Free I Remember, Daddy by Katie Matthews Page A

sort of way as he spoke, and I felt a wave of disgusted resentment and a determination not to accept his pathetic handouts for my mother.
    I shook my head and he shrugged and then suddenly bellowed at me, in a voice you might use to address someone who was partially deaf and feeble-minded, ‘You all better now? Not mental any more?’
    Gillian gasped and I felt Tom’s body stiffen beside me. But my father just laughed.
    ‘You were on lithium I hear.’ He looked directly into my eyes for the first time since we’d arrived, and then he turned towards Gillian as he said, ‘When nothing else works for psychotics, they bring out the big guns. Then you know you’re dealing with a real nutcase.’
    Gillian’s face was scarlet with embarrassment and distress. But my father just turned his head to look at me again and said slowly, ‘And who’s ever going to believe the word of someone like that?’
    Tom took a step towards him, but I put my hand on his arm as I said, ‘Please, let’s just leave.’ Then I walked ahead of him out of the room.
    My father had threatened me before, and I knew exactly what he was saying: whatever happened in the future and whatever I might say about him, I was now a once-certified mad woman – and he felt safe in the knowledge that no one would ever take my word against his.

Chapter Seven
     
    I hadn’t understood the flashes of images I was seeing before and after I was admitted to hospital. They seemed to be of dislocated scenes, which, although they didn’t make sense, always left me feeling deeply disturbed and distressed. And I think that if I hadn’t gradually learned to trust Dr Hendriks and been able to talk to him about what I was remembering, I might never have come out at the other end of the dark, terrifying tunnel I seemed to be in.
    The trouble was, though, that once the floodgates had opened, there was no way of controlling the flow of memories that were being released.
    Extraordinary as it seems now, despite what I was remembering about the things my father used to do to me, part of me continued to want him to love me. I simply couldn’t make any sense of why he’d hurt me and abused me and not loved me, and I thought it was my fault. I’d accepted for years that I was responsible for anything bad that happened to me or to the people I cared for, because that’s what my father had always told me. So it was difficult to override that ‘reality’ and replace it with the knowledge that I wasn’t to blame for what had been done to me when I was a child. And it was only two or three years ago when I finally realised that my father’s love was something I neither needed nor desired.
    One of the first clear memories I had when I was in the hospital was of something that happened when I was three years old. It seemed random and didn’t make much sense to begin with, until I realised that it was just one piece of the jigsaw that I was starting to put together, with Dr Hendriks’s help.
    The memory was of a time when I was very young and my father’s parents were staying with us. They were sitting in the kitchen one morning, drinking their early-morning cups of tea, when I appeared in the doorway in my nightdress and told them I had a really bad itch.
    ‘Well, that won’t do now, will it?’ my grandfather said, lifting me on to his lap and kissing the top of my head.
    I loved my grandfather. He was always kind and patient with me, and he told the most wonderful stories, which was something my father must have inherited from him – together, sadly, with his alcoholism.
    ‘And where is this terrible itch?’ my grandfather asked, sliding me down his legs on to the floor and then pulling me up by the arms so that I was sitting on his knee again.
    I laughed delightedly, and then pointed to my ‘front bottom’ as I said, ‘It’s down there.’
    I started to lift my nightdress, but my grandmother reached out her hand to stop me, saying firmly, ‘There’s no need to