know it at the time.
I have nobody to visit. There’s only one person I’d like to come, my brother, but I told him not to. I don’t want him to see this place or me in it. The lack of dignity would shock him.
Sleeping in a ward with other women, no privacy, wearing a rag-tag collection of clothes because someone’s always stealing yours. At one time, I’d have thought there was no dignity in living like that, but it isn’t a worry to me now. I know none of that has anything to do with dignity.
The people here are trying to help us. They are tough but nice. Nobody hits you. Nobody on the staff shouts at you. They’re trying to give you back your actual dignity, which means giving you back your mind and your soul.
That’s dignity. All the rest, like peeing with the toilet door open, is immaterial. Did you know that when your mind goes, so does your soul? Like a dandelion blown in the wind, it floats away.
I had a visitor from the shelter today. Mary. She wears red a lot, that’s what I remember most: huge red cardigans wrapped around her and red necklaces. Her hair is yellow from a home-dye kit, something my mother would be scornful of. Mary is the kindest woman I have ever met. She hugs me and I try to let her. I don’t think I deserve hugs. I am stiff in her embrace and I know it. I try, really I do, but this kindness almost hurts. It’s wrong. I cannot have it.
When I cry, she has tissues in her pockets. She’s always had a never-ending supply for the never-ending tears.
‘You deserve to be loved,’ she says to me. It’s exactly what the older psychiatrist has been saying.
Mary has no education except for running the shelter, but she knows as much as he does.
When Mary goes, I sleep. They’re trying to get my medication right and that means lots of changing doses. This week, the drugs are making me even more tired than usual. I have to nap all the time. I lie on my bed with my eyes closed. I can blot out the noises around me. It’s safe here. Even though that banging-head woman is wandering around, the only one she wants to hurt is herself. Another girl came in today, half-crazed with pain. She’s in a room they have under camera surveillance all the time in case she tries anything. So I am safe. Safe in the nuthouse. If I could laugh, I would.
In the shelter, where I felt safe for the first time in years, we talked about our lives and our men. I said I’d never got used to being hit. Used to the idea, sure, but the pain and the fear was as bad every time. Except I knew I deserved it. He said I did. He said I couldn’t spend any money. He kept the housekeeping money and it was doled out every week. None to spare, none to let me buy a lipstick: ‘What do you want with lipstick? You think another man would look more than once at you? I’ll make sure no man looks at you, bitch.’
One woman had lived with her husband for twenty-seven years before she ran away to the shelter. Her son wouldn’t take her in. He blamed her for not leaving his da years before, blamed her for putting him through the fear of growing up in their house.
‘I couldn’t tell him how trapped I felt,’ she said, crying.
We all comforted her and we all understood.
You’re trapped, like the mouse that a cat’s playing with. Paralysed with fear. You believe all the things he says to you.
You believe you’re worthless. Eventually, you reach the point where he doesn’t have to be there for you to believe it. A little voice in your head tells you non-stop: ‘You are a worthless piece of shit. You deserve this. You drive him to this. It’s all your fault.’
One woman lost two babies to her husband’s boot. She’d had six kids by then, it was all she could do to cope, and she didn’t know how she’d manage with seven. She told herself it was God’s way of making sure she didn’t have to cope with rearing another child.
I never had to cope with rearing my own baby. The first one I lost, I thought he’d be a boy. I felt it. Nobody did the trick with the ring on a piece of thread over my belly or said I was carrying low or high and that meant a boy or a girl. I didn’t have women friends to say or do these things. Antonio didn’t like me having friends. Friends got in the way.
It was all about control, I began to understand.
Control and fear was how they kept us under their boots and their fists. The beatings were just a way of reinforcing their control.
We’d been married six years when I lost the baby. He wanted sex off me and I was so tired, bone weary. I guessed I was somewhere near three months along. That’s when you’re tiredest, the books from the library said. I hadn’t been to the doctor about the baby. Our doctor said he hated treating me, seeing the bruises and the scars, when I would do nothing.
‘But my husband’s a good man, Doctor,’ I’d say. I didn’t add that it was me who made him do it and I had to stay with him, to take care of him.
I’d never refused Antonio sex before, never dreamt of it. Who knew what he’d do? I didn’t refuse him that night either. But I couldn’t pretend the way he liked, and he began to slap me.
The slaps could be the worst. He wouldn’t stop slapping. He didn’t even have a drink on him. Stone-cold sober, he was.
‘It’s that fucking brat inside you, isn’t it?’ he roared.
The fear that night was the worst. It wasn’t just me any more, it was my baby. Did you know that, even at three months, your hands aren’t big enough to protect your belly?
I must have passed out with the kicks. When I woke up, he was gone and I was lying in the bed, with the pain of losing my little boy deep in my belly.
The second baby was at the end. I didn’t know I could still get pregnant then. He punched me in the belly and I lost it.
That was the night something in me changed. Like a light switch going on.
The taxi driver said he wouldn’t charge for driving me to the shelter.
‘No, love,’ he said as he helped me in, then went back to get the few bits I’d taken from the flat. ‘It’s on me. He ought to be locked up, your fella. Locked up.’
Mary in the shelter was the first one I saw, and she got me straight to the hospital. She held my hand all the while, and when I woke up, when they’d scraped what was left of my second baby out of me, she was still there.
Mary didn’t say: If you’d left him, you could have saved your baby. But I was thinking it, and I was saying sorry to the baby.
The police went looking for him, but Antonio was always clever. Someone tipped him off and they couldn’t find him.
I knew he’d come after me, but Mary said I was safe. We used to sit on the fire escape looking out over the city, and she’d say he couldn’t touch me any more.
