Brutal Legacy

by Tracy Going

  The court case had been remanded to 9 and 10 June. It was another three very long months away. Eight months had already passed since he had beaten me up. I had already spent two gruelling days on the stand testifying. I know there is more to come.

  It is me who has been put on trial. I am the one they find either guilty or innocent.

  But, aside from the systematic, attempted destruction of me as a person and a mother in the courtroom, now my battered face is being splashed over newspapers and magazines countrywide.

  Then there is the Domestic Violence Bill of 1998. It is being amended and somehow, in between the re-writing and the broadening of the definition of domestic violence, my once-unsullied name has becoming synonymous with women abuse.

  I can’t go anywhere without being recognised. I see people elbowing each other as I pass them, nudging each other urgently as they whisper loudly.

  “It’s her.”

  “Who?”

  “The one who got beaten up.”

  “Who?”

  I see a hand being lifted, cupped to a mouth in disbelief, and an eyebrow raised. I notice the knowing nods.

  “Oh, that one!”

  “Yes … Shame.”

  I avert my eyes, and quicken and lighten my step as I pretend not to hear, not to see.

  I am being inundated with correspondence at work. I am receiving letters and faxes and, as much as I appreciate the words of solace, comfort, consolation, I find myself unable to respond.

  I am being detained in public as other women open their wounds and share their own brutal stories with me.

  One mid-week afternoon I am at the local supermarket, still hesitant to venture far from my home. I am standing at the fresh-meat counter alongside the fridges. The smell of chilling blood assails me when a woman, a little younger than me, approaches. She is pretty, with a broad, clean face, her complexion a warm, tawny brown. Her crimped black hair is pulled away from her face. I only notice because she calls my name.

  “Tracy, it’s you,” she says with familiarity.

  I look up, not sure whether I know her or not. She must see the confusion in my eyes.

  “You don’t know me, but I want to say thank you.”

  Then she introduces herself and, as she tells me her story, it is as though the torturous words spilling from her mouth are finally being set free. She has been silent for too long.

  She had been married for several years and been abused for equally as many. She knew it was time to leave when she was knocked unconscious and came round to find her husband biting chunks of flesh from her back. She lifts her blue T-shirt and shows me her scars. They are like puckered wounds of mangled fibrosis. They have left their mark like violent sucks of depravity. I want to be sick. I want to run from the cold aisle and hurl my horror, but instead I find the strength to stand still and hold her tight as the tears silently drop from her lashes.

  Only once I am back in my car do my thin walls collapse. It is then that I put my head down and allow the sobs to rip through me.

  It is unimaginable the lives that so many women are living.

  And, realistically, I am one of the lucky ones.

  It is another day that I am at the same supermarket, this time at the till, when there is a gentle tap on my shoulder. It is a middle-aged man and he is holding a bunch of flowers. A mixed bouquet of yellow and white chrysanthemums, bright roses and green leaves.

  “These are for you,” he smiles warmly. “Everything will turn out fine for you, and you’ll get over this thing.”

  He is gone before I can thank him.

  I take comfort from his words and reassurance from his gentleness.

  But I know that if I am being approached, being constantly reminded, then so too is my son. It is a blind deceit, self-deception, to hope that his friends aren’t talking about it at school. They are.

  He, too, will not be allowed to forget.

  Then there are the nightmares. He has been having bad dreams for a while.

  “Last night I dreamt he was here, Mom.”

  “It’s okay, my boy,” I say, tousling his rumpled hair. “Everything’s going be okay.”

  “But, Mommy …”

  “It’s only a dream.”

  The child psychologist has assured me that this, too, is very normal. But as I struggle to manage the chaos around me, there are many occasions when I wonder, what is truly normal? It seems to me that there is nothing much that is ordinary and usual.

  Then, with his little knuckles white and his fists clenched tight, he’d punch at the air.

  “Mommy, one day when I’m big, I’m going to hit him.

  “Like this …

  “And this …

  “And this!”

  Once he is spent, I take his fists and cup them in my hands and then pull him toward me so that I can hold him tight. There isn’t much else I can do to stave off his terror. It’ll be years before there is peace to his nights. He is a quiet boy, affable, never one to talk much about his internal musings, and even now as I write this book and ask him how he feels, his words are always the same.

  “Mom, I don’t want to think about it,” his voice deep and gruff.

  And again I have to let him be.

  But still I say it.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  Twenty-three

  He is gone. But still he is here. He will always be here. There will never be a time when he is not a part of my nightmares, but, as with all bad memories, they eventually fade over the years. However, back then, he shadows me in my waking life, follows me at night as he haunts and alters my unconscious. He changes form in the dark as I sleep. He becomes taller, more angular, his arms and legs even longer as he punches and kicks me. His ominous dreamt presence hangs over me like an over-used, dirty prison blanket and, as its greyness shrouds me, I am smothered by its coarseness. Then, as my breath is drawn from my body, suffocated, the violent images of him integrated and consolidated in my mind to tear through my awareness, I awaken. I drag him with me to the surface. I thrash around as I untangle myself from what is real and what is imagined. And, as I try to make sense of it all, the images play over and over again in my mind like a soundless, silent black-and-white movie trapped in its sprockets and caught in the revolving repetitions as the film negative clicks over loudly, whirs and splutters, desperate to escape its own machinations.

  I lie still as my heart pounds. Just as I did as a child, behind the drawn curtains, waiting for my father to negotiate the driveway, then stumble from the car to the front door. I wait breathless. I take slow breaths to calm myself, all the time clutching my duvet close to me as I stave off damp shivers. It is impossible to go back to sleep and so my day begins disjointed and anxious.

  Other times I have conversations with him in my head as I imagine him apologising. I don’t want him back – I want him well away from me – but there are times I need to pull him close to pretend a regretful acknowledgement of his violation.

  And in those desperate ruminations I have a voice. I can speak. It is always my voice though. Not his. He will forever remain silent.

  But it is only in these illusory conversations that my voice is loud and clear. In my day-to-day conversations, my voice is often hoarse and phlegmy. I am constantly sick, with one throat infection after another. My body responding to the trauma, an extemporaneous response to my unrelenting fight to reclaim myself. The infections strike me down repeatedly and, thinking about it and analysing all that has transpired, it reminds me how I’d been sick so often as a child. A childhood plagued with ear infections. I was continually being dragged from one doctor to another highly qualified physician, another ear, nose and throat specialist, always in the pursuit of a medical solution to my constant inflammation. But, looking back, it was simply my body acting as a receptacle to the ill around me, its immunity compromised by me not being heard, or me not wanting to hear.

  For most of my childhood I’d protected and defended my mother, my brother and my sis
ter where I could. Otherwise I tried to block out the noise, sometimes putting my hands over my ears so I couldn’t hear, then always drawing my thumb into my mouth as I sucked rhythmically for my safety, my tears falling noiselessly.

  In a household of abuse, as a child I was mostly helpless, but as a woman who’s been battered, I want to be heard.

  And it is in the courtroom that I expect to have a voice.

  The last court appearance leaves me reeling, mute and ravaged, as I am assaulted with the words and argument of the defence advocate, his strategy a repugnant legal reply to my terrifying experience.

  The remainder of the last afternoon in court is consumed with analysing the phone calls between me and the accused. I had unbelievably accepted fifty-eight phone calls from him and it was an opportunity for the defence to ‘prove’ that I had been cooperating with him, that I was complicit.

  It is hard for me to justify taking those calls. I had taken out a restraining order to keep him away. It stated quite clearly that he was not allowed to threaten me, nor enter my domain. Technically, there is nothing untoward about me having answered his ceaseless, frantic calls, but I am not oblivious – I knew it was in that ‘grey’ area that hovered between right and wrong – that it wasn’t legally appropriate. What I didn’t know then, however, was that he’d come back to beat me.

  Of course, he should never have called me in the first place, but perhaps it had been part of his game plan all along as he once again reminded me exactly who had the power and, whether we had a relationship or not, it would be on his terms. He had the authority to make fifty-eight phone calls if he so decided, whether the courts permitted him or not.

  “It’s not worth the paper it’s written on,” he’d scoffed, referring to the interdict.

  I had been surprised to see his number on the screen when he first called, one week after the sheriff of the court had delivered the interdict.

  I hadn’t answered.

  Then he phoned again.

  And again.

  Finally, I’d responded.

  He’d phoned to apologise, he said.

  Although I was tormented by having come so close to death at his hand and couldn’t clear my mind of the images of being dragged through my home, of being choked, of being held powerless, I needed to hear his words. It helped me make sense of my confusion. Perhaps if he could explain his behaviour, then I could understand. I needed to understand.

  Then there were the flowers, the offer to pay for the repairs to my car and my garage, the gift of air tickets so that I could take my son on a healing holiday.

  Suddenly it was no longer all about my loss, my longing and feeling lost.

  It became easier to hear his voice.

  But then he beat me up.

  And, unbelievably, sitting in the courtroom with him spread out ominously a few metres away, I still want answers. I still want to know … Why?

  Why did he do it?

  Why me?

  Why had I allowed it?

  Why hadn’t I seen it?

  The answers would only come over the years, and especially now, as I write. Back then, I was simply trying to survive. Then, getting much-needed help for me was an indulgence I couldn’t afford. I didn’t have the money, and besides, my son was more important and all my resources were going into lawyers, rebuilding our safety, and healing him. I took him to a child psychologist until she, herself, felt my son no longer needed the sessions. But with hindsight, I didn’t have the strength back then. I didn’t have the emotional grit to begin the arduous journey of exploring my past in an attempt to comprehend my present and future, and in so doing unpack the complexity of my own inheritance.

  I did see a psychologist for a short while. Sheryl wanted a psychological report for the civil matter that was by now unfolding alongside the criminal case and it was on her recommendation that I saw Leonard.

  Leonard is deeply religious and wore a yarmulke. I would meet with him in his home office, and as I sat on the couch opposite him I would hear his children playing in the garden, their light laughter tinkling through the open window.

  On my second meeting with Leonard he told me he had originally been approached by the defence to provide a psychological justification for the accused, to be an ‘expert’ witness. Leonard had instantly and unhesitatingly declined. He was not interested. He had no intention of ever vindicating violence. He was a man, to me at least, of enormous integrity, one who had little tolerance for abusive behaviour.

  I think he shared this detail of the defence’s approach because he wanted to reassure me that he was on my side. He understood that I had been completely overwhelmed by all that had happened – and continued to happen – and also appreciated the might and means being thrown at defending the accused and keeping him out of jail. But I found it unnerving. I could never completely give my mind over to him and trust him. I was concerned that there was a part of him that might have believed the accused’s version; perhaps it had already been put to him on that initial approach.

  And, of course, he was a man. How could a man even begin to identify with what I’d been put through?

  But when I watched Leonard giving his expert opinion on panel discussions between broadcasts from the courtroom of the Oscar Pistorius trial I realised that I could have – should have – trusted him completely. I had only stayed long enough for him to formulate an opinion on my state of mind and submit it as a report for my civil matter, and I’d never gone back. But watching his discerning response to all that had unfolded between Oscar and Reeva was evidence of his sound understanding of the power play between an abuser and his victim. In the months I spent watching the trial, Leonard appeared regularly, and I came to realise that he really did understand.

  So, as I neared this chapter, I reached out to Leonard, but this time of my own volition.

  Dear Leonard

  I hope you don’t mind me contacting you. I’m on the last stretch of my book and I’m writing about the court case now. I’m getting to the part where I take the accused’s endless calls after him holding me hostage for an entire night and assaulting me – and me getting a restraining order.

  Obviously, I look very stupid for taking all these calls – even after all these years I’m trying to understand why.

  What is it about me (or anyone) that does that?

  I just remember always wanting to know why … Why? Why?

  I wanted him to say sorry. To say he didn’t mean to do it.

  It’s complete madness.

  But I would love to get some insight into it all.

  Is it about worthlessness?

  Thanks

  Tracy

  Leonard’s response was almost immediate.

  Hi Tracy

  I am so happy to hear from you.

  I often wonder how you are doing.

  These are not difficult questions.

  The clue to your question is: What were you trying to reclaim, that you felt bereft or robbed of; power, dignity, worth, etc.?

  The compulsion to keep going back is a desperate quest to reclaim those things, to beat the man at his game. It is a game he is diabolically good at – even when he appears to be losing, he is just using another well-practised ploy.

  Also the shame, self-blame and humiliation keep you desperately trying to get vindication, trying to turn things around so that you can make it right after all.

  Then there is the weird Stockholm Syndrome solidarity with the abuser, where you unconsciously tell yourself [that] if you prove yourself to him he will love and protect you the way he promised before something (in your own mind), maybe you, upset him and pushed him over the edge.

  These are some of the pointers off the top of my head.

  Let me know if I can be of further help.

  Warm wishes

  Leonard

  When I sent this letter to Leonard I had no intention of including either it or his response in these pages, but Leonard’s words deeply affected me. Once again he
had the insight to understand – except this time I would accept his astuteness trustingly and would share it gratefully.

  He was right. I was trying to reclaim so much.

  But “Why? Why?” was a question I’d ask for many years.

  I remember turning to my friend, Charlene, a highly respected journalist who was going through her own personal hell as she fought for survival through her own rape trial. She had come home one night to find a man hiding in her bathroom. He then raped her. He took her life and irrevocably changed it with his penis.

  We were sitting outside the court waiting for the tea break to end before we all traipsed back into court. I was shattered, Charlene’s comforting arm around me, when I looked up at her and said, “Can you believe it, but I still just want to know why? Why did he do this to me?”

  She took me firmly by the shoulders, made me look her straight in the eyes.

  “Don’t expect an answer,” she said. “He did it because he could … He did it because no one has ever stopped him.”

  She was right.

  So, when tea was done, I stood up and walked back into the courtroom and I entered a little taller.

  It was just the other day when my friend Estie, with her probing mind and intriguing way of thinking, who also spent many hours sitting on the hard, wooden benches supporting me in the courtroom, asked me a question.

  “What would have happened if he had apologised?” she asked. “Would it have made any difference?”

  It was a thought-provoking question, and it took me completely by surprise.

  Would it have been enough, I wondered.

  And, after much mulling, I have realised the answer is not without complexity.

  Yes, an apology would have made an enormous difference to me. It would have soothed some of my wounds and, if his words had been sincere and honest, it would have disarmed me of my overwhelming fear because he would no longer have been a personal threat.

  But would it have made any difference to the process? Would it have meant that I would have decided against legal action? No, it would not. I was entitled to an apology, yes, but it wouldn’t have absolved him of the consequences. It would perhaps have diluted my determination as I became less impassioned, less afraid, but there would always have been a need for retribution. It cannot be otherwise – there are consequences to hurtful, punishing actions.