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 anyone else grounds for suspecting there was anything wrong with me. Otherwise, they might lock me up inside this soulless labyrinth of corridors and ill-health with its smell of floor polish and sickness. And then how would I ever get better?
‘No,’ I said again, shaking my head as if to emphasise the determination I was trying to summon up. ‘I don’t want to stay here. I want to go home.’
‘I’m sorry, Katherine. But I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist.’ The doctor smiled a small, sympathetic smile. ‘Just for a few days, while we sort out what the problem is.’
I stood up, still shaking my head, and he said, ‘Please, Katherine. You must stay. I would far rather you agreed to come in voluntarily, because I don’t want to section you. But I will do so if I have to.’
I’d forgotten Tom was in the room, until I felt his hand on my arm. ‘Please, Katie,’ he said. ‘Just stay here for a couple of days. Let them take care of you until you’re feeling well again. Please.’
Suddenly, it was as though someone had pulled out a plug in my body and I could actually see all the energy draining out of me. I seemed to have been struggling to act normally for so long that I’d finally run out of steam and I was too weary and defeated to argue any more.
‘Well, okay,’ I conceded at last, sitting down heavily in the chair. ‘But what about Sam? Who’s going to look after Sam if I’m in here?’
‘Don’t worry about Sam.’ Tom’s voice was loud with relief. ‘My mum and dad and your mum will help me take care of him. You know how much they’ve been dying to get their hands on him.’
‘No one must touch him!’ I leapt to my feet and shouted the words in Tom’s face. He took a step backwards and I could see the shock and the distress in his eyes. And then, just as quickly as the unidentifiable fear had overwhelmed me, it faded again, and I tried to smile at him as I said, ‘Okay. But look after Sam.’
Then I allowed myself to be led from the room and through one locked grey door, down a long grey corridor to another.
Chapter Six
I didn’t stay in the hospital for just a couple of days, as Tom had thought I would. I stayed there for almost six months, because I was far more ill than he, or anyone else, had realised.
I was put on medication, which eventually quietened, but didn’t silence, the clamour of voices in my head, and I was given sleeping tablets every night. I still found it difficult to sleep, though, because although I was frightened all the time, what I was most afraid of were the images I saw when I closed my eyes.
After Sam was born, I’d started to have flashes of half-remembered scenes: being in the bath with my father or lying in bed next to him – or, even more bizarrely, next to one of his friends – and feeling sick. They were images that had gradually become more detailed, until, by the time I was admitted to the psychiatric hospital, what I was remembering was too horrific for my mind to process it at all.
I
