Damaged, A Baby’s Cry and The Night the Angels Came 3-in-1 Collection. Cathy GlassЧитать онлайн книгу.
hallucinations. She was having more incidences of remembered pain now, and these became linked to disclosures; Jodie would complain that her arm hurt, and this would lead to the memory of her mother hitting her with an ashtray, or her father scalding her with hot water. In all of these cases Jodie’s pain seemed to be completely genuine, despite my attempts to explain to her that the injuries she was describing had happened months, sometimes years, ago.
Although I didn’t think she was fabricating the remembered pain, I was becoming increasingly aware that she was lying in other situations. Often, she was so convincing that I found myself questioning what I’d seen, and doubting the evidence of my own eyes. If I caught her red-handed in the middle of some misdemeanour, she would so emphatically deny that it was happening that I had to stop and reassess what I was looking at. She had sometimes told lies when she first arrived, but I had assumed that she had been reverting to past experience, telling lies to avoid punishment, so it had been somewhat understandable. Now, however, she must have known that she didn’t have to worry, that there was never any risk of her being physically or emotionally punished. Why, then, did she feel it necessary to deny her actions so vehemently?
She also started making false accusations, making up stories about the other children, even when I was in the room and had obviously seen that nothing had happened. She would claim Lucy or Paula had kicked, pinched or bitten her, which was clearly ludicrous. If anything, they were scared of her, quite understandably. When I pointed out to her that I had been in the room the whole time, and had seen that no one had gone near her, she flared up.
‘She did. She did! Why don’t you ever believe me?’
She was so passionate and convincing, I was often tempted to reconsider, and had to remind myself of what I’d seen.
At other times I caught her deliberately hurting herself. It wasn’t like the time she had cut herself so chillingly. Now it seemed more as though it was done in anger, in a fit of fury or passion, when she would thump herself, pinch herself, thud her head against something or pull her hair. Then she blamed it on one of her imaginary friends. Some friend, I thought. I would have to patiently tell her that actually she was the one who was doing it, as no one else had touched her. This self-harming was one of the most disturbing aspects of Jodie’s behaviour, and the pinches, scratches and thumps she inflicted sometimes produced marks, which she then used to convince herself even further that someone had been attacking her.
Even more worryingly, a week into the New Year the different voices she sometimes used began to suddenly take on identities of their own. Adrian’s mobile phone went missing, and after a lengthy search I eventually found it in Jodie’s toy box, which was on a shelf in the conservatory. Jodie hadn’t stolen anything before, but she did have problems respecting other people’s property, and I had been trying to teach her that we couldn’t just help ourselves to what we wanted, that we had to ask the owner first.
‘It wasn’t me, honestly,’ she repeated, looking me straight in the eyes and speaking in a babyish voice. ‘It really wasn’t. I’m not big enough to reach.’
Adrian and I both looked at the shelf, on which Jodie had just placed the toy box with ease.
‘Of course you are,’ said Adrian. ‘It’s just above your waist.’
‘No,’ she insisted, heightening her baby voice. ‘It was her.’ She pointed to the space beside her. ‘It was Jodie.’
‘You’re Jodie,’ I said wearily.
‘No. I’m Amy. I’m only two, and I can’t reach.’ She rubbed her eyes, and pouted like a toddler. I told her again that she mustn’t take Adrian’s mobile, and left it at that.
A day later, the separation of her personality took on another, more sinister form. She was up at 5.30 in the morning, so I went in to settle her. She was sitting on the bed playing with her music box, and clapping loudly.
‘Quietly, Jodie,’ I said. ‘Find something to do that’s quiet if you’ve had enough sleep.’
She spun round to face me. Her features were hard and distorted. ‘No,’ she shouted, in a gruff masculine voice. ‘Get out or I’ll rip you to pieces. Get out! Bitch!’
I instinctively took a step back. ‘Jodie! Don’t use that word. Now calm down. Find something to do quietly. I mean it. Now.’
She stood and brought herself to her full height. She advanced towards me, with her hands clawed, baring her teeth. ‘I’m not Jodie,’ she growled. ‘I’m Reg. Get out or I’ll fucking kill you.’
I wasn’t going to tackle her in that mood. I closed the door and waited on the landing. My heart was racing. I heard her pacing the floor, cursing my name, along with the rest of the family’s. ‘Wankers. Evil wankers. I’ll rip their heads off.’ She growled again, and then it went quiet. I opened the door and looked in. Jodie was in bed looking calmly at a book. Apparently, the old Jodie had returned.
As a foster carer, I’d seen some pretty extreme behaviour in children and to a certain extent I was used to it – but not this extreme. This was new. Jodie’s imaginary friends seemed to be taking her over.
‘Who’s Reg?’ I asked later that morning, as we emptied the dishwasher together. Jodie looked up at me uncomprehendingly. ‘Do you know someone called Reg? I thought you mentioned his name when I came into your room first thing this morning?’
She shook her head, and carried on sorting the cutlery. ‘There’s someone on Mum’s telly called Reg, but he’s horrible. I don’t talk to him.’
‘And there’s no one else you know called Reg?’
‘No.’
And I believed her. Reg, like Amy, seemed to have taken on a life of his own, without Jodie’s knowledge or consent.
When I told Jill about this, she was very surprised. ‘This is highly unusual. If I’m right, then it sounds like D.I.D. – Dissociative Identity Disorder.’
D.I.D. is a rare and complex response to stress, she explained, where the personality splits into a number of different identities, in order to cope. Often, one identity has no idea what the others are doing.
‘That sounds exactly what she’s doing,’ I said. ‘It’s very unnerving. Why is she doing it with us? It hasn’t happened before. Why would it start happening now, when she’s more secure than she’s ever been?’
‘Perhaps it’s because it’s only now that she feels safe enough to remember the abuse. I suspect that before, she wasn’t even able to accept and process what was happening to her. She blotted it out in order to survive. You said that she was very calm and accepting at first – remember how she passively began to take her clothes off when you wanted to photograph her? There was no fight in her, because she needed to keep going. However, now that she’s removed from the abuse, she can start recalling it and piecing together what happened.’
I told her about the remembered pain, and how real it seemed to Jodie.
‘That makes sense as well,’ said Jill. ‘She couldn’t afford to feel the pain at the time, so she’s feeling it now. She’s receiving an onslaught of information, physical and mental. Because she’s remembering all these awful things, her brain’s on overload, and can’t cope. By splitting her awareness, at least part of the self can be kept safe. So far you’ve seen baby Amy and an angry adult male. Does she have an adult female side as well?’
‘Now I come to think of it, yes. I thought she was just imitating her mother, but now I’m not so sure. She tries to chastise Lucy and Paula as an angry housewife.’
‘Does she refer to her by name?’
‘Not that I’ve heard, no.’
‘It’s the classic form. Baby, adult female, and adult male. We’ve all got these components in our personalities, but when we’re mentally healthy they’re all rolled into one.’ Jill paused. ‘To be honest, I’m really worried.’ I was now feeling extremely concerned myself. Jodie,