STEPS

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE Revisiting

Outside this current window, Spring is budding. Back in the suburbs, I tell myself it's time maybe. Laptop and cigarettes, I play-act leaving the house, sitting in a crowded cafe and sipping espresso, typing outdoors - where the people and the conversations will perhaps enliven me. I promise to do this, once the weather fines up. Take the boys to a cafe for an hour each day, the three of us sharing a continuing conversation.

"Another re-invention, chair at a cafe regular at nine and glasses perched on nose stuck in a laptop. Fingers alternating between words and a short black - five sugars so it sits like solid. The curious woman-child sitting alone and taking in the sights of people merging, re-emerging from situations long and best forgotten. I can do this. Shift my focus from rooftops to mass tabletops. From four beige walls one window, to colourful humanity promenading grandly and exchanging loud crass greetings."

See, it surfaces often, the realisation I've failed to create many joyful memories. What can my boys keep, apart from my isolation? My whining and my unpalatable frustration! It's not too late. There is still time to offer something other than reflection and instruction. I do contain everyday joys inside me, hopeful words. The optimist still lurks somewhere, albeit hiding always from the prospect of unintended discovery.

Yet the guilt freezes me in place. Always looking back, I drown over and over, this guilt thick, viscous. It has no bottom; I can only flail on the cloying surface, trying to stay afloat. Sure I got fucked over. But what I did! The chaos I brought forth, the calamity! Inescapable evidence everywhere: The exhorbitant rent my brother pays for us - so that we can be close in distance again. The second-hand clothes I wear - never mind the romanticising. My car banged up because I wasn't ever responsible enough to follow through. The apathy...

The accident not my fault, the guilty party responsible for the repairs, yet I did nothing and now the broken car is yet another constant reminder. I look at it whenever I open the front door: There's my screwed-up logic, right there.

My mother stopped dancing. I stopped living. Everything tied up, connected, everything pointing to then, the young wide-eyed child too afraid to pee, the monster persisting in the basement. The actions of a few man-devils bouncing back and forth through three generations.

...I came across the first one again at fifteen, holidaying with my parents in the old country. Walking down the street he going one way, I the other, we instantly recognised each other. Everything stopped. I stopped - I was paralysed - a statue held in place by the familiar fear. He passed me by so fucking slowly, head high, hands in pockets, the street narrow and empty...

Only then did I move, running, running, escaping the way I never could back then. Aware I should have screamed, punched out at him, hurt him so he also suffered pain. Too few the years though, too vivid the horror - hell - I was almost his height yet he still appeared larger, still a menace I needed to flee from.

Did he turn and witness this fleeing? What did he see those slow moments passing me? The statue unmoving, caught up in the dank basement again, water ankle deep in places from the nearby sea flooding it when the tide changed. Did he too re-visit the scene of my undoing?

I recall it now and it still bothers me. My sudden presence facilitating his memories, perhaps causing some further satisfaction - a sordid amusement in the recollection? Not guilt though. Fear? No. Not in him. The fear only ever lives in me. He continued walking as he'd been living, moving from me to others perhaps, retaining only the physical encounters, none of the aftermath.

I could have reported him to the authorities. Was I the only one he'd violated? Images of other little girls suffering similar fates or worse... they haunt me to this day. Men like him don't stop. They need to be stopped, locked away, done over by other criminals who despite their own screw-ups still maintain a moral code - he being the worst among them. Rightfully, once I became aware I should have acted on this awareness. Screamed my accusations loud, so they crossed oceans and reached him, destroyed him.

I expected them not to believe me I guess - thus the reluctance. To relive the horror, the smallest details, only to have it all brushed away... something I made up. My secret public, argued over, analysed and scrutinised. The memories disputed, argued over by men in pinstripe suits, bow ties and expensive haircuts. Perhaps deliberating, claiming I overreacted, my remembering out of context. Impossible to reconstruct in an adult brain the memories of a child?

Oh but how I wanted to howl though. There, in the middle of the street. Let it out, the misery, the helplessness, the tragedy accompanying me.

"Fuck you! Die you bastard! Someone chop his balls off so he doesn't do it again!"

His passing by yet another violation, another brush with unfairness; the fact he remained free, walking down the street - free whilst I existed ever imprisoned in the horror of his passage?

What if my parents hadn't migrated? I have reflected on this too sometimes. Would the abuse have continued until I lost my mind completely? Or would I finally have spoken out? What of being believed back then, especially by a father considering himself already shamed by a member of his family? Questions... I've sat alone too long, trying to source answers from a mind incapable, only ever considering, never appeasing the need to know.

Maybe they would have covered it up, my family. Perhaps the right thing to be done those years, for there was no spotlight on abusers, evil things dealt with quickly, quietly. Shame was shame, never mind who was responsible and who the victim. Or, maybe... I fancy this image of my father beating him senseless. Venting his anguish until the bastard lay in a bloody heap, this punishment eliciting enough fear so he stopped hurting other children. The idea of my father as the hero? Guilt here too. Did I deny him the opportunity only to despise him for a lifetime because he never once presented this heroic self?

It is strange now, reconstructing my past without the precious words, the impressions from the child, the teenager, the young adult. Retracing steps from memory alone? Most people do this as a given, I understand. They - comparable to me now - don't have the luxury of myriad pages collaborating on their recollection of history. Huh. It feels inadequate, relying on a mind full of all the other accumulated crap.

Then again, most people never contend with sudden pauses akin to this one, their passage from childhood to adult smooth and consistent. Linear in its progression their one path, their journey getting from there to here; what I'd call normal life. Stages achieved at expected and precise time intervals. No sudden interruptions, no detours, no reaching stages before the comprehension is in place. No real need thus to revisit, review, re-fucking-live over and over to apply this comprehension.