Chapter Five: there is no such thing as a happy childhood

When Phillip was thirteen he started to keep a diary. His entries were irregular; he wrote when he was down or, not so often, when he was happy. There were entries that comprised merely of lists; books to read, movies to see, places he’d been to or boring catalogues of his day:

8:00 went to school. 12:00 came home for lunch, Aunt Dee was a little pissed and she bought me a pie from the café. 15.00 came home from school and found Prince waiting for me at the corner. 20:00 read for two hours, going to sleep now.

Phillip was reading Freud, not understanding much but labouring through page after page, looking for something; searching for a key that would unlock the terminal loneliness that he felt. He would read and then reread passages that dealt with masturbation, incest, masochism and the fear of castration with a strange mixture of feelings welling up inside him. A combination of excitement and fear that made his mouth dry and his breath quicken.

The first entry in his diary was the first complete poem that he wrote:

Sitting alone
loneliness sat down beside me
and laughed at my being caught
sitting alone

Loneliness descended on him like a veil that blinded him to reality. He played games in which no other child would participate and finally entered the introspective and isolated world of his dreams. He cried a lot in private and acted out his fantasies on the island of his bed.

Arriving at school late one day Phillip reached his classroom as Mr. Barry, who taught English and was his favourite teacher, was calling the roll. His name had just been called and after a moment of silence he heard one of the boys say, “She’s not here sir, she’s having her period.” The class broke up laughing and with a stab of pain he heard Mr. Barry laughing with them. He turned and ran from the building, struggling for air.

He often stayed away from school and developed physical symptoms to guarantee his safety, to keep him in the warm security of his room. His asthma attacks were undoubtedly psychosomatic but his inability to breathe was very real. Outside his room he spent days on buses, travelling pointlessly from one depot to another. He cannot pinpoint the exact moment at which he disembarked from these journeys without destination and sometimes he wonders if he ever did.

That same year, Phillip detailed an alarming incident in his diary, one that still comes back to him in nightmares, compounding an already heavy burden of accumulated guilt and pain. He was never found out but he knew that one day he will be and that he’ll be punished. Until that day he punishes himself by reliving this event in his dreams.


When I came home from school today, Aunt Dee was out and her dog Jackie, he’s a Jack Russell, was loose and was playing with Prince in the backyard, his chain still attached to his collar and dragging behind him.

The way Prince bounced up to me, eyes gleaming and tail wagging made me really mad. I thought that it was strange that he hadn’t met me at the corner as he always does. Prince was cowering and whining at my feet and I wanted to hit him.

I fetched the strap that was hanging on the kitchen door, not sure of what I was about to do, and then I grabbed Jackie’s chain and dragged him to the empty garage, slamming the door behind me to keep Prince out.

I attached Jackie’s chain to a post. He was looking at me with gleaming eyes, his whole body wagging as though we were playing a game.

I lifted the strap and began slowly and methodically beating him. One, two; Jackie was screaming and wild eyed, struggling to get away from me but he couldn’t because of the chain. Three; scream, four, five, six.

With each swing of the strap I felt a pain inside, as though I was beating myself. When I stopped I was exhausted. I examined my body to see if there were marks or bruises but there was nothing. I dropped to my knees and grabbed Jackie. He licked my face and my hands; the hands that had beaten him. He’d pissed in his fright and I could smell it. I was hugging him and crying. I couldn’t stop.

Why did I do this terrible thing? I will be found out. God will punish me for this evil deed.


Phillip had no idea why he’d performed this ritual that imitated self-flagellation. He realizes now that Jackie had become the sacrificial lamb that he punished for his sins, just as, in his mind, Wuffie had been sacrificed back then; before the beatings had begun in earnest.

Phillip thinks that if it had been possible he’d have nailed Jackie to a cross, eaten his flesh and drank his blood.


Throughout his childhood and teenage years Phillip received regular beatings from his father for transgressions that his mother was always the one to discover. “Wait until I tell your father!” Once he didn’t go to school for weeks, sitting at bus stops or on buses, in his school uniform, reading one book after another. The school secretary phoned his mother to find out what was happening and when his father heard about this he made Phillip remove all his clothes and beat him with the strap until he bled. So severe was this beating that when he was dragged into the principal’s office the next day, and the older man saw the damage that had been done to Phillip’s buttocks and back, he refused to discipline him any further, “I think you’ve been punished enough.”

Phillip likes to think now that his childhood wasn’t all about suffering and that those years weren’t completely devoid of happiness. When the numerous psychologists that he’s seen during his adult life delved into his past he kept the cruelty to himself and said that his childhood was happy and uneventful. “There’s no such thing”, one therapist said bluntly.

He prefers to remember the brief periods when they’d functioned like a normal family. He remembers drives on Sunday afternoons, his mother’s hair blowing in the breeze from the open window, his father repeating silly rhymes from the driver’s seat to make him laugh; “The elephant is a wonderful bird it hops from bough to bough; it builds its nest in a rhubarb tree and whistles like a cow.”

There’s a photograph that he still has, of him and his father in a grove of trees standing on the rocks that traverse a cool and winding trickle of a river. His father holds his shoulders and smiles into the camera.

It’s not as though he did not experience moments of contentment and feelings of belonging and being loved, it’s just that he was always waiting for the bubble to burst, for his mother to scream, “What are you doing you wicked child, wait until your father gets home.”


There was a butcher shop on the corner of the road that Phillip called his world, with a deep, cold sill that smelt of blood. Each Friday at five he’d sit there and wait, not looking back through the window at the carcasses hung from those enormous and frightening steel hooks. The cars hurled past him and eventually a bus rattled to a stop with his father emerging like God. He handed Phillip money from his jingling pocket, a reward for being good. Then Phillip was running, the cars hooting and missing him by inches.

Each week he bought the same thing, from the hardware store, an angel meant for a Christmas tree, so damn pretty, with wings and a halo of gold.

Phillip learnt years later that Cathy had worked in that store. Had she seen him in his excited haste, dodging cars to cross the road? He could have been killed and she would have come out of the store and cried, and forgotten by now the image of blood on his face and his arms stuck out all wrong from his torn shirt sleeves. Those arms, having held her, she refused to forget.

Did he touch her hand when he gave her the coins; reaching out across the years, warning her?