I drifted into awareness to find him hovering over me. Leering down at me. Waiting to pounce upon me. My body was tied to the bed with wires and tubes. He stared hard at me, making me feel that I’d inadvertently annoyed him. Made him angry with me.
I wondered how he’d got me again. Where had he been waiting for me? I struggled to remember what I’d been doing when he’d captured me. I must have let my guard down momentarily. A moment of dangerous relaxation. And he’d taken his chance.
Several days later, once the anaesthetic had been purged from my system and the constant drip feed of powerful painkillers had been reduced sufficiently to enable my brain to process my thoughts with a useful level of analysis, I began to consider my feelings and reactions of that evening in the recovery room.
The belief that I’d been captured by “them,” that I’d experienced a kind of repeat performance, a replay of something profoundly terrible and frightening, continued to haunt me, my constant companion a sense of unease, a powerful need to remain vigilant.
I felt certain that there was some reason for the enduring power of the experience. It had to have been based on some reality, obviously something in my past. I started the process of thinking over the past fifty-seven years, taking the easy path of starting with the most recent parts of my life.
Everything was unexpectedly clear cut, logical progression, and sensible steps in the path of my career and married life.
Eventually I moved sufficiently far back in my personal history to reach my school days. I could find only a kind of foggy darkness. A blank. Five years, between the age of thirteen and eighteen, that I simply couldn’t account for. Before that I had the expected, childish memories. A normal, colourful, and noisy kaleidoscope of pictures, good and bad, but they stopped with the family holiday in Spain, just before I went to Public School for the first time. After that, nothing.
I could easily picture the school, beautiful rustic architecture, set in a spectacular rural location. I found that I could recall the daily routines so accurately that I’d have been able to return, after more than forty years, and slip seamlessly into my old life as if I’d never been away. And yet I could not recall a single thing that I’d done there. It simply didn’t make sense.
Then, one morning, as I was mooching around doing far too little for my satisfaction, “IT” came to me. I understood. I’d been sexually abused. Repeatedly. By another pupil, older and more important than me, in the flat of one of the senior teachers, within the school, while that teacher watched.
I felt sick. At least, now, I knew what it was that may have caused me to bury all memories of the place so deeply and inaccessibly. I needed time to process this sudden awareness of my past.