One morning, I felt a powerful urge to clean the house. Everybody was out, and I walked into Christopher’s bedroom to tidy his toys off the floor. I looked at his bed and, in a daze, lay down on it. The second I touched the duvet, my body seemed to shrink. I felt like a little girl again, and suddenly my body started to jerk up and down. My mind was travelling back down dark corridors, back through the years. When it stopped travelling, I was in the single bed at home in Dalkey. Daddy was in the bed with me, and I started crying.
‘No, Daddy, no! Please, Daddy, no!’ I cried out. My mind went oil black as the pain ripped through me. I thought I was going to split in two.
Moments later, I was back in Christopher’s room, looking at his blue-striped duvet cover and the picture of Spiderman on the wall. I didn’t move for hours. I just lay there sobbing.
I told Simon that night that my father had raped me as a young girl.
‘I will look after you,’ he told me tenderly, but I could see he was in shock too. And I was inconsolable.
I tried to carry on living as normal a life as possible, for Christopher’s sake. He had started school, and I joined a secretarial college, where I worked as hard on my studies as I did on trying to appear happy and normal like everybody else.
One Sunday night, in April 1993, I was lying in bed when a series of vivid memories made my spine stiffen. They came from nowhere, and I felt like I’d been electrocuted.
‘Oh my God, I was pregnant as a child!’ I called out.
Bizarre images blazed around my head. I saw sanitary towels and a sanitary belt, vitamins and raw eggs and liver. I tasted salt water in my mouth.
I had to tell Maureen. I had already confided to her that my father had actually raped me, but it was even harder telling her I was pregnant as a child.
I said it quietly, eyeing her carefully to judge her reaction.
‘I know,’ she said, nodding gently.
‘How can you know?’ I gasped.
‘I’ve been waiting for you to tell me, Cynthia.’ I was astonished. I sat rooted to the spot as Maureen explained how many of the other memories I’d shared, plus the vomiting and bloating I experienced around my periods, pointed to me suffering a pregnancy in childhood. She had had to wait for me to mention it first, because that was the way therapy worked. Everything had to come from me.
I shared all this news with Simon, but felt guilty burdening him. He didn’t doubt me or judge me, and I loved him more for that, if it were possible.
‘I’ll stand by you, come what may,’ he said.
I needed every ounce of his love and compassion, especially when I started having vivid recollections of the night Noleen died and the many sickening ways in which my father abused me.
Flashbacks came when I was reading to Christopher or cooking the dinner. I started staying downstairs at night, huddled by the dying embers of the coal fire.
I chain-smoked, and my body shook from head to toe as I relived one memory after another. I often stayed there until dawn, too scared to get into bed.
‘I want to move away and make a fresh start,’ I told Simon one day.
I desperately hoped that I could somehow learn to live with my memories and life would return to some sort of normality.
Simon agreed to give it a try. Our relationship was being tested, and we both welcomed the chance to make it better.
We moved to Scarborough in September 1993, and Simon found a new job as a taxi driver.
The first few months went well, but one night I was alone in the house when I suddenly felt like I had a spider inside my stomach. It was climbing slowly up towards my mouth and was about to spill out and make me scream.
I thought I was going mad. I put on some old Irish music and drank some vodka to dull the fright and wash the spider away.
As the sharp liquid slid down my throat, my memories started crowding round my head.
They were like ghosts and devils, haunting me and taunting me. I couldn’t shake them off. I saw Daddy’s dirty fingernails clawing me. And I saw Ma stabbing my baby in the face.
‘No!’ I screamed at the shadows. ‘No!’
When Simon came in, I was drunk and hysterical. ‘I have to stop living this lie,’ I sobbed. ‘I did have a baby, and I’m going to find that baby!’
‘Go to the police then,’ he said tenderly. ‘What else can you do?’
I laughed. ‘And tell them what? They’ll think I’m mental. They’ll lock me up.’
‘If you are telling the truth, they won’t,’ Simon said calmly.
I knew he was right, but in the cold light of day I was too frightened to call the police.
My mother had always told me I was crazy and a liar. I knew the police might say the same thing.
Christmas was coming, and I welcomed the distraction. Christopher had put up with a lot of upheaval, and I vowed to make it up to him.
I wanted to spend Christmas Day laughing and playing with him, but as soon as I smelled the turkey cooking I wanted to vomit.
I ran to the bathroom, feeling infected with turkey. It was everywhere, suffocating and poisoning me. I scrubbed my hands, then my whole body, and I vomited violently. Apologizing to Christopher, I wrapped myself up on the sofa, thinking I must have a virus.
‘It’s OK, Mum,’ he said, and as he spoke a bulb flashed in my mind.
Daddy was banging on the floor. I was carrying up his turkey dinner. And now he was hauling me across his lap and pulling down my pants.
The same images flashed before me. I saw those Christmas days. The
