My mother had always been timid, and my father had bullied and abused her for so long that she’d eventually lost the ability to defend herself at all. So another way in which Sally differed from my mother was in having a mind of her own, which I think was at least part of the reason why her marriage to my father didn’t last. Their split appeared to have been a good deal more amicable than the ending of my parents’ marriage, however – which, I used to half-joke, was probably the result of the fact that Sally knew too much about the sexual preferences of my father and of his influential friends for him to have risked making an enemy of her.
Perhaps surprisingly, though, and despite everything, I’d got on quite well with Sally as I got older, and I’d sometimes have a drink with her if I bumped into her in a pub in town. But that didn’t explain why I found myself that day standing outside the little house my father had bought for her when they divorced.
Still snivelling pathetically, I rang the doorbell, and then turned immediately and started to walk away.
‘Katie! Is that you?’ Sally sounded surprised. ‘Good God girl, you look awful. Come into the house and hide yourself away till we can sort you out and make you presentable again.’
She stepped forward, placing a hand on each of my shoulders and spinning me round so that she could steer me through the front door and along the hallway into the kitchen.
‘You’re clearly in need of something a bit stronger than a cup of tea,’ she said, opening a cupboard and taking out a bottle of Balvenie Single Malt. She picked up a glass from the draining board beside the dish-filled sink, wiped it briefly on a stained, grey tea towel, and then reached for another. ‘Nobody likes to drink on their own,’ she added, shrugging her shoulders and smiling as she splashed liberal amounts of whisky into the two glasses. Then she led the way back down the hall and into an elaborately decorated living room that looked as though it had been recently turned over during a burglary.
‘Sorry for the mess,’ Sally said, tossing piles of magazines off the sofa on to the floor to make space for us to sit down, and not looking sorry at all.
I hadn’t uttered a single word since coming into the house. But as I took my first sip of whisky and felt the warmth of it spread down through my chest, it was as though it released something inside me, and the words began tumbling out in a breathless jumble.
‘I’ve been having nightmares,’ I told Sally, tears stinging my eyes again. ‘They’re always about Dad. They’re horrible. I don’t really understand what’s happening in them, but I always wake up feeling frightened and …’ I wiped the back of my hand across my forehead, pushing the damp, matted hair to one side, as I searched for the right word. And then I added, in a voice that didn’t sound like mine, ‘Dirty.’
Sally had never been one for sentimentality, and her straight-talking, humorously cynical take on life had often made me laugh. So I was surprised to notice that the expression on her face as she looked at me was almost one of sympathetic understanding.
‘You don’t have to explain,’ she told me, swallowing a mouthful of whisky and then taking a long drag on her cigarette. ‘I know something happened when you were a child. I know your father did something to you that haunted him in some way.’
‘Why? What did he tell you?’ I asked. My whole body had started to shake and I felt a mixture of trepidation and anxious excitement at the thought that I was about to hear some revelation that was going to make sense of all the non-sense that had been churning around in my brain for the last few weeks.
‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me,’ I told Sally. ‘I feel as though there’s something terrible hidden just below the surface of my conscious mind. I want to know what it is, but at the same time I’m afraid of it, because I think it’s something really bad; something that will affect the way I feel about myself – about everything. Something that proves I’m not a nice person.’
‘I don’t really know anything,’ Sally said, stubbing out her cigarette in a square glass ashtray on the coffee table and immediately lighting another one. ‘Except that your father woke up in a cold sweat one night, sobbing like a child and talking what sounded like a lot of gibberish. When I asked him why he was so upset, he said, “Because of what I did to Katie.” I didn’t know what he meant. He never mentioned it again and I never asked – well, you know your father.’
She looked up at me quickly, and I knew that she was lying – or, at least, that if she didn’t actually know what my father’s nightmare had meant, she had a pretty good idea.
Suddenly, for just a few fleeting moments, all my dreams made sense. I could see clearly in my mind what my father had done to me – and it was far worse than anything I could ever have imagined.
‘I know what he meant,’ I told Sally.
I watched as the glass fell from my hand – apparently in slow motion – and spattered splashes of whisky across the papers and magazines on the floor beside the coffee table. Then I burst into tears and the picture I had seen in my mind shattered and was gone, leaving me feeling heartbroken and bereft and not understanding the reason why.
I don’t remember what happened after that. I think Sally must have phoned Tom and he came to collect me. I found out later that everyone at work had been worried to death when I’d left the office without explanation that morning, and someone had told Tom, who’d been searching for me for a couple of hours before he received Sally’s call.
Tom took me home, and his parents came to collect Sam so that he could spend the night with them and I could sleep. But I couldn’t get rid of the fear, or of the sound of the voices in my head. I sat on the floor in the corner of the living room for hours, curled into a ball like a child, clutching my knees to my chest and mumbling as I rocked slowly backwards and forwards.
The next morning, Tom rang the doctor’s surgery to make an emergency appointment for me, and I told the doctor about the voices, about the terrible fear, and about how I wanted to kill myself because I couldn’t bear the flashes of images I kept getting, which were so real and so horrific they almost paralysed me with disgust and self-loathing.
‘We need to get you up to the hospital,’ the doctor told me. ‘Just for an evaluation. Tom can take you.’
He meant a psychiatric evaluation, but I didn’t care any more. It was as though there was a person in my head, running in random, chaotic circles of panic, and every time they thought they knew where they were, they found that they were looking down another dark, forbidding corridor to nowhere. I seemed to be outside my body, watching, and unable to do anything to help myself. My whole world had shrunk until nothing existed except a tiny, frightened little girl sitting in a chair, muttering and mumbling to the doctor and trying not to remember.
I allowed Tom to put his arm around my shoulders and lead me out to the car, where I sat beside him in the passenger seat, rocking gently, no longer able or willing to try to reach out and grasp hold of reality.
Tom parked the car in the hospital car park. I don’t remember getting out of it, but I must have done so, because I do remember walking with Tom towards a set of double doors that were set in the centre of a large, red-brick Victorian building. Inside, he spoke to someone at the reception desk, who walked with us down an echoing, lino-floored corridor and knocked on one of the many identical grey doors.
The psychiatrist who questioned me gently had grey eyes and darker grey hair, and I remember wondering if greyness was one of the conditions of employment, so that all the people who worked in the hospital would blend in seamlessly with the almost colourless décor. He was kind, though, and he showed none of the irritated impatience I was half-expecting as he explained to me that I would have to be admitted to the hospital while they made a proper assessment of my mental state.
‘No.’ I spoke the word loudly, with a conviction I didn’t really feel. I was no longer sure about anything and I had a terrible, growing feeling that I might be quite mad. But it seemed important not to do or say something that would give