At around the age of 14, I began to draw a man’s face.
The man had broad features, shaggy dark hair and a fierce glower. I didn’t know
where he came from. Before long, I was compulsively drawing this man in the
margins of sketchbooks and puzzlers. When I was bored or when life seemed to
hold little meaning, I would draw him. I disliked and feared him yet I sensed
he needed something from me.
As no one of that description lived with us, I assumed
he was a fictional character.
Life Behind the Mask
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| Aidan who was never a Childhood Familiar |
Before long, something psychologically dangerous happened.
I imagined living his life and I put myself in his
shoes. I injected part of myself behind his face. As a result, my feelings for
this man grew conflicting. My dislike for him remained but now I felt guilty
and responsible for him. I even cared about him. This is because I had placed
my humanity behind the face of a man who was in fact callous. The resultant
concoction of emotions is extremely unsettling.
This man became a constant companion in my head. I
called him Aidan and I reasoned he was a childhood familiar.
Before long, I had Aidan’s life story, which
seemed to come from nowhere.
My Secret Fantasy World
Aidan is an obnoxious misfit who lives in a stuffy house
full of high achievers. He suffers dyslexia that causes shame within his
‘perfect’ household. Worse, Aidan belongs to a criminal gang headed by a
psychopath that operates in a derelict house.
A female counterpart is needed to ‘save’ Aidan from a wretched
life full of torment. Her name is Laura, a young English teacher who had
believed her student to be a schoolchild needing a little brushing-up on
literacy. But she is shocked to encounter a loutish thug.
What I hadn’t realised was that both Aidan and Laura are two parts of me. Aidan is abused and trapped in a vile situation; Laura is
the part of me I believed I was: un-abused and ‘free.’
My Parasitical Novel
With locations crystal-clear in my mind, I drew maps
and sketches, including a railway track and woods that backed onto the derelict
house where Aidan frequents. In response, my fantasy world intensified and grew
clearer.
When I turned 18, I made the momentous decision to put
it all in a novel. My first draft was called The Upstairs Room before I called it The Lessons.
This novel is presently on Kindle but I have changed the title and used a different pseudonym
in order to retain my anonymity.
I toiled over The Lessons
for 3 decades with the belief I had never been abused whatsoever.
When I was 51, I discovered that my mother’s
half-brother had lived in the cottage with us for over a year when I was a toddler. The year was
1968 and I was 3.
To this point, I believed he had stayed only briefly
and had little to do with us.
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| An early draft of my novel The Lessons |
A complex series of events caused my unearthing of
horrific memories of a man suffocating me on my bed before he assaulted me. Other memories followed suit, including being raped in the guestroom as well as other locations of my childhood home.
This terrible realization has thrown my life into
turmoil.
Horribly, Aidan possessed the name of my
uncle: Dan. Uncle Dan. Nan or Dad would naturally have addressed him ‘Hey, Dan’
or something like that. To my toddler ears, I would have simply heard ‘Aidan.’
Being so young, I will never know the extent of the
abuse my half-uncle had unleashed upon me. Ultimately, I will never know how
many times he had raped me. Such an uncertainty is terrible to live with.
The man that I had drawn in the margins of sketchbooks
when I was 14 was in fact a rapist. He was not a childhood familiar at all.
Worse, The Lessons novel cast
further clues to the horrors of my toddlerhood. However, these clues are hidden
behind the guise of an apparent psychological thriller about a teacher trying
to set free her criminal student. The nastiness of the novel is not crime nor
drug abuse, but about rape and loss of innocence.
