It was my first ever one, but I didn’t tell them that. I just lay there as they sorted me out. They must have mentioned it to my mum, because I remember her being spitting angry about it. I tried to reason with myself that it was because it was a sign of me growing up – something her beloved Charlotte would never do now. But it was something else entirely that had got Mother’s goat.
‘Damn,’ she hissed at me, looking down at me with unconcealed resentment, ‘we could have got more money if you couldn’t have had children.’
For Mum had wasted no time in getting onto the compensation people after the crash. Even while I was still in hospital, she was planning how to spend the thousands of pounds she would receive because of my injuries: she had her eye on a nice Italian fireplace for the farmhouse. Claiming the crash had made me infertile would have netted her another lump sum, but sadly for Mother this was not to be.
Still, she didn’t waste too much time in worrying about it. She’d had another idea as to how she could maximise her income from my beleaguered body, while at the same time keeping me right where she wanted me.
And what Mother wanted, Mother always got.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
‘Come on, Victoria, I know you can do this!’
I was in the basement of the hospital, having physiotherapy with Caroline. My metal cage had gone now, leaving only a couple of pins in my hips. I had been prostrate for months, however, so freedom didn’t come as easily as the removal of my aluminium architecture. Caroline was trying to help me learn to walk again, on my weakened legs that hadn’t been used in so long.
She grabbed my hands and pulled me out of my wheelchair, lifting me onto the parallel bars so they could support me.
From the corner, Mother watched. Her eyes were like laser beams, invisibly fixed on me, yet weighted with invincible power. She had given me a firm talking to before Caroline came to collect me for my session, whispering to me behind the curtains drawn around my hospital bed, ‘You’re not to get out of that chair, do you understand me? You’re not to get up. You’re not to cooperate.’
Dutifully, down in the basement, terrified by the ice in her constant stare, I let my legs bend beneath me and I collapsed to the floor.
Caroline gave an exasperated sigh, and hefted me back into my chair. She fixed me with a look that lidded her eyes with disappointment – and confusion. There was no medical reason why I shouldn’t be able to walk; she couldn’t understand why I didn’t seem to want to learn how to do it, why I wasn’t desperate to build up my strength so that, when the time came for me to be discharged, which wasn’t too far away now, I could walk out of the hospital and into the rest of my life. She looked at me like I was a naughty, nasty child who was wilfully ignoring her, and I could have cried.
From the corner, Mum spoke up. ‘She’s always been a lazy child, I’m afraid, Caroline. The trouble I had with her when she was a toddler … you wouldn’t believe it. I’m so sorry she’s being so very lazy again today.’
Caroline ran a hand through her short hair. ‘Come on, Victoria,’ she said firmly, if not a little harshly, trying to encourage me with stern words to try my best.
I wanted to try my best – oh, how I wanted to. I didn’t want to be in a wheelchair for the rest of my days. Still only a teenager, I was just weeks away from my fifteenth birthday, and I had a pair of working, if weakened, legs. I wanted to say to her, ‘It’s not me, it’s her.’ It was head-banging. But of course I couldn’t show any of that. I was so, so scared of Mum.
She hadn’t ever threatened me, in those whispered conversations behind the closed curtains, but she didn’t need to: we both knew what she was capable of. Instead, she would tell me about how she could get money for my incapacity, and she would say, ‘It’s the least you can do. Your granddad’s getting on now, he’s getting poorly. He’s in a wheelchair and he’s got Parkinson’s, and he’s going to need an outhouse built, and all that costs money. The least you can do is get that built for him by not cooperating. Do you realise your granddad is going to die knowing that his first-born granddaughter has died – and you’ve killed her? It’s the very least you can do.’
And so I tumbled to the floor again, her words ringing in my ears and my eyes locking onto hers as she stood in the corner, assessing my every move, judging me and finding me wanting.
Caroline sighed again, for the final time. ‘I think we’ve done all we can today, Victoria,’ she said tightly. ‘Perhaps you’ll feel in the mood to try a bit harder next time.’
She settled me back into my wheelchair, and went to take me back to the lift – but Mum interrupted her, settling her strong hands onto the bars of the chair, usurping Caroline’s place behind me.
‘I’ll take it from here, Caroline,’ she said smoothly. ‘Thanks so much for your help. I’m sorry Victoria didn’t see fit to repay your dedication.’
And she pushed me off and then back upstairs, where a lecture awaited me: ‘You looked like you could walk there,’ she hissed at me, once the coast was clear. ‘You did too well. I told you not to try, you autistic twit. Don’t you love your granddad? Don’t you want to atone for murdering your sisters?’
Those sessions were torture. I could see that Caroline cared and wanted to get me walking, but I just couldn’t cooperate; I didn’t dare to, not in the face of my mother’s wrath. And so, on the day when the nurses gathered round to wave me off with a homemade goodbye card, which they’d inscribed with messages about what a lovely, smiley girl I was, it was in a wheelchair I left, with Mother at the helm of it, my colostomy bag tucked under my shirt.
The nurses had given me another gift to take with me, too: a handmade pinky, peachy towel, with a dolly picture printed on it and the name ‘Katie’ sewn at the top. I’d been in tears when I realised that my beloved dolly, friend for life, had been ruined beyond repair in the crash. Even if someone had managed to salvage her from the wreckage, she would have stunk of the petrol fumes that had burned my nose so badly. And anything from the accident scene would have reeked of death; I did so myself, for a long time afterwards. Katie couldn’t be saved. The nurses had made me this replacement, though, and I’d slept with that towel every night from the moment they gave it to me. I took it with me as Mum and I headed back to George Dowty Drive on that cold winter’s day in December 2000. The nurses waved us off, but I kept my head down, conscious of Mum’s eyes on me, and of the knowledge that, once again, I was back in her ‘care’ for good.
To begin with, we moved in with my nan. All of us: me in my chair, Alloma, Christopher, Adam, Mum and Jet. We slept on blow-up beds in the living room. I believe social services may have had a hand in ensuring I was being discharged into suitable accommodation, so Mum had opted for Nan’s rather than the filthy hoarder’s hovel that was number twenty-four. As Nan and Granddad lived in a bungalow, Mum argued, it would be easy for me to use the bathroom and the shower. Since Granddad was also in a wheelchair, it would help me to adjust to my new, crippled life.
It wasn’t so bad, being home again, at first. Being reunited with Jet was an unadulterated joy: he would come up to me in my chair and rest his silken black head on my lap, as I fondled his floppy ears. He became very protective over me, now I was in the wheelchair – I think he sensed I wasn’t well. And I felt safe with my nan around, living in her home with its lovely Nanny smell, clean and human. Mum would still scream and shout at me, spit in my face and yank on my hair, but she hid the really violent stuff from Nan, which meant there was a period of respite.
Nan used to stand up to her about even the screaming, but, as she grew older, it was as if she had learned to be quiet – because by now she knew we were going to get it in the neck if she said anything. Or maybe the grief at losing her granddaughters took some of the fight out of her. Nevertheless, though she spoke up less, her presence alone was enough to stop Mum being really bad.
No, being at Nanny’s was fine. It was when we went back to number twenty-four that things got hard. Very hard.
Nothing had been touched since she had died.
Her things were all over the house. Her clothes, her bits and pieces – even the items she’d decided to leave behind on that final night of packing for Pontins. The things she hadn’t placed in her tweed, pony-covered case still lay strewn across the living room. Her smell was everywhere, overpowering.
I felt like I’d killed her all over again.
In the hallway, by my feet, were a series of black bin-liners. They reeked of the petrol fumes that I knew so well. The police had given Mum back what they had recovered from the crash site, and she had slung the bags in the hallway, not sorting or clearing or tidying, nor allowing anyone else to touch them, and there they remained, a constant reminder of the crash, a sensory overload that gave me nightmares for months on end.
Worse still for nightmares, though, was a little day trip Mum had planned. One day, she announced we were going to Somerset: ‘You need to come down and see the crash, you need to see what you’ve done,’ she told me.
When we arrived at our destination, I saw there was a tarpaulin laid out over a crushing truck. It was thrown back to reveal the blue Rascal van – or, rather, what was left of it.
Vomit threatened at the back of my throat as my eyes sucked in the sight. It didn’t much resemble a van anymore. Not only was it far too small, crushed impossibly in on itself, the roof had been pulled apart in long fingers of jagged metal, where the firemen had cut me out. It stank of petrol, too. Looking at it, I couldn’t believe I’d got out alive.
Yet all I could really see, when I looked at that van, were the two dead bodies forever imprinted on my mind. It was like I was looking at the inside of my sisters’ coffin.
The Corrs’ tape had unspooled in the smash and there was brown shiny ribbon flowing from the tape deck. Mum hopped up and picked it up, and then she removed the hubcaps to take home: more grisly souvenirs to add to the mausoleum.
Even that day, however, was as nothing compared to the day we saw the driver of the 24-tonne truck sentenced for the crash. The whole family went to Bristol for the court case, in September 2001; all of us under strict instructions to behave as Mum had said. I wanted to see the face of the person who had driven into the back of us, who had put me in this chair and who had made Colin such an unavoidable part of my life. But when I did, when I looked down at him, standing in the dock at the trial, it was so surreal. He had longish greasy hair and he just looked so normal.
It came out in the case that he hadn’t taken the rests he was supposed to, and that he’d been fiddling with his radio just before the crash happened. He hadn’t seen that the traffic wasn’t moving and he hadn’t slowed down. He was found guilty of two counts of causing death by dangerous driving and sentenced to eighteen months in jail. I felt no joy at the sentence. Nothing could bring my sisters back. If anything, I felt that I should have been the one standing in the dock.
Afterwards, the media gathered outside the courtroom to get a reaction from our family. It had been a reasonably big news story: two people killed, an autistic teenager crippled and another little boy also put in a wheelchair, albeit temporarily, while his broken bones healed. We must have looked quite a picture, Adam and me, both in our wheelchairs as we posed outside, my eyes burning holes in the pavement as I followed Mum’s instructions to look down, look down.
She stood alongside us, her face drawn in a perfect etching of grief. ‘I don’t want to sound a vindictive woman,’ she commented to the media. ‘I’m grieving very much for my daughters. We are not going to be able to put the pieces back together – because there are two pieces missing. I would have liked more than nine months, which realistically is what he’s going to get for having devastated my family. I’m glad he had a custodial sentence.’
The media cooed all over us: that poor, grief-stricken mother, everyone thought. The public perception of her turned even more in her favour. What a noble, noble mum she was.
She had, of course, lost her daughters; her grief on that count was truly genuine. But as we stood outside the courtroom, lined up obediently alongside our preaching mother, not one of those high-tech cameras recorded what was really happening.
Not one of them saw the truth.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Absolutely nothing changed after the crash. Nothing – except that my mother now hated me even more than she already had done, and I was now completely at her mercy. Living back at number twenty-four, free from the constraining influence of Nan’s twinkling eyes, Mum was free to pick up where she had left off before the crash.
She had been a bit subdued when I’d first come out of the coma but the better I got, the angrier she became. It was as if she somehow saw me getting better as me screwing her over, as me getting one over on her – something my mother resented more than anything else in the world. You may win the battle, but I will win the war. By the time we were back at home, me stuck fast in my wheelchair, and no longer any nurses or doctors or Nan around to interrupt her rants at me, she had free rein to treat me any way she wanted.
‘Get out of the way!’ she’d yell at me, as I sat awkwardly in my wheelchair, always blocking her path in the small suburban house. Her hand would fly out and swipe the back of my head. In the chair, I could no longer squeeze myself down the side of the cooker, in that sweet spot by the breezeblocks. I was out in the open, with nowhere to shelter, and always in her way. It was incredibly stressful.
She’d lash out at me as I sat quietly in the chair, whenever she walked past. With her hand, or her fist, or – a new favourite – with a long length of beading that was hung up in one of the doorways. She’d whip me with it as I cowered in my seat, the sharp shapes slicing into my skin, like tiny, thin pointed nails, leaving my hands raw and bloody. She’d seize a piece of sandpaper and rub my face with it fiercely, as though she was trying to rub me out of existence, get me out of her sight. She’d position my hands in the living room door and then slam it shut on my fingers. If I recoiled, or snatched my fingers away in anticipation of the crushing slam, she’d say, ‘Right, I’ll do it again and I’m going to do it twice now.’
Very occasionally, when my injuries merited it, especially from the sandpaper, she might be forced to take me to the doctors. Medical notes from that time say the doctors considered my wounds to be ‘self-inflicted’ – if it wasn’t so sad, it would be funny. When I’d been in hospital after the crash, I later learned from my medical notes, concerns had again been raised about our care – the change in my demeanour had been noted, from happy to the ‘dull affect’ of my ‘autism’ – but once again Mum had made sure no one got too close; and that any out-patient appointments were conducted in her presence, if at all. She asked the doctors not to test me further for my ability to walk, citing her worry that further tests meant further trauma for me. In reality, she was applying for Disability Living Allowance. Further tests might mean further confirmation that there was nothing medically wrong with me. Someone might ask why I wasn’t walking; they might discover it was because I was petrified of her.
I never showered. I never washed. I never brushed my teeth. I couldn’t, not at George Dowty, there was no downstairs loo. I had to change Colin in the kitchen, throwing the detritus into a black bin bag. Unbeknown to me, the doctors had told Mum that I was now ready for reconstructive surgery to remove Colin, and return to normal, but – a bit like my tests for walking – Mum ‘was not keen to pursue this’, according to my medical notes. So it didn’t happen. Colin stayed where he was, in the emergency position the surgeons had selected, thinking he was only going to be a temporary guest; an emergency position that meant he used to leak all the time.
After the crash I was badly incontinent with wee for a long time, too. I would wet myself in the wheelchair, but I couldn’t ever say a
nything to Mum. She wouldn’t have taken me to the hospital to get it sorted. I just had to clean myself up as best I could, as I did when my periods came, too. Mum had gotten so angry about them, every month, that I didn’t ever mention them to her anymore, nor complain about the dull ache of my period pains; it wasn’t like she was going to be sympathetic about them. I’d just shove some loo roll in my knickers and continue with my chores.
Oh yes, I still had chores: looking after Adam, looking after the animals. At least the first job had become somewhat easier in one respect because, while my eight-year-old brother had been in hospital, he’d finally been toilet-trained and so he was out of nappies at last.
But in another way, it had become even harder. I couldn’t chase around after him anymore – I couldn’t even get upstairs, because Mum had banned me, in case shuffling up on my bum strengthened my legs in any way. I was supposed to keep Adam downstairs, but that was a rule he would constantly break.
More even than my crippled state, though, the hardest thing of all when it came to looking after Adam was that he and I were no longer quite as close as we had once been. Perhaps it was because he was growing up. Or perhaps the time apart while I’d recuperated in hospital had meant my mother’s influence became that much stronger. Maybe the years of being told he was king, and seeing the way Mum treated me, just took over. At any rate, Adam’s naughtiness now seemed to know no bounds, and he even became a little spiteful. He’d walk past me and tilt me out of my wheelchair onto the floor, laughing his head off. I felt very insecure, very vulnerable. It seemed I could do nothing right.
Tortured: Abused and neglected by Britain’s most sadistic mum. This is my story of survival. Page 14