To begin with, I never said a word at the meetings. I rarely spoke anyway, and there seemed no point; not when Adam was there to do the talking for both of us. People would ask me a question, and he would answer for me. It was so normal to the pair of us that Adam’s opinion would be the only one worth hearing, and I was just to shut up and sit there.
But then a strange thing happened: people said they wanted to know what I thought. Some of the Witnesses would even tell Adam off for talking for me. They would say, ‘Will you let your sister talk now, please?’ Or, ‘No, I asked your sister first.’ And they spoke to me with respect.
It was the oddest thing I had ever experienced.
Over time, I started to get to know some of the Witnesses a bit better. There were some young girls my age at the meeting, and also some older women to whom I was drawn, including one of the elders’ wives, Jackie. The girls and the women would talk to me and, eventually, I started to talk to them too, very hesitantly. Without Mother around to remind me constantly, ‘Look down, look down,’ I dared to meet their eyes, and even venture a phrase here and there.
There was one girl I really liked: she was a pretty blonde called Amy, who was training to be a nursery nurse and loved children as much as I had always loved my dollies. When, a few months after our first meeting, Adam got permission from Mum for us to go on ministry, knocking on doors, I plucked up the courage to ask Amy if I could go with her.
As it turned out, she already had something else on, so she apologised and said she couldn’t make it. I looked at her mum, Judy, and said, ‘Can’t you make her go?’
Judy looked back at me with a surprised and even horrified expression on her face. ‘No, Victoria,’ she said, almost wonderingly, ‘of course I can’t make her go. She’s a young woman, it’s her choice, she can choose. I can’t make her do anything.’
I didn’t realise at the time the impact that exchange had on me, but I went away and it bugged me a lot: She’s a young woman, it’s her choice, I can’t make her do anything.
I was a young woman, too. But I never had a choice, never ever.
Or did I?
I was sitting at the back of the Kingdom Hall, my wheelchair parked in the shadows, with Adam sitting by my side. Mum had beaten me the day before, her fingers wrapped tight around my throat as she had screamed and spat in my face, and purple bruises shaded my fat white neck, one for each of her fingers. Red pockmarks studded the skin where her dirty fingernails had dug into me; already the bloody holes swelled with pus and infection, painful and sore.
Whenever my bruises showed, I made Adam park the wheelchair out of the way in a room at the back of the hall, where we were less likely to attract attention. Usually I could cover up the marks with a jumper, nice and easy, but Mum had really lost her temper yesterday and my bruises could be clearly seen.
The visual evidence of the attack didn’t bother her in the slightest, though. She’d looked me up and down just before we left the house that day, and told me with sly cunning, ‘If anybody asks, just say it’s your brother, Christopher, who did it. He’s naughty. We’ll all say it was his fault.’ Christopher was still living with Nan and Granddad; Nan had now been given the all-clear from cancer, but with Granddad’s health in continual decline, Christopher had stayed there to care for them and so we barely saw him. I’d just nodded meekly as my mother gave me my instructions, wheeling myself out of the house and down the road.
The meeting finished, and I saw Jackie watching me from the side of the room. She caught my eye and left her husband, Duncan, to come over to me. As she reached my chair and bent down, I saw her eyes flickering over the marks on my neck.
‘Are you OK, Victoria?’ she asked, concern heavy in her voice.
My eyes dropped automatically to the floor, and ‘protect Mum’ mode kicked in. The instructed lie was ready on my tongue, plump as a poisoned plum, but I hated blaming my brother; it was the worst thing in the world. I didn’t mind saying I’d fallen out of my chair or that something had fallen on me – those kinds of untruths I’d grown up with; they came to me as naturally as breathing – but when I had to blame another human being, an innocent, that felt very wrong. Naughtily, I swallowed down the lie and said instead, ‘I fell out of my chair.’
‘Again?’ Jackie asked, her eyes looking closely at the bruises, though I didn’t see that: my gaze was fixed firmly on the floor, dishonesty like a thick cloak around me, keeping Jackie’s warmth and kindness out.
‘I’m very clumsy.’
Jackie nodded slowly, and then stood as another Witness came over to us.
‘Can I offer you a lift home again, Victoria? Adam?’ he said. That was Daniel – he’d taken to giving us a lift home regularly, saying it must be so difficult for us to catch the bus when I was in my wheelchair.
‘Thank you, Daniel,’ I murmured, glad to get away from Jackie’s questioning eyes.
He pulled up as usual at the top of George Dowty Drive. Mum wouldn’t allow him to stop outside the house; it was too close – perhaps close enough to notice the curtains were always drawn, that the house stood too silent, sheltering its secrets. He had to park at the top of the road instead, and Adam and I would walk from there.
Mother wasn’t keen on our new friends – not keen at all. Amy had asked me along to a girls’ get-together but Mum wouldn’t allow me to go. Even though the people we were spending time with at the meetings were devout Witnesses, Mum would purse her lips together tightly if Adam or I brought them up at home: she didn’t want us getting close to anyone. Mum wouldn’t let us spend time with other people if she could help it, certainly nothing beyond the strictly religious weekly meeting. She did everything in her power to make sure I looked as unappealing as possible, too, so no one would want to be my friend. She’d taken to hacking my hair off, chopping it off in mad blonde clumps at the back, just for discipline, as a way of controlling me in public.
In public now, I beamed at Daniel as he helped me into my wheelchair by the side of the road. I was very self-conscious about my smile – my two front teeth had been knocked out long ago by Mum, and, since the incident with the X-ray and the dentist, she didn’t bother taking me to get them replaced anymore, so I had gaping holes in the line-up of my teeth – but I wanted to show him I was grateful.
‘See you next week,’ he said, tooting his car horn jollily as he drove off.
Adam and I made slow progress down the road, knowing Mum’s interrogation awaited us when we got home. We got through it, with neither of us saying much. I think the meetings were a bit of a refuge for Adam, too, and even he wouldn’t say a lot about it all when she asked him. That was fine by me. The less she knows, I reasoned, the less I’m going to get hurt. I didn’t like being beaten.
It was when I came to lock up that night that the first sick sensation hit me: I couldn’t find my keys anywhere. I looked and looked, but they had gone; I wouldn’t be able to lock up. When Mum did her nightly inspection check, the door would be unlocked and my duties unfulfilled.
Sure enough, she fired a question at me as soon as she tried the handle on her way up to bed – and the door opened wide. ‘Where are the keys, Victoria?’
‘I dropped them in Daniel’s car, I think,’ I mumbled. ‘I think they must be in the footwell of his car.’
‘Well, you text him and tell him to get them back here right now.’
She held out her mobile phone to me, and I laboriously plugged in an apology and the request to Daniel. The phone beeped with an incoming message.
Got the keys. I can’t come back right now, though. I’ll drop them in tomorrow for you, is that all right?
‘No, you tell him that is not all right! And you tell him he’s not to come to the front door.’ Mum wanted no one at the front door: she had to control everything.
But Daniel must have thought it ridiculous – and time-consuming – to wait for us down the road when he could drive straight up to the house. The letterbox flapped, an unfamiliar noise, as he posted th
e keys through it, and Mum went absolutely ballistic that he’d come to the door. You could smell the stench of the house from there, you see, and the smell betrayed the fact that she wasn’t the perfect home-keeper and mother she presented to the world.
‘Adam,’ she said, in such a measured tone. ‘Go down to Nanny’s house, now.’
There was a beat once Adam had pulled the door to behind him, and then she went for me. She pulled me out of my wheelchair in the hallway and kicked and kicked me round the floor.
There was a lot more of me for her to connect with these days. Her black shoes pounded every inch of my body. She was wearing purple jeans and I watched her violet legs kick and beat me until I was a mash of purple myself. Then she moved on – on to beating me with a bit of wood; on to strangling me; on to poking me in the eye, and pulling my lips out so she could press them into what was left of my teeth. She hit me round the face and that’s when I knew she’d really lost it: she punched me in the face until it was cut all over and my eyes were bloodshot orbs, streaming with tears from the pain, until I could barely see her raging face, her dyed black hair up in her ponytail, grey wispy bits falling out of the band as she beat me as hard as she could. She might have been getting older, but she was still as strong as ever, and no match for a cripple girl like me.
There was no hiding these bruises. When we went to the meeting the following week, even though I hid out in the room at the back, I could feel the watchful eyes not only of Jackie, but also Ruth, another elder’s wife, searching over my face. They came and spoke to me with kindness, and I stuttered out my usual excuse about falling out of the wheelchair. I’m not sure they even tried to conceal their disbelief anymore.
Their kindness was the most confusing thing. Back home at George Dowty, while Mum and Adam watched TV in the living room and I sat alone in the hallway in my chair, I tried to work through the bewildering puzzle. What the heck is going on here? I wondered. Mum has told me time and again, for eighteen years, that I’m the devil’s child, that I’m evil. But if that’s true, then why are Jackie and Ruth being nice to me?
I was confused, and depressed, and so lonely. That night, lying on the floor beneath my dirty duvet, I turned to the person I’d been hearing so much about at the meetings. I turned to God.
‘Dear God, please help me,’ I whispered under my breath, hot tears pricking at my swollen, black eyes as I prayed. ‘Am I good? Am I bad? Please help me. Please help me. Please help me understand.’
Because – for the first time in my life – I was seeing a difference: a difference that made no sense. A difference between the way I was being treated at home, and the way the Witnesses treated me.
But … I almost didn’t want to see what I was seeing – because, if what was happening at home was wrong, then I had no idea how I was going to get out of it.
So many times Mum had read the rulebook to me: ‘No one will believe you. You come from foster care, you’re a troubled child – who’s going to believe you, especially over me? I’m a wonderful mother.’ It was as if the cards were stacked against me and her authority was all-powerful. For eighteen years I had watched her manipulate and control every official she’d ever come across. I couldn’t, for the life of me, see a way out.
Well, there was one way. I heard Jet stir above me and come padding down the stairs. There was his dog lead; there was a way out if I really wanted to take it.
I pictured looping the lead around my neck, my legs kicking out a chair, and then kicking of their own accord as the noose tightened around my throat. I pictured Mum finding me … or Adam. Oh, Adam. How could I leave him? Because without me here, would she turn on him? Would she? Anything was possible when it came to my mother. I couldn’t bear that; I really couldn’t bear it if she hurt yet another child, all because of me.
Jet flopped down beside me on my pillow with a heavy, doggy sigh and snuffled his black snout into my face.
Please God, I thought again, please help me. Am I good after all? Can it possibly – possibly – be true?
Jet licked the tears off my face with his wet pink tongue. And I thought to myself, as my mad, muddled thoughts swirled crazily round my head: Something’s got to give.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I squinted in the September sunshine, my back protesting as I leaned down in my chair to adjust the flowers on my sisters’ graves. We made a pilgrimage every year on the anniversary of their deaths to leave floral tributes to them: yellow freesias for Judith and pink roses for Charlotte. Charlotte had loved pink roses, as pink as her cheeks and her array of pretty dresses – which were still hanging up in the closet in her locked room at home, never to be worn again. I was still so confused by my sisters’ deaths, and by the new world I was experiencing each week at the Jehovah’s Witness meetings.
Jumbled thoughts ticked over constantly in my head, fuelled by the humanity I saw in people’s eyes at the Kingdom Hall, by the concern I heard in their voices, and the love I saw them show each other, even me; these husbands and wives who had families of their own and tickled their children rather than beat them, who chased their toddlers round the Kingdom Hall with delight, and not a desire to hurt them.
Each day I felt like I was getting stronger, that blinkers were falling from my eyes. I even found the courage to tell Mum about Uncle Phil, and what he had been doing to me. It was a brave thing to do because she didn’t want any of us children knowing anything about sex; what I’d learned had been from Phil alone. But one day in the van, when it was just the two of us, I told her what had been happening.
She looked me up and down as I sat in my wheelchair. ‘Well,’ she said at long last. ‘At least you’re good for something.’
I don’t know what I’d expected her to say, but that wasn’t it. It was almost praise. Almost. And even though I knew what she was like, her words still cut me. What Uncle Phil did to me sickened me so much. Despite everything, I’d still thought that maybe my mother would help … fat chance. I think she did shout at him, but that just made me feel guilty for causing tension in the family.
Of course I was good for laundry, too, as well as countless other jobs. I did all the washing at home, making sure Adam’s princeling outfits were clean and ironed and came complete with all their fussy accoutrements. One cold winter’s day in December 2004, as I went to hang the washing outside amid the bare-branched trees, my heart pounded in my chest when I saw that a rogue blue sock had dyed the entire wash a sapphire shade: I would be in for it now.
I thought quickly, then wheeled myself up the garden and put all of Adam’s posh French thermal pants in a bucket of bleach. Perhaps I could dye them back. You could smell bleach everywhere – the scent of it made my throat contract in memory of all the times Mum had forced it into my mouth to be swallowed down – but I hoped it would do the trick.
I left the clothes for a day and then rewashed the whole lot. That distinctive odour still emanated from the washing, though, and Mum was no fool.
‘Have you used bleach?’ she asked me crossly, when I brought the washing in.
‘No,’ I fibbed.
‘Don’t lie to me! I’m not stupid. You have, haven’t you?’ She dragged me out of my wheelchair and kicked me hard. She pulled me up the stairs by my short, hacked-off hair and then threw me back down. ‘You’re such a lying bitch. You’re deceitful. You’re sly.’ Kick. Kick. Kick.
By the time she’d finished, my face was a kaleidoscope of contusions and cuts. It would be another backroom setting at the meeting that week; something I could really have done without. I felt like the pressure was mounting at the Kingdom Hall. More and more people were asking me if I was OK. I’d seen Jackie whispering to her husband Duncan, and Ruth chatting to her husband Mark, both casting worried glances in my direction. Jackie had even come round one day, to ask Mum about the bruises.
‘We’re all concerned,’ she’d said on the doorstep, as Mum narrowed the door opening to a slim slit, so Jackie couldn’t see the chaos inside. ‘Where are al
l these bruises coming from? Why are there strangulation marks around her neck? Adam and Victoria have said it’s Christopher doing it. Is it Christopher?’
Mum had smiled thinly and she’d concurred obliquely, ‘Yes, mainly.’
‘What do you mean, “mainly”?’ Jackie had asked, shocked.
‘Oh well, you know, Victoria’s autistic. She’s a very clumsy girl, she’s always falling over.’
The door had practically been slammed in Jackie’s face after that, and she’d had to leave. Nevertheless, each week I could see she was still thinking about it – and that made me very nervous indeed.
The final song and prayer faded out in the Kingdom Hall, and the main room started buzzing with the noise of chatter as the congregants milled and gossiped together. Now that the Bible study part of the meeting was over, I let Adam run off from our shared position in the back room to go and meet with the other Witnesses. I sat quietly on my own, keeping my head down, lest anyone should pop their head round the doorway and see me sitting there, bruises all over my face.
My mind ground over the same topic as always, these days. Something had to give.
You’re going to have to kill yourself, or you have to say something.
But I can’t leave Adam.
But you can’t keep on living like this.
I looked up as I heard a smart tap on the door. It was Mark, Ruth’s husband. One of the elders of the church, he was a tall, well-respected man in his early thirties, with a parting right in the middle of his neat, dark hair. He smiled at me as he walked over to my wheelchair.
‘Hello, Torrie,’ he said.
‘Hi, Mark,’ I replied, dipping my eyes out of habit.
There was a pause, a long pause, as though the world had stopped turning. I could hear the chatter out in the main hall. When I looked up again, Mark had his eyes fixed on me. My beaten face was reflected in the shiny brown of his irises, and he looked so pained; he looked so pained for me. He let the pause linger as we stared at each other, two still statues motionless in the hall, as the other Witnesses chatted and bustled about, some popping into the back room every now and again, but none of them disturbing us. I held Mark’s gaze for a long time as he watched me silently.
Tortured: Abused and neglected by Britain’s most sadistic mum. This is my story of survival. Page 16