by Alice Keale
Well, I’d stuck to my side of the bargain – for months. I’d answered his phone calls. I’d followed the rules. And now he was saying it was all over anyway.
In retrospect, it was ridiculous to have reacted the way I did, not least because the reality was that I hated my life. I’d hated it every single day since the discovery. There had been countless occasions when I’d wished I had the strength to walk away from Joe, or, failing that, that someone would help me. The irony was that, now Joe had given me the freedom I’d longed for, I didn’t want it. Because although he’d actually been destroying me, it felt to me as though he’d been propping me up. And when he suddenly stepped away, he let me fall.
What was true, however, was that he was the only thing I had left, and I couldn’t bear to face the prospect of having nothing at all.
That night when Joe rang me, and I listened to him telling me that it was over, the moonlight was streaming into my bedroom through the curtains I hadn’t bothered to close. I love the night sky, especially in the countryside where my parents live, where the light from the stars isn’t all but obliterated by street lights. But the moon that night seemed to be like a spotlight, shining into the bedroom and illuminating all the things I’d kept from my childhood, as if to say, ‘You built a good life for yourself when you left home. Now you’re back where you started more than fifteen years ago.’
I tried to contact Joe countless times over the next few weeks. Sometimes I sat in my room staring at my phone for hours on end, willing it to ring. But he didn’t ever answer my calls or texts, except for one, about a week after he told me it was over. After phoning and texting him many times without a response, I decided not to try to contact him at all, just to see what he’d do, and he phoned me that evening. But he didn’t really say anything; he just asked me how I was, and then hung up when I asked him, ‘How could you do this to me, Joe?’ I suppose that once he knew he’d regained control there wasn’t anything else he needed to say.
That was more than two years ago now, and although I continued to call him intermittently for the next six months, it was the last time I ever spoke to him.
I had what people call a nervous breakdown after Joe sent me home. I lived at my parents’ house – causing them a huge amount of worry, I know – and couldn’t get out of bed for weeks. It felt as though there wasn’t a single part of my life that hadn’t been adversely affected by my relationship with him. My mum made an appointment for me to see the GP I’d had before I’d left home and gone to live in London, who was very nice. But as I didn’t have any money to pay for the therapy I needed, my name was dropped into the black hole of NHS mental health care.
The depression that had first surfaced when I was at university, but had then been kept more or less under control, got a lot worse during those first few months. I also started getting panic attacks and flashbacks to the most violent incidents that had occurred during the time I’d spent with Joe, and I would find myself gasping for breath and incapacitated by fear. I still get them sometimes now, although they’re not as frequent or as severe as they used to be. It turned out that what I was experiencing were classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder – PTSD – which is the diagnosis that was made by the psychiatrist I saw about three months after my name had been added to the waiting list.
So then I was put on a waiting list to have therapy with a clinical psychologist. I’m still waiting, more than eighteen months later. I did eventually get six sessions with a counsellor. The trouble is that, for most people, six sessions isn’t enough. And although the counsellor I had was lovely, she wasn’t trained specifically to deal with victims of domestic abuse – which is how I’d be classified. So instead of achieving the magic cure I think I was hoping for, I ended up being left with all sorts of highlighted but unresolved issues, which just made me feel worse.
One of the many things I hated about the way I felt at that time – and still feel to some extent now – was the sense of being helpless. When I was working, before I met Joe, I used to pay to see a psychiatrist every few months, and for a CBT session whenever I felt I needed one, which made me feel as though I was in control of my mental health, rather than my mental health being in control of me. But by the time I really needed help I’d spent all my money on holidays and gifts for Joe, and could no longer afford to take care of myself. And that made me angry, which only added to my distress.
My parents tried to help me, but they couldn’t afford to pay for the kind of care I really needed. And my GP tried too, although there wasn’t really anything she could do unless I was suicidal, in which case I would be admitted to a psychiatric ward; but she really didn’t want that to happen, she told me, because she thought it would do me far more harm than good. We looked into going down the charity route too, but their waiting lists are even longer.
It’s an indescribably horrible feeling, desperately wanting help and finding that there’s none available to you.
Chapter 16
I had a couple of appointments booked with the psychiatrist, but she was away at the time of the second one and I saw a locum, who increased the dosage of my antidepressants. But that just made me feel numb, not better, and didn’t actually deal with anything.
Things did start to improve a bit with time, and after a few weeks I was at least able to get out of bed and do some basic things. Everyone kept telling me that ‘time heals’. I just didn’t realise it takes so long. Even a year after Joe’s last phone call, the agony would still be there. Maybe the volume had been turned down slightly, but it was still playing on a continuous loop in the background, like a constant, cacophonous soundtrack to my life.
For the time being, every day was painful, and far too long. How could fifteen hours, or however long I’d been awake, seem so interminable? The best part of each day – if anything so unremittingly miserable can be said to have a ‘best part’ – was just after I woke up, those few seconds when my mind was blank and I wasn’t aware of what I’d lost, or what I’d become. It’s true that ignorance is bliss; it certainly was for me in those blissfully ignorant first-waking moments of every day, before reality hit me like a physical blow, and the agony returned.
I did try to make the pain go away, but not during those first few weeks, when any sort of trying seemed to be out of the question, and when I could lie completely still in my bed for hours, just staring at the same patch of wall without really seeing it. I’d think I was thinking, but my mind was actually completely blank, and hours would seem like minutes. Sometimes I’d imagine myself getting out of bed, going into the bathroom and having a shower, making a cup of coffee and then going for a walk, or even just wanting to eat something. Then depression and apathy would take over again, and even just imagining doing those things was exhausting.
Although I often used to wish I didn’t have to struggle any more, I didn’t ever consider taking my own life – for reasons that I think were actually more positive than simply not having the physical or mental energy to do it. What was really driving me crazy was wanting to know why Joe did what he did to me.
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ my family and friends told me patiently. ‘He’s not well. You’re not responsible for the emotional and physical abuse he subjected you to.’ And I tried to believe them. But after all those months of Joe telling me it was my fault – added to the guilt I already felt for having had an affair with a married man – there’s a part of my brain that still thinks he’s right. What was certainly true, however, was that only Joe could answer the question I needed to have an answer to: ‘Why?’
What I also wanted to know – and still do – is if he really did believe that, by doing any of the multitude of things he told me to do during the months when we were so unhappy together, I really would be able to fix him. Or was he just playing a malevolent game with me, enjoying his role as puppeteer? It’s frustrating and disconcerting not to have answers to any of the questions I still ask myself on a fairly regular basis. Perhaps it’s time to
accept the fact that I never will.
I want to move on and leave the past where it belongs. But I also want Joe to have to account for what he did. I’d like him to have to listen while some medically qualified person, whose opinion he can’t dismiss, tells him that his reaction was out of all proportion to what I’d done and that there was no excuse for the way he treated me.
I hate the fact that I kept trying to contact him after he told me it was over. Apart from there being no rational explanation for my wanting to have anything to do with a man who had been abusing me for more than a year, it put him firmly back in the driving seat – in control to the bitter end. For a long time, I wanted him to be the weak one for a change and to phone me – even send me a text – to say he realised he had been in the wrong and that he was sorry. In the end, it took six months before I’d built up just enough self-esteem to stop calling him.
Something else I deeply regret is that I didn’t have the guts to be the one who ended it. I wish, too, that I hadn’t spent all my money; that I wasn’t facing the prospect of starting my adult life all over again; that I was able to work in the world I was working in when I met Joe, but which I know he’ll use his considerable influence to ensure is closed to me now; that I didn’t have nightmares; and that I could have the old me back again.
But despite wishing all those things could be different, I know I’m lucky in many ways, not least because I don’t feel trapped by Joe’s abuse any more. Not that I feel free – the PTSD still keeps me locked inside the memories. I’m lucky, too, to have good friends and a loving family, who are doing everything they can to make sure I succeed in creating a new life for myself. I know there’s no magic bullet and that it’s going to take time for the damage to be repaired and the psychological wounds to heal, but I will rebuild my life. It’ll be different from the life I imagined I’d have when I left university. But that’s true for lots of people, for lots of reasons. All I need now is to find some reason to be happy.
Although my family and friends have been incredibly supportive, when something bad has happened in your life there comes a point when people expect you to snap out of it, pull yourself together, pick yourself up and get back on track. Even though they might not say anything, you know it’s what they must be thinking. And it’s a reasonable expectation from their point of view. The problem is, I still sometimes doubt whether I will ever be able to return to my old self.
One day, after I’d stopped spending every day in bed but was still living at my parents’ house, I wandered into the garage and started looking through some of the boxes of my belongings that had been stored there, waiting to be moved to … who knows where? Among them, I found a plain brown shoebox into which I’d put everything I’d kept from my relationship with Joe. There was a book about Peru, about the Inca trail we’d trekked, which I’d bought for him, but which, for some reason, I’d ended up with myself. There were ticket stubs from films, plays and operas we’d seen together, of whose plots I had no recollection at all, because even in a theatre Joe’s questions and accusations used to continue, until eventually someone would tell him, angrily, to be quiet. There were plane tickets too, from our first, wonderful trip together to Barcelona, and from all the other expensive and desperately miserable holidays I’d paid for, to magical destinations that will now be linked forever in my mind with violence and fear.
There was just one photograph in the shoebox, of me and Joe standing on a mountain on the Inca trail under a cloudless sky, smiling and with our arms linked. Anyone looking at that photograph would be struck by how happy I am, unless they knew me well and looked more closely, when they would see the anxiety in my eyes and the stiffness of my stance.
The shoebox had arrived at my parents’ house in a van one day, sent by Joe with all the other belongings I’d left at his house when he sent me away. It was hard to believe it contained the only evidence I had left of fifteen months of indescribable pain.
‘Surely you’ll want to throw it all away,’ my sister said when I told her about it. And that certainly would have been the healthy thing to do. But, for some reason I still don’t understand, I needed to keep it. Maybe it felt as though it was the only proof I had that those months with Joe were real and that I hadn’t imagined it all, or dreamed about it in some horrific nightmare. One day I will be strong enough to dump that shoebox in a bin, or burn it on the fire. But not yet.
Seven months after Joe sent me away, I emailed to my sister and best friend the account I’d written shortly after I first went home. I hadn’t talked to anyone except my psychiatrist about what Joe had done to me, and when I pressed ‘Send’ on the laptop it felt in a way like the final betrayal of his trust. Then I was angry with myself for feeling guilty about revealing just some of the details of his abuse to people who really do love me. After I’d sent it, though, the anger and guilt were outweighed by a huge sense of relief, as though someone had, quite literally, lifted out of my hands the massive weight I’d been carrying around with me for almost two years. What I didn’t realise until some time later was that, by sharing some of my experiences that day, I had taken a significant step on the road to my recovery.
I had a colleague at work, before I met Joe, who told me one day that she often fantasised about winning the lottery. ‘I know everyone does it,’ she said. ‘But I got to the point where I’d taken it to what I think is probably an unhealthy level. I would imagine the car I’d buy, the house I’d purchase and how I’d decorate it. In fact, I not only picked out the wallpaper for every room, I ordered samples of each one. That’s when I realised I’d gone too far and needed to stop. And the stupid thing is, I only buy a lottery ticket once in a blue moon.’
Some of what she told me was very funny, while some of it did sound a bit extreme. But at the other end of the spectrum is not fantasising at all, which is probably just as bad. So I was relieved when, for the first time ‘after Joe’, I found myself trying to imagine what my life might be like in the future. It was about a year since I’d last heard from him and I was sick of having no job, no social life, and nothing to think about except the past. So I imagined that I’d rebuilt my life and was happy. It was a disheartening exercise in some respects, but the positive thing that came out of it was realising that I would eventually be able to move on.
Something else I sometimes imagine is bumping into Joe on the street. In one scenario, he’s become the man I thought he was when we first met and we get back together and work things out. In another, I’m very happy and successful, obviously not only surviving but thriving without him, and I just nod at him, then walk away without a second glance, leaving him deeply regretting having lost me.
The truth is, however, that Joe’s career is going from strength to strength, while I’m in the process of starting all over again. And although I’ve come a long way in the last few months, from the time when I was spending every day in bed at my parents’ house, crying and dialling Joe’s number over and over again on my phone, I’m still not ‘happy and successful’ – certainly not to an extent that would elicit envy and regret in Joe. So I don’t know how I’d react if I bumped into him, and I’m not sure that I want to find out.
I’m managing, though, mostly because I’m able, most of the time, to mask the real me – who’s almost paralysed by depression – with the pretend me – who’s content and doing well. My doctor tells me, gently, to try to find the middle ground, that being ‘okay’ is good enough, and that I don’t have to pretend. I know he’s right, but, somehow, I don’t seem to cope so well on the middle ground, because if I allow even a tiny part of the pain to show, it ends up overwhelming me. And once I start to cry, I can’t stop. So that’s why I pretend. If I push all the negative thoughts to the back of my mind and concentrate only on what I’m doing now, I can stay calm – for a while, at least, until the slowly expanding ball of pain inside me prevents me from breathing, and I have to stop what I’m doing while I wait for it to shrink again.
Unfortunately, not
being with Joe any more hasn’t banished my sense of guilt. Not about having had an affair with a married man – it was wrong and I’m sorry I did it, but I’m not going to beat myself up about it for the rest of my life. But about the fact that, because I didn’t report Joe’s behaviour to the police, he might be doing to some other poor woman what he did to me.
I did phone the police one day and asked, ‘If I wanted to make a statement about something but not take any further action, could you just file it away somewhere, so that it’s on record if the person concerned ever does something similar in the future?’ But they said they couldn’t, and that if I reported a crime to them they would have to investigate it, which I’m still too scared to let them do.
Although my mum really wanted me to talk to the police, so that Joe would be made accountable for what he’d done to me, my sister could understand why I wouldn’t do it. I wasn’t just afraid for myself; I was frightened for my family, because Joe always told me that if I ever did go to the police he’d sue my family for defamation and make sure they were ruined financially. And I was also frightened for Joe’s next potential victim, particularly after my therapist told me that it’s probable, rather than merely possible, that he will do the same thing to someone else.
It was that last fear that prompted me to talk to a friend who’s a lawyer – although not in the field of domestic abuse – who told me, ‘I know it’s terribly unfair, but I really don’t think you’d be able to cope emotionally with taking legal action against him. And God forbid you lost the case. What then? I can’t begin to imagine how that would make you feel. And losing is a real possibility, because of the lack of proof.’