The Little Prisoner_ A Memoir - Jane Elliott [57]
‘It’s not you,’ I kept assuring him. ‘It’s not you.’
‘So what is it?’ he wanted to know, his anger and frustration at our lack of lovemaking made worse by tiredness. He was such a kind and patient man and I was driving him away, ruining his life just like I’d ruined my other boyfriends’, and just like I was ruining my baby’s. It seemed that anyone who came close to me was immediately sucked into my terrible world of secrets and pain and fear. I had to do something to stop Steve from deciding that there was no future for us, to stop the relationship crumbling away to nothing, leaving Emma and me totally alone and vulnerable once more. I had to make him understand what had happened to me, why it seemed as if I was losing my mind, but I could no more find the words than jump from an aeroplane without a parachute. It was no good, I told myself, I was going to have to make the jump, I couldn’t put it off any longer.
‘There’s something I have to tell you …’ I said, but as I opened my mouth I saw all the terrifying ramifications of what I was about to tell him and my nerve deserted me again. ‘I’ve got to get Cheryl!’
‘What do you mean?’ He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. It must have seemed as though he was living with a total madwoman.
I didn’t stop to explain any more, I just ran out of the flat in my dressing-gown, leaving him open-mouthed and confused at the window as I stumbled tearfully down the road to Cheryl’s house and hammered on the door to wake her up.
‘What is it?’ Cheryl’s head popped out of the window upstairs. I could hear her husband’s sleepy voice in the background asking what was going on.
‘Is she alright?’ I heard him say.
‘I really need you,’ I called up, my throat so tight I was choking on the words as I fought back the hysteria. ‘You’re going to have to come with me.’
Cheryl probably wasn’t too thrilled at being woken up and dragged out into the cold night, but she was the only person in the world who really understood what was wrong with me.
She bustled back across the road with me, tying up her dressing-gown cord as she went, probably eager to get me back indoors before I woke the rest of the street up. She was such a good friend I knew she would do whatever I asked of her without hesitation. I’d always been lucky with my friends – the ones I was allowed to keep.
Now I knew there was no going back. I had made the jump from the plane and was plummeting towards the earth. Steve was going to find out everything over the next few hours.
I was already regretting taking the plunge. Steve was such a straightforward bloke. Until he met me his answer to anything like this would just have been to go to the police and report it, but in my world things were far more complicated than that. I was so frightened I wouldn’t be able to explain to him how important it was that he guarded my secret as closely as I had guarded it all these years. I knew how much it was going to hurt him and I wasn’t sure he would be able to control his anger. I was terrified of what he would do and what the consequences would be.
He was waiting for us in the front room. His anger had subsided now that Cheryl was there, just leaving the puzzlement and an air of tension as he waited to find out once and for all what was going on. He must have known that he was about to discover something bad and it must have made him nervous. What secret could be so terrible that I had allowed it to almost drive us apart when we loved each other so much?
I’d already told Steve a bit about what had happened to Cheryl when she was a child, probably because I was trying to edge him towards understanding my world even before I was ready to tell him the truth, but I don’t know if he had completely believed it. People who have had safe, protected and loving childhoods find it almost impossible to believe what goes on in the sort of homes Cheryl and I come from. It takes them