I Remember, Daddy: The harrowing true story of a daughter haunted by memories too terrible to forget. Katie Matthews
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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 hated the hospital. I was terrified of most of the other inmates, particularly the ones who’d suddenly start to shout and try to hurt themselves, or someone else, and who had to be wrestled to the ground by nurses and given injections that turned them – for a while, at least – from ranting, arm-flailing lunatics into limply passive, dead-eyed zombies.
Some of the other patients were suffering from schizophrenia, and they could be the most alarming of all. One moment they’d be talking to you quite normally, and then, suddenly, they’d fly into a rage and accuse you of saying something you hadn’t said. You’d stumble away from them, your heart racing with shock, and then you’d begin to wonder if you actually had said it after all. And that was even more frightening than the uncontrollable fury you’d just witnessed, because it meant that you never knew what was real and what was in your imagination, or whether perhaps you were crazier than they were.
One day, I was sitting in the day room with a woman who was telling me how much she hated the hospital and the doctors and nurses. She started talking about her family and about how she longed to be at home, and then she suddenly stood up, took a knife from inside the sleeve of her cardigan and tried to slit her throat. I don’t know how she’d got hold of the knife, but, fortunately, it was too blunt for her to be able to sever the artery in her neck and kill herself. She made a good attempt, though, and I can remember hearing the sound of what were actually my own wild-animal-like screams as I jumped up from the table, knocking over my chair in my haste to get away from the blood that had started to pour from the wound in her throat.
One of the reasons I was frightened of the other patients was because they weren’t like me. And then sometimes I’d be even more afraid because I began to think that perhaps they were, and that I’d be locked up with them for ever. I felt as though I was drowning, looking upwards from just below the surface of the water as I struggled to break through into the air and breathe, but never quite managing to do so.
Because of the medication I was taking, everything seemed blurred and unreal. I felt detached from what was going on around me, as though I’d turned in on myself and was living inside my own head, looking out. I was being dragged back to my childhood because of everything I was remembering and, like a child trying to comfort herself, I’d often sit on the floor in the corner of a room, curled into a ball and rocking backwards and forwards. Sometimes I’d hear the sound of someone crying, and it was only when I stopped rocking for a moment so that I could listen that I realised it was me. Great sobs of despair would rise up from somewhere deep inside me, where they’d been locked away for years. But, no matter how much I cried, I never felt any better.
I’d never forgotten my father’s violence towards me when I was a child, and how brutally he used to punish me whenever I did anything ‘naughty’. Often over the years, though, when I thought about my childhood, I could almost see something else – something dark and malignant that my mind didn’t want to remember. And, while I was in the hospital, those almost-thoughts became memories of the most terrible of all the things my father had done to me when I was a young child – memories that my brain had locked away when I was in my early teens, leaving me with an inexplicable sense of guilt and unhappiness that had underscored every aspect of my life for years.
I’d been desperately unhappy as a teenager; I’d hated my life and I’d hated myself, for reasons I’d never understood. I’d lived with a constant, inexplicable sense of self-disgust and a sometimes overpowering anger that would cause me to lash out and want to hurt people. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, and there was no one I could turn to for help. So I’d tried to hide my self-loathing and the turmoil of my emotions beneath a façade of bravado and bad behaviour.
Then, for some reason, the birth of my child had triggered the unlocking of some of those previously repressed memories. At first, they were just flashes of unfocused images; but, gradually, they became complete pictures that I didn’t want to look at but that I could no longer ignore. And, eventually, my brain had blown a fuse and I’d become so mentally disorientated and so uncertain of what was real and what I was imagining that my mind had been unable to process any thoughts or function on any level at all, which was when I’d ended up in hospital.
Luckily, though, I had a wonderful psychiatrist. Dr Hendriks was the first person I’d ever talked to about the things I was remembering, and I was reluctant to talk about them at all to begin with, not least because it was almost impossible to find the words to describe the images I was seeing. But Dr Hendriks always listened without judging me and, perhaps most importantly of all, he made it clear that not only did he believe what I was telling him, but that he didn’t blame me for what had happened to me as a child. Because, as well as beginning to remember what my father used to do to me, and what he allowed and encouraged his friends to do too, I remembered that he had always told me that all of it was my fault – and the responsibility of that belief was a burden I’d carried throughout my life.
I’d been at the hospital for just a few days when I walked out of the day room one morning and heard a commotion at the end of the corridor. There were often quarrels and scuffles of one sort or another – patients fighting amongst themselves or arguing with the nurses – and I’d quickly learned to be wary and alert to the signs that indicated something was kicking off. So, without looking overtly in the direction from which