‘When I remembered what he did to me.’

Chapter Fifty-Three

Ciara

Then

I was a precocious child. I was led to believe from a young age that the sun, moon and stars shone directly out of my backside. I was the apple of my mother’s eye but I was, undoubtedly, a daddy’s girl. I hero-worshipped the very ground he walked on. There was no one in the world who mattered to me as much as him, often to the annoyance of my mother.

We were a team and I would often be at his side as his ‘shadow’, going with him to the library or for long walks in the countryside. I’d sit with him while he did odd jobs around the house. Ask him to explain them to me. I’d always manage to get an extra cuddle or three from him, whenever I could.

I would tell him, with all the innocence that comes with being a young child, that I would marry him when I grew up.

‘But I’m already married to Mammy,’ he would say with a laugh.

‘Well,’ I’d tell him, full of the confidence of a six-year-old – the kind that leaves by the time teen years arrive and never comes back – ‘you’ll have to get Mammy a new person to marry, because I love you the mostest and we have to get married.’

I’d become quite distressed at the notion of ever living in a house where he wouldn’t be. I was as obsessed with him as any child would be with their father.

He knew that, of course. And there were times, after, when I wondered had I loved him too much? Had I brought it on myself?

That’s what he did to me. That’s how he damaged me. That I would dare question it was my fault.

I was six the first time.

Six.

I cry still for the baby I was then and what happened to her.

He had come upstairs to read me a bedtime story. Mammy was downstairs. I could hear her singing to herself in the kitchen as he did things that I instinctively knew were wrong. I didn’t understand it. I didn’t like it. I was scared but he was my daddy. And he loved me ‘most of anyone in the whole world’.

Afterwards, he told me I was his best girl. That he loved me to the moon and back, and that no other daddy and little girl ever loved each other as much we did. We couldn’t tell anyone, he said, because they would only be jealous. He’d laughed when he added, ‘Especially not Mammy! She’d be so jealous and we haven’t found her a new person to marry yet, have we?’ he’d winked.

I heard him whistling as he walked downstairs afterwards, heard him joining in singing with my mammy when he reached the kitchen. He sounded so happy. They sounded so happy. I just felt incredibly confused by it all.