The Hidden Years (33 page)

The sounds and smells from some of the rooms when one
passed by the briefly open doors were stomach-rendingly nauseating.
Faye had seen other relatives leaving this place harrowed by what they
had seen and heard, and yet knowing that here their money was buying
their mothers, their aunts, their grandmothers the very best care there
was.

In these locked rooms, encased in their too strong bondage
of flesh and bone, were women who had given life to others and then
unwittingly destroyed that life, as their illness, their dependence had
inexorably destroyed their offspring's lives.

Her mother's dementia was different, its cause mental
rather than physical, its sources easy to find. Unlike the majority of
the visitors here, Faye did not have the harrowing fear of being
confronted by her own future. She did not see, in the tormented
features at once familiar and yet frighteningly unrecognisable, a
terrifying shadow of her own face.

It was mid-afternoon when she left, her head pulsing with
the onset of a migraine, her body trembling visibly as she headed for
the sanctuary of her car.

There was a pedestrian crossing in front of the house. A
car drew up to it and stopped for her to cross. She gave the driver a
blind, glittering smile that made him frown. He had recognised her as
she walked towards the crossing. The daughter-in-law of the woman in
ICU, but looking very different from the last time he had seen her.

Then she had been shocked, fearful, as so many of the
relatives of his patients were, but those emotions had been controlled,
at least until he had reached out to touch her. As he watched her now
his trained eye saw someone in a dangerous state of near collapse.
Someone who, he suspected, if he hadn't stopped for her might easily
have simply stepped in front of his car. The road was quiet, no traffic
waiting for him to move off, so he watched curiously as Faye walked
towards the sea-front and her car.

He frowned as he watched her unlock the door. In the
interests of safety she should not be allowed to drive, but to his
relief she made no attempt to do so, and he could see quite clearly the
way she was slumped in the passenger seat.

He glanced back towards the house she had just left,
frowning again as he saw the discreet plaque set into one of the stone
supports of the gate.

There were many such establishments in Fellingham; this
one, as he recalled, was rather better than most and had a good
reputation. It specialised in taking women suffering from advanced
stages of Alzheimer's Disease, or senile dementia as it was more
commonly known, and no one who had ever witnessed its devastating
effects both on the sufferer and on those who tried to nurture and
support that sufferer could wonder at the need for such homes.

Faye had struck him as a frail, dependent sort the first
time he'd seen her. She had not seemed the type to have the strength to
visit somewhere like this… Her sort normally turned their
backs, made excuses, installed their relatives somewhere conveniently
too distant from their own homes to allow regular visiting…

He told himself that it was in the interests of safety
that he drove his car a short distance away from Faye's and parked it
discreetly where he could watch her. After all, if she made any attempt
to drive in her present condition she would be a liability to herself
and, more importantly, to others. It would be his duty to stop her, to
caution her…

Faye was oblivious to him. She felt spent,
drained… weak to the point where she felt as though if she
closed her eyes the life would simply flood from her. She felt sick,
light-headed, weak in the way she had when she had given birth to her
aborted foetus. She shivered, suddenly cold, knowing that she should
move, that she ought to get into the driver's seat and start her car,
but she had no will to do so… no will to do anything other
than simply crouch in the passenger seat, barely daring to breathe,
panting like a hunted creature on guard for the killer stalking it.

Why couldn't she let go of the past? It was all so long
ago, over, part of another life… And yet she could not let
go… could not forget. Images, sharp and clear, danced
through her head, feelings, memories clearer by far than those she had
of David… sharper than any of the happier images with which
she sought to overlay them.

Incest. It was a word few feared to use these
days… and yet to Faye it smouldered with the sulphurous
smell of hell, conjuring up such images, such pain that she felt as
though it was written in flames of fire.

As a child she hadn't even known such a word existed. She
had, in her innocence, her naiveté, imagined that no one else in the
world had been bad enough to suffer what she was forced to suffer. That
there were no other bad girls who had to be punished as her stepfather
had punished her… That there were no other six-year-olds who
lay awake in such fear that when eventually the dreaded footstep
came… when eventually the hurting male hand cajoled and then
demanded… when the disgusting intrusion of that alien,
adult male body made her want to scream and scream again, it was almost
a relief to have it actually happen, because she knew that afterwards
she would be allowed to sleep, to escape from her fear.

It was because she was a bad girl that he had to do these
things to her, he always told her. He used to whisper the words over
and over again, telling her how bad she had been as his flesh pushed
and tore and his hand clamped over her mouth, stifling her with its
scent and heat.

It was because she was such a bad girl that her own father
had died… and he had married her mother because God had
wanted him to punish her… But she was not to tell anyone
about what happened, because if she did God would be very angry with
her, and would take her mother away from her.

Eventually there had come a time when her intelligence had
told her he was lying to her… when she was old enough to
understand properly what was happening. When every night she'd prayed
that her mother would find out what he was doing to her and make him
stop. Because even though she knew by then that her father had died of
cancer and that it was for his own pleasure that her stepfather abused
her, he had told her that the authorities would take her away from her
mother and lock her up in a children's home if she dared to tell anyone
what was going on.

She had known that that was true. There were children in
her class at school who lived with foster parents, who had been taken
away from their own parents.

Later, as she grew older still, the threat had been that
her mother would be sent to prison, and with the development of her
body come the sickening self-realisation that she was, as he had always
told her, bad… that it was bad and wrong to have let him do
to her what he had. She heard the other children at school making jokes
about sex, talking about girls who did 'it', and her self-revulsion
grew, but she could not stop his visits to her room… to her
bed…

She'd fantasised about her mother discovering him with her
and sending him away. Every day she'd prayed that it would
happen… but no matter how much noise he made her mother
remained deeply asleep.

And then had come the final catalyst. On the morning of
her fourteenth birthday she had woken up and immediately been violently
sick. For over a week she had kept on being sick, and she had seen the
nervous way her mother's eyes flicked over her when she came out of the
bathroom, her own dark with misery… pleading for her to say
something, to notice something… But she hadn't.

Others had, though. She never knew which of her teachers
guessed that she was pregnant. She was sent for by her headmistress,
and questioned gently but firmly. Which boy was it who had got her into
trouble? A lecture had followed about her age, about the law, about the
irresponsibility of both herself and the boy concerned, but it wasn't
until the headmistress had threatened to send for her parents that she
had broken down and told her what had happened…

Now she knew that she had been lucky. The older woman had
accepted what she had told her, and had acted swiftly to protect her.
She had not, as so many others in the same circumstances had, been sent
back home with a note to her parents about her telling lies.

The child she carried was aborted, the staff at the
hospital kind and caring, but nothing had been able to take away her
horror, the pain, the shock of her brutal emergence from childhood into
the world of women.

She had been taken into care, and had discovered that it
was not after all the prison-like life she had been told. Her foster
parents were kind and caring, and chosen especially for their
experience in dealing with damaged children. She was given her own
room, with a door that locked and her own bathroom. No one came into
her room without being invited, and Mr Masters—Uncle
Bob—never made any attempt to touch her in any way. Her
nightmare was over, or so it had seemed.

And then had come the court case, and the shock of
discovering that her mother had known all along what was happening. Had
known and done nothing, nothing at all to help her.

Faye had been too young to understand then, as she had
come to understand later, that some women were incapable of standing up
to men like her stepfather. But it was in that courtroom that her fear,
her pain, her agony had given birth not just to shock, but also to
anger, resentment and bitterness against her mother.

Looking
back, Faye acknowledged that she had been lucky, in some ways at least.
Her foster parents had been marvellous, giving her far more love than
she had ever been able to give them. In some ways it was as though the
shock of discovering that her mother had known all along what was
happening to her, had known and done nothing to help her, to save her,
had traumatised her to such an extent that that part of her which had
once responded emotionally to others had been totally destroyed.

She was conscious of the love and care she was being
given, but it was as though an invisible wall separated her from other
people, preventing her from reaching out and responding to them.

Shockingly perhaps in some ways, her anger and bitterness
against her mother were far stronger than her feelings against her
stepfather.

For the remainder of her teens she lived in a kind of
limbo… a state of nothingness during which she went to
school—a new school where no one knew what had happened to
her—worked hard, and did so well in her exams that she was
able to apply to go to university.

During those years she knew that on the surface she must
have made all the right responses, done the normal things, but
inside—inwardly… Ah, that was a different story.
No doubt from the best possible motives, her past and what had happened
to her was something that was never discussed by her foster parents,
and so as she grew towards maturity, and her male peers made advances
towards her, Faye had no way of dealing with the disgust and fear she
felt towards these boys.

If she went out at all it was only with a group of girls,
and only when she was completely sure that she was not going to be
paired off with someone.

Only once since she went to live with her foster parents
did she allow anyone male to touch her, and that was by accident at the
eighteenth birthday party of a school-friend, when she was caught off
guard and found herself in the clumsy embrace of a fellow pupil, who
attempted to kiss her.

She went rigid in his arms, paralysed with fear and sick
disgust. Fortunately he was too inexperienced to be aware of her
feelings, and when she pushed him away he let her go.

She went home immediately afterwards, locking herself in
her bathroom, showering and scrubbing her body, until her flesh was
almost raw.

Up until then she had not allowed herself to think about
her future… about what her life would be; but now for the
first time she did, and, lying in bed, the glimmer of the night light
she could not bear to be without illuminating the darkness, she allowed
herself to confront the truth.

She could never be as other girls; she could never tease,
flirt, or indulge in sexual experimentation. She could never make love.
Make love… the very words made her want to scream with
savage fury.

None of them, not one single one of her friends when they
giggled over who had done what and with whom and what it had been like,
and what it would be like really to 'do it', had any idea of what sex
actually was…of how men used it…of how filthy and
degrading the whole thing was… How could any woman actually
like it, actually
want
...?

Faye was an intelligent girl. She read widely; after all,
she had the time… when other girls were out on dates and she
was on her own. She knew that her view of men, of sex, was warped by
her experiences. She knew that what she read, what she heard could not
all be made up, but the thought of allowing anyone, any man at all to
do to her what her stepfather had once done made her sick with loathing
and disgust.

But worst of all was her own feeling of guilt, her
destructive inner belief that somehow she had been responsible for what
had happened, that somehow she had invited it, encouraged
it… As though somehow deep inside herself she was bad,
wicked…as though those heated, thick, disgusting words her
stepfather had moaned as he punished her for her wickedness were the
truth.

It was while she was at university that other people first
started noticing her aloofness towards men.

When she discovered what was being said about
her— that she was frigid, that she was a
lesbian—she withdrew further and further into herself,
concentrating on getting her degree.

While she was in her final year her foster parents were
killed in a car crash. She mourned their deaths, knowing how much they
had genuinely cared for her, yet unable to feel anything more than a
distant regret. That was the trouble, she acknowledged: she was unable
to feel anything, anything at all.