CHAPTER 9

LOUISE

‘Get in the house!’ Louise yelled, almost screaming at us.

‘What’s wrong?’ I shouted as we safely dragged Mary, Louise’s four-year-old daughter, back inside.

We were all panting, our eyes popping out of our heads. Louise was bordering on the hysterical. The dog, Shep – half border collie, half god knows what – barked defiantly at the window overlooking the back garden as the scene unfolded before us.

‘What’s wrong?’ I repeated to Louise, the only grown-up available for sensible comment. ‘What is it?’

‘There’s a snake in the garden. And it’s fighting with Blackie.’

We all looked out to see the imaginatively named cat wrestling with something. Blackie stood up on her hind legs, scratching at this unknown assailant. She rolled about with it, biting it and giving it those bunny kicks that only cats can. Then she’d run away only to turn again to face this monster of the back garden.

We all climbed over each other, standing on the living room sofa to get a better, and safe, view of what was going on. ‘It looks like a short snake,’ someone, possibly me, shouted.

‘A snake? I’ll phone the police!’ Louise cried.

Being a nerdy, animal loving, inquisitive sort of soul, I knew that it was very unlikely that Blackie was having some kind of life and death struggle with an adder, the UK’s only poisonous snake. I thought, at the very worst, we could be dealing with a grass snake. A small, non-venomous creature that lived mainly on insects and very small mammals – of which Blackie wasn’t one.

Having bravely caught a lizard in my back garden with a table spoon and a jam jar a couple of years before, I felt I was more than suitably qualified to deal with whatever Blackie was sinking her teeth into.

In a true Captain Oates style, I stood at the back door and, in as manly a voice as my 11-year-old pre-pubescent form could muster, I said, ‘I’m going out there. Keep the door closed.’

To be brutally honest, Blackie was infinitely scarier than the beast I finally managed to catch using the coffee jar and bit of card that I’d been provided with. She had decided that since she was getting the upper hand, this thing she had in her vice-like grip was hers to eat. After a great deal of growling, scratching and hissing I finally managed to rescue the poor, now clearly defenceless, creature.

It was a caterpillar. Granted it was a fucking huge caterpillar – the biggest I’ve seen outside of London zoo – but it was a caterpillar nonetheless. It did have a big spike growing out of its rear end, but that was more decorative than offensive. For those of you who are interested, it was probably the caterpillar of the humming bird hawk moth.

So that was Louise and her family.

Histrionic. Dramatic. Working as a family unit in an ‘all for one and one for all’ kind of style. I think she liked the image of the mother bear looking after her cubs.

Although she was always around, helping out, popping in, doing this and that, making her an invaluable member of our world, I have no memory of Louise in my early years – she left the area when I was two or three. Not to worry though, I’m sure she was delighted that her babysitting duties would follow her wherever she went. Mum seemed to decant Jim and I on a regular basis. Louise didn’t work at the time; she was busy looking after child number one. This meant that Mum had a regular, cheap, not terribly handy (being eight miles away) childcare service.

Already though, I was developing my ‘normal rules need not apply’ approach to life. Louise had a large free-standing cabinet in her kitchen. It held all the cutlery and crockery necessary for normal domestic life. Being an independent sort, I liked to get my own cup when I was thirsty. Louise had a vast array of Tupperware, so the likelihood of me chewing up one of her tumblers and bleeding to death was fairly slim.

Since the taps were out of reach to the young Christopher, Louise felt it only reasonable to keep the cups on the top shelf of the cabinet so that she could be in charge of the whole drink-getting process.

So – cup, top shelf, and an independent, and some say spoilt, fouryear-old in need of a drink. Now is probably a good time to mention that Louise didn’t have the best of relationships with Mum. With this in mind, she was always keen to please Mum, trying to demonstrate she was capable in all things domestic. How Mum laughed when she found her little boy just as he had managed to climb to the top shelf of the cabinet. I’m sure her sides were fairly splitting with mirth as it toppled over, the top crashing into the opposite wall of the kitchen, all of Louise’s plates, glasses, knives and forks whizzing past my poor little head. I think if the kitchen had been a foot wider, the cabinet wouldn’t have been stopped in its fall and I would have been squashed flat.

Okay, you’ve got me – no one was laughing. Least of all me. I obviously felt that this was a golden opportunity to demonstrate to everyone around me that, in spite of my trauma, my lungs were still in perfect working order.

And so it was. The more poor Louise tried to impress Mum, the more I would contrive to make things go completely tits up. As time went by, I think Louise gradually decided that there was absolutely no pleasing Mum. So she began to rebel in her own little way. Not terribly overtly – no, Louise chose a more surreptitious way to kick back at Mum. She found she could be a little bit naughty through Jim and me.

For example, having been taught the beauty of French nursery rhymes by my darling carer, it came as a complete surprise to me at school when nobody else finished the song Frere Jaques with the line, ‘Shit and Piss Marie.’

Louise’s crazed revenge didn’t stop there. Oh no. Although Mum was happy for me to watch horror films with her while curled up on the sofa with her, she made sure that my youthful mind was not overly terrorised by inappropriate nasties. She limited my exposure to horror to The Hammer House of Horror – namely films where you could tell that the bad guy was someone dressed up and where the only truly horrific thing was the acting.

Louise introduced us to films like Children of the Damned and a variety of horror books that kept my youthful imagination going for hours. It all felt wonderfully conspiratorial. Louise would allow us access to these forbidden fruits in return for our silence. Mum didn’t need to know a thing. So, over the years we saw Louise as someone who was a little whacky – Bohemian even – who understood us kids and our needs to be just a little bit off-the-rails.

At times, it became a little dull for me in the Young household, you know, having to be the youngest and everything. At Louise’s I wasn’t. At Louise’s I could coerce and drag her son Michael around, getting him to do the things that I wanted to do, play the games I wanted to play, and generally push him around. Michael and I would spend hours digging about in the dirt, finding all kinds of creepy crawlies to examine.

We noticed that, occasionally, when an ant from one nest wandered into the territory of another nest, then battle would commence. Now this was better than telly. One-on-one was all terribly interesting, but what happens when you get a few ants from each side to square up to each other? What happens when, say for example, we were to dig up one nest and move a whole bunch of ants next door to another? The problem with pitting black ant against black ant was that it was tricky, unless you were an ant, to work out who was on whose side. We solved that problem by moving a red ant nest in with a mountain of black ants.

See what happens when you leave me to my own devices? When you put me in charge? It’s like Lord of the Flies – well, kind of.

Time flew while we were having fun. Louise marked the years by measuring us and scoring lines on the wall next to her pantry. I remember that some weeks there’d be frenzied measuring activity when I was sure, absolutely positive that I was due a growth spurt. We’d listen to sixties music. The Beach Boys, Bread, the Kinks, the Beatles, Herman’s Hermits and The Tremeloes were all common currency. Occasionally Louise would let Keith put something on the stereo that he liked, but it was invariably some heavy metal shite that didn’t make any reference to falling in or out of love whatsoever.

Louise had whacky friends – her wild and crazy parties were spoken about in hushed tones with knowing winks and snorting laughter. In short, Louise was fun.

And then Mum died.

For a long time, Louise ceased to exist. I just assumed she had her own family to look after. She was busy with her own stuff. But after two or three years of homemade misery, I gradually decided that it was time to have Louise back in my life. At 14, I was more than able to use public transport and, if Keith, or one of his friends was driving the bus, I could get to travel for free. I had the passport to Northamptonshire.

It was still the same. Fun and a little conspiratorial. Since Michael was four years younger than me, I suddenly felt that I was in on the ‘in jokes’. I was involved in the grown-up giggles and nods. This was great fun – and it felt like growing up.

Since my home was a complete pigsty, Louise’s house offered me a place to bring my mates. Derek, Colin and Barney all had a sample of my new surrogate mother’s somewhat irreverent lifestyle. Much of the time though, it was just me who climbed on the 265 bus to Kettering to get away from it all.

The more I visited Louise though, the more I gradually became aware that not everything was as it seemed. Louise suffered from something she and her family referred to as her ‘funnies’. At these times, she would take to her bed and take a blue (bomber) or yellow (peril) tablet as the occasion would demand. At particularly bad times, she’d take both.

Over a couple of months, Louise started to become a little more serious. She told me intimate information about her life and family and that she was sexually abused from a young age. Somewhere deep down I felt that I had heard somewhere that Louise was prone to making up stories, and so internally I questioned her history.

My mind raced. What would she have to gain by lying? She must be telling the truth. I made this conclusion purely based on the fact that, at the time, I liked Louise. She’d looked after me, cared for me – filling that awful vacuum following Mum’s death. I didn’t ask any of the obvious questions – When? Where? Who? How long has this been going on? How old were you when they first did it? Was it still going on?

Almost 30 years later, Louise would tell me that it had been going on since she was six years old and that it had continued well into her adulthood. Fucking hell.

I continued to visit Louise. We spent more and more time together – somehow, we were brought closer by this awful secret she’d shared. In my normal, everyday life I continued to struggle with my relationships with other people. I was still aggressive towards boys and, because of my complete lack of fashionable clothing I felt that I wasn’t even on the starting grid in my race to win the heart of a girl. As I grew though, I came to realise that I was quite handsome, if you caught me in a particular light and if I didn’t smile too broadly. Linda Reid, a girl in my class at school, had stopped a small discussion group we were having in English to tell me what stunning blue eyes I had. Although I’d wanted to die on the spot it did make me think, D’you know, you might just have something there.

One day I was standing in the kitchen at Louise’s house. She had a mirror just next to the sink. I looked at my face, thinking that there might be some hope for me, when Louise walked past and said, ‘You are really handsome.’

I felt great. It put a bit of a skip in my step. But then, as a kind of surrogate mother she was meant to say things like that, wasn’t she?

In a world that had been bereft of physical contact except for the occasional punch-up, Louise made me feel warm and happy again with the occasional hug, telling me that she loved me and I was funny.

It was while I was admiring myself in that same mirror (had I become a bit self-obsessed?) that Louise said something slightly unusual. She told me that she really liked the way I blew gently into her ear.

I had never blown into Louise’s ear, gale force or otherwise. I had never even thought of doing it. Why would she say that? And yet it still made me smile. There I was, 15 years old with the body of a man, the mental age of a six-year-old, and the emotional age of an infant. Of course it made me smile.

She began to look at me differently. There was prolonged eye contact. There was an altogether new kind of smile when she looked at me. She acted all twitterpated every time I was around her. She touched me more and more. She’d stroke my head, run her hands over my shoulders, and occasionally she’d cheekily pinch my bum and giggle.

I really liked this new-found attention. I’d look forward to my visits to Louise’s. I found myself hoping that I’d catch her at times when Keith was on a late shift and the kids were in bed. We’d listen to our sixties music together. We’d talk about everything and nothing.

I was round Louise’s one afternoon when I’d bunked off school. She didn’t mind that sort of thing, being a free thinker. Keith was at work and the kids were at school. We’d been talking about relationships. I had explained that, even though I’d gone out with Theresa Paton for a couple of weeks and had kissed her with tongues, I wasn’t really ready for that girlfriend / boyfriend kind of nonsense.

I was sitting in my usual place next to the stereo and Louise was sitting on the sofa opposite. She looked at me very intensely and said, ‘Here, let me help you with that.’

She walked across the room and sat next to me on the floor. She undid my trousers, took out my cock and began to wank me slowly at the same time as kissing my mouth deeply. She stopped kissing me and concentrated on my cock.

My mind was swimming. Suddenly my legs felt terribly far away. The room, my cock, Louise – everything was miles away. I found myself fixing my gaze on a round glass picture on the wall. It had a kind of three-dimensional effect – a stag had been painted (badly) on the glass in the foreground and a scene from the Scottish Highlands had been printed on the paper in the background. Dad had bought it for Louise when we’d gone up to Scotland after Mum had died.

Suddenly she stopped, ‘Shit, Michael will be home from school in a minute. You’d better do yourself up.’

I was back into the world of reality again. I hurriedly did up my trousers. What the fuck had just happened? Michael did come home from school; Mary came home too and we all had tea.

A week or so later Louise and I went out for a drink at the pub across the road. Getting served with alcohol wasn’t really a problem since, at 15, I looked about 47. I hadn’t stopped thinking about what happened. I couldn’t speak to anyone about it –except Louise.

On the way home we walked arm in arm as we chatted about nothing. Then we stopped in a secluded spot just under some trees and she kissed me. I was so confused, but turned on. I kissed her back. Louise started to cry. My head was spinning – my mind and body were completely out of control. I wanted to kiss her – shit, I wanted to fuck her – and here she was crying.

When we got back to the house we told Keith that we were going upstairs to talk. This was nothing particularly unusual for him, since Louise and I appeared pretty close and we did spend a lot of time talking. Keith wasn’t a terribly big fan of chatting so it kind of let him off the hook. Louise and I went upstairs, undressed each other and I lost my virginity. I came inside her very quickly with her shouting, ‘There – there – there!’ with Keith watching the television downstairs.

We went back downstairs and watched television with Keith for a while. We might have had a bacon roll, we might have had some hot chocolate – who knows? I went to bed in Michael’s room and she went back to bed with Keith.

I lay awake for hours listening to Michael’s gentle snoring. What the fuck had I done? What the fuck had we done? This had to stop and it had to stop now.

The following day I got up with Michael, Mary, and Keith and I waved them all off to school and work promising that, at some point during the day, I would wash the breakfast dishes. Later that morning I heard Louise in the shower. I decided I would confront her with my decision – nipping it in the bud before we really fucked things up.

I met her coming out of the shower and we kissed. We went into the bedroom and we rolled about on the bed for a bit. I pulled away. ‘This has got to stop,’ I said, ‘It’s wrong.’

Louise’s response came a bit as a surprise, ‘You fucking wimp!’ I’ll never forget that derisory look on her face as she sneered at me. ‘Fuck off.’

So I did. I fucked off. I broke my promise to Keith and the kids.

For the following week, my mind was in complete turmoil. It was wrong – it was right. I thought that she, as the adult, would’ve agreed with me. I thought she would have said something along the lines of, ‘You’re absolutely right Christopher, we’ve made a terrible mistake. Let’s just try and get our relationship back to where it was.’

I had to go back and talk to her about it. ‘Fuck off’ was not a good way to leave things. I went back. We went out for a drink and we talked about it. ‘I’m in love with you, Christopher,’ she said. This wasn’t fucking helping! I was 15 years old and she was in her early thirties. It shouldn’t have been down to me to be saying, ‘You can’t be – you’re like my mum.’ And she was. Ever since I’d sought out the shelter of her family, she’d done all the things that I’d imagine my mum would have done for me.

‘But I’m not.’ She stressed the word ‘not’ like that made it all okay. ‘I want to be with you.’

This emotional table tennis continued throughout the evening. I went to bed as soon as we got back and left early in the morning. What if she told Keith? Or Dad? Or anyone? Oh my fucking god – what a mess.

I let a few weeks go by without seeing her again. Life went on as normal. Dad was still shit, the house was still a dump, I still relied on my friends’ parents to feed me.

What about Derek? Fuck, I couldn’t even tell my best friend about what had happened. Surely this would stretch the boundaries of friendship even for us. I remember when we’d been about 12, he and I sat ourselves down and vowed to tell each other our most terrible secrets. I can’t remember Derek’s. Shit. We’d built all that stress and nonsense around it, and I can’t even remember what his terrible truth was.

In case Derek has forgotten I told him that, as a young child, I really liked Tuc biscuits. Not a crime in itself, I hear you cry. The horrible thing was that I liked to chew up one Tuc biscuit and gob it out onto another, placing another on top and then devouring it. I invented the Tuc sandwich – don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

The Louise thing though – god, that was just unchartered territory. I had to go back and talk to Louise again. She was the only person in the world that I could discuss this with. And so I went back again and we went for a drink.

‘I’m pregnant.’ She stated this in the same bland way that she’d said, ‘I was sexually abused when I was younger.’

Being unaccustomed to women saying such things to me, I blurted out, ‘How do you know?’

‘A woman just knows these kinds of things. You forget, I’ve had two children already.’

This couldn’t get any worse. I asked her about abortion and she said that there was absolutely no way that she would consider such a thing. Fuck. It wasn’t meant to be like this. I was 15 years old and the woman I thought of as my surrogate mother was going to have my baby.

I went home again. I didn’t go back to Louise’s for about a month. In the meantime, I wandered about in a shocked daze. What the fuck was I going to do? This was no good. I couldn’t avoid her. I couldn’t avoid the situation any longer. I had to be responsible.

In time-honoured tradition, I went round to Louise’s house and we went out for a drink. ‘What are we going to do about this baby?’ I said, taking the bull by the horns.

‘Oh,’ she began nonchalantly, ‘I’m not pregnant. There isn’t going to be a baby.’

I had to get away from her. She was dangerous. She seemed to have absolutely no insight into what all this was doing to me. My whole world was spinning uncontrollably. Nothing was real.

30 years later Louise asked me, ‘If things were so terrible at home, why didn’t you come to me?’

I wish, I wish, I wish I’d said the first thing that came into my mind. ‘Because, Louise, when I did, you fucked me.’

I had almost no contact with Louise for the next two years. Dad, Jim and Stuart felt I was being ridiculous. ‘Surely nothing is worth destroying your relationship with her?’ appeared to be the recurring theme. If someone had said, ‘Why don’t you just kiss and make up?’ one more time, I swear I would fucking kill them.

I couldn’t tell anyone. I had to hold this inside until the day I died. I thought I had taken the whole messy business, folded it up and stuck it in the cupboard under the stairs in my mind never to see the light of day again. But things just don’t work that way, do they?

About six years later, after I’d flunked out of school, nearly lost both my arms, fallen out with Stuart after starting to talk to Louise again, only to find she’d broken all my confidences to put me right in the shit (I wondered what she would have thought if I’d broken some of her confidences?); after I’d got my A levels and finally, finally found myself at college – something strange happened.

I was doing physiology as part of my degree in psychology. We were looking at the body’s responses to stressful stimuli. We were looking at the good old ‘flight or fight’ response. The plan was to measure my response to having my bare foot plunged into a bucket of ice. To this end I was plugged into a heart rate monitor and a galvanic skin response thingy. The pupil of my left eye would be videoed.

It was all pretty straightforward, first-year psychology stuff. As all my fellow students expected, my heart rate rapidly increased, my sweat glands caused the GSR monitor to go off the scale and my pupils dilated to their maximum size.

The problem was I hadn’t actually put my foot in the ice bucket. No – what all the gizmos and gadgets were actually measuring was my response to seeing my own face on the video monitor. I bluffed my way out of this by saying that I wasn’t feeling very well.

It was then that I realised that I hadn’t looked at myself for six years. After what had happened with Louise, I was unable to look myself in the eye. I avoided looking at mirrors and my reflection in shop windows. Looking at photographs of myself made me feel physically sick.

Over those years I had decided that I was every bit as culpable for what had happened between me and Louise as she was. I saw it as tantamount to incest – as two consenting people choosing to break one of the most fundamental family rules. I was despicable and disgusting and I’d spent six years denying my own physical existence.

Fast forward with me to 1995 again. I’m back in Deacon Brodie’s Tavern with Jim. The Hungarian man has come and gone. It was 25 years after the incident with Louise. I really felt it was time he knew.

‘I’m not really sure how to deliver this, so I’m going to be short and sweet,’ I’d clearly been skirting around something all evening. It must have been a relief to him that I was finally getting down to it.

‘I lost my virginity to Louise when I was 17.’ I just couldn’t bring myself to tell him I’d been 15. Would he have jumped to my defence? Called the police? Encouraged me to use the full force of the law against this heinous child abuser?

If this had a massive emotional effect on Jim, he certainly didn’t show it. After a short pause for thought he said, ‘This makes no difference in the way I feel about you. You’re still the kind of guy I’d like to go out for a drink with.’

And that was it. I felt kind of thankful that he didn’t slap my face and leave, screaming things like, ‘You’re no brother of mine!’ I was also relieved that he didn’t say, ‘She did exactly the same with me.’

Mum dying of cancer; Dad becoming an alcoholic; abject fucking poverty and then shagging my surrogate mother – it all felt like it had happened yesterday.