Perceptions of a peadophile

There are lots of people inside me with something to say right now.* My writers voice is fighting to be heard over the silent but insistent sobbing of my inner child and the roaring, righteous anger of my big sister/parental persona. I need to turn my mental madness into verbal vomit so you'll just have to pick the sweetcorn out on your own.

I think when I realised I had an audience I forgot that a bit, wrote for the reader rather than for me. Which, don't get me wrong, was good; I love writing for an audience, I like feedback saying I've made people laugh or remember or feel better or think or cringe. It just wasn't always what I needed and I realise now that I've gone onto my standard class clown, people-pleasing mode at the expense of expressing my dark side, a cost that my various inner people aren't willing to cough up at this moment in time. Tight bastards.

Anyway, you've been warned.

Impact statement signed, I read the statement that step-dad gave to the police. The first thing that struck me was how I heard it in my head. The policewoman's lines, transcribed verbatim from the tapes as per, very clearly processed in her voice with all her particular intonations, emphases and pauses. His words though, heard silently. No voice auto-attached itself to the words as they hit the back of my eyeballs, no accent, no timbre, not even a monotone. Just black type, white page, aural nothingness.

I feel this is more than reticence of the retina. Have the years of estrangement made me forget his voice? Maybe reading his version took me back to that place, those incidents. All carried out in oppressive, urgent, I'm not sure why I just know none of us must speak, suffocating, silence. Perhaps that's why my mind never shuts up now. Silence is icky even when peace is what I so desperately need.

The next hit, the justifications. I actually laughed out loud reading it. Apologised to policewoman for such an inappropriate reaction. It's a good job he pleaded guilty, a jury of normal people would have ripped him to shreds, it's classic paedophiliac thinking process. You see, my sis and I, at the ages of 4 and 6, well, we came on to him. Fucking pair of Lolita's we were!

The male, 'bad', copper asked him if he seriously believed that two children of that age really could, independently and separately, make overtly sexual advances to a man in his thirties, cos he didn't think so. The arrogance of 'I'm afraid it doesn't matter what you think' needed no voice to convey the venom he spat out with the words.

There are episodes he's mixed up, said it was sis when my recall tells me it was me and vice versa. I feel strangely offended that I meant that little to him. Feeling offended at that makes me want to vomit. I hate that it opposes his manipulative 'it was only because I loved you so much' bullshit, drip fed to me for years afterwards in order to ensure my silence, my toeing the family line, my non-rocking of boats. I hate that feeling either offended or manipulated are my only choices. Acknowledge, own, move on. Two down, one to go. Next.

People that meet me socially wouldn't guess it but I have an invisibility problem. I went for an appointment with my therapist once and stood in the waiting room for 35 minutes beyond my scheduled time because I'd not seen her emerge from the room to tell me her previous client had left. When she eventually found me she said she'd looked for me three times, knowing I was never late. I'd been standing right there, she simply hadn't seen me. I'm invisible, easy to overlook or ignore according to your needs. She took it to supervision then we explored it, decided this was obviously something I learned in order to avoid more abuse. Stimuli -> response. Box -> ticked. Therapist -> exonerated.

Bollocks.

Reading his perception now I see my invisibility was a condition I got from from birth and he confirmed by being so obviously 'in love' with sis that I was nothing more than similar neck down and malleable neck up. A second class gift, he didn't even have to work to make me serve in silence for I was born good. My mother tells proudly of the good baby I was - the subtext being how, amongst her life of violence and abuse, I was the one thing that didn't control her. Later in life, like, at four or five, I figured that out for myself. I innately knew not to do or say anything that would induce the tears or sighs of depression from my victimised mother. By the time she married him I was 6 years old and compliance personified.

Sis and I have always argued that the other had it worse. Till now I truly believed that she had it worse because, as the mother figure, I should have protected her. I read his words and yes, it's sick that he thought of her as some kind of ex-lover tormenting him with her 'new' man when she was 16 and again with the man she went on to marry. I laugh when I see his total recall of the the money he paid for her son to have some educational tests done privately.

He remembers a sum of £268 but the fact that it was seven year old me he abused during a particular incident isn't worth mentally tagging. What he did is recalled perfectly, who he did it to doesn't deserve memory space.

Ok, sis; you're right. I can finally see that what he did to me was worse. Worse because he used the overly compliant child that I was, not only for his own ends but as second best and made no secret of it. Worse because he used my previous emotional manipulations against me and that led to so many years of self loathing that there have been countless long nights in the last three decades that I wished he'd just killed me rather than leave me feeling like this for the rest of my life.



*I started this post on the 11th April, a whole month ago. I come back to look at the draft every few days, feeling full of bravery and good intentions but then balk, flit off somewhere more comfortable. Somewhere I can be funny or caustic or advisory, someone else's comment box, somewhere I could wear my mask in safety. My eternal thanks go to Peach for the post that forced my inertia to remove its clown make-up, get on its bike and try to complete this phase in my recovery. I owe you a pint, Peachypants.