proudly but shyly, if he would come in and put his name on mine. He looked offended and became very angry.
‘You don’t need a signature to know I’m your father. I’m paying for our holiday, aren’t I? And I’m the one paying for your flat and to go to university. Who else would pay out thousands of pounds like that?’
I was stunned. Everything always came down to money with Brendan, but I thought he’d know how important this was to me. It wasn’t about the money but about how much I needed to be acknowledged by him, even though he could never do that publicly because of their affair. I tried to get him to look at me, but he wouldn’t. He stood there stiffly, his face without expression, waiting for me to go back in.
I tried to convince myself that he didn’t deserve to have his name on my birth certificate, in an effort to dull the pain of the disappointment. But as I was thinking it,‘Please,’ escaped my lips. I felt like I was betraying myself, hearing myself say it again. I had said please when I first asked; now it felt like I was begging.
‘No,’ he said angrily. He turned and walked off fast down the Strand, leaving me crying and ashamed amongst the crowds of tourists filing past.
He obviously didn’t trust even me, and for a second I understood some of what my uncle must have felt over the years when they didn’t trust him enough to tell him who my father was. I remembered Brendan once telling me he thought my uncle might blackmail them if ever he knew. I was offended and angry that he might think that of me too. Especially after all those years at boarding school when I had to phone him at home to tell him my holiday dates and the times of the trains to meet me. I could so easily have told his wife or one of his children who I really was when they picked up the phone. But of course I never would.
‘It’s not to blackmail you with…if that’s what you think,’ I shouted after him down the Strand.‘It’s to get a passport, not to get even.’
I went back to get the birth certificate feeling wretched; dragging the heavy book off the shelf and over to the table, shaking with hurt and anger. When I saw the diagonal line drawn in blue ink through the last box in my entry, and in crabbed handwriting,‘unknown’ written in place of ‘Father’s name’, it seemed more accurate than the truth. That afternoon I realised I definitely didn’t know him as well as I thought I had all these years.
Next morning he apologised for not doing that for me. Brendan rarely apologised for anything. When I recall the way he came out of the hotel bathroom—his face half-covered in foam, his razor lifted and head hung, telling me that he was sorry—I knew it was sincere. I knew that it couldn’t wait until he was finished shaving; that perhaps he couldn’t look into his own eyes. I felt he was apologising for more than that too. I still feel such a pang of love for him when I remember how sad he looked that time that I could forgive him anything.
He went on to explain that although he obviously couldn’t put me in his will he had already arranged to set aside some money for me in a separate deal that none of his family knew about. I knew he was trying to show that he did consider me his daughter, although he couldn’t publicly admit it or treat me the same as them. But I didn’t even want to talk about it. I hated thinking that one day Brendan wouldn’t be there.
Chapter 34
After A levels I got into university to study law. I thought I’d finally moved on from the difficulties of my childhood. I made a new life for myself and did well; all the old pain folded away deep inside me. No one who met me would have guessed what lay in my past. I graduated with a good degree, passed my postgraduate exams at the College of Law in Guildford, had a series of interesting jobs, fell in love, went on holidays with friends and did all the things you’d expect of a twenty-something woman. It seemed that I had survived my childhood.
I was still in contact with Mummy and the family during this period, visiting occasionally at weekends and going over for Christmas. But as new husbands, wives and friends came into the family, my role in it seemed more and more awkward to explain, and I felt increasingly uncomfortable. In some ways I was consciously moving on, but I felt pushed out too. Obviously they needed to tell people a better version of our past, cleaning it up and removing unsavoury chunks, but it was hard to accept when I was one of them. They distanced me more and more, phoning each other but not me; inviting everyone but me to family occasions; keeping me an awkward stranger in front of the new members of the family. And although I knew she still loved me, even Mummy slowly turned her back to keep the past a secret, retreating further and further over the years until, when she and my uncle finally emigrated to Spain to live with Liam and his family, I had very little contact even with her.
A few years after I graduated, Kathy and Brendan’s relationship finally ended too. Neither of them would tell me why or talk to me about it, which made it harder for me to accept. They couldn’t understand why I needed to know.‘It’s none of your business,’ Kathy once told me when I asked her why she wouldn’t tell me what had happened. When their affair ended she said she was unable to cope with the connection to Brendan, and that I was part of that. She said she’d get back in touch when she could, but she never did. I wanted to keep the connection so I still called her every so often—as often as I dared—but it was always the same. She wasn’t ready yet. Eventually I lost hope and gave up. The rejection was too painful to keep trying.
I was still in touch with Brendan. But when one of his children found out about his affair, and about me, things became more difficult. She would put down the phone whenever I called, or he would put it down whenever she came into the room. Soon even he was turning his back to keep his family together, only phoning me in secret occasionally, which felt sordid and wrong.
I was becoming more and more isolated from everyone. But the shell I had built up around me over the years to stop the feelings was numbing a lot of the pain.
Then, more than a decade after I’d graduated, I fell into a relationship with a man called Craig.
Chapter 35
Inever intended becoming involved with Craig. I had just come out of a very good five-year relationship with Neil, my only real partner until then, and although ending the relationship had been the right decision I was feeling raw an
d emotionally vulnerable.
To begin with Craig was the best friend anyone could have. Supportive, sensitive and full of good advice and the empathy that helped me in getting over the break-up with Neil. Maybe inevitably, the friendship developed into a more intimate one, even though he was almost twenty years older than me and I wasn’t really sexually attracted to him. We were never equal partners; he was more like a father figure at the beginning, and I quickly became emotionally dependent in ways I hadn’t expected.
Very soon the relationship became controlling. Over the couple of years that I knew him, he gradually turned more and more mentally abusive, until in the end my world was smashed to pieces.
I’d told him some of my background and it wasn’t long before he was using it against me. He’d also convinced me by then that I shouldn’t see any of my family, that they were continuing to punish me, making me their scapegoat; even that Mummy and Brendan didn’t love me. Brendan had just been trying to silence me over the years, he said, and Mummy had only been doing a favour for her sister, not really caring about me at all. He was the only one who had probably ever loved me, he said. Of course I knew that wasn’t true, but somehow it got me questioning everything and thinking all sorts of dark thoughts. It was too distressing to even think about in the end so I just drank more and more to try to blot it all out.
My self-esteem and confidence were soon so low it was easy to convince myself I didn’t deserve anyone’s love. I didn’t even try to make contact with family or friends. I thought Craig was all I had. When he said he loved me, I didn’t even think I deserved that, despite how he was being by then. But as soon as I dropped my barriers and allowed myself to get close he would say twisted things like how my uncle was‘all right’; that I should forgive him for all the stuff he’d done to me; that it wasn’t really a crime; that most men liked little girls like that.
The abuse was so gradual that I hardly noticed it at first. As an adult I hadn’t met anybody like my uncle, but the little girl in me was so used to being treated like that in the past that I almost accepted the way Craig became towards me. Craig was tall, thin and pale-skinned, but emotionally it was like meeting my uncle all over again. He cracked my shell right open; and all those emotions from my childhood came flooding back. Soon I wasn’t sure if I was reacting to something Craig was doing or saying, or something my uncle had done to me all those years ago, or that I had witnessed him doing to Mummy. Everything became very muddled.
After seeing Mummy go through what she had, I vowed that I would never stay in any kind of abusive relationship. But once I was in the relationship with Craig I didn’t know how to leave it. The worse he became, the worse I felt about myself rather than about him. It was classic abusive stuff, I suppose. I became so fragile, vulnerable and dependent—and used to him flying into rages at the slightest thing—that I was almost too frightened to leave him. I was so ashamed that I had ended up in an abusive situation. He turned everything around so I ended up thinking it was all my fault, and I would be the one apologising to him.
Quite early on in our relationship he told me that he’d had treatment for mental problems. But all that was in the past. I didn’t see any evidence of it until it was too late. Besides, to my mind that just made him vulnerable, not dangerous. It was definitely not a reason for me to walk away from him, especially since we were only friends to begin with. Mental illness wasn’t contagious, I knew that much about it, but I didn’t know how serious his illness sometimes got, and how much it was going to affect me.
He would swing between being the best person in the world to be with and someone who was manipulative, vicious and controlled by voices in his head, blaming me for everything. I was soon under his spell, and tried to understand and change him, rather than leave him.
He never actually hit me; it was always mental abuse. But on one occasion towards the end, when I disagreed with him about something, he suddenly jumped on me, his hands around my throat, tighter and tighter until I was choking, staring back at him in absolute terror and confusion. He said he was going to kill me; and I really thought he was. All the breath went out of my body and, gasping for breath, something opened up in me. I started to tremble inside and I never really stopped.
When he finally let go, all those old fears I’d had as a little girl flooded through me. I was fearful of everything after that, and although I wouldn’t admit it to myself, I was right back in the mindset of that little girl.
I should have walked out and never come back that time, but I didn’t. He held me afterwards and I didn’t know how to walk away from the need for that. I just wanted to belong somewhere and to be taken care of. I became more and more distressed and more and more exhausted and couldn’t cope with doing the most ordinary things on my own. I was doing the bare minimum of work; the stress of it all got to me. Even my periods stopped.
Whenever I got close to telling him I wanted to end the relationship he would tell me he was doing it all on purpose to shake me up a bit; that I was like a stuck wristwatch; that he was doing it to get me moving, to start me up again. That made a kind of sense to me because deep down there was that bit of me that felt like that. I was beginning to feel so vulnerable and‘controlled’ by him that by some perverse twist in my thinking I sometimes fell into believing that he was doing me some good after all.
Other times, when I felt stronger and threatened to end the relationship, he would tell me he’d end up in a mental hospital again if I ever left him. I felt it impossible to just walk away then, and he knew it; he had been manipulating and playing mind games with me right from the start. But in the end I did run away.
I moved flat twice and changed my telephone number, but he tracked me down each time and pleaded with me to come back. My head was so muddled by the end that even after I got away I would sometimes think the‘episodes’ he went into were my fault for not loving him enough. When he said I could never get away from him, that his‘voices’ would find me wherever I was and lead him to me, I was so freaked out and manipulated by him that I believed him, despite telling myself how ridiculous and impossible that was. I was frightened of my own shadow in the end.
I saw him one last time, on Tottenham Court Road. He came out of nowhere by a row of shops opposite Habitat as I waited at the bus stop one evening. His waxy face lit up like a pumpkin in the dark, terrifying me with his words:‘You’ll come back to me because there’ll be nowhere else for you to go. You don’t belong anywhere, you never have. Neither do I. People who don’t belong, belong to each other…’ I stood up to get the bus and he was still whispering beside me,‘You’ll come back to me. I’m the only one who will ever love you. You’ll never get away.’
Sitting on the top deck with tears streaming down my face and his words crashing through my head, I was shaking uncontrollably, convinced he was sitting on the lower deck and would follow me to my new flat, and that I would never get away. I sat there until the end of the line, until the driver flashed the lights to tell me to get off. I had decided I had to go. I didn’t know where. I just knew I had to get away from him and from London.
There was nothing left for me to stay for anyway. I was too ashamed to go back and tell any friends or even Mummy or Brendan the kind of relationship I had been in with Craig, or let them see how broken and shaky it had left me. I felt like such a failure. Both my best friends from university had recently left London almost at the same time—one to live in Germany, one in South Africa—but I hadn’t been in touch with them for over two years anyway.
I handed in my notice and fled to Newcastle, where I was offered some temp work and rented another flat. But I was in too much mental turmoil to rebuild my life effectively. I fell into a depression that I didn’t seem able to pull myself out of. Life seemed to be covered in a grey veil; I felt smothered by it and had little energy for anything at all. I felt lethargic and flat and shaky, and close to tears almost constantly. Work was soon drying up, leaving me struggling to make ends meet and taking out lo
ans to pay bills. I was still waiting for my ex-partner, Neil, to repay some money I had put into his business. I had invested all the savings I had, but in the end it didn’t save his business, and I knew he was still in real financial difficulties. It wasn’t a legal agreement, but I’d never known him to go back on his word, so it felt realistic to think that he would still pay me back.
I’m not sure I was realistic about much else, though. I wasn’t coping. Diagnosing me with clinical depression, the GP gave me a letter that I eventually used to sign on for social security. It felt like defeat, but I knew it would only be for a short while. It would take the pressure off me for a bit.
When the tenancy on my flat came to an end I knew I had to give it up, but I had no idea where to go next. I had no friends, no job and no idea what to do about it. Craig’s words, after all this time, were still swirling about inside my head. I felt entirely alone.
Chapter 36
With my whole life falling apart around me, I was desperate to have someone around who I knew was on my side. So at Christmas I got back in touch with Brendan. Despite what Craig had been trying to convince me, I knew he must love me. I sent him my new mobile phone number on a Christmas card, and when I answered it one day and heard the sound of his voice I broke down in tears.