Beyond All Evil

by June Thomson

  We continued to live the charade. To the onlooker, Ash was the doting father, the attentive ‘husband’. On the day I allowed Ash to walk back through my door the charm offensive he launched was so effective that he had me feeling almost sorry for him. The tears that coursed down his face were real. He held me and murmured apologies in a childlike voice. Ash believed what he was saying. I am convinced of that. He was contrite, ashamed and desperate to make amends.

  I had told no one that he struck me or that he had run off with Paul. I bottled it up and so I did not have the sounding board of my sisters or my mother to guide me. In spite of the incident – and the fleeting crisis it had created – everything and nothing had changed. He would be there when Paul awoke. He would visit at lunchtime. When he finished work in the evening, he would make his way from the post office to ‘our’ home. He probably saw as much of his son as any normal working father.

  The only difference now was that each night when his mobile rang and he made to leave, I no longer pleaded with him to stay. Ash the charmer seemed to be thriving on the lack of pressure and his diffidence began to evaporate. His flights of fancy returned, as did his arrogance. One of his bugbears was that I had been claiming state benefits. I had no alternative. I had never asked Ash for money and he had never offered it. If I had given up my benefits, it would have placed me completely under his control, and I had reached the point where I would rather cut out my tongue than ask him for anything.

  ‘Why do you take money from the Government when I am going to be a wealthy businessman or an important lawyer?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s simple. I need the money to live,’ I told him.

  ‘But I get you things.’

  ‘You don’t give me money.’

  When Ash visited, he would bring baby food, toys and gifts, but if Paul needed something Ash would instruct me to go to a shop, choose what I wanted and tell the shopkeeper to ‘put it behind the counter’. Ash would then go in and pay, and I would return and pick up the item. It was humiliating. I hated the way the staff in the shops looked at me, as if I was a visitor from the Middle Ages. Of course, I didn’t want to exist on state handouts, but what choice did I have?

  ‘You claiming benefits could affect my career, you know,’ he would say.

  Dealing with Ash’s double standards and snobbery was exasperating, but I tried to ignore his prejudices. I did draw the line when he began sneering at the folk of Royston.

  ‘I don’t want Paul to speak with their accent,’ he told me.

  ‘You mean my accent?’ I said.

  I was not ashamed of where I – or Paul – came from. Royston is a community with a heart, where you are not judged on your salary, the size of your car or the value of your house.

  ‘We should get a big house in Bearsden,’ Ash said, referring to the salubrious suburb to the north of the city.

  ‘Ash, don’t!’ I said wearily.

  I may have tolerated – and often disliked – the Walter Mitty Ash, but I couldn’t help loving Ash, the father. He adored Paul.

  ‘We’re going to do wonderful things. You are my very special boy,’ he would tell Paul, holding him so tightly that our son would squirm.

  When I tried to take Paul, to soothe him, Ash would say, ‘No … no … no. Daddy will sort it.’

  He couldn’t, of course. When a child is upset it usually wants its mother, and I had the impression that Ash was envious of that special bond. He would relinquish Paul to me reluctantly and he was displeased when the baby’s mood changed almost immediately. I think Ash came to believe that he was the only one who should matter to Paul.

  This strange attitude manifested itself when we went on days out and he would try to commandeer Paul’s attention. He was not only jealous of me but of little Giselle, who would often accompany us. She basically regarded Paul as ‘her baby’. She was little more than a child herself and Ash should have been delighted by her devotion to our boy, but he was jealous of the relationship she had with Paul. Ash’s jealousy was even more intense when he witnessed the very strong bond that had developed between Paul and my mother.

  Ma loved music and she would sing children’s nursery rhymes to him. Paul mimicked the words in the adorable way that infants do. Ash hated it. Whenever he saw them singing together, he would take Paul away to visit his mother. He became paranoid over how often my family saw Paul, insisting that every time he visited my parents or my siblings he had to visit his mother’s home to balance things out. Ash’s one-upmanship exasperated me. I tried to talk to him about it, but he seemed incapable of recognising anyone else’s point of view.

  ‘This isn’t a contest,’ I told him. ‘Paul isn’t a pawn in some kind of game. It’s confusing him, making him unhappy.’

  ‘My perfect boy isn’t unhappy,’ Ash insisted.

  ‘You have to let him be part of a family. His granny, his cousins, aunts and uncles – they all love him,’ I said.

  ‘But he’s mine,’ Ash told me.

  Chapter 15

  So Alone

  ‘Rab physically isolated June. Ash detached Giselle from her family psychologically. For both men, it was ultimately about control.’

  Ian Stephen

  June: Then Rab took me away from everything I’d ever known.

  Five times I had tried to leave. Five times he had forced me to return. Three times I had tried to kill myself. Three times I had failed. The statistics of despair.

  I was so ground down now that Rab’s workaday cruelties had lost much of their effect. From the beginning, Rab had assumed total control. He earned the money. Everything was in ‘his name’ – the bank account, the insurance policies, the mortgage. Even the care package that would be set up for Michelle. There was, of course, nothing to physically prevent me from walking out the door. Rab couldn’t watch me 24 hours a day, but he had already warned me that I would never be allowed to leave. I believed him. Every attempt to escape came to nothing. Rab would find me and literally drag me back. I was paralysed by fear, shackled by an invisible chain stronger than any steel.

  It was not just my fear that bound me to him. I had three children who had to come first. They loved their dad; they did not know the monster – yet. I was a hostage to their needs, particularly those of Michelle. She became deeply disturbed if there was the smallest change to her daily routine. I couldn’t just flee. Michelle went to a special educational facility, the James Reid School in Saltcoats, a coastal town in North Ayrshire.

  She loved it there. A taxi picked her up in the morning and returned her in the evening. Michelle responded wonderfully to the care she received. With the teachers’ guidance, she blossomed. Her speech improved in leaps and bounds. She was able to forge friendships and develop social skills she could not have learned without their support.

  To take her away from that would have been devastating. Nature had deprived her of so much. How could I think of robbing her of even more? If I did escape, where was she to be educated? There were so few schools catering for her needs. On one of the occasions when I did flee, Rab went to Michelle’s school and asked her where we had gone. My daughter was incapable of telling a lie and she told him we were in a women’s refuge nearby. That evening I was called to the public phone in the shelter.

  ‘Look out of the window!’ Rab’s triumphant voice said.

  He was outside in his car, smiling. He had proved yet again there was no hiding place.

  On another occasion, the ‘system’ that is meant to support battered women actually worked against me. During one of Rab’s beatings I had run from the house and taken refuge in a different women’s shelter. When I tried to begin the process to get legal custody of my children it was impossible because I did not have a ‘proper home’. It was catch-22. Rab held all the cards. If I wanted to be with my children, I had to go crawling back and, inevitably, I did. What mother wouldn’t?

  In his warped mind Rab decided that if I were to be kept at heel he would have to isolate me even further. Michelle wou
ld be the means he would use to do it. He refused to allow her to go to school, claiming the regime at James Reid was exacerbating her disabilities.

  ‘Michelle’s not nearly as bad as the others. She’s copying them! She’s not going to get better if she stays there,’ he said.

  It was nonsense, of course, but it brought us into conflict with the local authority, which threatened legal action for keeping her away from school.

  ‘They’re not telling me what to do with my daughter. We’re going to move to another area and they won’t be able to touch us,’ Rab said.

  ‘Where are we going to go?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve been looking at jobs in Fife,’ he said.

  Fife was on the east coast, 80 miles from where we lived on the west coast – a world away.

  ‘Fife!’ I said. ‘It’s too far. Who do we know there?’

  ‘It’s fucking settled,’ Rab said.

  He was killing two birds with one stone – escaping censure from the authorities and taking me away from what family support I had.

  Rab did get a job, driving heavy plant machinery for a company on the outskirts of Kirkcaldy, the main town of Fife. He organised a council-house exchange with an Ayrshire family that wanted to return home. The miracle was that we found a special school for Michelle – the Rosslyn School, which would turn out to be a wonderful institution that she would attend until she was 19 years old.

  When we left Ayrshire, Shaun was eight and Ross was a year away from starting school. They had every child’s ability of being able to adapt to new surroundings and they did so with ease. Any worries I had about Michelle were dispelled when she was quickly absorbed into the life of her new school. Rab had always been a loner so he, too, had no difficulty in embracing change.

  I had never felt so alone.

  Giselle: Ash couldn’t take me away from my family … But I was distanced from them by even more secrets and lies.

  My isolation was emotional rather than physical. June was treated cruelly, displaced deliberately and dragged from one side of the country to the other, far from her family. I experienced none of those things in an overt way apart from the single occasion when Ash had struck me. No matter what Ash said or did, I was never going to be pulled away from my family. But there were barriers, invisible barriers that Ash had forced me to construct. And soon there would be something else.

  ‘I think we should get divorced,’ Ash said one day.

  ‘Divorced?’ I replied, stunned.

  ‘Yes. Being married might harm my chances of getting a loan. I need it for my new career.’

  Where had this come from? And then I knew. He was still smarting over my refusal to give up claiming benefits.

  ‘I can’t apply for a loan if you are claiming benefits,’ he said.

  ‘There’s no way that should affect your chances of getting a loan,’ I said. ‘We’ve never lived together as man and wife, but if you think that way then go ahead.’

  Ash’s ‘business plan’ turned out to be driving a taxi.

  The family that had owned the shop where the post office was had sold the business and Ash was out of a job. He had joined a local mini-cab business as a self-employed driver. It should have been a good job, but like everything Ash touched it was less than a success. He spent more time annoying my dad and Tam than he did driving. He would phone them at all hours, asking for directions to streets in the city. My family bent over backwards to help, as they had always done.

  There was one benefit. I did not need to find so many excuses for Ash’s absences from ‘our’ home. Taxi drivers routinely work strange hours. It was a ready-made excuse, but it was also a double-edged sword. No longer bound by his 9-to-5 existence, Ash began to turn up at all hours. And with these new hours Ash’s influence over me increased. At first I thought he was merely enjoying a new-found freedom, but it quickly became apparent that he saw it as a means to drive a physical wedge between me and my family in a way he had never been able to do before, when he was trapped at the post office. Now that he was working late shifts and night duty, he began exerting more control over how I spent my days. I realise now that Ash was every bit as controlling and manipulative as Rab. He just did it differently, with charm rather than violence. I was as trapped as June. The bars of my prison were just not so evident.

  He demanded to be fed information about me every minute of the day, with interminable phone calls and inquiries about where I was, whom I was seeing and where I was going. It stopped only when Paul and I were in bed.

  I was still hiding this strange way of life of ours from my family, and it isolated me even further. It forced me constantly to tell small lies about the simplest of things. Why was Ash not at home in the evening when Ma or Katie called? Where was he on a Saturday morning? A Sunday? Why did he not join in with the life of our family?

  Ash and I would be invited to family occasions, but he would always refuse to go and I’d be left trying to find excuses that weren’t hurtful to them. I was in a real cleft stick.

  I’d hidden my sham marriage from them. Now I would have to conceal the divorce.

  ‘I’ll handle all the paperwork,’ he said. ‘After all, I know the law. I’m going to be a lawyer one day. I’ll handle everything.’

  If Ash had expected me to be upset about the divorce he was wrong. In many ways it was actually a relief. If I was divorced I’d never have to mention the wedding.

  ‘Nothing needs to change. We’ll just go on as we always have,’ Ash said.

  June: Rab knew now that when I fell there was no one to catch me.

  If I had entertained hopes of making new friends then these were soon dashed. Who was going to speak to the monster’s wife?

  Moving me across the country wasn’t enough. Now Rab had isolated me from our neighbours. He made it his business to be as obnoxious as possible to the families in the cul-de-sac we had moved into at Oswald Court in Kirkcaldy. He began castigating our neighbours’ children if they were playing in the street, shouting threats at them and ordering them away from our house. One mother tried to remonstrate. At the time Rab was working on one of his DIY projects, using a portable electric sanding machine. When the woman spoke to him Rab towered over her, his face inches from hers.

  He said, ‘If you don’t fuck off, I’ll sand your fucking face!’

  The poor woman bolted.

  Rab loved a scene, shouting, swearing and menacing people. If he had a row with someone, when he returned home he plotted revenge. On one occasion this involved splattering paint over a neighbour’s caravan. It got so bad that even the man who drove the ice-cream van refused to enter the cul-de-sac. The driver had warned Ross that it was dangerous to hang on to the side of the vehicle. When Ross innocently told his dad that he’d had a telling off, Rab went out and rammed an ice-cream cornet in the man’s face and threatened to kill him.

  As his notoriety spread, I became a pariah, which suited Rab. With no family and no hope of friends, Rab had me where he wanted. He lived in a perpetual rage and, if he could find no outlet, it was then directed at me.

  His violence escalated. I was standing in the kitchen one day and he was berating me. He was holding a pair of pliers and he leapt forward, grabbing me by the nose with the tool. I was dragged around the room. The pain was excruciating and I still bear the scar. Even by his own standards, Rab was descending to new depths.

  On a family outing one day we were walking beside a dam. There was a treacherous drop to my right. The children were in the distance, far enough away not to hear Rab’s words.

  ‘I could kill you here and now, and nobody would know,’ he said.

  He was gripping my arm and his fingers dug into my skin.

  ‘Rab,’ I whimpered, feeling the emptiness of the gorge behind me.

  His eyes were hard, unfathomable black pebbles. I truly believed that I could count the rest of my life in seconds. My eyes must have reflected my fear. He looked into them, laughed suddenly and released me.

  ‘
Ha … fucking … ha. Only joking.’

  He walked away. I could not follow. My legs wouldn’t work. Mercifully, this new level of madness did not occupy every minute of the day. There were periods of calm and what passed for normality. Rab worked incredibly hard and he was paid well. It was inordinately important to him that he was seen as the good provider. He had to have a bigger car and spend more money than anyone else. As a result, we wanted for nothing in a material sense, but I could be punched one day and presented with a new gold chain the next. It was like living with a cobra. Would it dance? Or strike?

  Such extremes of behaviour were never more apparent than when Rab bought a caravan and decided we would go on holiday to Perthshire. We set off on a clear, bright morning, and I hoped against hope for peace and normality. I should have known better. We arrived at the campsite and settled. I put the children to bed, and Rab and I sat outside in the fading light of a summer’s evening. I can’t remember what I said to provoke his anger but suddenly I was being punched. I escaped, crawled into bed and rose before first light. My face was a mask of bruises, my lips burst and my eyes blackened.

  Rab snarled, ‘Get the fucking kids up. We’re going home.’

  It was quite clear that he did not want ‘outsiders’ seeing the state of my face. I did what I was told and I wondered yet again, for the thousandth time, how I could ever explain to anyone how or why I could put up with this.

  All the way back to Fife, the children were crying, demanding to know why the holiday was over.

  I turned to them with my ruined face and said, ‘Mummy’s fallen over.’

  In a sense I was telling the truth. Mummy had fallen.

  Mummy had fallen a very long way.

  Giselle: And I discovered there was no escape from Ash’s mind games.

  We were divorced now, but if I had thought it would distance me from Ash I was mistaken. If anything it intensified the control he tried to exert over me. It was as if he were playing some secret game, the rules of which only he knew. One minute he was never away from us; the next he disappeared without warning or explanation.