Raised by Committee

It was raining, hard, and the alley leading to Dr. Foster’s office was dark. Very dark. The sign at the entrance to the alley, with the hand pointing the way, swayed on its hinges. It was chipped and faded, but it didn’t really matter. Everyone in town knew where the doctor’s surgery was, and what days he was available, and how many babies he’d delivered, and who he was treating for what. Such information was passed on during hushed conversations over tea in the café down by the monument. Constable Jones rapped sharply on the door. Regular surgery hours were long since finished. The door was opened almost immediately. A pool of light fell into the alley, lighting up raindrops like fireflies. We were hustled inside. “Please remove her clothing below the waist,” Dr. Foster told Mum, once we were in the examining room, “and get her to sit up on the table. There’s a sheet here to cover her with. I’ll be right back.” I scrambled out of my clothes and stood shivering in my bare feet, wearing only my petticoat and blouse. I climbed onto the table and pulled the sheet up under my chin in an attempt to keep warm, but I couldn’t stop the shivering. There was a light tap on the door. Dr. Foster came in and asked my mother to wait outside. I felt very small in that room, alone with the doctor I had known all my life, but never before been alone with. Mum was always with me, talking about me as though I wasn’t even there, except for the occasional ‘isn’t that right, dear?’ One time she’d been describing, in graphic detail, a nasty sinus infection which was troubling me. Dr. Foster had looked down at me from his towering six-foot height, and placed his index finger over one nostril, thereby closing it off. He then instructed me to ‘Blow!’ It seemed a strange request, given the nature of my ailment, but I did it anyway. As I blew, an accumulation of thick green mucus was propelled from my nostril onto the doctor’s hand. As I lay shivering on the examining table I wondered if he too remembered the incident and, if so, whether he was the type of man to bear a grudge. Dr. Foster had known me all my life. He was the first human to touch my flesh, as I entered this world kicking and screaming from my mother’s womb. He had cut the umbilical cord which joined me to my mother, and now he was going to ‘examine’ me. What part of me didn’t he know? He pulled on a pair of rubber gloves, snapping them around his wrists. Then he picked up a scary looking instrument and turned to face me, all the while talking and trying to calm me. But I wasn’t listening. I was too intent on watching. Watching to see what he would do next. “I want you to lie back and put your feet in the stirrups,’ he said. And as he speaks, he gently guides my feet into the cold metal stirrups, which feel like ice on such a dark and rainy night. My petticoat slips down my thighs and bunches on my hips. I thrust it between my legs and strain to pull my knees together to cover my private parts. I don’t want anyone looking at me down there. I’m tired of being treated like a piece of meat, like I don’t even own this body I’m in. I feel so small, so unable to shield myself from yet another man probing my body. I start to cry. Silently, like I’ve learned to do. I bite my lip to stop myself from crying out. I hear the doctor talking, soothingly, telling me it won’t hurt. But it does hurt. It hurts far more than he or my father can ever know. It hurts to the very core of my being. I withdraw inside myself where it’s safe, where I can no longer feel the pain or humiliation. Inside where there is only a gentle rocking, and a soft wailing that blends with my soul and becomes me. I am numb. And nothing on the outside matters because I can’t feel it, it can’t hurt me anymore. But I can feel the cold metal entering my body. I tense, instinctively, and it hurts more. “Relax, relax. It’s alright. It’ll only take a minute. It won’t hurt if you relax.” And so Dr. Foster drones on, for what seems like an eternity. Then I feel the pressure easing, cold metal sliding out of me, a reassuring pat on the knees, the sheet being pulled down over me, to quell the shivering which is wracking my skinny body. “You can get dressed now, Gail,” he tells me, as he walks towards the door. He leaves it ajar, and says to come out when I’m done. As I reach for my tunic and knickers I hear him talking. Words drift into the room in disjointed whispers ‘… violated …’ ‘… ruptured hymen…’ ‘… very tense, nervous child…’. The tears start flowing again. I hate being talked about in this way. I’ve become Exhibit A in a police file. As I listen to their muffled talk, I worry about what people will say if they find out. I’ll have to deal with the humiliation and shame of it all, which will almost be worse than the abuse itself. Then I could just leave my body, rise up into the far corner of the room, and watch what was happening from there. That way it didn’t seem so bad. I could pretend it was someone else down there and I was just watching, like a show on TV. Except it made me cry a lot. And I got angry a lot. And I couldn’t do anything about it, unless you count the time I bit Dad’s penis as hard as I could. I’d heard him cry out and tasted his blood in my mouth in that instant before his hand came crashing down across the side of my head in a blind fury, knocking me to the floor. But even that didn’t stop him; it just gave him a taste for a bit of violence.