My phone drags me back to the present moment. A local number, not anyone I know. Expecting the worst, I answer. It’s the police officer we’ve just been with. He asks me to return to the station so that he can give me back some of the digital equipment they had confiscated from my father. I glance at the clock on the kitchen microwave: 5.25pm. I can’t help feeling that he’s holding something back. And that can’t be good.
I try to turn the time to my advantage. As casually as I can, I ask if I couldn’t pick everything up the next day, given how late it is. But no, my instinct was right. He tells me he has something he needs to show me, something that concerns me directly.
Trembling, I end the call and mechanically pick up the car keys and my handbag. I’m heading out when my brother Florian says he’ll drive me to the station, insisting there’s no way he’ll let me go without him by my side.
I enter the station convinced that I will leave it feeling utterly demolished. My brother steers me in. Just as well, as I can’t feel my legs. An officer calls me forward. Florian gets up to accompany me, but he’s told he can’t. He has to stay where he is.
Ten paces take me into a room, just as small as the previous one, where two officers sit behind their computers. I take a seat, slip my hands down onto my thighs and slowly squeeze them, hoping to distract myself from the anxiety that threatens to choke me. A large blue folder lies on the table. Photos printed on sheets of A4 poke out from it. I’m afraid of what I’m about to discover.
One of the officers tries to calm me. “You can handle this,” he tells me. I only have to look at two photos. All they want to know is if I’m in either of them. The first picture shows a young woman with dark brown hair and a straight-cut fringe lying on a bed on her left side.
It’s night-time, with a bedside lamp lighting the scene. She’s wearing a thick white pyjama top and beige underwear. She’s asleep, but the quilt covering her has been lifted aside to expose her buttocks. She’s deathly pale, with dark ringed eyes.
I look up at the officer and tell him I’m not sure whether or not it’s me. The officer hands over the second photo. The bedsheets seem familiar, but I can’t be sure. The pose is the same as the previous image. Not just similar, identical. Creepily so.
It’s the same young woman too and it makes me recoil in exactly the same way. It was taken in a different room. The woman is wearing a black-and-white patterned sleeveless sweater. The underwear hasn’t changed, though. I ask to look at the first photo again. Definitely the same underwear. But, once again, I tell them I don’t think it’s me.
The officer studies my face for a brief moment. “I hope you don’t mind me pointing this out, but don’t you have a brown mole on your right cheek, just like the young woman in the photos?”
I force my eyes back to the images, and finally the veil drops from my eyes. I start to shiver, my vision is disturbed by a host of tiny starbursts, my ears start ringing and I jerk back in the chair.
The officer calls in my brother. Florian kneels before me, holds my hands, and tells me to try to breathe along with him. How did he manage to take my photo in the middle of the night without waking me up? Where did the underwear come from, as I’m sure it’s not mine? Did he drug me? Did he go beyond the photos? Did he – I can’t keep the unthinkable at bay – abuse me? It takes some time for me to be able to look directly at the police officers and admit that it is indeed me in the photos.
I try to think when they might have been taken. It’s hard to say, but they don’t look recent. One of the officers, perhaps trying to reassure me, says: “Your father underwent a psychiatric evaluation in September 2020, when he was first brought in, and it showed a marked proclivity for voyeurism.” He goes on to say that the elements they have gathered suggest that my father’s sexual obsessions grew stronger over time. That as the years passed, he sank deeper and deeper, until he crossed the line into his unspeakable treatment of my mother.
The next step can’t be avoided. I have to file a complaint against my father. I have to step up and join the other victims. If I don’t, what he did to me cannot be held against him. It’s only two photos, but they, too, must be weighed in the balance, as additional proof of his perversity.
Heading back to the house, I call my other brother, David, and tell him everything. Another gut punch. I can’t get over my position in the photos. It just didn’t look natural to me. I’m a light sleeper, prone to waking at the slightest disturbance. Drugs alone could have made such a pose possible.
I find my mother in the lounge, facing down an array of documents spread out before her – unpaid bills, outstanding debts, accounts in the red. Although I’m not sure she’s capable of taking it in, I feel obliged to tell her about the photos. When I do, I’m not surprised when she doesn’t react. She just stands there, a blank look on her face. “Are you absolutely sure it’s you?” She doesn’t believe me. I feel sick. Maybe her doubt is an unconscious attempt to shield herself, but it hurts me all the same.
Florian steps up and insists that the photos are of me. His tone is firm, definitive. He adds that he’s sure he recognised the background in one of them. It was a room in my parents’ old apartment. Which would mean it was taken long before 2013. Mum remains in denial.
Even though I’m exhausted, I’m terrified by the thought of sleeping in the violet room that had welcomed me so often before. How many aggressors, intent on raping my mother, had passed through this house? I can’t shake off the fear that one of them might come back in the middle of the night, until Florian brings his mattress and lays it down beside my bed.
Back in Paris, my son Tom and husband Paul are at home watching a football match between Paris Saint-Germain and Olympique Marseille. Tom and my father – his beloved Grandad – used to call each other before these matches and argue about how it would play out. This time round, my son turns to his father and says: “Dad, will you tell Grandad I think Olympique Marseille’s going to crush them?”
As the stadium yells and the players come onto the pitch, Paul is grief-struck, knowing that Tom’s pre-match ritual is lost forever. There’s anger, too, that my father could do such a thing to Tom, who had placed his Grandad at the centre of his affections.
The match over, Paul sends a final text message to my father. He knows that my father, stuck in a cell without his phone, can’t read what he’s typing. But he does it anyway. One last time. You’ll never see this. But still … Watching Olympique Marseille play next to your grandson means listening to him say, every five minutes, tell Grandad this or that. But I’ll never tell Grandad anything ever again. Neither will he. What you’ve done is beyond contempt. Depriving your grandson of the last grandfather left to him – beyond contempt. It makes me cry. It makes me want to tell you to go to hell.
The two photos torment me all night long. I wake in the dark at 5.42am, having forgotten where I am. I can hear Florian’s breathing. He’s fast asleep, so close I could reach out and touch him. I want to go to the toilet, but am afraid to. This house doesn’t feel safe anymore. I make myself go, but I brace myself to take each step and light my way with my phone’s torch, constantly checking all around me.
I rush back to bed and curl up under the sheets. I want to go back to sleep but I’m too tense. My ears prick up at the slightest sound. Morning can’t come too soon.
This is an edited extract from I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again, by Caroline Darian (Allen & Unwin, $32.99).
