[Sound of whispering]
Denise: Don’t talk to her.
Tom: Why not? Do you think I could hurt her?
Jean: Tom, perhaps –
Tom: Hush, Jean. Denise?
[A hissing noise, followed by silence and then the tape shuts off]
‘I wonder what she meant by “I didn’t want him”,’ I said. ‘Why wouldn’t she want him?’
‘We can’t be sure that she was talking about Peter.’
‘Who else would she be talking about? She said, “He took my boy.”’
‘It’s weird, isn’t it?’
Mark was annoyed with my dad. ‘Do you think Jean guessed something?’
‘I’m not sure. Perhaps she was hinting to Dad that he needed to be more patient with her. The way he said that about hurting me, Denise could have interpreted that as a threat.’
‘Was he like that with you? Impatient?’ said Mark.
‘Not at all. He was kind and indulgent with me. But I guess I was always compliant. That tape is dated almost a year after our rescue. I’d say he was exhausted. He hadn’t made any breakthrough with Denise. She wasn’t exactly cooperative, was she?’
‘After what she’d been through? Are you surprised?’ Mark raised his voice.
‘I’m sorry. I forget that you knew her. She was your big sister. I wish I remembered her.’
‘Another thing we can thank Tom Diamond for,’ Mark said, a bitter tone in his voice.
‘He was doing his best, what he thought was right for me.’ I was fed up with people talking badly about my dad. He might not have done everything he should have, but what he did do, he did for the right reasons. I’d had plenty of time to put myself in his shoes and imagine what I would have done if I had been him. Tina made me see it. I had forgiven him. ‘We can’t change the past,’ I told Mark.
‘One thing I can’t understand,’ he said. ‘If Peter has known all this time about you and about Denise, if he remembered what Conor Geary said and did, why didn’t he ever go to the police? Being afraid of publicity is a lame excuse for shielding a paedophile, especially after he’s dead.’
‘I get it, Mark. I would be the same as him. He hasn’t done anything wrong. Why should he be associated with his – our psychopathic father?’
I ignored his glare.
48
Peter, 2012
It took Lindy five years to forgive me for giving the baby away. She had called her Wanda. Throughout the pregnancy, I had pretended to go along with it. I thought it was easier to let her have this fantasy. It made her so happy.
I had taken the baby in the box to the front door of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Auckland in the middle of the night. It was cold. I hoped she would survive and tucked her as tightly into the blankets as I could. As I walked away, I heard her begin to mewl. I kept walking through the deserted streets until I got into the car and drove home.
Lindy was beyond hysterical when I got back. At first, she thought I’d taken the baby to the hospital because there was something wrong with her. I didn’t tell her anything.
During the following years Lindy attacked me so often that I had to put the shackles back on. She stabbed me with knitting needles, knives and scissors, scarred my arms badly with a solution of sugar and boiled water, attempted to strangle me with a home-made noose. I ended up in the hospital’s A & E twice. The staff there assumed I’d got into fights with my peers. I let them think that. One matron threatened to call the cops, but when she looked at my medical records and saw that I was that Steven Armstrong, who had been orphaned so young, she relented and instead gave me a lecture about mixing with the wrong crowd.
Lindy stayed angry for years. We went back to the old ways. I lived in the house and dropped her groceries inside the door once a week. I still visited every day. I’d make idle conversation about stories in the news. She did not respond. The abandoned baby at St Patrick’s Cathedral made national news and, with radio and TV, I followed the story, up to the point when the baby was adopted six months later. I breathed a sigh of relief. I hoped that Lindy might accept our circumstances now, but without uttering a syllable, she made it clear that our relationship was over.
When I tried to touch her, she violently repelled me. She barely spoke full sentences and, when she finally did, it was to renew her demands to be released. ‘I’m never going to touch you again, Steve, never. You might as well let me go and get my baby, or kill me.’
She had refused to do any further knitting for the stall too, and money was becoming an even more pressing issue. I needed to do something else for a living. I was clever. I should have gone away to college and made something of myself. I had studied so many books in my younger days, I could have been a scientist or a doctor or an engineer. The reason I didn’t was because I couldn’t leave Lindy. So, I became a gardener, and now we were living on the breadline. I still couldn’t let her go. I held on to the hope that one day she would forgive me.
I signed up for computer classes in the local community centre and got some basic skills. I got a job as an office junior in a real estate agent’s office. They liked that I kept myself to myself and didn’t ask any questions. I didn’t want to go for a beer with them on a Friday after work. After three months, they wanted to promote me. It meant more money, but I would be showing people around houses. I didn’t want the promotion. I knew from TV how normal families worked. I’d never had one and I didn’t want to be confronted with them in somebody else’s domestic setting.
I moved on and got a job working for a cancer charity. It involved cold-calling businesses all over the Bay of Plenty region and asking them to sign up to a monthly donation. I was not good at this. I was so unused to talking to people, and the manager said that I sounded like I didn’t care. I was supposed to tug on these people’s heartstrings. The job was commission only. After the first month, I’d made less than I had with the real estate agent. I kept going back to the recruitment agency.
A job had come up in a bank in town. It was full-time, cataloguing accounts for their new computer system. The interviewers were impressed by my self-education. One of them remembered my father’s death being in the papers; he had contributed to the fund for me. They treated me like a minor celebrity: ‘You’re that kid?’
I admitted I liked to keep to myself, and I’d prefer to work alone. They seemed delighted with that answer. The job I was applying for was one I’d be expected to do on my own after some initial training. I was offered the job a week later, which I was glad to accept in September 1999.
The training on their computer system was a residential course in Wellington. There was no way I could commute there and back. I’d have to leave Lindy on her own. The day before I left, I brought her the usual bag of groceries, but when I tried to talk to her, to tell her that I would be gone for a week, she turned up the radio full blast to drown out my voice.
The course could have been done in a day. Most of the other attendees were younger. They seemed to be slow on the uptake. It was incredibly easy to learn the system. At the end of the week, they gave us booklets that explained the whole process anyway. In the evenings, we went back to the low-grade hotel. The girls went to dinner together. Several of them turned up every morning with hangovers. I got sandwiches and ate them in my room and watched TV. I shunned their requests to join them. One of the course instructors warned me that my social skills could use some improvement. But she praised the speed of my learning.