If You Love Me

by Alice Keale

  A few months after Joe told me it was over, my doctor said to me one day, ‘You were lucky to have got out when you did, Alice. You’re very fortunate to be alive.’ I think that was when it finally hit me just how serious my situation had been.

  I used to feel sick with fear whenever Joe shouted at me, ‘I will kill you if you move, if you scream, if you speak. Believe me, Alice, I will kill you.’ And I did believe him. Every time it happened, I’d think, ‘Is this the last time? Will he really do it this time?’ Then I’d wake up the next morning determined to phone my sister, my best friend, my parents, even the police, and beg them, ‘Please help me. You were right: his behaviour isn’t normal. He’s a madman and I do, desperately, need help.’

  But as the relief of finding myself still alive slowly began to fade, my determination to leave always faded too. For a while, Joe would be vulnerable and charming – although never apologetic – and I would accept his assertion that he was the injured party, not me. And when he told me, as he always did, that he needed me to stay, because I was the only person who could help him get through the agony of hurt I’d caused him, I’d feel guilty again. I’d put cold water on the bruises and bite marks he’d inflicted on me so viciously the night before, and I’d abandon any thought of leaving, because it was my fault and, because, for some reason, I had to believe that, eventually, if I tried hard enough, everything would be all right.

  So when my doctor said I’d been lucky, I realised, at last, that he was right and that I had come incredibly close to dying at the hands of the charming, funny, kind man I’d loved, a man who is, in reality, a potentially dangerous psychopath.

  About the Author

  Alice Keale is 34 and lives in London, where she is working hard to establish herself in a new career. She is also slowly rebuilding all the other aspects of the life she lost after she met and fell in love with the man of her dreams.

  Jane Smith is the ghostwriter of numerous bestselling books, including several Sunday Times top ten bestsellers. www.janesmithghostwriter.com

  Moved by If You Love Me?

  Read I Know What You Are by Taylor Edison and Jane Smith, the heartbreaking true story of a lonely little girl abused by those she trusted most.

  Read an excerpt now.

  Chapter 1

  I was two years old when Mum and I moved into the flat that quickly became a doss-house for an assortment of her weed-smoking friends. I didn’t have a bedroom of my own in that flat; my bed was wherever I happened to fall asleep each night, which was usually on the sofa or floor in the living room. Fortunately, Mum’s friends were nice to me and there was always someone who was willing (and able) to feed me when I was hungry or put me in the bath when I needed a wash. So I was perfectly happy, as far as I remember. Until I started school.

  Because I had assumed – as children tend to do without even thinking about it – that what happened in my own home was ‘normal’, school came as a complete shock to me, for many reasons. As I hadn’t really mixed with other kids before I started school, I didn’t know how to make friends or even how to play with other children. And I wasn’t used to being shouted at the way my teacher shouted at me on my very first day when I didn’t do something she had told me to do.

  I wasn’t being deliberately disobedient or naughty. I just didn’t understand what she meant. I was used to being given simple directions by my mum and her friends – ‘Stop it’, ‘Eat it’, ‘Go to sleep’ – and I was bewildered by the teacher’s collective instructions to the class, which became even more incomprehensible to me when she said things like, ‘Unfortunately, we won’t be able to go outside at playtime today as it’s still raining cats and dogs.’

  It didn’t matter how hard I tried to understand what I was supposed to be doing, I invariably seemed to get it wrong. So I was always either already in trouble or feeling sick with apprehension, which meant that school was pretty much ruined for me right from the start.

  Another thing I hated about school was that it meant being away from my mum, which was something I wasn’t used to, although that was true for most of the other children too, I suppose. I don’t have many specific memories of my mum when I was a young child, but I know she was almost always there – in body, if not in spirit – and that I never spent a single night away from home when I was a little girl. In fact, Mum and I had a very close relationship at that time, and even though it might have been odd and dysfunctional in some ways, at least it was familiar and comprehensible to me. I could tell when she was angry, for example, and I usually knew why; while she knew how to talk to me in a way that I could understand and that didn’t trigger a meltdown in my weirdly wired brain.

  But I didn’t understand my teachers, and because the lack of comprehension was mutual, they would often back me into a corner, literally as well as figuratively, so that I felt trapped and panicked. As a result, it wasn’t long before a hostile relationship began to develop between me and my teachers, which, far from trying to rectify, Mum sometimes seemed actively to encourage. After being happy to let other people take care of me since we’d moved into the flat that was always full of her drunk and drug-addicted friends, I think the time when I started school coincided with a phase when she wanted it to be just her and me against the rest of the world. So maybe she resented the influence she thought my teachers would have on me, or perhaps it simply felt as though she was getting her own back on all the teachers she used to tell me about who she hadn’t liked when she was a child.

  I didn’t want to be in conflict with anyone though, and as well as trying – and usually failing – not to annoy my teachers, I longed to be like the other kids, who seemed to be able to follow instructions that, to me, seemed impossibly complicated and indecipherable. I hadn’t been at school for very long before I realised that there must be something wrong with me, which I assumed was the fact that I was ‘retarded’, as Mum often told me I was. And that made me even more anxious to learn to behave the way the other kids did, because I really didn’t want to have to go to a ‘special school’ like the one Mum described to me, where they sent children who weren’t ‘normal’.

  Even when I was diagnosed as having Asperger syndrome, which was something that apparently couldn’t be ‘cured’, I think Mum still preferred to believe I was ‘retarded’, because that was something she thought I could recover from, if only I tried hard enough. Perhaps her intentions were basically good, in that she was hoping to push me towards normality by refusing to accept that I had a problem. Or maybe she was just hoping that, whatever the problem was, it would go away if we ignored it.

  It didn’t go away though. It just got worse, until, eventually, I was so confused, lonely and unhappy I would have done almost anything to feel that my mother loved and approved of me, or that I had just one real friend. And then that became the real problem, because being desperate for affection puts any child in a potentially dangerous situation, particularly a child like me, who was already vulnerable for other reasons.

  It wasn’t until I started school that I realised I didn’t have a dad. Even then, it didn’t seem like a huge deal, because I wasn’t the only child whose dad wasn’t around, although I think most of the others at least knew who their fathers were, whereas I didn’t know anything about mine.

  I’ve never met my dad and Mum has never talked about him, except to say that he left before I was born. Perhaps he didn’t even know Mum was pregnant and so has no idea that he has been a father for the last 21 years. I sometimes wonder if things might have been better – for Mum and for me – if he had stuck around while I was growing up. I don’t wish he had though, because he might have made things worse, especially if he was an alcoholic or a drug addict, like most of Mum’s friends when I was a child. And, in my experience, getting the thing you wish for doesn’t always turn out well.

  Mum was living with someone else when she met my dad, and when she got pregnant he threw her out. So she moved in with her mum, and that’s where I lived, too, from the t
ime I was born until I was two years old.

  Grandma was in her forties when she had Mum, and Mum was in her thirties when she had me. So Grandma was well over 70 by the time I was born, and was already suffering from whatever it was that killed her when I was five. I don’t have any clear memories of my grandma. I don’t think she played a very active role in the first few years of my life, because she was ill and because she and my mum didn’t get on.

  My only other close relative is Mum’s cousin, Cora, who lived in a flat in the house next door to Grandma. Cora suffers from depression and often finds life a bit of a struggle. But she has always worked hard and has done quite well for herself – which was fortunate for Mum and me, because when Grandma threw Mum out, Cora let us live in another property she owned. I don’t know where we would have gone if she hadn’t helped us, because, unlike her cousin, Mum has never worked or owned anything.

  We are the sort of family that doesn’t talk about anything important. So I don’t know what caused Cora’s mental-health problems, or why Grandma and Mum didn’t get on, or why Mum was only able to deal with life at all when she was separated from reality by a haze of cannabis smoke. I do know that I was very difficult as a child. At least, that’s what Mum always told me, and I have to assume it was true, because I was certainly ‘difficult’ a few years later. Even so, maybe it’s something no child needs to be told, and certainly not repeatedly.

  Growing up knowing that your mum is having a horrible time and hating every minute of her life is bad enough. Believing that it’s all your fault can provide the momentum that keeps the vicious circle of stress and bad behaviour spinning. It didn’t do much for my confidence or self-esteem either. What made it even worse was the fact that I can’t read or interpret people’s expressions and body language, which meant that, as a child, I simply accepted whatever I was told as fact. Taking everything literally can be confusing at any age, but particularly when you’re a child trying to make sense of the world for the first time. So, as far as I was concerned, I was difficult and I was the sole cause of all Mum’s frustrations, disappointments and anger. Otherwise, why would she have said I was?

  Fortunately, after we moved out of Grandma’s place and into Cora’s other property, Mum made friends with a couple who lived in the flat downstairs and who enjoyed smoking weed almost as much as she did. The fortunate bit about it, for me, was the fact that they were happy to help her look after me. Someone who’s pretty much stoned from shortly after her first cup of tea in the morning until she falls asleep at night does need some help taking care of a two-year-old child and, as it turned out, three pot-heads are better than one.

  It wasn’t long, though, before our flat had become a doss-house for numerous alcoholics, drug addicts and petty thieves. Having grown up in the 1960s and 1970s, Mum saw it as a sort of hippy commune, which, to her, was something positive. And it did have some positive aspects. But, even taking those into account, it wasn’t a good environment for any child to grow up in, for lots of reasons.

  Despite all the pitfalls and potential dangers, however, everyone was very nice to me and I was never abused or neglected while we lived there. Mum’s friends might have been doing irrevocable damage to their own lives and mental health, but they were mostly more ‘peace and love’ than intent on kicking anyone’s head in. So the atmosphere was usually quite relaxed and there was rarely any aggression – as there might easily have been with so many dysfunctional, ultimately self-destructive people living together in one room.

  Having so many people dossing in the flat also meant that on the many occasions when Mum was too stoned to remember she even had a child, there was always someone who was clear-headed enough to be able to put me in the bath, get me a drink from the kitchen or take me out to McDonald’s and buy me something to eat.

  From the little I know about Mum’s life before I was old enough to understand things myself, I think she was already quite heavily involved with drugs by the time I was born. She told me once that she stopped taking speed and ecstasy when she was pregnant, but that she still smoked a lot of weed. I remembered that recently, when I read something about smoking weed in pregnancy possibly having a negative effect on the development of the baby’s brain and behaviour. I wonder what my life would be like now if I hadn’t grown up believing that all my behavioural problems – and the frustration and distress they caused Mum – were my fault.

  After we had been living at the flat for a while, some of Mum’s friends started getting addicted to more serious drugs. I think it was because they were stealing to feed their habit and then got involved with petty criminals and drug dealers who had their own, financial, reasons for wanting to get them hooked on something harder than cannabis. I think that was why things began to take a darker turn at the flat. There was certainly a period Mum has never wanted to talk about. Although I was very young, I have a clear memory that must have been during that time of climbing up on to a man’s knee and not being able to wake him up, then hearing Mum telling someone later that he had overdosed and was actually dead in the chair.

  I was too young to understand any of it. So I am not consciously aware of any bad memories associated with that time. Maybe I wasn’t always happy there though, because I tried to run away on at least one occasion. Apparently, I managed to drag my bicycle down the steps at the front of the house and on to the pavement without anyone noticing. Then I cycled to the corner shop and sat with the shopkeeper for a whole hour before he realised no one was coming for me and took me home.

  The flat had one bedroom and a high-ceilinged living room that was always full of people sleeping, smoking and drinking. Everyone made a mess and no one ever cleaned it up, except to wash a plate or a cup on a strictly as-needed basis or to scrape up the occasional congealed mess of vomit after someone had been sick in a corner of the room. I didn’t have a bed of my own, so I slept in a drawer until I got too big for it, then in Mum’s bed or on the sofa in the living room, or wherever else I happened to be when I fell asleep amongst all the prostrate bodies.

  I thought everyone lived like we did and just accepted it all as normal. I didn’t know anything else, and as none of Mum’s friends had children of their own, I didn’t have any other child’s life to compare with mine. In fact, I had just one friend at that time, a little girl called Judy, who lived a few doors away and was probably 11 years old when I was four. But as her mum was a serious drug addict, my life seemed pretty good compared with hers. Despite never having been looked after in any practical or emotional way herself, Judy took care of her little sister almost from the day she was born, and often fed and played with me too.

  Eventually, when I was five, Cora got fed up with her flat being used as a doss-house and told Mum she would have to find somewhere else to live. And as Mum had recently started seeing a guy called Dan, we moved in with him.

  The fact that Dan was an alcoholic would have been enough to make him an unsuitable stepfather for any child. But he took the place of the dad I didn’t have and was always good to me. (I always called him my stepdad, although he didn’t actually marry my mum.) Despite his drinking, he was still managing to hold down a job – as a sort of cowboy builder – when we moved in with him. So at least someone was bringing money into the household.

  At Dan’s house, I had my own bed at last, in the basement. More importantly though, I had stepsiblings. Dan had two daughters, aged seven and eight, and three sons in their teens, although only the two younger ones ever stayed overnight. Even with my problems interpreting social interaction, it was clear to me right from the start that Dan’s children didn’t like me. Looking back on it now, I suppose they had enough troubles of their own, having to cope with being dumped at irregular intervals by one alcoholic parent on the other. So I must have seemed like a cuckoo in their already overcrowded nest. But I was too young to understand that at the time. I thought it was for purely personal reasons that they would push me down the stairs or wrap me in a blanket and sit on my head until
I became hysterical with breathless panic. They may have disliked me too, of course. But, whatever their reasons for bullying and teasing me, I know I was easy prey.

  When Dan was at work, Mum usually went out as well, leaving me in the house to be looked after by the other kids, who, when they weren’t tormenting me, took me shoplifting. I imagine all children want to be liked; I was the sort of child who wanted it desperately. And, like any other desperate need, that made me vulnerable. Add to that the fact that I was gullible, naive and totally lacking in social awareness, and you can understand why I was like putty in their hands.

  When the adults were out and my stepbrothers took me into town, it was my job to distract the shop assistant in whichever shop they chose as their target for the day. Having been well instructed and rehearsed, I would peer over the counter and say, in my sweetest, most innocent-sounding voice, ‘Excuse me. Can you help me, please? I want to buy a present for my mum.’ Then, while the shop assistant’s attention was focused on helping me, my stepbrothers would be helping themselves to whatever they wanted off the shelves. Surprisingly, perhaps, we didn’t ever get caught, although our success might have been due to the fact that we were taking advantage of the kindness of decent people who didn’t expect to be conned by a five-year-old child, rather than to any great skill on our behalf.

  My stepsiblings were supposed to live most of the time with their mum, but she often dropped them off at their dad’s house when she got tired of looking after them or had better things to do. Dan’s eldest son used to visit us sometimes too. I always liked it when he came because, unlike his siblings, he was really nice to me and would spend ages styling my hair and putting varnish on my fingernails. Then, one day, his dad found out he was gay and beat the crap out of him, and he didn’t ever come again.