‘The bastard! A voice screamed inside my head. I looked at Christopher unwrapping his presents by the tree. Each time he laughed with joy, my heart twanged.
How could parents harm their own child? Had my father’s childhood in the orphanage damaged him so much that he didn’t know his behaviour was so wrong?
I agonized for months and months about phoning the police. One Sunday morning in April 1994, Simon, Christopher and I went for a drive to the beach.
The sun was shining, and Christopher was playing contentedly with a toy on the back seat when I glimpsed myself as an eight-year-old girl, in bed with Daddy. I was telling him he hurt me, and I was crying and whimpering and begging him to stop.
My mind clicked back to Christopher. I pictured our play fights on the living-room carpet. We rolled around and tickled each other, but whenever Christopher said, ‘Stop, Mum! That hurts!’ I stopped immediately and gave him a cuddle to say sorry.
My face was bathed in sunlight, and I felt warm tears trickle down my cheeks.
Whatever had happened in his past, my father couldn’t say he didn’t know it was wrong to hurt me. The second I told him he was hurting me and I wanted him to stop, he should have stopped.
Instead he tied my arms with a belt to stop me struggling free.
The full force of his evil hit me, right there in the car. You stupid cow, I told myself. Of course he knew it was wrong. He’s a wicked child-abuser. There can be no excuse.
What if he’s still abusing other children? You cannot sit back and do nothing.
‘Are you OK?’ Simon asked, noticing my tears.
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘The minute I get back home, I’m ringing the police.’
I spent many hours giving a statement to North Yorkshire Police about the sexual abuse I suffered as a child.
The interviews were unbearably upsetting, but liberating too. I had taken the first step towards seeing my parents locked up in jail, where they belonged.
When I got home, deep fear kicked in. I was dealing with sick paedophiles. My mother was a murderer. What would happen next?
One night, Simon came home from work, got down on one knee and asked me to marry him.
He had asked me a million times before, but I had always refused.
I loved him to bits, but the timing had never been right. There was always a trauma going on, and I always put him off, afraid that marriage might change our wonderful relationship.
‘Yes, let’s get married,’ I whispered back. ‘I’m ready now.’
Simon looked surprised and delighted.
‘I love you,’ I told him, then found myself adding, ‘And I want you to legally adopt Christopher.’
I explained to Simon I’d had dark thoughts during my lonely nights in bed when he was out working. I was terrified that when my statement hit the Irish Police, something terrible could happen to me.
‘If I die, I want you to be Christopher’s next of kin. I do not want my parents to have any claim on him, ever.’
He kissed me tenderly. ‘I love you and I want to look after you and Christopher for ever,’ he told me.
We had a simple wedding in August 1994, and I cried tears of joy.
I knew Simon truly loved me, and would do anything for me.
Within weeks of our marriage, the police talked to my family in Ireland.
I was working full-time by then, for a building society in Scarborough, running a small department.
Despite an appalling attendance record at college, I’d come out with outstanding grades and was determined to carve out a good career for myself. I didn’t want to give my parents the satisfaction of stealing my education as well as everything else.
Besides, my job gave me a focus when I woke up with a black cloud of depression over my head. With Christopher at school, I needed to keep busy while I waited for news from the police in Ireland.
I was doing a pretty good job until 10 March 1995, when Esther phoned unexpectedly. I hadn’t heard from her for a while, and I asked if she had any news.
There was a long silence on the end of the phone.
‘You don’t know, do you, Cynthia?’ she said finally.
‘What are you talking about, Esther?’
‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I’ll go to the phone in the other room.’
As soon as I heard her breathe again, I asked, ‘Who has died, Esther?’
As I said the words, I was sure it was our mother. All those suicide threats over the years flashed before me. She was a coward, and it was the only way she could escape the police closing in on her. It had to be her.
But Esther said another name. She said the name Martin. My little brother, Martin.
I went dizzy. I repeated his name time and time again, gasping for air and shaking my head.
‘How, Esther? When?’
Martin had killed himself in our family home, banging a nail into the door in the living room, the one leading to the hallway that backed on to the bedrooms, and hanging himself. He was twenty-seven-years old.
I sobbed and shook.
I found out later, that he had been terrified and ashamed of it coming out that he had been sexually abused by my father.
He had died three months previously, but nobody had told me because my father didn’t want me at the funeral.
I hung up the phone and lit a cigarette, even though at that point I hadn’t smoked for years.
I watched the smoke swirl in the air as I remembered Martin sitting by my desk in his buggy, looking at me longingly with his big bright eyes.
I shifted on the sofa. I recalled how Martin used to try and sleep fully clothed on the sofa in the sitting room sometimes. Now it was clear to me that it must have been in order to avoid the beds upstairs
