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Friday, 19 January 2007
My Sista, the Ho'
The following e-mail correspondence between me and my brother is the sum total of my family's response to my 'outing' letters (see from Here There Be Tygers onwards).
The first 'answer' I received was from my brother, by telephone, on Friday the 12th of January. He left a message on my answering service to call him. This correspondence starts with my e-mail to him in answer to that call.
I have not answered his final e-mail.
Be warned - this is a long blog by necessity. I'd recommend you don't start reading it if you have a poor attention span.
I'm not sure if I will have anything further to say on this exercise in futility - at least in the immediate future - so I'm offering you this correspondence by way of closure. It has not been corrected, edited or censored and appears in its entirety.
MY FIRST E-MAIL TO ANDREW IN RESPONSE TO HIS PHONE CALL OF FRIDAY EVENING 12/1/06
Hi Andrew,
I got your message tonight. I'm afraid I don't want to talk at the moment.
I can't think of a polite way to say this so I'm just going to say it without beating around the bush. You are still emmeshed with your family. I know you are in regular contact with your mother and she told me that you also speak to/see your father (I'm assuming here that he's still alive - unless that's what you phoned to tell me?)
Given these circumstances I don't feel prepared to enter into any kind of dialogue, because the object here is for me to finish this, not keep it at one remove.
I appreciate that you may just have wanted to say your piece, good or bad. That's fine. Either way, whatever it is you want to say I'd rather you put it in writing to me.
You can write to me here at Poison Pixie with safety. It's only Max that sees these.
Please understand that although you may not intend it to be so you bring family baggage with you, in ways both visible and obvious and in ways both invisible and very subtle.
Bluntly put, I need to know what you want to say before I am prepared to listen to it.
All the best, Chancery
ANDREW'S RESPONSE E-MAIL TO ME 16/1/06 @ 6:38 AM
In no particular order.
I asked Isobel is she had been abused (I also said Hi! How have the last 25 years been for you, so I'm sure she was at ease)she couldn't remember anything like that happening. Not the conclusive proof I was expecting.
I got some clarification from my Mum about my recollections of her calling her dad a dirty old man - this version, she saw him in the back of a cinema with a prostitute.
I've been catching up with all my relatives, Robert, Joseph no recollections, connections with having abused you.
I'm a long way away from everybody and talking on the phone doesn't offer much insight.
You're right about my parents faults, if it wasn't for my own impressive list I'd be tempted to follow your lead.
One of the things I say to people, if asked, is that I'm not particularly interested in people spouting about their beliefs and principles unless there's been a cost involved in holding them. There's what you might hope you'd do, and that is pure fiction.
You're quite right i don't know you. But I did once, and loved the very bones of you in the useless, thoughtless way I've done most things in life, so my deal is as follows.
Tell me what happened, who with, how long, context, anything of substance. I appreciate you might not have clear memories. Be straight with me and write like you have in the email and then I'll ask the questions. If there is a case I can pursue then I'll pursue it.
This is not about me wanting to fight your battles, going to court, or helping you rebuild a broken life, or any other piece of fiction. I loved you and if someone, anyone, did things to you that they shouldn't have then I want to know.
One thing I would say, I lived with a girl who had been abused and when she finally got away from home she buried her memories and never thought for a second that anyone else could possibly be involved. She was amazed to find out later that her sisters were abused too and that, in all probability, he'd been abusing all of them from the off.
Andy
HIS SECOND E-MAIL SENT THAT SAME DAY AT 10: 04 PM
Just checking that this is the second email you've received from me. Acknowledge receipt or I'll have to phone, visit, etc...
MY REPLY SENT 17TH – FOLLOWING MORNING
Are you threatening me?
I'll answer you when I'm good and ready. And I'd like to point out that I don't owe you anything; neither details, explanations or to "Tell me what happened, who with, how long, context, anything of substance."
I suggest you drop the hectoring tone. You're not in the classroom now, and I'm not some cowed Henery bitch that you can herd up and pull into line.
Chancery
ANDREW'S REPLY LATER THAT SAME DAY
Why would you see it as a threat? And if I was threatening you - which I'm not - what difference would your tone make to me?
I'm merely trying to ascertain whether I'm dealing with:
Someone with a pathology rooted in a single extrapolated experience of abuse
A psychopath in the clinical sense. Robert D. Hare describes psychopaths as "intraspecies predators who use charm, manipulation, intimidation, and violence to control others and to satisfy their own selfish needs. Lacking in conscience and in feelings for others, they cold-bloodedly take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without the slightest sense of guilt or regret." "What is missing, in other words, are the very qualities that allow a human being to live in social harmony."
The product of a group of psychopaths systematically abusing a child
Someone with narcissistic personality disorder who found a supportive partner. As Wikipedia put it - Though individuals with NPD are often ambitious and capable, the inability to tolerate setbacks, disagreements or criticism, along with lack of empathy, make it difficult for such individuals to work cooperatively with others or to maintain long-term professional achievements [9]. With narcissistic personality disorder, the person's perceived fantastic grandiosity, often coupled with a hypomanic mood, is typically not commensurate with his or her real accomplishments.
The interpersonal relationships of patients with NPD are typically impaired due to the individual's lack of empathy, disregard for others, exploitativeness, sense of entitlement, and constant need for attention. They frequently select as mates, and engender in their children, "co-narcissism," which is a term coined to refer to a co-dependent personality style similar to co-alcoholism and co-dependency. Co-narcissists organize themselves around the needs of others. They feel responsible for others, accept blame readily, are eager to please, defer to other's opinions, and fear being considered selfish if they act assertively.
The irony of springing that letter and resultant psychological baggage on me, whilst wishing to guard your own privacy can't be lost on you. I don't think for a second that this is about me, but you should understan that If i get a sense that your accusations are founded I'll be kissing my family good bye. I will not replace them with you and be your new best friend.
If this is just self-promotion for Danny 2, I'll be talking to the police and commuinty mental health team. If I think you were abused and aren't going to pursue with the police, I will, unless I can think of a compelling reason not to.
Like most people I've taken a long time to develop a sense of self that I'm comfortable with. As frankel says, ' Everything can be taken from us except one thing - the freedom to choose our attitude in any set of circumstances.'
To return to the 2nd email. i don't email often on NTL and didn't know if the first one had gone through. You may have been dealing with these issues for a very ong time, but they're new to me and important.
Make of all this what you will.
just in passing, there's hardly a day that goes buy that some kid I work with doesn't call me a cunt, or worse, so don't feel you have to add any emphasis for my benefit.
MY ANSWER TO "WHY WOULD YOU SEE IT AS A THREAT" E-MAIL, STILL 17/1/06
"Why would you see it as a threat?"
Because it is one. When you are uncertain whether someone has received an e-mail you ask them if they have received your e-mail. You do not add the demand, " Acknowledge receipt or I'll have to phone, visit, etc... " Have to? Because someone is holding a gun to your head or what? And you'll find "please acknowledge" goes a long way towards your 'request' not being read as a demand.
"I'm merely trying to ascertain whether I'm dealing with: Someone with a pathology rooted in a single extrapolated experience of abuse" or "Someone with narcissistic personality disorder who found a supportive partner."
Really?
Challenging.
Perhaps you're dealing with someone who is neither psychopathic nor narcissistic. Perhaps you're dealing with someone who is telling you something you don't want to hear and demands for facts and figures, dates and times make you feel more comfortable. Must get everything back to the status quo, and must get there NOW. I must be made to do whatever suits you because you are feeling uncomfortable and that won't do.
If you want to go to the source of your discomfort try something really novel and ask your parents. If you're looking for answers as to why I am either a narcissist or a psychopath try Oliver James – much more reliable than Wikipedia. Unfortunately he'll tell you that, surprise, surprise, mad parents produce mad children and that, although I may indeed be either option A or option B, they still can't wriggle out of option C – whatever fuck-up I am, they did the fucking – not me.
"The irony of springing that letter and resultant psychological baggage on me, whilst wishing to guard your own privacy can't be lost on you."
The letter was sent to you so that you would not have anything 'sprung' on you. The apology for my part in your child-rearing was well overdue, a responsibility I had shirked for quite long enough. Your part in my letters to my parents is nil. Nevertheless, because I have a reasonable IQ, it seemed fair to assume you might get some fall-out from it – hence the letter, warning you in advance, as it were. Might I remind you that you had absolutely no need to read the letters to your parents and, had I chosen to do so, I could have kept them entirely private. I repeat, it's not your business and I don't owe you anything.
And what psychological baggage? It's their psychological baggage – not yours. And how, exactly, am I guarding my privacy? I wrote to you in the first instance, providing you with my address, thus giving you the right to reply. I also provided you with my e-mail address and gave you express permission to write to me. Perhaps you could elucidate how exactly this is unequal? Because you ought to be able to phone me up if you feel like it, demand answers from me, make me make everything right again, or provide concrete 'proof' that your pop-psychology taken from Wikipedia is right?
I repeat, I am not a Henery bitch prepared to leap and bark because an angry male feels his life has been disrupted. It is not my job to make you feel comfortable about what you have learned about your family. You must make sense of that any way you see fit, and if Wikipedia's niche insanity diagnosis is it, then you knock yourself out.
"I don't think for a second that this is about me, but you should understand that If i get a sense that your accusations are founded I'll be kissing my family good bye. I will not replace them with you and be your new best friend."
Really? And yet you are behaving as if you do think this is about you. What's more you are also trying to make me realise that you will hold me responsible should you be forced to "kiss your family goodbye." What you do with your family is your responsibility, not mine. If you stayed with it, it would not be my fault, and if you left it, it would not be my fault. Sounds like the old gun to the head problem again. And I'm not sure what the "new best friend" thing is about. Do you think this is a demand for some kind of loyalty? I'm not naïve, I appreciate that any decision on your part inevitably 'takes sides'. But, short of calling me a liar, which you've neatly avoided by calling me insane instead (so much more polite than calling me a liar, inferring as it does that I can't help myself) I really don't care what you do.
If you had written back to me and said, "Can't believe it. Too much to take. Going on with my life as before. Sorry, but thanks for the warning and apology." I might not exactly have admired you for it but I'd have understood. Instead I get demands for authentication (after forty years?) and the stunning, sheer unbelievabilty that you phoned Isobel and Joseph and Robert who, shock, horror, denied it, so I had to give you what they wouldn't. Proof.
If you want to hear 'proof' I suggest you read the following blogs on my blog site. These started coming out when I had to go for dentistry (the last in a long list of dental problems).
As you seem to have very little knowledge of how childhood abuse memories are first lost then, occasionally, retrieved, these will give you both an idea of how realistic a goal 'proof' is and some of the scant details I can actually provide.
I can, of course, give you more hard evidence that your mother (and Isobel) seem to have both conveniently forgotten. I suppose in my narcissistic state, or during one of my psychotic episodes, I completely imagined my grandmother once turning up at Lindores Drive in the middle of the day, in tears, talking about my grandfather being caught and the two little girls and the threats to call the police? And Isobel appears to have 'forgotten' all her precocious sexual knowledge, her nickname of 'dirty old bastard' for my grandfather (perhaps she, too, saw him in a cinema with a prostitute when she was eight). Indeed, you seem to have forgotten telling me at Crosby about your girlfriend (Caroline?) having a conversation with Mum where she, and I quote you, "confessed as much to her" (that she had been abused herself) when Caroline had been talking about her own abuse.
I could go on all day, providing you with all the little glimpses, snatched pieces of conversation, avoided topics, but perhaps you'd rather hear about how your Dad's father, in his eighties, used to stare at my pubic hair through my nightdress when I was changing for bed behind the sofa, until it got so noticeable I was made to change upstairs – and made to feel ashamed and dirty for his filthy habits?
Is that the kind of details you'd like? Shall I relive it all so you can export some more of your stress using the old Henery stand-by of "You must be mad, you"?
The blogs are as follows, you'll find them in the archive for 2006 (box in the right hand side bar). If you intend to read them you should read them in the order given here and start from Warning wounded and dangerous:
16/6/06 – "Warning Wounded and Dangerous" – about dental experiences and some abuse connections.
20/6/06 – "I owe my life to a bad-fitting plug" – various abuse including Dad's predilection for beating women about the breasts and genitals
22/6/06 "Forget the crusts it's the worms" – general stuff, Mum and her theories on my inferiority
29/6/06 – "Got yourself a crying, talking, living fucking doll" – Isobel
21/7/06 – "The one in which the messianic complex gets completely out of hand" – no abuse, as such, but it's relevant. Talks about 'proof'. Something you should understand.
23/7/06 – "Walk across my swimming pool" – more self-doubt about proof. You should find this one even more interesting. Makes a good case for all us mentally unstable liars.
28/7/06 – "Misty, water-coloured? Barbra, give me a break" – this is your pay dirt. Enjoy it.
30/7/06 – "Give me a reason to love you" – second part of above.
That's about it. After that I had arrived at too uncomfortable a place and had to stop. I have not resumed since as I am still not comfortable with that place. Unfortunately, you never know whether you will resume again or not – and, frankly, who cares? The world certainly doesn't.
Lastly, yes, absolutely it is "just self-promotion for Danny 2" and you be sure and leave no stone unturned when you report me to the police and the "commuinty mental health team".
As for calling you a cunt, are we back in your classroom again? Are you going to explain to me it shows a lack of vocabulary?
Personally, I favour the right word for the right occasion. Perhaps you ought to spend more time worrying about how your parents earned that title than fearing for their mental health in hearing it.
Chancery
ANDREW THEN SENT THE FOLLOWING THREE E-MAILS IN REPLY, ALL THE SAME DAY
1st EMAIL - 9:40 PM
Couse it was a threat, but just because I won't give up on this.
I do feel uncomfortable and, surprisingly, I don't know exactly what to do.
You were honest enough to tell me you don't know me. Quite right, you don't. Not pertinent.
I did ask my parents, I just didn't know what questions to ask.
You don't owe me an apology you were a lovely sister and I have great memories.
Any obligation you felt to be a parent was yours not mine. I appreciate it.
You don't owe me anything.
I'm not angry.
I'm happy to take responsibility for my own decisions.
You can't ask for loyalty, but I can give it. That's my choice. I free you of all assumed obligation. Reject/accept as you see fit - not a problem.
I'm cool with calling you a liar, if that's what I ultimately decide.
Episodic/oblique memories of abuse - check.
'The old Henery stand-by...' I'm just me. It took a long time to get comfortable with that. That lack of expectation and other romanticised notions you talked about in your letter aren't that positive.
A small factual point, I think you stopped talking to me. If I mis-heard that was a major fuck-up on my part.
were you actually cutting me some slack in that last sentence?
I don't pay much attention to people banging on about their beliefs and principles unless there's been a cost involved in holding them. Based on my recollections of our family and how I've reconciled myself to their and my flaws
2ND EMAIL 9:42 PM
I'm going to read the blogs now.
3rd EMAIL 11PM
I've just read the blogs. No erection or excitement just stomach cramps. I'm now freefalling. Will take compassionate leave from work and fly to Scotland. I'm very good at reading people and asking questions.
Take care
MY REPLY THE FOLLOWING MORNING
Just a quick note regarding your proposed trip to Scotland. I want you to understand very clearly that I am not prepared to see you on this trip, or any other.
I am not prepared to meet anywhere in person to discuss anything.
All discussion on this matter must be done in writing.
I'm not sure what you think you will achieve with this. I can't imagine people who have been in denial for forty years are going to suddenly crack because they are faced with some sort of self-appointed Angel of the Lord on a fact-finding mission.
You seem to be hell-bent on turning something which is irretrievably stuck in a grey zone into black and white. You are placing all your 'happiness' on one of two options: - me being mentally ill or them being social stereotype 'evil monsters'.
There is no proof and, short of a confession, there isn't ever going to be any proof.
If you think you can somehow worm a confession out of them then you are seriously barking up the wrong tree. Think this through for two minutes. Supposing I've put the wrong complexion on the events from my childhood. Suppose 'all' that happened to me was Dad beat me up because his marriage to Mum was rocky. Suppose then that the 'steps' episode I describe in the blog was just Dad exporting some stress onto me because he was mad at something else and my brain has just tried to make sense of it and come up with some garbled, half-baked sex abuse nonsense.
Okay, suppose now you 'confront' him with this. Is he going to say, "No, of course I never sexually abused your sister" (the 'truth' in our new scenario), "I only took her upstairs and thrashed her because I was mad at Jimmy Stewart for dropping a brick on my foot." Or "because your mother wasn't home". Or "because I caught her sitting on Mr Litterick's knee".
Even supposing there was no sexual abuse and I 'made it all up', he can't possibly tell you the 'truth'. Because the truth is that no matter what way you look at it, the 'truth' is unacceptable. Beating a child, terrorising a child - psychologically, emotionally or sexually - is wrong.
I am struck, reading your responses, that you never refer to the abuse in specifics, but I get the strongest feeling that all that concerns you is the sexual abuse. You phoned Isobel, Joseph, Robert - none of whom had anything to do with my long-term psychological and emotional abuse.
I know child sexual abuse is very fashionable. It provides that so very necessary social stereotype 'evil monster' - which you seem to think you can unearth by asking a few questions while using your X-ray vision. Why don't you take exception to everything else they did? Why is the sex abuse so important? Because it clearly delineates my father as a monster and my mother as an accomplice and you can let them go with a clear conscience?
You will never have a clear conscience in this because whatever you decide will have an infinite possibility to be wrong.
By all means attempt to use psychic powers to flush them out but, ultimately, you will be up against a decision based on very tenuous 'facts' indeed.
In closing I'd just like to repeat that no part of me is prepared to be interrogated, by you or anyone else, however prettily it may be disguised as 'truth' or fact-finding. If you wish to face down your relatives I wish you luck, but I will not be bullied, coerced or guilt-tripped into seeing any member of my family, including you.
Chancery
ANDREW'S FINAL E-MAIL REPLY 18/1/06
You really have me firmly placed in Midfield School for the Gifted, don't you. I'm sure you get the reference; the Larson cartoon with the kid pushing the door marked pull?
However, I admit to provoking you.
I'm not being clever, trying to be clever, or particularly thick.
My childhood was just that, my childhood. I don't remember, or partially remember, the same stuff as you.
In the intervening 20 – 40 years Mum will have gone through a process. She isn't the same person. Not better or worse, just not the same. Dad also. You've gone through/are going through yours.
Coming to terms with my family baggage was a different thing. I think it was difficult and painful for me at times. I really don't remember much of my childhood. I do know that my dad scared the shit out of me at times. It was interesting to read in one of your pieces that you wouldn't have pissed on him if he was burning. For many years that was my stock response. My mum is still as self-contained (generous, aren’t I?) and uncomfortable around people, but much less so in the last few years - she seems to have a strong group of women friends in her village. She liked the notion of grandchildren, but has no real interest in the reality - has visited once. We've been up to her about 3 times and it has been fine. It annoys Karon more than me. The kids are oblivious to it - they just assume, rightly, they're the centre of the world.
I chose to keep my parents in my life. Mostly because I’ve got so many flaws and have been a grade-A shit on too many occasions to count. My upbringing could have been better or worse. However, the chances of being sentient in the Universe are remote and I personally wouldn’t miss this ride for the world - any of it, good or bad. That works for me.
I don't think that the sexual abuse is the worst thing. I work in schools but don't teach, I just sit in classes and watch. I watch the ripples and tiny adjustments that follow interactions of all kinds. Life is tough, for some people really, really tough. I don’t have a problem with you not talking to me, or your parents, and if I ever do talk to them about you I defend your right to do what you please.
I'm not coming to visit you. I don't see myself as your knight in shining armour. I'm not a one-man truth and reconciliation committee.
I would rather none of this had happened, but I needed to know that there is no resolution to this for, you, them or me.
I’m not happy about that. In my own life I try not to do grey – I worship trudging on, making mistakes, telling yourself you won’t fuck up, fucking up, falling off, climbing back on. I go to bed some nights thinking I’m a shit dad and partner, go to sleep, wake up and get on with it. What’s the alternative? Crying for ‘me’ time?
Walking out on my kids? (Yeah, I know I’ve done that…). Nope. Like the ad says – Just Do It. Now join me in a rousing chorus of… I actually believe this! Schmaltz or what? I don’t care. I love life.
Thank you for taking the time to write to me. It’s a pisser that we ended up like this. I remember that photo of you coltish by the autobahn – what a beautiful sister. Take care.
Good bye.
Andrew
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Friday, 12 January 2007
And It's Goodbye From Him...
PLEASE NOTE: If you are new to this site I would advise that you start reading this particular (related) series of blogs from the one entitled "Here There Be Tygers" in order to make sense of them.
Please bear in mind these are personal letters and were not written for publication. I found that after writing them I was unable to edit them. Apparently the inner child that mastered them did not wish them tampered with. I always respect the wishes of the client so all dangling prepositions and untidy sentences have been left as is, unpolished. They deal in emotions, not pretty phrasing, or reasonably thought-out arguments. They are intended to offload, not convince.
My family history is as follows. Father's name Andrew Henery, mother's name Mary Henery. Two children, myself and my brother, Andrew, younger by seven years.
Place of birth, 23 Falkland Place, East Kilbride. Later lived at 26 Lindores Drive, East Kilbride. Mother's maiden name, Mary Baxter Toole. Her father's name, Andrew Toole, married to Jean Toole. Address 1 Springwells Drive (I think), Blantyre. My cousin Isobel, daughter of my mother's brother, Ian, was permanently resident with them through her childhood. I stayed most weekends with them up till the age of eleven or so when Isobel left to stay with her father. My mother has two more brothers, the youngest of which is the Bobby referred to in these letters.
Father's family also hailed from Blantyre and later from East Kilbride. Father Francis, mother possibly Margaret? My father was the youngest of 8 (or possibly 9) children. His eldest brother was Joe. It is his sons, Joseph & Robert (a doctor & a headmaster, respectively), who are referred to in the text of these letters. Bill was one of the other brothers - very macho, male and misogynistic, as most of them were. The Maleys, also referred to, were family acquaintances, fellow-members of the communist party.
My father currently lives at Emerson Road, Bishopbriggs, Glasgow. My mother lives in Lochcarron, near Inverness.
My maternal grandfather was a known paedophile who had been in trouble with the police although, to my knowledge, never charged. No other member of my family has ever, to my knowledge, been accused of or been charged with a similar crime.
The name given to me by my parents was Jane Henery, which I changed by deed poll in the 1980's.
This is the last letter of three, to my brother.
I'm done.
Dear Andrew,
I am writing your letter as the last of three. I've already written to my Dad and then Mum.
How to describe the purpose of these letters….
Let's say they are doing two things, relieving me of the burden of their content and relieving me of the guilt and responsibility that goes with that content.
I don't doubt for one instant that these letters will cause you some pain, if for no other reason than you may consider them unmitigated lies and that, lies or no, you will undoubtedly be at the brunt of any of the unpleasant fall-out they produce. After all, it is you they have to convince, they already know I have gone to the dark side. But what can they do to me, withhold their love, call me a liar, a lunatic? Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.
I won't apologise to you for their reaction. That's their problem, and only you have the power to stop them using you as an emotional dumping ground. Just remember, if I am a liar and a madman then they have nothing to fear. No-one is frightened of the man on the bus who thinks his corned beef tin is a bomb and he is the Dalai Lama.
The letters themselves are about thirty years overdue. Unfortunately, although time may be a great healer it has no sense of itself and, in my case, seems to have taken fucking forever to 'heal' me sufficiently to talk about these things, or indeed, be able to venture into the territory of putting things right.
Sadly, putting things right in this instance can only mean telling the truth, not repairing the damage. In my case that is irreparable. All I am doing with these letters is letting the guilt and shame go back to the people who really own it – my parents.
I don't use the term 'my' parents lightly, because I did, indeed, have different parents from you. Your experience of them was substantially different from mine. Indeed, by the time you were born they were actually different people from the ones I'd known in the first seven years of my life.
As it seems highly likely the worst incidents of my life, at least with your father, occurred even before you were born then it was as if they happened in a whole different universe from yours.
I don't expect you, therefore, to have any experience of them, or even to care.
For a long time I have wanted to apologise to you for the second-rate child-care you received at my hands. But I confess I was reluctant to do it because I did not want to get back into a relationship with you in any shape manner or form. Understand, this was never about you but about what you were part of. You were a connection to my parents and I wanted nothing by word or deed to suggest to them that I wished to have any connection with them.
Also when you decided to stop talking to me I was never exactly sure why. I suspected it was because I'd moved the goal posts, rewritten the family script, by taking myself out of the role of fat, academic frump and venturing into the territory of slim, extrovert performer. It can be deeply intimidating when someone in the family suddenly behaves "out of character" but, nevertheless, it was a fairly open statement that you did not think I 'should' be doing it, and that was not good news for me. Subsequently I made no attempt to heal the breach.
I am second-guessing you here, and your reasons may have been entirely different. Fearing I was going to 'expose' the family, for instance, and later the publication of my book must have looked that way to you. Certainly your reaction, as my mother reported it (not necessarily reliable), indicated that you thought I was indeed a bad person, shaming the family.
If so I'm afraid you're in for a whole lot worse.
To you, of all people, I wish more than anything that I could give you facts and figures. To you I wish I could make you believe. Not because, as when you saw me last, I wish to convince you of our parents 'evil'. I am absolutely sure you are aware of at least some of their shortcomings. I no longer have a zealot's zeal (is there any other kind?) to go out and evangelise on our family dysfunction. When I say to you that I don't care what you think of our family, our parents or me I mean that wholeheartedly. It is no longer a defensive statement. I mean that if you told me you loved them with all your heart I would not hate, resent or dislike you for it. Nor would I try to convince you otherwise. Whereas I might get pissed off if you called me a liar I wouldn't care if you said, Mum really loves me (as opposed to me, I mean).
The fact that I don't believe either of our parents can love is born of my experience and as such may well be limited. The fact that I don't think it is, changes nothing about what you feel. Your feelings and experiences are unique to you and not for me to decide.
It may sound like stating the obvious but I am me and you are you, and ne'er the twain shall meet. The only thing I ask of you is to understand that no child would willingly make up experiences like mine. No child willingly gives up on their parents. It is a long, slow, painful battle to come to terms with being unloved, and therefore unlovable, so nothing I have done was done lightly. I don't believe it was ever really revenge, although I believe I would have been entitled to that. Maybe my motives on that one is for God to decide.
I am publishing all three letters on my web blog. Blog publication is a second rate alternative to sending letters to all my relatives, better still putting a notice in the local paper. But everyone is dead now, I can't publicly name and shame them, so this is the next best thing.
If it is of any comfort to you I doubt if any relatives will even see it. I have a readership of around 2,000 every month. I don't know if it's the same 2,000 every month or some are different, but either way it's just entertainment to them. They'll have forgotten it in a week.
This act is the closest I can come to blowing the lid off the ugly, festering pile of filth that is our family heritage and you'll either have to forgive me for it or learn to live with it, because it's done.
As I say I have no facts to offer you. Those I do have, such as they are, are very flimsy indeed. And, yes, trust me, I understand more than you can possibly imagine just how terrible it is to denounce someone without concrete evidence. Nevertheless it must be done if I am to find any peace at all.
I thought I was doing my bit to stop this canker by not having children but it was a foolish notion, like killing the dog to stop it getting rabies. This is the only way to stop it. Too late for all the sad little girls who suffered but there you have it – I'm not my mother's daughter for nothing. Silence was always second nature to me.
So, now I need to apologise to you. Not for this. For this I am not sorry, and never will be. Even if everything I thought my father had done to me was a fantasy, some kind of deranged dream shorthand for my own sickness, the fact would still remain that the thought and idea of it was in his heart. And, try as everyone would like to deny it, my grandfather was a paedophile of the finest water and the outside world knew it, thus, tragically, vindicating me and Isobel and any other female relative who suffered at his hands.
No, I need to apologise to you for all the exported stress I passed on to you. I was bitterly unhappy as a child and chronically depressed as a teenager. Much as I loved you – and I did, very much – I deeply resented my imprisonment in that home and my constant unrelenting labour of which, sadly, for both me and you, you were just another facet.
Believe me when I say I never really did mind looking after you in the deepest part of my heart, because I did love you, and I genuinely enjoyed your company. You were the closest thing I had to a kindred spirit and you were a truly beautiful little boy, very fey and sweet with a wonderfully gentle and zany sense of humour and some of the most fabulous flights of imagination I ever saw. Even although you could be scarily destructive I never really believed that was truly you, even while it was happening and I didn't understand it. Dad was hardly a good role model in that respect and you must have been terribly adrift since he was completely indifferent to you.
I always take great comfort from the fact that when Max first met our family he thought, and I quote, "that you were like some kid that had wandered in from next door." I take comfort because I always felt (deluded myself?) that I tried to connect with you, that I was the only real bond you had, that I loved you, even if they were too busy to notice you.
Unfortunately I realise you may have a completely different picture of me, as some bad-tempered harridan who never let up, who was always on your case, nagging, harping. Like three parents in one. Believe it or not some of this was actually produced by anxiety for your sake. To me you looked frighteningly rootless. You often used to wander around like a little waif, with neither parent giving a fuck what happened to you. Dad's only real moments of connection came when he caught you stealing, or some such, and then it was just to punch you up and down the floor while he blamed the rest of us for your failings, as if parenting wasn't his responsibility at all.
Sadly though, honesty forces me to admit there was definite jealousy and resentment in the mix. I had been doing cooking, cleaning and child care since ten or eleven – you never did any. The power of possessing a penis, indeed. Likewise, there was virtually no pressure on you to achieve. You had been designated the funny, charming, good-looking one (see what I mean about playing family roles?) and academic achievement was very half-hearted when it came to you.
Unfortunately I had the opposite experience. A report card full of six A's and one B was met with "What's the meaning of this B?" Never good enough. I watched you be 'loved', however half-heartedly, for doing nothing at all, just being, and that hurt.
So, for all the ugly sides of my personality I apologise. I hope you will take into account that I was only a child being badly raised by two seriously damaged human beings and find it in your heart to forgive me.
I can only repeat you were always very dear to me, the only good thing in the family, and it would have killed me if anything bad had ever happened to you. I'd like to think I'd have defended you to the death, but for all I know one of them got to you anyway. If so, although it was not my responsibility, I am more sorry than you can possibly imagine.
I'd very much like to close by saying I still love you, but I no longer know you and I don't want to add insincerity to my other misdemeanours. Let's just leave it at I did love you, very much, and still absolutely, with no shadow of a doubt, love my memories of you.
If you do get horrendous fall-out from these letters please remember that they are nothing to do with you. Your parents knew that, ultimately, there would be repercussions to what they did, and still they went ahead and did it anyway. You are not there to make excuses for them, defend them, or make them feel better about themselves. They are your parents, you are not theirs. No matter how old or sick they are they need to take responsibility for their own actions. And if you are tempted to feel sorry for their 'public' humiliation, especially your father, remember what Tracey Emin said when someone was offended by her including their name on her People I've Slept With tent, "You should have thought of that before you fucked me."
All the best, Chancery.
P.S. Should you wish to read their letters you'll find them on Blogspirit at http://danny.blogspirit.com/
Not yet read DANNY? You can check it out now at Poison Pixie where you can read a BIG extract for Free! Or grab a copy on Amazon here.
Once you've bagged your masterpiece you can rub shoulders with DANNY's other rich and famous readers at Chancery Fans
There is also an independent Live Journal DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY. If you would like to talk about the upcoming new volumes or find out why you should read Volume 1 (and you should) Jill & Jodie are experts, so please go along and badger them with questions and unreasonable demands for proof that it's worth reading before you part with your readies. I guarantee they will provide the most hardened literary cynics with a reason, or die trying.
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Thursday, 11 January 2007
Roll Me Over in the Clover, and Do It Again...
PLEASE NOTE: If you are new to this site I would advise that you start reading this particular (related) series of blogs from the one entitled "Here There Be Tygers" in order to make sense of them.
Please bear in mind these are personal letters and were not written for publication. I found that after writing them I was unable to edit them. Apparently the inner child that mastered them did not wish them tampered with. I always respect the wishes of the client so all dangling prepositions and untidy sentences have been left as is, unpolished. They deal in emotions, not pretty phrasing, or reasonably thought-out arguments. They are intended to offload, not convince.
My family history is as follows. Father's name Andrew Henery, mother's name Mary Henery. Two children, myself and my brother, Andrew, younger by seven years.
Place of birth, 23 Falkland Place, East Kilbride. Later lived at 26 Lindores Drive, East Kilbride. Mother's maiden name, Mary Baxter Toole. Her father's name, Andrew Toole, married to Jean Toole. Address 1 Springwells Drive (I think), Blantyre. My cousin Isobel, daughter of my mother's brother, Ian, was permanently resident with them through her childhood. I stayed most weekends with them up till the age of eleven or so when Isobel left to stay with her father. My mother has two more brothers, the youngest of which is the Bobby referred to in these letters.
Father's family also hailed from Blantyre and later from East Kilbride. Father Francis, mother possibly Margaret? My father was the youngest of 8 (or possibly 9) children. His eldest brother was Joe. It is his sons, Joseph & Robert (a doctor & a headmaster, respectively), who are referred to in the text of these letters. Bill was one of the other brothers - macho, male and misogynistic, as most of them were. The Maleys, also referred to, were family acquaintances, fellow-members of the communist party.
My father currently lives at Emerson Road, Bishopbriggs, Glasgow. My mother lives in Lochcarron, near Inverness.
My maternal grandfather was a known paedophile who had been in trouble with the police although, to my knowledge, never charged. No other member of my family has ever, to my knowledge, been accused of or been charged with a similar crime.
The name given to me by my parents was Jane Henery, which I changed by deed poll in the 1980's.
This is the second letter of three, to my mother. I will publish the last remaining letter to my brother tomorrow.
Dear Mum,
This letter is long overdue. As I am breaking silence on something that is, quite literally and with no exaggeration, probably hundreds of years old, it is not easy to know where to start.
You were quite probably the worst mother I've ever known. Whereas I've met vicious critics, lonely controllers and crafty little manipulators, they mostly shared one thing in common, some genuine feeling for their children, however warped it was by their own personal failings.
In you I saw none, met none and felt none.
Andrew's experience of you was undoubtedly different and, as such, cannot and will not stand comparison to mine. He was much later, when you and my father had already changed, your relationship was different, and, more importantly, he was male.
All the threatening things you felt towards women were automatically absent in him. He couldn't evoke memories in you of what it was like to be a small girl and so could not make you uncomfortable. I could and did.
I don't believe you wanted either of us and I don't believe you loved either of us, but it is entirely up to him to make that decision. I couldn't influence him when I was a child and I am very far from influencing him now. I wouldn't want to. My only concern with him is that you do not use him as a scapegoat, providing some kind of dubious 'proof' that my experience of childhood is somehow invalid.
He is not me and I am not him and everything I felt and experienced I felt and experienced.
I do not love you and have not loved you for a very long time. When I look back on it I am amazed and astounded, as I am with my father, that my love lasted as long as it did, living proof that children's love is even more unconditional than that of a dog, and certainly less discerning.
My father molested me. I have exceedingly scant memory of how but a very strong conviction that he did. My grandfather also molested me, just as he more extensively molested Isobel. I was also molested by my cousin Joseph and, to a lesser extent (I believe he may only have been present rather than participant) by my cousin Robert. I was also molested by the boy who lived with the Maleys (a cousin?). I have no memory of his name but, with some odd perversion of irony I can remember exactly how. In detail.
I have often prayed for a similar kind of memory of my experiences with my loving 'relatives' but they work on some elusive sliding scale, ever running away from me. The closer the relatives are to home the more they elude me.
There are absolutely no words in the English language to express the level of anguish such 'self-protection' has caused me over the years. I have lived my whole life in some kind of half-lit netherworld with these ugly little men and their filthy little predilections hovering just outside the corner of my vision. My heart and soul does not want to remember, has done such a convincing job of telling me that I must not tell myself, or anyone else, the truth, that it feels like extracting teeth to get the tiniest bit of information. When I do retrieve any memories I feel dirty, ferocious, like the whole of my head becomes vicious, filed-down teeth that I want to rip and tear heads off with. In short, my rage and fear are so much that my brain just closes down before I can see anything more than a glimpse. After that I spend weeks, months, trying to grimly hang onto the reality of it before I convince myself yet again that I'm not mad and "it wasn't that bad".
It was that bad. It was beyond bad, it was inhuman, and it is your fault.
The abuse itself was, and is, the responsibility of every one of the ugly little fuckers that perpetrated it, but the permission to do it came from you, and my grandmother before you, and no doubt her mother before her. Every one of you was a lousy, cheap, cowardly pimp. You knew what was going on, you knew both of our stinking families were ripe with it, and you shut your mouth, and kept shutting it, because it was what you did. Anything for a quiet life.
Your father molested you. Over years, I'm guessing, and she never did a thing to stop it. Not one. Oh yes, she mouthed her fatuous little pleas, her unctuous oil-on-troubled-waters, her excuses and justifications. What were they? He was drunk and couldn't help himself? She was too fat and he no longer desired her? She was pregnant and he no longer desired her? He was oversexed? Or were you just special? Tell me, did you share a close bond like the one you wrote for me and my dad?
Yeah, we were very close. I was terrified of him. He was a violent, narcissistic, deviant psychotic – but we were so close. Close in the bath, close when he changed my nappies, close when he lost his temper and got off on beating me up.
Was that what he paid prostitutes to do? Before he met you? While he was married to you even? Did he keep going, or were you supposed to provide that? Little spankings that turned to punchings, verbal and psychological abuse?
God, what a gift I was to you both. Tiny, vulnerable, no idea what kind of monstrous family I'd been born into.
Did he ever confess to you that he'd been molested too? Or is that another big secret? Are you going to feign shock?
I know none of this, of course, not a word. No-one told me anything, they just sent me into the lion's den every week and then pretended nothing had happened. What was it? A quiet word in Gran's ear? Did you read her the riot act about his behaviour? Did she get the guilt? "You know what he did to Elsie, Agnes, Maggie…" Was your name even on the list, or was it just every other kid in the district that he'd already molested? Were you still playing a big game of let's pretend with your mother at forty, fifty? Did she die with you taking your secret to the grave?
And protecting what, exactly?
If every fucker in Blantyre knew your father was a paedophile, as they undoubtedly did, what precisely did any of you imagine you were protecting? The family name? That was dirt the day he first opened his malicious little mouth and you know it. Everybody despised him. He was so obnoxious and screwed up he didn't have a single friend in the whole world, not even his own children. And look, you've ended up exactly the same. That's what your silence bought you. Good, isn't it?
You passed misery and despair on like a infectious disease, to me, to Isobel, to every little girl he ever connived and blackmailed into that shed of his, his bedroom, the bathroom, anywhere he could get his dirty little mitts on them.
The man was a spastic and his wife the worst kind of snivelling coward God has ever seen trembling before him. And you thought that was a good road to follow. Worked for them, it will work for you.
And we have your excuses. Let's run through a few. You thought he was 'cured'. Yep, that'll work. Did you think that every time he was caught, or only every second time? Was he ever cured with you? Or was it only sleeping with your mother that provided his miraculous 'cure'? You thought he was too old? Oh, and when he was caught, yet again, when I was a teenager, were you shocked, saddened and surprised? Funny, I seem to remember you reading my grandmother the riot act about how she ought to know better. Funny that, bit of kettle and pot there, because, by Christ, you didn't seem to know any better, did you?
And where was I during this? Banished to the kitchen so I couldn't hear the family shame. I was the fucking family shame. I was one of those girls. We were all one of those girls and you knew it.
So we're left with something darker. We have to be. What mother do you know who was repeatedly molested (raped? You tell me) by her own father, who had been caught molesting other girls, who, in fact, I'll bet had a bloody good reputation as the dirtiest cunt in the whole town, who would then send her daughter weekend after weekend to be watched over by that same parent? So you could do what? Save the world? Feed the poor? Fight one of my father's legendary political battles?
Hell no, go out for a little light fun. A little dancing and wining and frivolity while your child suffers out yet another two days of fear and evasion with an equally frightened and unhappy cousin who has likewise been abandoned by her father.
What was it? A constant reminder to your mother of how she'd failed you? Was she supposed to make it up to you by protecting me instead? Or was I just bait for his failure? Were you secretly hoping in your darkest places that it would all go wrong and he'd be uncovered for the sick little fuck he was?
You tell me, Mum, because forty years hasn't made sense of it for me yet. Forty years hasn't let me find a justification for why my mother would repeatedly hand me over to a sick, sadistic little paedophile with the morality of a sewer rat and a wife who would protect him at all costs.
At all costs. Didn't the penny ever drop? Were you just thick or something a whole lot worse? What was it, Mum, total indifference, wilful neglect? After all he'd got up your cunt, why shouldn't he get up mine too? Or was it a warped urge for revenge?
You have to admit it's difficult for me to find a good motive for you.
I can see some (very, very) slight excuse for my grandmother. She belonged to a different generation, she was trained to obey the little weasel in all things, no divorce, but you? Remind me what year it was again? Remind me about that thing you did with my Dad called divorce. Remind me that your father was not your husband and you had no need to put me in that danger at all. None. Zero. Nil.
But, Christ, you might have had to pay a babysitter – Jesus, that wouldn't do. Giving something for your children. God, no.
Even if you felt you had to send me in there, hand me over, where was the warning? Why not simply tell me?
I'll tell you why. Because as soon as you say, "Don't let your grandfather touch you. Tell your Gran if he does. Stop him." The whole thing would have come down like a pack of cards, because you knew he would, and then I would, and you'd have to actually do something. And doing something for me was never on the cards, was it?
I was there to serve you. I was there to do the housework, take care of my brother, keep my Dad's moods sweet and, just like you had done for your mother, be his love interest.
I was Daddy's little bedtime playtime pal. God, what a shame you couldn't just hand me over to him. But that was too far, even for you.
Although you tried once. I remember after I left for university I got sent on some weird trip to Loch Goil with my father. This was supposed to be some kind of bonding exercise. To this day I still don't know what the fuck you though you were playing at. What was it, some desperate attempt to bring me back into the nest, to make sure I wouldn't dump the role of his caretaking back on you?
I spent that whole trip feverishly talking to his stony silence, feeling as if I had been handed over to Charles Manson. Even during it, when I had no real concept of the incestuous nature of my father's relationship with me, I knew it was very seriously wrong. I felt like some kind of fucking concubine served up for a dirty old man. You have no idea how flimsy that wooden partition door felt in the caravan that night.
And you did this to me. What the hell was going through your head? How the hell could I patch up your marriage? It was your marriage, not mine. I was your daughter, not your therapist or your marriage counsellor or your revenge plan for your father, or a safe woman to compete with. Because compete you did. I've met some classic A-Types in my time, but you make them all look like Minnie Mouse.
Never once did I get a straightforward maternal reaction out of you. It had to be run through the Mary Henery checklist first.
1. Would it cost you anything, financially or emotionally? If so it was binned immediately. Mary's first law – I do not give. Just like my father you had been deprived, had a thieving scumbag for a father who never let you own anything. And, just like my father, did this make you say to yourself, "My child won't have to live like that. I'll respect boundaries, possessions, she'll have what I didn't"? Did you fuck. It was, "I'll have this and I'll have that and oops, I've changed my mind, that's too old/big/inappropriate for you - you'll never use it." Any of these sound familiar? No? Doesn't surprise me. Denial runs in your family.
2. If I empathise with my child she will a) think she can come to me with problems (see above No Giving rule - that included time) and/or b) she'll think I'm weak or human and I can't do that because then she'll win.
Yep, you were right, that's what parenting is about, winning. You have to beat your children at everything. Always. Jesus Christ, woman, you even had to beat me at bodily functions. What was wrong with you? Did you never once see yourself? Did you never hear yourself? I was a young child, struggling not only like every other but more than most. After all, I had a highly dysfunctional father who had quite possibly raped me as a child, but who had certainly beat me and molested me and who constantly behaved inappropriately with me, with your blessing. When I came to you with routine everyday ailments I was treated like a leper. You were never sick. God, no, you were the only fucking human on the planet that never got sick. Did you really believe that bullshit? You seemed to. Certainly to a child who devotedly believed in her parents and trusted them implicitly, I certainly took you at face value. I have been deeply shamed for years by how well I was taken in by a pair of parents who resembled Ian Brady and Myra Hyndley to a truly alarming degree. He beat up and molested small children till he crossed the line and started killing them while she stood by and watched, pimping them for him without a qualm. Sound familiar?
No doubt her defence was like yours, he was a big bully and she couldn't help it.
Oh, poor you. Funny, I never saw that lack of spunk in you when you ran strikes in factories, when you were expected to make tea for the men in offices. Strangely, outside the home, when Mary Henery was expected to break her first commandment, I shall not Give, then a whole different bolshie feminist bitch reared her ugly head.
Let me tell you something about these big scary men that you grovelled and demeaned both yourself and me for. My grandfather was all of five foot nothing. He was a skinny, puny, undersized runt. Even Isobel and I got wise and learned how to elude him and we were kids. I swear a small Pomeranian dog could have taken him. One good hard punch from my grandmother would have decked him. And there's another funny thing. I remember being profoundly shocked to discover you had not only cheeked my grandfather as a child but physically assaulted him too. Once even biting him. Tell me, can you remember Jane Henery ever doing anything like that? Can you remember Jane Henery's mother, Mary, ever encouraging her daughter to defend herself against her own father or, indeed, her grandfather that way? No? Me neither. You couldn't even give me that, could you? You were too scared I might use my independence against you, defend myself against the controlling life of semi-slavery I led. You had it too fucking cushy to risk anything taking that away.
Too right you were prepared to let my father get away with anything he liked, to let my grandfather run unchecked – you stood to gain, and gaining was everything to you.
Nothing in life has ever meant more to you than stuff. And the even greater irony is that, actually, when it comes to it, stuff has no real value to you. You gave away your children to stuff. You had a child who loved you absolutely and you abandoned her to the filthiest most depraved of men so that you could be comfortable surrounded by all your stuff. After all, you'd paid for half of it and you damn well weren't giving it up for some brat, even if she was your own.
Even when it came to the divorce, when you might have had a chance to redeem yourself, speak out, you still didn't do it. No, of course you didn't, stuff was on the line. Nothing must come between you and stuff. Doesn't matter if you want the thing or not you have to take it because it's there and no-one else must have it. That is your third law. I Shall Take What I Do Not Want, Just So That Others Cannot Have.
During the divorce you saw your golden opportunity to get the upper hand. Yeah, sure, you could tell the courts he beat you, threw you out the house, went to prostitutes but you knew he could fire back infidelity, that the courts could say, So what, you could have left. No, you had to play the dirty card, The Big Secret. You had waited for just such a moment, just like it was always hanging over the head of your father – at any moment you could blow the whistle. So you let it be known to my dad that you were going to reveal his 'perversions' in court.
Oh, big time panic in Dad's house. Suddenly his slut daughter who had not only dropped his ambitions of becoming a lawyer and who'd betrayed him by taking up with another man was no longer a persona non grata. No, now it was "Let's let bygones be bygones, daughter". Damn right, it was, because I was the perversion. Whatever he'd done with me as a child was it. You'd caught him doing something, knew something, and you were going to use it.
I've never seen someone so close to a nervous breakdown. By Christ, did you have him over a barrel. I remember him telling me about this big bogey man threat and he wouldn't meet my eyes. I thought it was shame because his life with whores or his urge for anal sex was about to be aired in public. But I now think it's because he was facing his crime itself, in person, waiting for me to say, I know what you did, Dad. He could relax, I knew nothing, except always that niggling feeling that this was always about something else, something I couldn't see, only feel. Of course he came to me, not because he loved me or even needed me, but because he had to know if I remembered and if I would stand up in court and say No, nothing happened, she's a lying bitch.
So there you were, holding him at gunpoint and where was I? Bait. Yet again. You were bartering me for a holiday chalet, you fucking sad, ugly bitch. You bartered me, ran risks with my hidden memories, my distress, my trauma, for a holiday chalet? You didn't even want it. You sold it almost immediately, always your eye on the money, what it could buy you, do for you. What was love, loyalty, betrayal compared to a little love pad in Cambuslang?
How did you sell the idea to yourself? I didn't know anyway so it wouldn't hurt me? My dad and me had a close bond. God, that good old close bond. Do you have any idea how much I detest my father? If he was on fire I wouldn't piss on him to put it out. I sometimes try to think of good things about him, trying to convince myself I'm not caught up in some horrible delusion, and all I can ever come up with was he enjoyed nature and he was great with maps. That's it. Gosh, what a bundle of happy memories.
You were the meanest, coldest, most emotionally distant woman I ever met. Worse even than Bobby or your Mother, and that's saying something. I was never once sick that you didn't leave me to suffer alone. I was never once afraid that you didn't tell me not to be stupid, I never once struggled with loneliness and isolation that you never sent me off, uncomforted, to wash dishes or feed the dog or sweep the kitchen or minister to my poor, tragic, misunderstood father's myriad emotional needs.
I parented you, my father and my brother. I ran your house, I cooked, I cleaned and I was not only not thanked I was never even noticed. My sole interaction with you was a list of chores and you better be achieving at school and making the name of Henery great or by Christ, girl, you'll never hear the end of it.
Achieve for me, love me, feed me, shop for me, run errands for me, keep house for me, give me your stuff, baby-sit, go study, study more, you don't need a social life, friends, clothes, shoes, love, a life.
Explain to me why I had high heel shoes, party clothes, even dresses that were exact copies of yours when I was a small child yet after puberty I lived in a school uniform and big sensible shoes. And how did we convince ourselves this one was for "my own good"? I know, by making me a misfit frump and telling me constantly that I smelled, had an unnatural body, was fat, too hairy, had weird hair since I'd had worms years before (what the fuck were you on?) I was going to stop men hitting on me and it would keep me an innocent virgin till you married me off at thirty-four, when I'd move in with you, in the granny flat I'd paid for out of my lawyer's earnings, to keep house for you and sleep with my father forever.
Good plan, especially that part about it being for my sexual protection, oh, you diligent mother, you. Shame every relative and a few extra had already used me by the time I was six. Shame that you also knew my father and grandfather had certainly had their hands in and you were protecting damaged goods. Of course, it had nothing to do with you being desperately jealous of me, fearing this other woman in the nest, fearing a younger 'adversary'. You who was so competitive, so determined to win that you couldn't give an inch, completely losing sight of the fact that I WAS YOUR DAUGHTER. Not your enemy, or your competitor. What? Scared I was going to steal my dad away? Bit late, weren't you? I think we already knew that battle was lost. After all, anything with body hair and breasts was of no interest to my father. Maybe all that molestation at his father/brother/mother's hands (who knows and, frankly, who cares?) had made him just a touch homosexual as well as paedophilic. I always felt he had it in him. Why not? He had everything else.
So, nothing else left to say. All written out. I've written one of these to my dad too and a fat lot of fucking good that will do. But then it's not about that, it's about me breaking silence and making this real. It's about me seeing you for who you really are. It's about me breaking the chains of perfection you created for yourself, the lying myth of Mary Henery – superwoman. The superwoman who led her own child to the slaughter repeatedly for her own - almost comic if it wasn't so fucking tragic - tiny gains. The superwoman who was too chickenshit to out two of the most cowardly little fuck-ups it's ever been my misfortune to know. The superwoman who lied repeatedly and doggedly about the smallest things rather than show a chink of imaginary 'weakness' solely so she could refuse her child some comfort in case she gave away the tiniest thing to anyone. The superwoman who was utterly unable to relate to her own child and who doesn't even know what love looks like let alone feels like.
It is not your tragedy that your father was an animal and your mother a coward who brutalised and betrayed the child they were supposed to love and protect. That was not your fault and I truly feel for you, as someone who suffered exactly the same fate. What is your tragedy and your responsibility is that instead of looking inside yourself, trying to learn from your own horrendous upbringing, making any kind of approach at all towards self-knowledge, you instead bulldozed all over your own child's unconditional love so that you might gain 'things' and a temporary and fleeting feeling of being 'better' than someone else.
I no longer love you. I will never love you again. That's what you truly earned in your life, I wish you joy of it.
P.S. I have what's known as a web blog. This is the equivalent of a newspaper column on the internet. It presently has a readership of around 2,000 people a month. These letters and full details of our families' identities will be published there.
Not yet read DANNY? The price rise for Volume 1 is imminent, and I mean imminent, so if you need a copy check it out now at Poison Pixie where you can read a BIG extract for Free! Or grab a copy on Amazon here.
Once you've bagged your masterpiece you can rub shoulders with DANNY's other rich and famous readers at Chancery Fans
There is also an independent Live Journal DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY. If you would like to talk about the upcoming new volumes or find out why you should read Volume 1 (and you should) Jill & Jodie are experts, so please go along and badger them with questions and unreasonable demands for proof that it's worth reading before you part with your readies. I guarantee they will provide the most hardened literary cynics with a reason, or die trying.
18:31 Posted in Blog | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Wednesday, 10 January 2007
And This is Number One, And The Fun Has Just Begun...
PLEASE NOTE: If you are new to this site I would advise that you start reading this particular (related) series of blogs from the one entitled "Here There Be Tygers" in order to make sense of them.
Please bear in mind these are personal letters and were not written for publication. I found that after writing them I was unable to edit them. Apparently the inner child that mastered them did not wish them tampered with. I always respect the wishes of the client so all dangling prepositions and untidy sentences have been left as is, unpolished. They deal in emotions, not pleasant phrasing, or reasonably thought-out arguments. They are intended to offload, not convince.
My family history is as follows. Father's name Andrew Henery, mother's name Mary Henery. Two children, myself and my brother, Andrew, younger by seven years.
Place of birth, 23 Falkland Place, East Kilbride. Later lived at 26 Lindores Drive, East Kilbride. Mother's maiden name, Mary Baxter Toole. Her father's name, Andrew Toole, married to Jean Toole. Address 1 Springwells Drive (I think), Blantyre. My cousin Isobel, daughter of my mother's brother, Ian, was permanently resident with them through her childhood. I stayed most weekends with them up till the age of eleven or so when Isobel left to stay with her father.
Father's family also hailed from Blantyre and later from East Kilbride. Father Francis, mother possibly Margaret? My father was the youngest of 8 (or possibly 9) children. His eldest brother was Joe. It is his sons, Joseph & Robert (a doctor & a headmaster, respectively), who are referred to in the text of these letters. Bill was one of the other brothers - very macho, male and misogynistic, as most of them were. The Maleys, also referred to, were family acquaintances, fellow-members of the communist party.
My father currently lives at Emerson Road, Bishopbriggs, Glasgow. My mother lives in Lochcarron, near Inverness.
My maternal grandfather was a known paedophile who had been in trouble with the police although, to my knowledge, never charged. No other member of my family has ever, to my knowledge, been accused of or been charged with a similar crime.
The name given to me by my parents was Jane Henery, which I changed by deed poll in the 1980's.
This is the first letter of three, to my father. I will publish the other two over the next two days.
Dear Dad,
I am writing to tell you things I should have said a long time ago, things I never said because "there was no point". While trying to deal with these things and their caustic side effects over the years I have come to realise that the only person my silence hurt was me, and the only person it protected was you.
I am no longer prepared to remain silent. Your time has come to take responsibility for how you behaved and what you did - something you've never done before. You can die denying responsibility but it's still yours. I've given it to you and I am not taking it back. From now on you can wear Child Molester round your neck. You can be the complete failure as a human being you really are. And when you go to meet your maker, let's hope he has some forgiveness to offer you because you are getting none from me
I am writing this with no knowledge of whether you are alive or not. I hope you are because I want you to hear this before you die. I want you to understand that I do not care how old or sick you may be, just as you never cared how small and defenceless I was. You may try to get one of your trained dogs to do your dirty work for you but, believe me in this if you believe nothing else, nothing anyone can say or do in an attempt to transfer the guilt to me will work. I in no way resemble the child you remember and your capability to hurt me no longer exists. I no longer care what you think or feel, and haven't in a very long time. Every single thing you ever told me was a self-serving lie, a deceit. Any love I felt for you you destroyed slowly and systematically, inch by vicious inch. Where you find yourself now you earned with every bloody ugly deed you did. Finally, it is no-one's fault but your own.
You always were a sorry, sad excuse for a human being. The only difference now is you are an old, sick, sorry, sad excuse for a human being. It will always remain a deep regret of mine that I never once told you to fuck off. If ever a human being needed to be forcefully reminded of just what a stunted, cowardly pygmy he was it was you.
Although I have no personal knowledge of it, time and experience has taught me that everything you did to me was almost certainly done to you. Just as I know much of your childhood was impoverished and neglected. However, I now realise something that I was never prepared to admit before, no matter what abuse you received at your own family's hands it did not justify your abuse of me.
Nothing on God's earth ever condones physical, verbal, psychological and sexual abuse against a small child. You are a deplorable monster, an animal. You always have been and I don't doubt for one instant that you will go to the grave as one. Your capacity to empathise was nil. Your ability to see or hear anything outside of yourself was nil. The whole world revolved around you. It was always what you felt, how uncomfortable you were, how unhappy you were. It was our job, and more specifically my job, to keep you happy.
I never could. Your rage was too enormous. Your unhappiness too profound.
It was never my responsibility to take care of you, emotionally, physically, sexually or any other way. I was not your wife, or your mother. I was your child. It was your job to take care of me, to worry about me, to protect me. And you never did, not once, in my whole childhood.
You always made a great big noise about how you clothed and fed me, how you kept me in school, sent me to university. You fucking cheeky bastard. What studying did you ever do for me? What help did you give me, financial or otherwise? The state paid for my education, not you. It never cost you a penny. Every mouthful of food I ate, every piece of my limited, ha-ha 'wardrobe' was paid for fifty times over in the free housekeeping and childcare you got. I made every meal, washed every dish. I took care of Andrew every day, fed him, looked after him, cared for him. I took sole care of him every weekend while you went out socialising. I was never once asked. It was my duty as a good daughter - after all you fed and clothed me.
To listen to you you'd have thought we lived in Victorian times, as if I might otherwise have been down the mines, blacking boots, in the poor house, that you'd somehow rescued me from a fate worse than death, when they real truth of the matter was that I lived like a nineteenth century skivvy in my own home, while all around me were living like pampered aristocrats, on my labour.
I was never once thanked. I had to fight for every 'luxury' I ever got. I was forbidden from dating or socialising. That meant I'd always be available to baby-sit, you, my mother and Andrew. How convenient.
My career and life was decided for me. I was never asked. That was the story of my life - I was never asked. And yet, still, I remained a good daughter, never cheeking you, no rebellion, no teenage dramas. On the rare occasions when I couldn't stand it any more and answered back I was beaten to within an inch of my life.
Ring any bells? Sound anything like your own childhood? Remember the one you had with the drunken, cold father and the saintly mother? She was so fucking saintly she let you be beaten, bullied, tyrannised, probably sexually abused. And you, in turn, thought how much better you'd feel if you could use me in exactly the same way. What was it? Character building? Did your arrogant, egotistical terrorising of your family make you hard? Did it get you off?
Yes, this is where we get to the real meat of you. Literally. What was your problem? Was it beating up women that got you there? Did you offer up prayers of gratitude to God when you got a girl child first time out? So what if your wife was fucked up and frigid because, surprise, surprise, she had been systematically raped and abused by her own father while her mother stood by and made excuses for him, covering up the family's dirty little secrets just like yours had done. It didn't matter that your wife wasn't responsive enough to really get you there. Did you make a mistake? Did you think when you picked her that she'd play the doting daughter? Did you think dirty old Andrew Toole had broken her in for you? Only you discovered - what? She could be bolshie, uncooperative? What was it? How did she fail you? Did she sleep around? Go limp and silent when you needed her to cry and struggle? What was it she didn't give you that I could?
Oh, lucky old you. Talk about getting it with jam on it. There I was, a lovely, soft, little vulnerable thing, so rejected by her mother that I lived in abject terror of dying of sheer neglect. And, no, before you open your big, fat, whiny mouth about you working yourself to death to provide, FOOD IS NOT LOVE. A house is not love. Neglect is what it was from her. Cruelty and sexual perversion is what it was from you.
You were deviant. You probably still are, only now you're too old to be a danger to anyone. And I was so desperate to be loved and protected, so afraid and alone, that no matter what you did to me I took it and went right on loving you. You were my God, my hero, you could do no wrong.
Christ, what a tragic, ugly mistake that was. Only I was too young to know any better.
But I do now. This is it. And you can rage and yell and deny all you like, old man, but I know who you are and don't you ever forget it.
I know you better than anyone. I know everything about you. I know things about you you never told anyone. I know all your secrets and lies. I know who you really are under that dirty little façade, that Great Communist Man of the People bullshit, the line you spouted for years. The great egalitarian who couldn't even grasp the basic concepts of equality. You didn't even know what the fucking word meant. Equality to you was never anything more than, "I want what he's got. I had a hard childhood, people should take care of me. Now. Gimme, gimme, gimme."
You were a fat, ugly fuck of a man. A greedy, spoilt selfish little child screaming and throwing one perpetual tantrum because Mummy didn't love you enough. If anyone dared cross you, disagree with you in any way, you'd shout them down and if that didn't work you punched it out of them. That was the great orator, the man of the people. Thank God they never gave you any real power or you'd have been a bigger monster than Joseph Stalin, stealing and marauding and raping while you told everyone else how to live their lives, constantly whining on about how you had no opportunities, stealing more and more from everyone around you, like a fat cuckoo, getting me to live out your dreams and ambitions because you were too fucking chickenshit to go out and take them for yourself.
And all this because your father was a sad little bully, just like you, and your mother a chickenshit little peasant who didn't have the wits or the courage to get herself out the hole she'd dug.
I didn't let them beat you, she did. I didn't let them verbally abuse you, she did. I didn't let them rape you, she did. And yet you couldn't admit it, so instead you did it all to me, passing it on for no more reason that it made you feel better. Constant criticism, sadism, disparaging remarks, terrorising me with things you knew I feared. This was all 'funny', meant as a joke. Was it funny when they did it to you as a kid? Did you laugh your head off when Bill raped you, beat you? Funny, was it?
And you had the cheek to sneer at my grandfather (Toole), the unbelievable gall. But he knew who you were. It takes one to know one, and he spotted you a mile off. Why do you think he disliked you so? Why do you imagine you disliked him? Because you were mirrors of each other. You saw into each other's souls and hated the very sight of yourself. Everything he was you were. A domestic tyrant, a drunk, only yours was food addiction. You thought you were so smart because you didn't drink, but you ate till you were obese and developed heart and intestinal problems, but if anyone dared suggest you had a problem with food you went ballistic and yelled them down. You were an addict just like your father and my grandfather, you'd just put a socially acceptable face on it.
You were your father. You still are. All the time I knew you you never changed a bit. Not an inch. You had no self-knowledge at all, you who was such a "Great thinker". You pretentious little fart. What the fuck did you know about "thinking"? The only thinking you'd ever done was to quickly tidy life up to your own advantage so that you never had to feel a single, uncomfortable feeling. You snapped your fingers and we all ran to do your bidding – must keep the giant baby in our living room happy.
You always claimed you mellowed with age. No, you just got the status quo exactly as you liked it. In fact, you got such a quiet life out of us that your wife finally quietly slid away from you, by the back door when you weren't even looking. The very thing you strove to achieve, a life where no ugly realities intruded at all was finally achieved and, lo and behold, we were not living in Victorian times and you could not do a single thing to stop her.
I remember how panicked you got by the divorce. You nearly fell apart and I felt so sorry for you. I felt sorry for you. I can't believe the irony. This was the man who had beaten me, abused me, probably raped and certainly molested me when I was less than seven years old. This was the man who played sexual games with me in front of my cousin Joseph, who also sexually molested me. This was the man who sent me to my grandfather every other weekend knowing he was a paedophile and I felt sorry for him.
I could never quite understand your panic. You hadn't had any kind of relationship with my mother since your forties, and even then it was a mockery, based on lies and deceit and mutual dependency – why the big anxiety attack? And then it came out, she was going to accuse you of 'perversions' in the court.
I remember getting a funny feeling, that scary familiarity, a feeling of "I knew it" – but still I didn't get it. I thought, anal sex. Still illegal then. It's the public humiliation, I thought. But I didn't even believe it myself. For years it preyed on my mind. Then the prostitute murder came up, when you were 'arrested' (Andrew's description). And I remembered then my grandfather had always said you went with prostitutes. He was such a malicious old fucker I never really believed it. Except I did. Oh, yes, I did. It exactly fitted the hypocritical, two-faced, self-serving bastard you were. It exactly fitted the psychopath, loner, sad-boy who didn't get married till his thirties, out cruising for your little innocent, broken girls. Of course you used whores. You need that abused, beaten, tragic thing to get you off.
But that still wasn't it, was it?
No. It was me. It was always me. What happened? Did Mum catch you doing something you shouldn't?
I don't know because I only have fragmentary memories which started to come back in the last two years. Memories which were, and are, so horrific to me that I won't think them.
I felt up till now that until I had some categorical proof then I couldn't confront you with this. I couldn't claim ownership of it because I couldn't remember it. I still can't. And a big part of me doesn't want to. In fact I suspect that I never will.
What has changed is that I no longer care about the details. I don't care about your whys or your 'reasons'. Oh, I'm damn sure you have them. Or is your denial so strong that you've just wiped them out? What was it, a rage attack because Mum was denying you sex/ being unfaithful/ unable to understand your 'unusual' sexual needs? Or was it something more basic than that? Did your dad do it to you? Bill? I always feel if it was any of the brothers it was Bill and/or maybe Joe. After all, Joe managed to bring up a paedophile too, he had to have learned it somewhere.
Hell, maybe it was one of those good, old Henery traditions, the ones you macho Scottish boys used to be so proud of in your working class, mining, communist, grass roots, salt-of-the-earth kind of a way. Just like being a chauvinist pig and beating your wife and children. Maybe that was the problem. You couldn't beat Mum so I got it. Or am I being naïve – did she get it too?
Was that it? Did the evil bitch threaten to tell? Was that why I got it – because Mary threatened to tell?
I'll never know and, like I say, I no longer care.
Knock yourself out, Dad, take out an ad in the Sunday papers, full page, deny it, scream it from the roof tops, just don't forget – I know you. I was there. I know what I feel and I know who you are. I've always known who you are – an ugly, misshapen dwarf consumed by his own bitterness, rage and fear. A man who was so in denial about the abuse he suffered at the hands of his parents and brothers that he thought it gave him carte blanche to do anything he liked to his own child as long as he fed and clothed her.
I wasn't a person to you. I was a thing, an object to be used and dispensed with as you saw fit. You were a bully and a sadist and a sexual deviant. You were exactly like your father, a man you felt contempt for, all the time sanctimoniously pretending you didn't. A man you felt superior to. Oh, you thought you'd moved on so far from him. You never got a half inch out the shadow of his big, ugly boots, you stayed exactly in the pit of degradation and ignorance he dug for you, mired in your own resentment and self-pity. You were stunted and pathetic. You were cruel, selfish and ruthless.
You are the lowest form of pond life and I wish I'd never known you. It still shames me that you are my father even although rationally I know it is not my fault.
In conclusion, I have what's known as a web blog. This is the equivalent of a newspaper column on the internet. It presently has a readership of around 2,000 people a month. This letter, a similar letter to my mother and a letter to Andrew, along with full details of your identity will be published there.
Your bad karma just came back and bit you in the ass, you dirty old cunt.
Enjoy.
Not yet read DANNY? The price rise for Volume 1 is imminent, and I mean imminent, so if you need a copy check it out now at Poison Pixie where you can read a BIG extract for Free! Or grab a copy on Amazon here.
Once you've bagged your masterpiece you can rub shoulders with DANNY's other rich and famous readers at Chancery Fans
There is also an independent Live Journal DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY. If you would like to talk about the upcoming new volumes or find out why you should read Volume 1 (and you should) Jill & Jodie are experts, so please go along and badger them with questions and unreasonable demands for proof that it's worth reading before you part with your readies. I guarantee they will provide the most hardened literary cynics with a reason, or die trying.
21:40 Posted in Blog | Permalink | Comments (2) | Email this
Sunday, 07 January 2007
Here There Be Tygers
Confrontation – what an ugly word.
No-one really enjoys confrontation, except for the few ugly souls I've met – anti-social and obnoxious to a man – who thrive on it as a way of either keeping people away or/and as a way of testing your love.
When you think about it it's no surprise. Confrontation plugs straight into your primitive, cave-dwelling soul. Confrontation is facing down the sabre-toothed tiger or, worse, your fellow man. Confrontation cannot be friendly. If it was friendly you wouldn't be confronting, you'd be talking. At worst it would be a disagreement, a lively debate.
Hands up how many of you who are, right now, already feeling uncomfortable at the idea of where this might be leading?
Oh hell, we're off into Chancery Stone territory; her ugly, dirty life.
Some of you, perhaps a lot of you, enjoy this. I, sadly, have no idea why. I can conjecture till I'm blue in the face, but it's always tinged with my own expectancies, my own experiences.
I always think, Yeah, they come here to get off on it, too scared to do it themselves, they live through me vicariously. But, my own behaviour proves that's as absurd and judgemental as it can possibly be.
I've spent my entire life actively seeking out every kind of filthy secret humans possess. I've kept newspaper clippings of horrendous child abuse that beats DANNY with a stick. I used to avidly read books on incest and child abuse, frantically searching, until I got sick of the whiny victimisation of them. In fact, if you want to cure yourself of feeling sorry for abuse victims pretty much anything by the Pelzer family will do that for you. Or try the one that's on the shelves currently – Ugly – guaranteed to free you from sympathy for life.
Trouble is that might just be my warped perspective too. You might be sitting there right now thinking, I read Ugly last week and thought it was deeply moving. See, trouble is I have the same vulnerability to this as a polio victim has to someone who damages a leg in a car crash. Don't come fucking whining to me for sympathy, I'm the forgotten child of Fred and Rosemary West.
Is it jealousy? Why are they getting the love and attention I never got? Maybe. Or is it something darker? Is it a horrible fear of having to see yourself, stripped back, bare and exposed? Maybe to realise your position was even worse, and to come up against the ugly face of your own unlovability.
Because that's what every single story of child abuse is about, no matter what was done to you, how often and by whom. No matter what colour, sex or race you are. It is always about being unlovable.
It's the one unifying factor of all abused children. We are all unlovable. And that one single problem is the one we are all fighting to overcome, whether that's by therapy, self-help, medical interference or addiction.
Oh yes, that's what addiction is – self-medication, a desperate attempt to put yourself on an even-keel, to feel 'normal', to be like everyone else.
I once read a description by an abuse victim where he said he was, "Waiting to feel happy."
That's what we're all doing, every one of us – waiting to feel happy. Trouble is we don't know what that feels like. It's like being sent out to find a drabgod. What the fuck is a drabgod? If you don't know what it looks like you can't find it.
Which brings me back to confrontation. Confrontation is what John and Danny don't do. It's what they edge round, refer to even, occasionally appear to dig up and use against one another. But, don't be fooled, they never actually do it. Because, like all of us, they are too afraid of what they might find, what they have to face. They are afraid that Here There be Tygers.
And very reasonable that is too.
Confrontation is inevitable in self-help books for abused children. It's the dreaded chapter 26. It's the exercise you'll "come back to" and somehow never do. It's the thing, like in my case, you put off indefinitely, even occasionally give up on completely, because "there's no point."
Confrontation is ugly. If it were positive even half the time we'd be able to tolerate it. But the truth of the matter is it's always ugly, if only because you feel ugly doing it. Even if a relieved and liberated part of you is doing the Watusi and shouting "Wahey!" as you caper round your mental living room, it won't last. Like any good purge the aftermath is inevitable. Either externally or internally. If they don't get you, you will.
It's hard-wired into you. You're an abuse victim, for Christ's sake. What did you expect? That they'd lie down and take it? That they'd accept the guilt, the responsibility they've been avidly denying for ten, twenty, thirty, forty years? That you'd change the shamed, guilty, abject creature you are overnight? What planet are you on?
Nope, much as it is supposed to be 'good' for you, and much as you may need it to 'heal' and 'move on', no confrontation is going to be fun.
Add into this mix that nearly all child abuse, and sexual abuse in particular, is based on secret-keeping and you will see that the very nature of confrontation is the absolute antithesis of what you've lived all your life.
Think about it for a moment. You've been told repeatedly through hidden and covert messages, or direct threat, that you must never tell. One secret begets another and still you must not tell. You get sick and nearly die but YOU MUST NOT TELL. It's like brainwashing. Child abuse is the communist threat. We are all pod people and we must not tell.
We go through life like automatons, unable to feel very much, except rage and/or depression, experiencing little joy, avoiding people like the plague, either literally or by fucking so many of them we hope to simply blur them all together into a composite 'other' and all this so no-one will ever find out what we must not tell. It's M. Night Shyamalan's The Village without the red cloaks and the porcupine quills. Our life is that of which we must not speak.
Suddenly, after struggling through this in a kind of quiet desperation where we are one step out of synch with the rest of the world, someone comes along and says, I can save you. They talk to us soothingly, as if we were fretful and nervous horses, help us make sense of feelings we've barely understood before and then suddenly, just as we're thinking we've found something safe and reassuring, they drop this on us. You must confront your oppressor.
Oh, dear God, the panic.
Now they want me to tell?
I have 'told' of course, over the years, in one way or another and, finally in DANNY, very publicly.
But I haven't.
Only one member of my family has read DANNY. And I don't even know if she read all of it. I know my brother's seen it but whether he's read it or not I do not know. He got far enough to refute it as "a book like that". But what that means is anyone's guess.
These reactions are neither new nor exclusive. Don't think we're talking about some private world of dysfunction which you well-balanced sorts are not part of. Do not comfort yourself that you stand well outside our Hell, bathed in pity.
Just recently I've seen almost word for word reactions in the fangirl world, where it has become something of a fashion to read the current 'novel-length' DANNY extract then pretend to know the book. (They've been popping up all over Google for more than a month – two days here then gone again, and all from Live Journal. Make of that what you like.)
They get themselves in all kinds of tangles trying to dismiss it, claiming to have only skimmed it, then fall flat on their faces when their Inner Prude comes out with gems like, "When I… got to the scene where Danny's MOM wants to get it on with him, I fled."
Rampant prudery from twenty-year olds goes hand in hand with the stupidity of old dears, like my mother's friend who wrote to me recently, on my mother's behalf, asking for my current address. I emailed it to her and my e-mail, sent from Poison Pixie, had an ad on the bottom like it always does, saying "Have you read Danny yet?" along with a one-line review from Scarlet magazine. Imagine my surprise when I got an answer back saying "Yes, I read it, was unable to complete."
I managed to restrain myself from e-mailing her back to say the question was rhetorical and had she written to Nike to tell them she didn't want to "just do it"?
But this is exactly the point. Prudish shock and distaste, be it from teen fangirls or old ladies, is exactly the same animal – just another way of saying, "I don't want to hear, so you mustn't tell."
It's not that I object to them not wanting to hear. That's their prerogative, of no concern to me, but why tell me about it? In the case of the fangirls why read it at all? Why devote time and space to it? Why discuss it? One of them, a fortnight before Christmas, went so far as to have an on-line party (I know, and 353 'guests' turned up) where she invited everyone to come along with the lure that you would get to "steal a kiss from Chancery Stone's Danny". This along with watching Beauty and the Beast, mind you.
Why? Because they'd all been reading the free extract and somehow, somewhere they got comfort out of putting it together with a Disney film. No part of DANNY resembles a Disney film. I know that, you know that and they know that. That's the point. What I wonder is why would they want it to? And they do. They talk about Henderson, endlessly. He's become something of a hero to them. Why?
Because he's hairy, apparently, thus underlining - accidentally and very forcefully - how much young girls fear male sexuality. Did Henderson repel as well as attract? Christ knows. I don't. But I was struck by how irrelevant it all was.
It was like standing in front of Mont Blanc and talking about the varnish on the door of the ski lodge.
If you were with someone who did this in real life, stood looking at a battered child say, and talked about the kid's Barbie back-pack, bitching about how lower class it was and what a cheap piece of tat, you'd be standing there thinking, What is this bitch on? There's a battered, bleeding child here, what the fuck has her back-pack got to do with anything?
Enter the land of Denial. This is where the 'unrealistic' words live, close friends of 'just pornography', 'just sensationalistic' and any other supposedly 'dismissive' but, in truth, very revealing overreaction. Interestingly, one of my dad's favourite childhood criticisms of me was, "You're losing touch with reality."
The whole fangirl reaction (which coincided with other web denouncements of me - coincidentally, of course) is the usual storm in a teacup. People howling at the moon, screaming abuse, all the time trying desperately to cover it up as disinterest and indifference. Never, seemingly, aware that disinterest has the word interest built into it. If they aren't interested why are they there?
Oh, they come striding back, like a small child standing four feet away from his opponent and hurling his toy car, to scream (and if any of them are reading this right now you'll hear from them, I guarantee it), "We're not interested. We're mocking."
Of course you are. We know that. Desperate, frantic, spending all the hours on God's earth reading through my blogs (my stats chart the hours readers spend on site as well as the number of pages read), and the only way you can find to 'mock' is by writing, "I AM LOYAL TO JUDAS. HE WILL BE MY SNUGGLEBUNNY ALWAYS AND FOREVER" or "You better watch out, I'm coming to steal your pies."
You spent all that time, tentatively sneaking peeps at DANNY, rereading the 'dirty bits', over and over, horrified and aroused at once, feeling guilty, squeamish, unnerved till you had to stop, driven back here to sneer some more, driven to make me stop, to shut me up. But, after trying all the other insults that work on your friends, you are left creatively bankrupt, with absolutely no idea of how to reach me and make it hurt.
We're not even going to go into the territory of envy. After all, you are strident in your surety that I have nothing for anyone to be envious of. You know I can't write. DANNY's crap. It's a pile of lying shit, just sensationalist pornography. That's every one of your fears, both revealed and disguised in one sentence. Well, I agree with you. I'm a plumber from Poughkeepsie. I made it all up. You can go now.
Only you can't, can you? Hover around, lurk about, wait till you see some other glimpse of yourself, then try again and again to silence me, knowing you'll fail. Knowing I will never shut up. Knowing some part of me is far bigger and scarier than you can ever imagine. I'm the silent one who finally found her voice and you know in your bones I cannot be shut up. The depth of my rage is bottomless, unplumbed, and you'll still be hearing the echo long after I'm dead.
This is annoying you right now, isn't it? You're itching to put me in my place. How dare I expose your dirty little secrets?
Ah well, price you pay, my friend. If you will come over here, however obliquely, and flaunt your insecurities in my face you have to be prepared to stand up. This is what happens in confrontations. People tell the truth. And I know all yours. I warned you it was ugly.
I know how inadequate you feel, and, more importantly, how inadequate I make you feel. I know what you are thinking every single time you open your mouth. I'm not distracted by discussions on Henderson's shoes, or his home décor or his body hair. All I see is what you're trying desperately not to look at. And the more you stare at the thing that you don't care about the more I can read what you do care about. The more you scream horror about the things that repulse you the mo