by Alice Keale
‘I know you’re right,’ I said. ‘I’m just going to have to find some way of coming to terms with the fact that he’s got away with what he did and will carry on living his life as if nothing had ever happened!’
In fact, psychological and emotional abuse has only very recently become a crime, with abusers facing up to five years in prison for ‘coercive, controlling behaviour’ towards their partners, spouses or family members. The abuse has to be reported within two years of it occurring. But although it would be possible for Joe to be prosecuted under the new law, I know it would be a case of my word against his, because I don’t have any proof of what he did to me. The only record of it that exists are the reports that were made when my family were worried about me, which include my statement to the police officers who came to Joe’s house, in which I denied being abused by him in any way.
The other barrier to any kind of legal action is that Joe is very believable. I can just imagine him explaining in court that, although he doesn’t want to blame me – ‘In view of the fact that she suffers from depression and has done some things which, quite frankly, Your Honour, are not the sort of things you’d expect a moral, sane person to do’ – he is completely bemused by my accusations. And even if I did have irrefutable proof of his abuse – including the physical violence he subjected me to on a regular basis – I don’t know if my mental health would withstand everything that would be involved in instigating a case against him.
So although I think I’ll always feel a sense of resentment about the fact that Joe hasn’t had to account for his actions, I realised after the conversation I had with my lawyer friend that it was time to move on. And that what’s I’m trying to do now, although there are still days when normal life is bowling along surprisingly smoothly and then something happens or someone says something that makes me feel as though I’ve been punched in the stomach. For example, there’s a really nice girl at work who told me the other day that she’d had an affair with a married man. ‘I felt terrible about it,’ she said. ‘So obviously I didn’t want to tell my parents. But I also didn’t want to compound one underhand thing with another. And when I did tell them they were great. They weren’t very pleased about it, as you can imagine, and they said all the things you’d expect them to say. But then they were just like, “So now learn from it and move on.”’
It seemed so unfair that she’d made the same mistake I’d made and come through it relatively unscathed, while my mother still says she won’t ever be able to forgive me. Now, though, when something upsets my still very tentative equilibrium – like the girl at work telling me about her parents’ mild reaction to her relationship with a married man – I remind myself that what happened to me could have been much worse. I could have had Joe’s child, for example, and then I would have been trapped forever.
I know that, eventually, a day will pass when I don’t think about the months I spent with Joe, and that I’ve already made more progress than I ever thought would be possible. In fact, even just a few weeks ago I couldn’t have told my story at all.
Chapter 17
I knew that the worst was over and that I was on the road to recovery – however long and rocky it might prove to be – when I started doing some of the things Joe had always forbidden me to do. There was a list – of course – which included the following, among many others.
No watching the weather forecast, the news, certain television programmes and films – because, in Joe’s mind, they had some tenuous link to the married man.
No looking in the mirror, or even in the general direction of a mirror.
No long hair – he took care of that one himself with a pair of nail scissors.
No wearing of jeans, certain styles of dresses, shorts; no underwear in certain colours – basically, no wearing of any clothes like those I’d worn when I was seeing Anthony.
No shaving of legs or regular attention to any other kind of personal grooming.
No make-up to be worn except on specific occasions, and with Joe’s permission.
Hair to be washed no more than every other day.
No iPhone.
No phone with any camera, video or internet connection.
No digital camera.
No keeping of old photographs or videos – all of which had to be destroyed, because everything and everyone who had been part of my life before I met Joe didn’t matter any more.
All contact with family and friends to be kept to a minimum, and to be strictly under Joe’s supervision.
No social life that hadn’t been agreed by Joe, and none at all that didn’t include him.
No sleeping during the day.
No going into the bedroom during the day.
No deleting of internet browsing history – which would always be checked and monitored by Joe.
No phone calls except those approved by Joe – all phone bills were itemised and he checked every detail.
No going anywhere without first asking Joe’s permission.
No working – and no mention of the word ‘career’ in relation to myself.
No use of certain other words, including any with the suffix ‘wise’ – as in ‘work-wise’.
No use of certain phrases such as ‘to be honest’.
No visits to … The list of places I wasn’t allowed to visit was far too long to include here.
It was childish to start working my way through the list. But it made me feel like a real person again to watch television programmes Joe had expressly forbidden, to channel-hop so that I caught five weather forecasts in a row, to spend minutes at a time pulling faces at myself in the mirror, to wait until my parents had gone to work and then run around the house dressed in jeans and a black bra shouting, ‘To be honest, I think that, work-wise, and to all intents and purposes …’
The rule about not wearing jeans had come into force just a few days after the discovery, when Joe asked me, ‘Does wearing jeans remind you of him – because you were wearing them when you first got involved with him? Is that why you persist in wearing them? Do you have no morals at all, Alice?’
Then, one day, after I’d been living with my parents for a few months, my sister Lucy said, ‘You used to wear jeans almost all the time. I think it’s time for you to buy some more.’ So we went shopping together, and as I stood in front of the mirror in the changing room I started to cry. I cried a lot at that time, and when I’d pulled myself together I bought two pairs that day. Then, as I tapped my new PIN number into the card reader at the till, I had a sudden moment of panic. ‘Oh my God, he’ll know,’ I told Lucy, before remembering that he wouldn’t, because he no longer had access to my bank account and couldn’t examine every transaction and demand to know what I’d bought. So I could wear jeans every single day for the rest of my life if I wanted to.
I bought an iPhone too, as soon as I could afford one. The phone I’d had when I met Joe was a symbol of my amorality, according to him, and he’d made me smash it into a thousand pieces. So when a new iPhone went on sale a few months ago, I fantasised about buying one in every available colour and having a different one for every day of the week. I didn’t, of course; I just bought one. But it was nice to think that I could have done so if I’d really wanted to.
Joe would never know I was doing all the things he hadn’t allowed me to do, and he wouldn’t have cared if he had known. To me, though, it was all part of getting my life back and of realising that it hadn’t been completely destroyed, along with all my old videos and photographs. Having said that, I know I’m still a long way from being ‘fixed’, and there will probably always be things that trigger the sense of something very close to despair that sometimes overwhelms me.
One example was when Lucy got married recently, and I was a bridesmaid at her wedding. I love my sister very much. I don’t know how I would have coped over the last couple of years without her support. So it was wonderful to see how happy she looked as she walked down the aisle towards her husband-to-be, Simon. But I fel
t something else too, something that made me very ashamed of myself, because it was very much like envy. My sister has a lovely home, a good career, a very bright future and was about to marry a man she loved and who loved her. And, in that moment, I longed to step into her shoes, to trade places with her so that all those good things – the things I thought I was going to have with Joe when I first met him – were in my grasp.
‘Compare and despair’ is what my therapist calls it. ‘No good will come of it,’ she told me. ‘It will only make you feel miserable. So concentrate instead on your achievements, on all the positives in your own life.’ But sometimes I can’t see anything positive in my life. Sometimes I just want to stop having to try so hard to take even the smallest step forward, and give up. Those moments of despair do eventually pass, though, and when I’m being rational I know that, in time, they’ll become even fewer and further between. It’s just a case of hanging on until that happens.
The waiting lists – around the whole country, I think – are so long that it was more than a year before I got the six therapy sessions I was entitled to under the NHS, and I wanted to make sure I didn’t waste a moment of any of them. ‘I get so frustrated with myself,’ I told the therapist during one of my appointments. ‘I desperately want to start working again and to feel better than I do … And I’m so sick of crying,’ I added, as I felt the tears pricking my eyes yet again.
‘I know that’s how you feel, but you must be kinder to yourself,’ the therapist said. ‘You’re doing really well, Alice. Particularly considering the hell you’ve been through, you’re making really good progress. You’re talking about what happened, which you couldn’t do at all a few weeks ago, and you’re looking at new career opportunities. I understand that you want to be able to snap your fingers and have everything back the way it was before you met him. But you know it’s going to take time. You will get there, though. You can be confident of that.’
I smiled at her through my tears and nodded my head. I was lucky to have been given a therapist I really liked. Talking to her made me feel less isolated, and less angry with myself. And it was encouraging to hear a professional person say that I wasn’t to blame for what had happened, and that Joe’s reaction and behaviour weren’t normal.
‘I know,’ I said, dabbing at my tears with a tissue from the box she held out to me. ‘It’s just that, on some days, the doubts creep back in and I feel worthless and stupid again. Then I blame myself for what happened, even though I know you’re right and Joe’s behaviour wasn’t my fault.’
It wasn’t long after the last of my sessions with the therapist that I applied for a job. Until then, just the thought of having to go for an interview and tell people, ‘This is me,’ filled me with panic.
It wasn’t easy going back to London the first time ‘after Joe’. Everything there seemed to remind me of him and of the life I’d had before I met him. In fact, I was so anxious about the interview that I arrived ridiculously early, and I was sitting in a café, killing time and trying to calm my nerves, when two girls came in and sat at the table next to mine. They were probably in their early twenties, and one of them was telling the other one about the internship she was doing, how well it was going and how she hoped it would lead to a proper job.
Suddenly, I felt a terrible pang of jealousy and for a moment I thought I was actually going to cry. They were both so young and full of optimism, so certain that anything was possible and that, whatever happened, their lives were going to be fun. But as I listened to them, I began to realise that it was their attitude I was really jealous of, because even if reality didn’t end up meeting their expectations, they’d adapt and still be happy. ‘And that’s what I have to do,’ I thought. ‘What happened during the months I spent with Joe is irrevocable – the wounds will heal, but the scars will probably remain forever. I can’t change the past. But the future can be whatever I want it to be.’
When I came out of the job interview a couple of hours later, I phoned Sarah, whom I’d arranged to meet when she finished work.
‘I had to force myself not to phone you,’ she told me. ‘How did it go?’
‘Good, I think. I was dreading it, but it seemed to go quite well. In fact, I found myself enjoying it. It felt really good to be doing something normal at last, something that might help me get my life back. I know it sounds stupid, but it felt like Joe hadn’t won after all.’
‘It doesn’t sound stupid,’ Sarah said. ‘I’m so proud of you, Alice. I know you want that job, but even if you don’t get it, it’s been worth doing the interview. It took a lot of courage to do what you’ve done today. I can get off work in about an hour. I’ll treat you to dinner this evening, to celebrate. Take my word for it, you’re going to be more successful and, more importantly, far happier than he’ll ever be.’
After I’d spoken to Sarah on the phone, I went to the National Gallery, where I sat on a bench opposite my favourite painting, Vermeer’s Young Woman Seated at a Virginal, and thought about what it would be like to be working again, and to be happy. A couple of bored-looking teenagers in school uniform meandered past me while I was sitting there. Then an elderly woman sat down on the bench beside me and started rummaging through her handbag. And another woman took out a pad of paper and began to sketch the painting next to my Vermeer. They were all normal people doing normal things. And, for the first time in more than two years, so was I. Suddenly, I felt as though I was back in the real world, from which I’d been absent for far too long.
I did get the job, and I’ve been working in London for several months now. I do sometimes feel a bit resentful about the fact that, throughout everything that happened, Joe kept his job and has become quite a respected expert in his field, whereas I’m working in a different industry from the one I used to work in, and have had to start very close to the bottom rung of a ladder again. But that’s fine. I’m back in London, living in a flat with a friend, and putting my history of art degree to good use. More importantly, I’m making my own life.
I’m making contact with friends again too, although only very tentatively. In fact, I bumped into a friend from university just a few days ago – a girl called Katie – while I was standing at a bus stop. The last time I’d seen her was just before I met Joe. Then I lost her contact details – along with those of almost all the other friends I had at that time – when he made me smash up my mobile phone and change my number.
When I met Katie at the bus stop, she asked me what I’d been doing for the last couple of years, and when I told her, very briefly, I was upset. She was really nice, and said she’d thought something must have happened when I didn’t answer any of her text messages, but that she hadn’t known how to get in touch with me. She’s still friends with some of the other people I lost contact with, and she’s going to arrange for us all to meet up, as soon as I let her know I feel able to do so. So that’s something good from the past that, fortunately, hasn’t been lost forever.
One of the main reasons for telling my story is the hope that it might serve as a warning to other potential victims of people like Joe. I expect most people who read it will believe that nothing similar could ever happen to them, or to anyone they know. I thought that too. I’d read stories in newspapers and magazines about women who had been subjected to horrendous psychological and physical abuse at the hands of their husbands or partners – and about men who’d been abused by women. But, in my mind, it was something that happened to other people, people who weren’t able to take care of themselves for some reason, who weren’t very good judges of character or didn’t have families and friends to turn to when things started to go wrong. I didn’t consider for even a moment the possibility that it could ever happen to sensible, strong, career-focused women like me.
In fact, figures for England and Wales that were released by the Office of National Statistics in 2015 show that one woman is killed every three days by a past or present partner. In addition, one in four women will experience domestic abuse durin
g their lifetime. And, according to the Home Office, domestic violence has a higher rate of repeat victimisation than any other crime. So maybe it is happening to someone you know, someone who has been so brainwashed and is so frightened they’ll deny it, and won’t accept any help that might be offered to them.
I thought at the time that I resented the attempts my family and friends made to help me. I told myself they didn’t understand what Joe and I were going through, and that I needed to do the things he was telling me to do so that I could make him better. I wish now that I had been honest with them, or that I had taken the advice of the woman who spoke to me outside the café in London that day and told me, ‘You’ve got to leave him.’
Deep down inside me somewhere, I think I always knew the truth about my relationship with Joe. But I was in denial, because I was frightened and because I had been essentially brainwashed into believing the lies he told me so convincingly. What I needed was for someone to tell me the truth again and again – that it was not my fault, that Joe’s behaviour wasn’t acceptable, that I wasn’t alone and did have a way out – until, eventually, I was forced to accept it.
It was very difficult for my family and friends to keep trying to intervene when I kept insisting that I was all right and didn’t need their help. But I did need it, because I was too weak and scared to extricate myself from the situation that, eventually, only the people who really loved me could see for what it was.
To anyone who recognises any aspect of their own situation in my story, I would say, ‘Don’t wait. Leave now. You don’t have to live like that. It isn’t your fault. And it won’t get better.’ And to anyone who knows someone they think is being manipulated, coerced and abused by their partner: ‘Keep in touch with them, however difficult they make it for you to do so. And don’t be put off by their apparently heartfelt but ultimately unconvincing denials.’