Passage House

TW: domestic abuse

I am in a perpetual state of confusion; My where is depressingly familiar, but my when is shaky. It shifts and fluctuates and never quite seems to settle.

People often talk about the ‘sands of time’ and how it can slip through one’s hands, but my experience of time is that it is more viscous; hours seep into days, days saturate into weeks and weeks haemorrhage into months. 

My ‘where’ is a place called Passage House. It is a shelter for female victims of domestic abuse. I arrived here some time ago. I can’t give you an exact measure of time because of the shifting and the fluctuating.

All I know is, it has been a while. Each day bleeds into the next, leaving me clueless and disorientated. I don’t know what day of the week it is today and I have no idea what month we are in. I could hazard a guess at the season, but a guess is all it would be.

I am timeless and I am fading – like the contrail of an aeroplane, slowly dispersing and evaporating into nothingness.

---

This refuge isn’t my home. Nor is this city or even this country. What brought me to England, to London, is the same thing that forced me to this refuge; the man that I loved. Janis. Janis was charismatic and enchanting. Inquisitive and curious. He was intensely interested in life, and surprisingly, in me.

We would spend hours messaging online before progressing to endless phone calls. Our conversations were never boring; together we joked, gossiped and theorised. Not once did we run out of things to say to one another. We were never lost in a sea of static silence.

He was refreshing, invigorating, a breath of fresh air, a thirst quenching drink.

He was everything and because of him, I became so much more than I had ever been before.

So when he asked me to move to London to be with him, I was ecstatic. It was all I’d ever wanted; freedom, independence, adventure and love. Beautiful, earth shattering, overwhelming, uncontrollable love. The love that we shared was the kind of love that made it essential to move half way around the world to be together. It was the kind of love where it was necessary to leave your family and friends behind without a second thought. It was the kind of love that was worth breaking your Mama’s heart for.

Even now, after everything, my chest swells and my heart hums whenever I think of Janis.

Even if a large part of that, is in fear.

---

The calendar in my room hangs limply. When I first arrived, I flicked through it idly. I wouldn’t have chosen it myself. It has pictures of dogs in hats on it; a different dog with a different hat for every month of the year.

I have never really liked dogs, either with or without hats.

I stopped marking the days off quite some time ago. It is too cruel, too painful. My muddled sense of disorientation became preferable to acknowledging how long I’d been hiding in this room for.

The calendar, just like everything else in this room, was donated to me when I first arrived. Beggars can’t be choosers, so I gratefully accepted what I was given; the calendar, the clothes, the second hand books.

These things might not be mine, but they are free of obligation and that makes them priceless.

---

It is my anniversary, I think.

I arrived in London a year ago – more or less.

I know this because of the tell-tale yellow daffodils sprouting smugly outside of my window. When my plane landed in England, Janis met me in the arrivals lounge holding a bunch of yellow Daffodils. He told me that the sunshine blooms symbolised new beginnings. I was euphoric.

We caught the tube back to his flat and made love for the first time.

There was tenderness and urgency; we had waited a long time for this. His willowy body was finally mine to explore. At last, here was the man that I craved. The man whose very soul I was utterly convinced I knew inside and out. The man that would make all my dreams, and my nightmares, come true.

After we made love, I found a chipped ceramic mug in his kitchen, filled it with water and placed my daffodils on a windowsill.

The smug daffodils fill my mind with intrusive memories. I find myself wondering how Janis and I came to be so withered and rotten, when our first tentative buds had seemed so promising. Perhaps if I had any photographs of our time together, I would be able to look back and pinpoint the moment when we began to wilt; When his looks, once so tender, became tainted with malice.

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, I cannot do this because when I left, I had only the clothes on my back and the tang of blood on my tongue.

---

This Spring is turning out to be not so different from the last. After a few weeks I wasn’t allowed out of our flat much, aside from our weekly walks to the nearby allotments. Those days had felt so golden; bathed in sunlight with Janis by my side. He was my stronghold in this strange city.

London felt alien to me; The people moved quickly, with purpose.

I was directionless and lost; I couldn’t understand the language or wrap my head around the bleak concrete maze of the city. I was overwhelmed and in the way. I was vulnerable. Janis understood this, of course he had been the same when he first arrived. It would take time. Why not spend more time at the flat, where it was safe, until my confidence grew?

And so I did. I stayed inside, cooking for Janis and maintaining our home.

I was proud when he enjoyed the food that I prepared so carefully for him and when he complimented the newly potted plants on our window-sill, I was overjoyed. Now I stay here, at Passage House, too scared to venture out of this ramshackle safe space. There are no potted plants and I cannot prepare my own meals, but my space is my own and that counts for a lot.

A quiet, murmuring terror kept trapped me in this room when I first arrived. I couldn’t be sure that I was safe and so my window and door remained locked, the curtains pulled. I hid. Food was brought to me and I washed only in the hand sink in my room. As the rivers of time passed, no one came.

The breath that had been held tightly in my chest eased its way out. I breathed deeply. Comfortably. I opened the curtains, unlocked the window and let the weak spring sunlight creep into my heart.

---

It is a common misconception that the violence is the worst part of it all. Bodily, brutal and raw. Of course it wasn’t pleasant, but it usually had a start point and an end point. After all, you can only kick someone in the stomach for so long.

For me, the worst part was the sabotage of my mind. The slow deconstruction of my sense of self. The dedicated, relentless attack on my paper-thin soul. Janis was like a child pulling the legs off a spider; Slowly, meticulously. Subtly. It took me a long time, too long, to realise that my limbs were hanging off.

Staying in the flat was fine, until the phone-lines were cut off and because I wasn’t working, we couldn’t afford international phone-calls home. I had no friends to speak of, because I didn’t go anywhere or do anything that would involve other human-beings. Janis was the only person I spoke to for months on end. I was painfully lonely and I was desperate.

---

The daffodils on the windowsill died days after I arrived, but I’d often look out below at the street and as the burgeoning’s of summer appeared, I noticed the absence of something else. I had not bled in four months.

My breasts were swollen, my stomach tender and I felt a strong undercurrent of nausea. My Mama would be overjoyed. There would be a party, a magnificent family celebration. There should be laughter, embraces, kind words.

Now, I had only silence and dread. Janis was thrilled.

I had always wanted to be a mother; wanted the warmth of a small hand in my own, wanted the desperate, dependable love of an infant. Wanted to be so badly needed by something so helpless.

Now I was the helpless one.

---

The pregnancy didn’t stop the violence; it just fine-tuned it. No more kicks to the stomach or elbows to the diaphragm. Every other expanse of skin was fine though.

I knew I couldn’t stay, but I didn’t know how to leave. There was no one to ask. No pamphlets, helplines, social workers. I was on my own and sleeping on the streets with a newborn didn’t seem practical, so I swallowed it.

I took it all; the punches, the snide comments, the spittle in my face.

His body on mine.

I took it all.

As my stomach ballooned, my heart softened; finally, I had a friend.

Small flutterings and gentle kicks strengthened me. I would talk to her too; I’d tell her about her grandmother and her homeland. I’d whisper secrets as I massaged my swollen belly. I knew the baby was a girl, even though we didn’t attend any scans. Janis was too nervous for me to leave the flat to let me attend any doctor’s appointments. But I knew, beyond any doubt, that the life I carried was a girl.

---

I didn’t have a plan, not even the hint of one. I was resigned to my fate. I would have my baby and care for her as if my life, and hers, depended on it.

If anyone was to ask me, not that they have, what changed - I don’t think I could answer. There was no inciting incident, no climax or crescendo.

He was just there, lying in our bed. Asleep in the half light of morning.

I didn’t plan it, didn’t strategize or organise. I simply walked to the kitchen, picked up the biggest, heaviest potted plant from our windowsill.

I dropped it on his handsome, sleeping head.

His eyes didn’t open and he didn’t make a single sound or movement as I kissed his warm, blood spattered cheek. I put my shoes on and left.

I didn’t look back.

---

Somehow, I made my way here. To Passage House. I’m not sure how. After stepping into the damp, early light of morning, I remember very little.

I remember commuters weaving around me and I remember breathing in the clammy London air, and that is all.

---

Now I am here, in my room at Passage House and I do not know where Janis is; whether he is alive or whether I killed him. Nor do I care. I do not know where my baby is either. That is something I care about very much.

The disorientation is not helped by the drugs I am given here. They say they will help, but everything is shrouded in a dense London fog and sometimes, I am not sure what is real and what is not. My skin is no longer streaked with rainbows of purples and greens, my stomach is flat and desolate. Did those things really happen? Could my own flesh lie to me?

My heart aches and I know that my daughter is somewhere out there, the missing piece of my puzzle. I can only hope that time, slippery though it is, will bring her back to me and at last, we can blossom together.