Death Row

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‘The percentage of adults who experienced sexual abuse as children and have had long-term side effects is not known. However, in one British study, thirteen per cent of the sample of such adults reported that they had been permanently damaged.’

Counselling Directory 2009

They all say it’s a physical thing. An urge. An uncontrollable desire that builds and swells, like an ocean at high tide, until action must be taken. A slow boiling of the blood. As uncontrollable and devastatingly powerful as a tsunami. But that isn’t it: it was part of it but just that — a part. It’s a mental thing, he knew that as well as any. Thoughts scuttling and skittering in the brain like hundreds of small crabs in a tin bath, climbing the sides with scratching, feverish claws, falling back into the writhing, clicking mass. Memories crawling through his mind like shickle in a turning drum.

Billy Thompson. Just eight years old and his first trip to the seaside. His first trip anywhere more than five miles from where he was born and had lived his entire life. It was deep in the cold-hearted grip of a brutal winter and he was huddled against the passenger-seat window, shivering against the cold. It was a boxy, draughty, metallic rectangle-on-wheels of a car, with a hard bench seat and the wind whistling through gaps in the doors and window frames. It bounced and clattered on the uneven road, jolting him and sending needles of pain shooting though his thin, bony body. The wipers were scratching thick, flurrying snow from the windscreen and tears were pricking his eyes so that his vision of the changing landscape outside was softened, blurred. His life behind him fragmenting like the flakes of snow scattering into pin-points in the rear-view mirror.

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