Escape From Evil - Cathy Wilson [124]
As soon as the door was closed, Peter pulled out a sharp breadknife and forced the girls to drink vodka, wine and cider and swallow pills – or else. One of them passed out quickly. The other was sick, then tried to fight. That was when Peter turned nasty. He’d raped the girl, then sodomized her.
The only good thing from my point of view was that Daniel was sent to his room first. Apparently, he’d watched The Terminator, which normally I would have hated. On this occasion, it was better than what was going on in the room next door.
But that hadn’t been the end of it for him. The girl who’d fought back had managed to twist Peter’s arm so the breadknife cut into his calf. That’s when he called for my son, my precious son, to fetch ice from the freezer to stem the bleeding. Peter could have gone himself, I know he could. When I’d seen him later that night there was nothing wrong with his leg. But for some reason he wanted my terrified four-year-old to come out, to see what was going on, to be involved. Daniel had to go right over to where the naked girl was writhing and sobbing in agony and watch while his dad shouted at her to be quiet. He had to stand there, shaking, while Peter clumsily packed ice onto his wound. And all the while he couldn’t take his eyes off the knife in his dad’s hand.
Apparently, the girl begged him for help. But what could Daniel do? He was four years old and traumatized by what he saw. As soon as he could, he ran back into his room and tried to drown out the screams with Arnie Schwarzenegger.
The guilt at not picking up on any signs my son had shown was nothing, though, compared to the anxiety that filled me over what might have been. If Peter was capable of stabbing and torturing strangers, then he was more than capable of doing it to family. What would have happened if the girls hadn’t entered Peter’s flat? Would the bloodlust have still been there? Would he have found someone else?
Or would he have taken it out on Daniel?
Not knowing is a dangerous place to be. Your brain needs information that you just don’t have. So you start to invent things, nightmare scenarios that get worse and worse with every run-through. You start to obsess about the ‘what ifs’ and then you start looking for the clues that were never there. At a time when I should have been concentrating on my son and the future, my only thought was for the past. It was typical of Peter that, two years after I’d left him, he still had the power to completely screw up my mind.
However, it was Daniel’s mind I was most concerned about. No human being should witness the things he’d endured, much less a child. He was four, so he wouldn’t understand rape and alcohol. He saw the girls crying and screaming and he knew they were hurt. But imagine how it looked to him. Every child instinctively believes their parents are right. Look how I’d blindly followed my mother’s crazy plans and been completely unaware that how we were living wasn’t normal. I’d laid lino, rolled joints, skipped school till I was seven and I didn’t have a clue it was wrong. It was the same for Daniel, but far, far worse.
Daniel hated seeing those girls get hurt. It felt wrong hearing their cries, but Daddy wouldn’t do anything wrong, would he? That’s how we’re programmed to think. Daddy was trying to stop them crying. He was angry that they kept screaming. But the girls wouldn’t stop.
There are so many things to hate Peter for that it’s hard to separate them. Even suggesting to Daniel that what he was doing was okay was unforgiveable, but that was something we could get over in time.
The thing I still to this day can’t forgive Peter for is making Daniel feel guilty. Without him, without the bait of playing with him while they waited, those girls might never have gone into that flat. Maybe Peter would have come up with a different temptation, we don’t know. But the girls had naturally assumed