Chapter Thirty-Two #2
‘I wasn’t trained to care about myself or have standards about how other people treated me. That’s the problem. So when some guy turns out to treat you like absolute crap, you think that’s normal. That it’s actually your fault. Your fault they’re upset, your fault they don’t have what they want.’
Dianne’s face is stony.
‘But it’s familiar. You leave an abusive home and go right into abusive relationships. It was like I had a beacon on me that shone for people like Geoff: someone who wanted a person to treat like absolute crap and who would accept it.’
‘What was he like with the children?’ asks Rose.
‘He was a tough father. Made a big deal out of everyone doing their best, yadda yadda. Was rarely angry with them, though. He had different rules with different people. He liked the girls – Lauren was so clever, so he adored that. His clever daughter. Ellie was very pretty and brilliant at sports, so that was all inherited from him too.’
‘They never witnessed his cruelty to you?’ Rose asks.
‘They certainly did as they got older but I made it all seem OK. “Daddy and Mummy were having words,” or “Mummy did something silly” …
‘I protected them as well as I could from him. I never thought of leaving because I thought I was stupid, I thought I was all the useless things he told me I was. I made us a part of the community. We were always having cake sales, the kids played all sorts of sports, Lauren played clarinet for years. The hours I spent in the car driving them around. I got us into a car pool. Other women were coming into our house picking the kids up. We always had someone else’s child in for dinner. ’
‘You hid in the herd,’ says Rose softly.
‘Yeah. Geoff didn’t realise what I was doing. He liked it because I told my friends he was the perfect man. I said we would have lovely special dinners at home when the kids were in bed. I said I was so lucky to be with the love of my life.’
Dianne stares up at Rose.
‘People really believed that shit,’ she growls.
‘Nobody ever looked any further. I mean, a fucking idiot with half a brain cell could see that I was exhausted, never had any money for myself although my husband had a decent job.
I froze when he came into a room, jumped if I heard a loud noise – I was a walking, talking case of domestic abuse and nobody noticed.
‘I was so thin, my mind raced and my heart raced, I was always behind. Behind with the laundry, running low on housekeeping, trying to keep up with all the school stuff and parents’ groups, doing the kids’ homework with them.
He never did anything. Came home from work and sat on the verandah with a beer,’ Dianne went on.
‘At night, he’d expect the kids to be in bed, the place tidy and me to be waiting for him in our bed. I always said yes.’
Her face looks haunted but she keeps going, as if she has to get it all out in one go.
‘He’d lie on top of me, bang and bang into me and I’d cry, silent crying, but still crying. I’d have tears on my face. He’d see me wiping them away and he never said anything. I was his, he could do what he liked to me.’
‘I am so sorry you had to go through this—’ began Rose but Dianne waves her concern away.
‘Just let me get to the end. But you can’t tell anyone, OK? Promise?’
‘I promise but you can’t blame yourself, Dianne.’
‘I do. I married the bastard. I chose him. It’s like my daughter Ellie’s married to Tate and I don’t trust him.
He seems fine but then every man can seem fine from the outside.
I’m not sure if I’m any judge. Because how can I be?
I lived with abuse for so long, all my life, to be honest, and I never knew. I thought it was normal.’
‘You explain your family of origin pretty well,’ Rose says. ‘A life of never confronting anything, of emotional cruelty, the silent treatment. How could you have known that was wrong when Geoff began doing the same thing to you?’
Dianne drinks some of her sparkling water.
‘Perhaps you didn’t choose him, either, Dianne. Perhaps he chose you. Abusers are very good at finding the sort of people who’ll …’ Rose reaches blindly for the words.
‘Who’ll be stupid enough to put up with them?’ finishes Dianne harshly.
‘No, not that. People who are gentle, people who are used to being treated badly within their families: there are a lot of people like that in the world. They’re not victims, Dianne, they’re simply people who did not see the red flags.
If you’ve been raised to think that anger and cruelty are acceptable from the people who are supposed to love you, then you assume that you are loved by people who do that later in life. ’
‘When Geoff died the girls were so upset and I didn’t know how to comfort them. After the numbness wore off, I had to pretend to be sad, pretend to keep the whole thing going. Otherwise, I’d be saying that their whole happy childhood is a myth. I can’t do that, can I?’
‘Perhaps you can?’ asks Rose. ‘Tell me, how did Geoff die?’
Dianne closes her eyes as if she cannot possibly look at another person while she recounts this part of her story.
‘We were home together, he was up on some steps trying to change a lightbulb. The back of the house has an extension and there’s a high ceiling with the skylight.
‘I had to wait around always whenever he did any stuff around the house, like his slave. And then one moment, his face changed. I could see it happening, it looked as if he was in pain and he dropped the bulb and he grabbed his arm. I knew he was having a heart attack.’
‘Go on,’ says Rose gently, but Dianne doesn’t open her eyes.
‘He fell onto the floor and he lay there still moving, calling out for me to call an ambulance. If he’d been able to cry out loudly, some of the neighbours might have heard him but his voice was so faint. So weak …’
Dianne finally opens her eyes.
‘I sat on a kitchen chair and I watched him,’ she says quietly. ‘I watched him die, Rose. It didn’t take long: five minutes, a hundred minutes, I don’t know.’
‘You didn’t kill him, Dianne, you know that,’ says Rose, wondering if this is what upsets Dianne.
‘I know I didn’t,’ says Dianne, ‘but I had so much guilt about it, for not calling the ambulance. I could have saved him.’ She shrugs.
‘I could have performed CPR. But I didn’t.
For about a week after the funeral, I was numb.
The girls were worried about me. Ellie said I needed to see the doctor and I thought of all the times I’d go to the doctor for nerves and he’d tell me I was lucky I had a good man – ha! ’
Rose feels overwhelmed with compassion for Dianne but the only thing she can do right now is hear her confession.
‘Then one day I woke up and I realised he was gone.’
Dianne is whispering now.
‘I was free. There was nobody to tell me that I was stupid, nobody to shout at me. I didn’t have to jump through hoops any more for Geoff.
Do you know what I felt then, Rose?’ Dianne asks, not waiting for an answer.
‘Bloody rage. Rage that I hadn’t known how to escape, rage that he’d won in the end.
He was dead and he’d destroyed my life. The rage won’t go. It’s there all the time—’
‘You’ve lived on an emotional tightrope for years,’ says Rose, ‘living in virtual battlefield conditions for years. That takes its toll on every part of the body. I think in time, and you’ll need to discuss this with a future therapist, but you’ve got to think of telling your family what it was really like.
They’re going to want to know where the rage came from, what made you so upset,’ Rose adds.
‘That’s ruining the memory of their perfect childhood,’ says Dianne sadly.
‘Do you think it’s possible that they already know the truth?
’ Rose asks carefully. ‘They might never have put words on what they grew up with but they’ll know somewhere deep inside that their father treated you badly.
Just because he didn’t hit you does not make it OK.
It’s still domestic abuse. Emotional abuse. ’
‘If a man hits you, you have a bruise, wounds. What Geoff did to me – the wounds were on the inside. I still can’t cry about him, though. I didn’t cry at the funeral. Everyone thought I was too numb with grief,’ she laughs loudly. ‘It wasn’t grief, it was numbness …’
‘It might take a long time to cry,’ Rose says. ‘Please realise that your anger makes total sense. All your life, you haven’t been able to be angry in case it upset someone. That anger goes somewhere – inside you. Now that it’s safe, the anger is coming out.’
They sit there in silence. Rose drinks some water. Minutes pass. Twenty minutes.
Rose knows that sometimes walking alongside someone in pain, being silent with them, is enough.
Finally, she notices that Dianne has started to cry. Not heaving sobs the way children cry. But a stream of silent tears.
Dianne doesn’t move to wipe them away: instead she lets them flood out.
Rose picks up the box of tissues from the shelves and puts it beside Dianne. Then she sits back in her chair, silently. She has nowhere else more important to be.