I Remember, Daddy by Katie Matthews Page A

head, and I was given sleeping tablets every night. I still found it difficult to sleep, though, because although I was frightened all the time, what I was most afraid of were the images I saw when I closed my eyes.
    After Sam was born, I’d started to have flashes of half-remembered scenes: being in the bath with my father or lying in bed next to him – or, even more bizarrely, next to one of his friends – and feeling sick. They were images that had gradually become more detailed, until, by the time I was admitted to the psychiatric hospital, what I was remembering was too horrific for my mind to process it at all.
    I hated the hospital. I was terrified of most of the other inmates, particularly the ones who’d suddenly start to shout and try to hurt themselves, or someone else, and who had to be wrestled to the ground by nurses and given injections that turned them – for a while, at least – from ranting, arm-flailing lunatics into limply passive, dead-eyed zombies.
    Some of the other patients were suffering from schizophrenia, and they could be the most alarming of all. One moment they’d be talking to you quite normally, and then, suddenly, they’d fly into a rage and accuse you of saying something you hadn’t said. You’d stumble away from them, your heart racing with shock, and then you’d begin to wonder if you actually had said it after all. And that was even more frightening than the uncontrollable fury you’d just witnessed, because it meant that you never knew what was real and what was in your imagination, or whether perhaps you were crazier than they were.
    One day, I was sitting in the day room with a woman who was telling me how much she hated the hospital and the doctors and nurses. She started talking about her family and about how she longed to be at home, and then she suddenly stood up, took a knife from inside the sleeve of her cardigan and tried to slit her throat. I don’t know how she’d got hold of the knife, but, fortunately, it was too blunt for her to be able to sever the artery in her neck and kill herself. She made a good attempt, though, and I can remember hearing the sound of what were actually my own wild-animal-like screams as I jumped up from the table, knocking over my chair in my haste to get away from the blood that had started to pour from the wound in her throat.
    One of the reasons I was frightened of the other patients was because they weren’t like me. And then sometimes I’d be even more afraid because I began to think that perhaps they were, and that I’d be locked up with them for ever. I felt as though I was drowning, looking upwards from just below the surface of the water as I struggled to break through into the air and breathe, but never quite managing to do so.
    Because of the medication I was taking, everything seemed blurred and unreal. I felt detached from what was going on around me, as though I’d turned in on myself and was living inside my own head, looking out. I was being dragged back to my childhood because of everything I was remembering and, like a child trying to comfort herself, I’d often sit on the floor in the corner of a room, curled into a ball and rocking backwards and forwards. Sometimes I’d hear the sound of someone crying, and it was only when I stopped rocking for a moment so that I could listen that I realised it was me. Great sobs of despair would rise up from somewhere deep inside me, where they’d been locked away for years. But, no matter how much I cried, I never felt any better.
    I’d never forgotten my father’s violence towards me when I was a child, and how brutally he used to punish me whenever I did anything ‘naughty’. Often over the years, though, when I thought about my childhood, I could almost see something else – something dark and malignant that my mind didn’t want to remember. And, while I was in the hospital, those almost-thoughts became memories of the most terrible of all the things my father had