Unanswered Questions

I admit it. I’m obsessed with you. I want to know everything you do. I want to know everywhere you go. I need to know everyone you see.  I watch you from a distance, even though you don’t see me, I am there watching you, waiting and when you least expect it I will appear and then you will know exactly how I feel.

                Lifetimes ago, I thought we were happy. I was. Do you remember when the children were small? The holidays, the fun, the laughter, the caring, sharing times we had.

                You were perfect, as perfect as I could ever hope for but it was all a lie, pretence, false, fake because unknown to me, you had an ulterior motive. We’re you aware of it? Was it a conscious decision to change or was it, is it part of your make up? I’d love to know, maybe then I could understand, just a little. Who am I kidding? I will never understand. No, I can never understand the depravity of your sick mind.

                Looking back I know now when it changed. It changed when my two eldest boys started to grow up. The older they got the worse the beating were. At first it was a slap, then it went to slaps around the head, then your fists were pummelled into them. But you were clever, you hid a lot from me and you told them not to say anything. They didn’t because although you weren’t their biological father you were their Dad and they loved you.

                You’d take their belongings and hide them and when they took them back, you’d beat them again and again. You’d ridicule and mock them and tried to take every bit of self confidence they had, fortunately you didn’t manage that, not quite but recovery for them has been long and slow.

                And all the time I asked myself why?

                I thought you were jealous of their youth but that didn’t make sense. You hated them and took every opportunity to let them know, without actually saying it.

                In the meantime you showered my youngest with love, gifts and your time. I remember the Christmas you wouldn’t take me out. I couldn’t go out on my own because of the cursed wheelchair and you did the Christmas shopping. It was pathetic what you bought for the eldest two and yet the youngest, he had it all. Your excuse, they’re not children any longer.

                Should I have known then?

                I didn’t understand.

                I understood even less when you changed towards the little one. The change was gradual, you’d play good guy, bad guy until none of us knew what was going on, we were scared of your mood changes and my little one remained silent.

                He was ten years old when you slapped him around the head, causing him to cry and when he cried, you punched him the stomach. For God’s sake, he was a child and you a grown man. Yet you felt no remorse, you hated him too.

                Why, why, why? I asked myself. I asked you too. You blamed him, you said he was naughty. He deserved it. He made you do it.

                How can a child make you hit them, I asked? But you never replied because to me there wasn’t a reason and I said so. You retaliated by giving me the silent treatment and punishing the boys even more.

                Then you decided to get rid of them. On the first of January you wrote my eldest son and eviction notice ordering him to get out of the house. He didn’t. I stopped it and your response was to make life even more unbearable for him, for all of us. He moved out a few months later, happy to go but frightened to leave us with you.

                Unsurprisingly you turned your attention to my second son. There was no letter this time, you told him to his face and he too had no choice but to go. Again, scared for his mother and little brother’s safety. I tried to reassure them both that we’d be all right but how could they believe me when I didn’t quite believe it myself.

                Foolishly I thought that was it. But no, my youngest, my little boy had to go too. Eleven years old and he was packed off to boarding school. I didn’t want him to go but he did. At the time it hurt but now I know why.

                I remember watching him as we dropped him off, running free towards his boarding house. Running free was what went through my mind as the tears brimmed at my eyes threatening to tumble down my cheeks but I knew they couldn’t, he would never have stood for that.

                The silence was unbearable. I longed for a Friday when my little one came home. I’d pick him on a Friday afternoon, rush home and we’d watch The Simpsons together, his head tucked under my arm and I’d kiss and hug him, constantly whispering I love you.

                But you hated that, you hated that time we had together. You’d yell at him to get changed, to put his bags upstairs, to sort his laundry out anything but to have a cuddle with his Mum. I thought you were jealous, were you? If so why? God how stupid was I?

                I hated Sunday evenings when he had to go back. I hoped he’d turn around and say he didn’t want to go but he never did. He was happy to go back to school, eventually he told me why. He wanted to get away from you.

                At the time, I thought understood why but I didn’t.

                I’d also spend time with my two eldest sons. I missed the sound of their voices, their laughter, their presence. I wanted them to come back too but they were so much happier than they’d been at home and who was I to take that away from them?

                They did visit but when they came, there was little laughter. You didn’t want them there and if they stayed for a meal, you stab them with your fork, if you cut the meat up you’d give them the fat and the gristle and then tell them to piss off. They’d go but not before giving me a hug and telling me they loved me and to be careful.

                But our time was running out although you, in your arrogance didn’t realise it.

                It took one too many clenched fists against my little one’s face on evening and I called the police. Oh and how you ran. You didn’t appear until the next day and when you came back you were full of bravado. I’m going to, you shouted and then the lies started. You’d never done that, I was lying, the boys were lying, you were a good, honest, upright citizen and we were making it all up.

                Your lies scared me. How competent you were at it and yet all the things you claimed not to have done, we bore the scars, some physical the rest leaving indelible marks on our minds, our pasts and who we are now.

                The beatings stopped but the mind games reached a new intensity. You weren’t content with driving my children away, you now wanted rid of us. We lived in constant fear until eventually it could go on no longer, both the police, my solicitor and friends were begging us to go for our own safety and we went.

                Do you know but in a very silly way I tried to kill you or rather as a result of my actions I hoped you’d die but you didn’t. However, it did make people laugh and yes the police knew what I was doing. Every night before I went to bed, I’d clean the toilet with your toothbrush, sometimes I’d use bleach and then I’d put it back but you probably never used that toothbrush when you deigned to spend the night in the house you claimed to the courts you had live at when in reality that again was part of your sick, pathetic games.

                In fact that was last thing I did before I closed the door on our home for fourteen years, your toothbrush went round the toilet bowl for the last time and then we vanished.

                Oh God, it was funny how you tried to find us. You did ask but I wouldn’t tell you. You even asked others but they wouldn’t say either. You found out we were living in Mid Wales but that was as far as it got. We finally had peace, or so I thought and my sons were back home.

                Four years past and then you reappeared, not as a threatening monster, which at first I thought, but as a rat trying to slink in the back door. You were a coward, you didn’t even put your name to the magazine subscription you sent but we all knew it from you. Why was what we didn’t understand, at least not all of us.

                I reported it the police who as usual, couldn’t do anything unless you did it again              but then, three months later all the unanswered questions of many years were answered.

                It was fairly typical, quiet Sunday evening shattered by two of sons squaring up to each other, tears running down their faces yelling, ‘fucking tell her.’

                ‘Tell me what?’ Three simple words that changed everything for ever.

                I watched as tall, beautiful youngest son, no longer a child but a man, crumpled before me and cried ‘he abused me Mum, he sexually abused me.’

                I wish you’d been there because I would have killed you. I still want to kill you. He was nine years old when you ruthlessly took his childhood with your own bare hands to satisfy your own perverse cravings. He was little more than a baby when you touched him and forced him to touch you, when you forced him to know things which at the time he didn’t need to know.

                When you killed the little boy in him!

                You may have thought you got away with it. Insufficient evidence the Crown Prosecution Service said as they let another paedophile go free.

                But you haven’t and you never will because as long as I hate myself for not protecting him, I shall hate you and I can never forgive myself. Payback day will come, as I said, I admit it. I’m obsessed by you and I’m watching you and God help you if I hear you’ve touched another child.

                Then I will kill you.