jump up after a few minutes and almost run to the kitchen to scrub the floor or clean a work surface I’d already scoured with bleach half a dozen times that day.
People began to notice how irritable I was becoming, and how often I cried. However, I think even those closest to me had only just begun to realise that something might be wrong, when all the fear and confusion that had been building up inside me finally erupted.
I’d been having terrible nightmares. They’d started at around the time Sam was born and almost all of them involved my father. Night after anxious night, I’d wake up in the middle of a vivid dream, frightened and sweating, with my heart thumping painfully, thinking I was a child again. In some of the dreams, I was hiding in a wardrobe, holding my breath and listening to the slow, heavy tread of footsteps as someone crossed the bedroom floor towards me. I had something draped over my head, so I could only hear the sound of the wardrobe door as it creaked open.
Sometimes, I’d wake up at that point in the dream, waving my arms wildly in front of my face and shouting ‘No, no!’ And at other times the wardrobe door would swing back on its hinges, the cover would be lifted from my head, and I’d see my father looking down at me. For a moment, I’d feel a sense of relief. But then I’d see that his face was ugly and his expression sneering, and as he reached down and lifted me roughly out of my hiding place, I’d feel a terror so powerful I’d think my heart was going to stop.
On some nights, I’d dream that I was in a bath and I’d stretch out my hand to touch the cool, shiny surface of the blue-tiled wall beside me. Then, suddenly, I’d feel cold and sick, and when I turned my head away from the wall, my father would be sitting in the bath facing me. Dressed in just the jacket of a pinstriped suit, he’d frown angrily at me and say, ‘It’s your fault, Katie. It’s – all – your – fault.’
Sometimes, I’d dream that I was in the bed I used to sleep in as a child and that I’d woken up to find my father leaning over me, completely naked except for a top hat. I’d try to scream, but he’d clamp the short, strong, thick fingers of his hand over my mouth and hiss at me, ‘If you say anything, I’ll kill you. It won’t be the first time I’ve put someone six feet under.’ Then he’d laugh a nasty, humourless laugh, and I’d wake up sobbing.
As the dreams became increasingly frequent, I began to be afraid to go to sleep at all, and before long, as each tiring day was followed by another restless night, I was exhausted.
Then, one morning, a couple of weeks after I’d gone back to work, I stood up from my desk, picked up my jacket and handbag and walked out of the office. As I passed through the reception area, heading for the door to the street, Jackie, the receptionist, called after me, ‘Katie! Is anything wrong?’ She sounded worried, but I didn’t answer her, and I didn’t turn around. I didn’t want her to see the tears that were pouring down my face and then have to try to explain what it was I was crying about – because I didn’t know.
For the next couple of hours, I walked through the streets of the town, wiping my steadily flowing tears on to the sleeve of my jacket, and going nowhere. Eventually, I found myself on a road I recognised; it was the road where Sally lived.
Sally had been my father’s girlfriend after my mother left him, when I was seven, and she’d become, briefly, his second wife. She moved into our house just a few days after my mother and I fled into the night, and she slept in my mother’s bed and wore the clothes my mother had left behind in her wardrobe.
Despite their apparently similar taste in clothes, though, Sally and my mother were about as different from each other as two people could possibly be. My mother was a neat, house-proud, quietly spoken, well-brought-up, attractive, twinset and pearls sort of woman; whereas Sally was brassy, untidy, chaotic, loudly raucous and hard-headed. But, apparently, my father had been happy to replace a wife who cooked his meals, catered for his parties and looked after his house and children for one whose talents lay in the bedroom.
However, perhaps equally importantly, as far as my father was concerned, was the fact that Sally knew a lot of girls and young women who were willing to go to parties at my father’s house and do whatever people wanted them to do in exchange for money. It wasn’t long before my father’s parties had become legendary, or before alcohol, cocaine and doing exactly what he wanted to do had begun to cloud his better judgement.
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
