And then one day, if you’re both lucky and incredibly unlucky, you get to put the two halves together and understand everything you always knew but didn’t know. That’s how you become whole but also consciously damaged. Self-knowledge comes at huge cost.
So yeah, my father was a paedophile. There. I finally said it.
There is no specific moment you realise a thing like that. Instead, it’s something you grow up with, a horror that hangs in the air. And then at some point, if you’re lucky but also unlucky – usually because you’re trying to understand what’s wrong with you, or, in my case, why you can’t breathe – you realise that you always knew, but also that you didn’t know. You honestly, trulydidn’t know. But you also did, because that’s where the queasy feeling came from. Only then do you understand why you’ve always felt broken in two.
By the time I was thirteen, I agreed with my mother. I didn’t much like Julie coming to our place either, though I couldn’t have told you why.
By fourteen, I knew I felt jealous. My father preferred the neighbour's kid to me, and, because she was everything he didn’t want me to be – because she was feminine and pretty and soft when he demanded that I be hard and boyish and cruel – I didn’t understand how that could be. His preference for Julie made no sense to me.
By the time I was fifteen, their friendship was making me feel uncomfortable. I’d come home to find fourteen-year-old Julie on the sofa watching TV with her head laid on my father’s lap. Officially she was just waiting for me, so why did she look embarrassed that I was home early?
Dad continued to buy Julie more stuff than he ever bought me. ‘She’s like a sister to him,’ he would say, when Mum criticised his generosity – generosity we genuinely couldn’t afford. He’d turn to me then for backup and ask, ‘Isn’t she? Isn’t she like a sister to you?’
I never knew how to answer that one, because I never knew which answer – sister or stranger – would be the answer that made my friend safe.
That realisation – the joining of the halves – came to me while talking to the school psychologist, who I was seeing because of my panic attacks. It was there, in the middle of an unrelated conversation, that I consciously realised the thing that I’d always but never quite known: what my father and Julie had been doing.
Of course, with adult hindsight, that should be rephrased aswhat Dad was doing to Julie. Because at fourteen or thirteen, or perhaps earlier – because I have no idea when it started – Julie certainly could not have given consent. And that’s why it’s called abuse. And that’s why it’s called rape. But at fifteen, I blamed them equally. Sad I know, but true.
That day, the day it came to me, I sat there, sweat pouring from me even though it was winter, watching the shrink’s lips moving, trying to push images of my father and my best friend from my mind’s eye. Trying not to throw up, too.
We drifted apart after that, Julie and I. Oh, we’d exchange a few words if I came home and she was there. We kind of had to really, because she’d pretend that she was there to see me. But she wasn’t, we both knew that. She was there to see my father.
Then one day when I was almost seventeen, I came home from my job as an apprentice electrician to find my mother red-eyed at the kitchen table.
‘I need to talk to you, Son,’ she said, solemnly. ‘I need to talk to you about something serious.’ She’d never talked to me about somethingseriousbefore. She’d never called mesoneither.
‘Julie Sturgess is pregnant,’ she said, once I’d taken off my jacket and sat down. ‘And a man is coming in a bit – a policeman – and I need you to do something important for me. I need you to say that it’s yours.’
At first I didn’t understand what she was saying, and then once I did I didn’t understand why. But there was no time for explanation because the doorbell had rung and the policeman had entered, and was sitting down at our kitchen table with a notepad.
‘Your husband?’ he asked, glancing around as if he might be hiding in the corner of the room.
‘Away on business,’ Mum said, ‘and he doesn’t know, which is just as well, as he’d beat the living daylights out of him.’
I realised in that moment that we were lying, and then with a shudder, with a hair-bristling shiver, I worked out why. Pennies can be slow to drop, especially when you don’t want them to.
When the policeman asked me how long I’d been sleeping with Julie Sturgess, Mum said, ‘Must be, what, six months, Son? He shouldn’t have done it – we can all agree on that – but if we’re being honest, that girl’s always been a bit of a slut.’
It took everything I could muster not to gasp. I felt as if my head was exploding.
‘I’d rather Rob answered, if you don’t mind,’ the policeman told her.
I looked at her, no longer My Beloved Mother, now suddenly The Great Paedophile Facilitator. Her eyes were steely blue, commanding me to obey…
This is the last thing you’ll ever hear me say,I thought.This is the last time we will ever sit together.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘About that. About six months.’You are dead to me.
The policeman said that Julie’s parents weren’t pressing charges but that I wasn’t to go within a mile of her.
‘She lives next door,’ I pointed out, quite reasonably. ‘How can I not go within a mile?’
‘She’s gone away,’ the policeman said. ‘She’s gone away to sort out the pregnancy.’
‘I hope she’s getting rid of it,’ my mother said. ‘No point bringing another little bastard into the world.’
The policeman coughed, then cleared his throat. ‘I believe that is what her family have decided,’ he croaked.
