“You are kidding me?” I ask in disbelief, but I know she is telling the truth.
“I thought I’d seen him mad before, but he was beyond fucking furious when my mother told him what I’d been saying. I got sent to his office in the church which was always a sign that it was going to be a more severe punishment, the location guaranteed isolation and privacy. As soon as the office door shut behind him, I knew I had made a huge mistake in telling my mother, in telling anyone. Some of the girls knew kids in the local village so were a little wiser than me and as I say, they talked. I knew how wrong the things he did were by then, but I had no idea how to stop it. I should have kept my mouth shut and waited because I knew that once I was sixteen, I could run away and escape.”
“Olivia, you had every right to be safe and protected and your mother should have done that.”
“I know,” she says with a weak smile. “But that didn’t happen. He punished me harshly, with a belt which hurt like nothing I had ever felt before. I couldn’t imagine him ever being able to do anything again that would hurt me as bad, I was wrong,” she says with another bitter, ironic laugh. “He made me strip and bent me over the back of a chair while he took his belt off. The first time it landed I screamed and jumped up. He quoted something from the bible and told me that if I moved again, I was just bringing further retribution upon myself. I moved with the next one too. It was impossible to stay still so he tied me to the chair and continued to lash me with his belt. How the fuck my back and arse weren’t scarred I will never know. When he stopped, I thought that was it, punishment over, but it wasn’t. I heard him removing his clothes and opening a condom.”
“Oh baby.” I don’t know what else to say as a single tear escapes and runs down her face. I reach up to brush it away, but she catches my hand before it touches her cheek and simply grips my hand, bringing it into her lap.
“He really hurt me then, like he never had before, did something he’d never done before.” She’s struggling for the words she needs, but not because she doesn’t know them but because she still feels degraded and humiliated by this man’s actions, years later.
“He, erm, I believe the correct term is sodomise, he sodomised me,” she says and then the tears really fall.
I have no clue whether I should or shouldn’t do something so rely on instinct and simply scoop her up into my arms, pulling her into my lap to hold her.
“That’s why the morning after we got together, after Sarah arranged for us to meet, when we were in my kitchen.”
It all comes flooding back to me; her spread across the table in her flat, face down, the brief look of fear on her face as I took her that way, from behind.
“Oh fuck, I am so sorry,” I say but she looks up, dishevelled and distraught.
“No, no. I find that hard, it makes me vulnerable, but I trusted you, even then.” Her words manage to make my heart swell at the same time as cutting me deeper than I have ever been cut before. “Even if I told you I didn’t. My brother is two years older than me and a few weeks later he found me and saw the marks and fading bruises. I eventually told him Raymond had done it and after some coaxing, I told him what else he’d done to me and he flipped, beat the shit out of Raymond.”
“Thank fuck somebody did,” I mutter wondering where Scott, her brother is now.
“No, not really. Raymond called the police and had Scott arrested.”
“What?” I cry incredulously.
“Yeah, he was arrogant to the point of insanity, I think. As an adult I know I should have told the police what had happened, but Raymond got in my head and to me he was invincible. Whenever I tried to stop what he was doing to me things just got worse so when he told me that Scott would go to prison for a very long time and it was my fault, I believed him.”
“Of course you did.” I land a single gentle kiss to the top of her head.
“He told me I had to go to the police and make a confession about what I had told Scott, to tell them I had lied, that the truth was that I was sleeping around and one boy I was sleeping with had hurt me and they’d let Scott go. I did what he said, but they didn’t let him go, they still charged him with assault and he was convicted, although he never got a custodial sentence. He never forgave me and never spoke to me again, not after saying,I hate you.”
The tears are unstoppable now and I realise that no matter what else Raymond did, the divide he had put between Olivia and her brother was by far the thing that had hurt her most and still did.
“His treatment of me continued and after Scott was convicted I was made to stand in front of the whole church, our whole community and tell them what I had done with some other revelations like the fact that I was a whore and was sneaking out into the village and sleeping with all the local lads, that I was evil and ungrateful. He totally discredited me.”
“So, then you left?” I’m thinking this man can’t have done much more to Olivia and if he did, I might just hunt the fucker down and finish off the job Scott started.
A brief shake of her head makes me gasp.
“I made one last trip to the doctor where Raymond watched as Mathers assaulted me. I think that was the completion of my humiliation in his mind, him watching as someone else did what he had done so many times before. That was the only time the doctor raped me.”
I can’t believe that she can say that so freely and seems grateful of the fact that the doctor assaulted her regularly for eighteen months but only raped her once, what a fucking saint!
“I’d stopped crying when Raymond did those things some time before, but this time with him watching I cried, and he laughed as he told me how he enjoyed the sight and sound of my tears. That they represented the good in me fighting the evil that made these things happen to me. The doctor was rough at the best of times but seemed more so with an audience. Raymond told him I wouldn’t be going back to him so he should make full use of me. I thought that meant he was going to kill me and I was kind of hopeful. The doctor did indeed make full use of me and then Raymond did too,” she stalls on a sob. “He told him to make me come, that if I came it showed how much I wanted it, what a whore I really was and unable to get enough. As the doctor, you know, penetrated me he looked at me and saidyou really know how to get yourself fucked don’t you.”
I said that to her one time. That morning in her kitchen, those exact words,you really know how to get yourself fucked don’t you. Not that I knew any of this, but I saw her face when I said those words, when they registered in her mind, when she bolted, locked herself in the bathroom and cried.
“Olivia, I am so sorry. So, so sorry, baby.” I hug her tightly, more for my benefit than hers. “None of that was ever your fault. Bastards. It was their fault and your mother’s. What about now, do you see them, ever?” I’m thinking that if she does, I can’t be involved with them. I will fucking kill Raymond, the man of God. What a fucking joke that is.
“No. After that last visit to the doctor I knew I had to get out. Raymond continued to rape me and the whole of our community who cast me out thought he was the messiah incarnate with his forgiveness of me and the way he took me under his wing, loved me, nurtured me no matter how evil I was. What they didn’t know was that being under his wing, him being the only one who would even acknowledge my existence just made me an easier target. He once came in my mouth in the church while he practised his sermon. I mean, how the fuck did he make that okay in his mind? He spoke about eternity and until death which made me even more certain he was going to kill me. It was about eight weeks after the visit to the doctor, the night before my sixteenth birthday when I went out to put the chickens away which I did alone. I ran, bolted, and never looked back. In my mind being sixteen made me an independent grown up. I hitched a lift from a trucker and ended up here, in the city. The driver gave me some cash. I think he could see how desperate and alone I was, but it wasn’t much, so I slept rough for a few nights. I knew nobody but found myself in a hostel a few weeks later and one of the workers there was a teacher at a college, Roisin. We got talking and she helped me to enrol and then a few months later she helped me to find a bedsit, a dentist, a doctor who in turn put me in touch with Janet. Roisin was my saviour really and she introduced me to books. I then met Ridley and Sarah.”
“Do you know that from the outside other women must envy you? You are funny, smart, beautiful, have a good education, and a job that’s on the up. Nobody should ever have to endure what you went through, yet you survived.”
“Thank you, for listening and not spewing your guts. I know that is the natural instinct. It makes me want to chunder, so I get it.”
