I Remember, Daddy: The harrowing true story of a daughter haunted by memories too terrible to forget

Author:Matthews, Katie [Matthews, Katie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper Collins, Inc.
Published: 2011-03-30T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

A few months later, when I was 18, I spent the summer working in a seaside town with my friend Jenny. We rented a couple of rooms in a house that was owned and lived in by a man and his son, although they were hardly ever there and we often had the place to ourselves for days at a time. It all seemed like an adventure. The town was popular with holiday-makers, so there were plenty of jobs to be had during the summer, and we both started work almost immediately after we arrived – Jenny in a café/restaurant and me in a pub. Then we settled down to earn some money and enjoy the sun, sea and sense of freedom we both felt at being footloose, fancy-free and far away from home.

There were lots of other young people working the summer season, and we soon made friends. Because there was no one there who knew me – apart from Jenny, who I could trust not to talk about me to anyone – I felt as though, for the first time in my life, I could decide who I was and what I wanted to tell people about myself. Although I could never completely lose my sense of underlying guilt and anxiety, it was liberating to get away from my real life for a while and from all the baggage and complications that went with it.

One of the people I became friends with was a girl called Issie. She was seven months’ pregnant when I met her, and her boyfriend, Dan, was the manager of the pub where I was working. Issie was a really lovely girl, sweet-natured and pretty and clearly besotted by Dan, who seemed to be just as in love with her, too. So, on the couple of occasions when Dan tried to kiss me, I brushed it off, told him not to be so daft and assumed he was just messing around.

Then, one night, when I finished work late, after everyone else had already left the pub, Dan offered to walk me home. He was locking up as I was leaving and so we set off together, past the few drunks who were still out on the streets and along the road that led to the house where I was staying. We talked about some of the people who’d been in the pub that night, and about the preparations he and Issie were making for the birth of their baby, and when we got to the house, he asked if he could come in to phone for a taxi to take him the rest of the way home.

As I turned my key in the front door, the house was in darkness. The owner and his son were away, and clearly Jenny was having a late night out too. So I turned on the hall light, showed Dan where the phone was and then went upstairs to the bathroom.

When I came out, Dan was standing outside the bathroom door and I almost jumped out of my skin.

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