When I Was Invisible (50 page)

‘I'm here because I have something to tell you,' I say. I suddenly, almost violently, wish that Roni was here, so I could reach out and take her hand, find the strength in her physical presence to do this. ‘I don't know if you remember the other Veronica Harper? Well, last night she went to the home of our former ballet teacher, Mr Daneaux, ready to harm him for r-r—' I still can't say the word. I can barely think it, and I can't say it. ‘She wanted to kill him for abusing her and me all those years ago.'

‘What?' Sasha says. She moves into the room, stares at me through a deep, confused crinkle of a horrified frown. ‘What are you talking about?'

‘I know you didn't believe me at the time, but after last night he is now being investigated for historic child sexual abuse crimes. The police say he's likely to have abused quite a few other young girls as well as me and Veronica, so it's probably going to be all over the papers. They won't print our names, but I wanted to tell you before that happened because they will print his name. You can have a chance to get your story straight or to decide to pretend that you vaguely remember the ballet teacher and don't remember anything untoward going on with your daughter. Whatever. I thought you deserved to know.'

‘What is she talking about?' Sasha says to my parents. When they remain silent, she turns back to me. ‘What are you talking about?'

‘I can't say it again, Sasha. I've talked and talked to the police about it for most of the night and I can't say it again. I just thought you should all know because it's going to be public and I'm going to go on record, I'll probably have to go to court if it comes to that. And most people will know he lived and taught around here and that he mainly did those things to his star pupils, of which I was one.'

Sasha's face starts to tremble – she looks like she might start crying. ‘Did you … did you tell them that you'd been abused by this man and they did nothing about it?' she asks.

Todd, too
, I want to say. Todd spent years sexually abusing and raping me but in a different, quieter way. In all my reading I found out that if it happened to you as a child, especially if you didn't tell or no one believed you, you are likely to fall into a similar relationship as an adult. You are likely to end up with another person who will abuse you, too. It is the familiarity, being used to someone trampling over your boundaries, being used to always doing what others want, never expecting to be treated well, always being grateful when you are.

My sister spins towards my parents. ‘YOU DID NOTHING?' she bellows at them. Her rage is so unexpected, I take a step back. I didn't think someone would respond like that on my behalf.

Ralph puts a hand on my shoulder and I nearly leap out of my skin. ‘I'm so sorry, Nika,' he whispers. ‘I had no idea. This shouldn't have happened to you.'

Sasha comes to me, grabs me into a hug and clings to me. ‘Why didn't you tell me, Nika? Why didn't you tell me?'

We were never that close; we were never really how people tell you sisters are meant to be. And anyway, ‘I couldn't handle you not believing me, either. Mummy and Daddy didn't believe me – I couldn't stand to share a room with you and have you not believe me.'

‘This is so horrible,' she says. ‘It all makes sense now, why you just disappeared into yourself for all those years. I was so caught up in trying to escape the hideous atmosphere in the house I didn't even notice properly. I never understood why you left and wouldn't even think about coming back. That's why I kept sending your letters on to you – I just wanted to keep in touch with you, let you know you had a link somewhere. I didn't understand why you wouldn't talk, why … I can't believe they did nothing.'

Sasha believes me. Ralph believes me. Two people I know believe me the first time they hear what I have to say.

Sasha lets me go, turns to my parents. ‘I can't believe I lived here all this time and let you look after Tracy-Dee when all along you protected someone who had raped your daughter. Well, no more. Ralph,' she says over her shoulder, ‘pack up everything, every single thing you can because we're not coming back here. I don't care if we have to throw stuff in the bin, we're doing this in one run.'

She slips her hand into mine. ‘Come on, Nika, you're staying with us.'

‘No, no, I'm fine. I've got a life and a job and everything back in Brighton,' I tell her. The world feels floaty right now, nothing feels real or touchable. I am like a helium-filled balloon – light and ready to drift away. If I close my eyes and let go of her hand, I will float away. Everything is a bit surreal because for once I have been believed straight away.

‘No, Nika. I'm overruling you on this. You need someone to take care of you for a while. She's staying with us, isn't she, Ralph?'

‘Yes,' he calls from the corridor. He is moving quickly; the packing that was being done at a leisurely, almost languid pace, from what I picked up from the atmosphere when I walked in, is now being done almost frantically.

Sasha leads me out of the house and puts me in the front seat of the van, then returns to the house to join her husband in the frantic packing.

Mummy didn't speak to me once
, I think as I sit on the bench seat of the van, tethered there like Sasha has tied down an over-inflated balloon.

Even after all these years, my mother's doubt about me can't be put aside. I am not the daughter she wanted, I am not the girl she wanted to bring up. I wonder if she would have liked me, preferred me, if I had just shut up and put up all those years. Or is it that my mother has been there, too?

I remember that look in her eyes sometimes, the way she would glare at me as though she couldn't understand what the big deal was. When I wasn't eating, when I would sit and stare into space, when I would vomit before my ballet classes, I would sometimes see my mother looking at me as though I was making a mountain out of a molehill.
Every girl has this happen to them
, she seemed to be saying with that expression,
why are you making such a big deal about it?

Quickly, decisively, I wipe that thought away. No one who had been through that would let someone else go through that,
would they
?

‘We're going to look after you,' Sasha says to me as she climbs into the van some time later. ‘Stay as long as you want, because for the next little while, this is going to be all about you.'

They believe us. They believe Veronika Harper and Veronica Harper. They believe what he did to us; they have opened up an investigation into him and will be contacting all his current and former students to see if any of them will speak to them.

They believe us. And one of the police officers even apologised to me and to Nika (separately) for not believing her all those years ago. I don't know what Nika said, or what she felt when they told her that, but I hope, hope, hope that being believed this time helps her. It can't erase the past, but it can make the future a little better. At least I hope it can. She left the police station before me. I had to stay longer to tell them all about my uncle. They want to open up an investigation into him as well. Not only for what he did to me, but also the crimes against my brothers. They will talk to Brian and Damian to see what they want to do.

Mrs Daneaux will probably be charged with attempted manslaughter; her husband is expected to make a full recovery from what we heard and saw last night. I said to the police officer who questioned me that is a good thing, but part of me wishes it were different. I admitted that because I was confessing to everything.
Everything
.

I have finally confessed to everything. Everything that is inside me has been told and retold to another person. Not anyone who can tell me to say a number of Hail Marys, who will listen to my act of contrition, who will then absolve me of my sins, but someone else. I will go to confession, tell a priest everything at some point, reveal the true contents of my heart, my lapse in being able to put aside the vengeful thoughts, the unforgiving thoughts, and my inability to comfort a man who may have been dying. Yes, I might not be a nun any more, but as I explained to Cliff, being a nun is part of who you are, not a job. I still feel like a nun, I know that I should, for the most part, behave like one. But for now, what seems most important is that I have confessed.

I am unburdened and burdened at the same time.

Since I am here in Brighton, I have thought about visiting Nika's flat, trying to see her so I can tell her again I am sorry. But that would be for me, not her. That would be another attempt by me to make her OK when she has every right to not be. I hope she has called Marshall, that she is curled up in his arms, basking in the adoration he so obviously feels for her. I hope she is not alone and she has someone to take care of her.

I hope this is the beginning of the next phase of her life. It's certainly the start of mine.

I'm sitting here in the police station foyer waiting for Dad to come and pick me up. I pull my knees up to my chest, rest my head on my knees. I hope he doesn't take too long.

I have been away for nearly three weeks.

Sasha would not let me leave, and once she made that decision, I found that I couldn't leave because I didn't want to.

I slept in their tiny box room, which had nothing but the bed, a circular rug on the floor and a lamp that sat on the floor beside the bed. I slept a lot, would often miss whole chunks of the day from simply rolling over and going back to sleep. At night, I was often plagued by the past: worry would creep in with the darkness, crawling its way through my mind and keeping me awake with its half-formed remembrances and body-tremoring flashbacks.

My big sister called my work and told them. Just like that. I should have been angry at her for not checking with me first what I wanted them to know, but she thought I had nothing to be ashamed of, that I had done nothing wrong and she was going to fight anyone who dared to question if I had. Mrs Nasir was very understanding, apparently, and turned down Sasha's kind offer to go and work in my place to make sure I kept my job.

I often heard Sasha and Ralph talking in the night, and I knew she blamed herself for not noticing. For being out of the house, for us not being close enough for me to tell her.
‘It's not your fault,'
I wanted to say to her.
‘It's no one's fault but his.'

She also went to see Roni's dad. To tell him that Roni had to stay away for now and to stop ringing me. ‘I felt so sorry for him,' she explained afterwards. ‘Most of the time we just sat there in silence cos we didn't know what to say. He looks like someone's taken him apart, piece by piece. He seems so broken but trying to keep it together for Roni's sake.'
‘Like I am with you,'
she silently added.

I sent Marshall a text telling him I was away for a couple of weeks and I would get in touch with him when I got back. Which is now. I am back now. I am back at work, I have plans to meet Marshall, talk to him properly about all that he has read in the papers recently. He knows I knew Mr Daneaux, and that the story has completely shaken me, but he doesn't know the full extent.

Planning to tell Marshall, I think, has brought Todd to mind a lot. Maybe because of how he used what I told him about my abuse to hurt me. He got some kind of sick pleasure from it, I think, and I was in a place where being treated like that was all I knew. I read all about it at the library, and I can look back and see it, but it's only now I can feel it. Roni engaged in drinking, drug-taking and reckless sex with older men to treat herself in the only way she knew how. Todd did that for me.

Thinking about Todd always leads into thinking about Roni. We're so intertwined, our stories curling and curving around each other like two trees growing from one root – even after years apart, the stems of our stories are twisted together. We are like music on a song sheet: right-hand notes and left-hand notes, both played together, both necessary for the song to be complete.

I haven't seen her. She has done as Sasha asked and has kept away, which is the best thing for both of us. It's given me a chance to want to talk to her. If she was in my face all the time, I would want her far away. I need to talk to her. Now that we've been believed, now that other people have come forward to tell about Mr Daneaux, our worlds are different.

I step outside the service entrance at the back of the hotel, into the wide alley-cum-side street that runs along the back of the hotel. I'm always amazed that this wide space exists out here, when everywhere around this part of Brighton is narrow and close, as though hunched up together to keep warm against the strong breezes that roll in from the sea. Usually there are three or four members of hotel staff standing here, smoking or drinking cups of coffee, or having a good old gossip about someone else who works in the building. Today, it's empty. The light is fading and soon the sky will turn a light pewter, signalling the start of evening and then night.

Roni
. The thought of her rushes through me, like it did all those months ago when Judge decided to get payback. I have to stop – the thought of her is so powerful as it sweeps through my body and mind, a strong wave that almost knocks me over.
Roni
. I take a deep breath in, hold it. When I feel the panic coming on, I know to remember to breathe. Breathe. It's what the books all told me over the years to do, to breathe. It quells the panic, soothes my mind. I reach into my pocket, take out my music player. I don't usually wear headphones when walking around, I don't feel safe if I can't hear what is going on, but after the breathing, music is what helps me.

A scuffling noise to my left doesn't do enough to distract me from unwinding my headphones. I need to breathe. Breathe. More scuttling, and then footsteps, and then a hand around my throat, shoving me back against the wall.