Silent Valley

 

When I was eight years old, I was caught wheeling a shopping trolley, laden with brightly coloured pens and colour-in books, out of a supermarket. None of the contents had been paid for. I’d just walked into Supermac, helped myself to what I wanted and breezed out, as I had done on several previous occasions. My younger sister was with me. She didn’t have a clue about what was going on… and when it came down to it, neither did I.

The store detective, a portly middle aged man, guided us and the trolley back into the supermarket and into his office behind the row of tills. While he was asking me serious question after serious question, I noticed the Pirelli calendar hanging on the wall behind him. Today was 16 May and, as I looked at the date, I knew I would remember today for the rest of my life because this was the day I’d been caught doing a very bad thing. There would be trouble for this at home, big trouble, probably enough to warrant the use of my stepmother’s new weapon against us: a sturdy bamboo cane.

After asking for our names, our parents’ names and address, and how long we had been shoplifting for, probably the most important question the store detective asked was why we had stolen from the supermarket. The question hung in the air for a while before I replied that I didn’t know, and I didn’t. It’s not that we were keeping everything that we had stolen, because we weren’t. We carried most of it to an abandoned house about a ten-minute walk from the supermarket, and hid it there, hoping to come back another day to collect it. 

The fact that our stash always disappeared from its hiding place, did not disappoint or dissuade us. After all, there was plenty more where that came from. We could always return to the supermarket and replenish our stock. That was most likely what we were doing on the day the store detective stopped us. Why we were doing this was never a matter that we reflected on. What was the point of stealing from a supermarket and stashing it. And then having it repeatedly stolen from us again? It made little sense back then.

Apart from a few sweets, we stole colour-in books, felt tip pens and crayons, as well as some stylish drawing pads that attracted our attention on the shelves of the supermarket. The few trinkets we kept for ourselves were hidden under our beds at home, but we lived in fear that they would be discovered by one or other of our parents. This, we knew, was an inevitability once the store detective became involved.

Two days passed and we were beginning to hope that there might not be any consequences for our misbehaviour, that perhaps the kind store detective had decided to forget the matter. It was not to be. On Saturday morning, he rang the doorbell of our house and my father opened it.  My parents and the store detective went into the parlour and closed the door. Their voices hummed in a steady rhythm below us that was audible from my bedroom, but the words were muffled. I felt mounting trepidation and fear rising through my body, so I suggested to my sister we play the “long hair game” using our stepmother’s scarves. She would not allow us to have long hair, even though we pleaded with her, and we thought that the scarves, clipped on to our heads and streaming down our backs, was the next best thing.

When I heard the front door open and watched the store detective walk away, silence descended on the house. I felt sick with anxiety. We were summoned downstairs to the parlour and our stepmother demanded to know why we had been shoplifting. Again, we had no reason to offer, and this baffled them even more. I was perplexed. Nothing seemed to make sense to me or them. Silence descended again… until we got into the car, and that was when our stepmother unleashed her fury on us. Fortunately, she was in the passenger seat while we were in the back, so all she could do was lunge at us, and many of her slaps and punches missed us. Finally, dad shouted “Enough” and we motored onward, in the direction of the Silent Valley, the destination of our day trip. From that point onward we all disappeared into our respective silences – mine filled with fear and my stepmother’s filled with rage - for the rest of our journey.

Silence prevailed in our family about so many uncomfortable truths. Silence over my mother and why she had taken her own life. Silence about me finding her hanging from a taut rope at the top of the stairs. Silence over my mother even existing. Silence over the bruises that my stepmother left on me with her brutality. Silence over the night that my sister and I ran away from our new home to escape… And so it went that somebody took a decision to involve a psychiatrist in the mess that I was at the centre of, to find out if I had gone mad.

I was invited to take a seat in the psychiatrist’s office and given a glass of fruit juice. I was not used to being treated with such courtesy, so it made me apprehensive. I was given my own chair, which was too big for me, and my own table. When I was seated, the psychiatrist invited me to choose from a range of colourful shapes and slide them into the right holes on the board. Believing it to be a game, I cooperated enthusiastically and quickly finished the task while this man watched me. I expected him to open up the scenario, to ask me to explain why I was like I was, to tell him about my life, so I was taken by surprise when he smiled and guided me out of the door in silence. That was that.

Dad was invited in to hear the verdict: normal. That was a disappointment for me. Now I had no excuse for my deviant behaviour. Nothing changed after the psychiatrist. We were still left alone every day, day after day of the school holidays. Bored and lonely. Missing my real mother all the time, wondering why she had left me behind…