I was born into a world of horror.

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Other psychiatrists have told me that I’ve put up mental barriers to block virtually every memory from my early childhood. Ask me my earliest recollection and I’d describe something from the mental hospital in which I spent my eleventh and twelfth years: the smile of a nurse, someone comforting me after I awoke screaming in the night, or maybe an orderly making me laugh. Everything earlier than that is either erased or hidden. On rare occasions, I have had a flash of something – a vague, enraged woman’s face or a woman’s angry yell, with words indistinguishable – and I’ve been overcome with dread. Maybe that woman is a memory, maybe she was my mother, or maybe she’s a monster conjured up by my damaged mind.

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All I know is, the first ten years of my life are a black hole. And something truly sinister lives in there.

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When I reached my teens, I was living in a halfway house. That was how the team who ran it liked the centre described – ‘a halfway house where children waited for loving adoption’. Older kids like me knew it was really an orphanage; damaged kids like me also knew that no one would ever adopt us. I wasn’t upset by these facts, however. I understood that my life consisted of ten years of ‘something so bad I had blotted it out’, then two years of care at the hospital, and finally the more open environment of the halfway house. I liked the adults who took care of us – especially the janitor who sneaked me old Batman comics – and I loved the schooling we received at the centre. Learning, to me, was true freedom. Knowledge was fuel for the soul.

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Best of all, the nightmares I’d suffered from in the hospital had gone. I never slept well – the slightest noise would wake me and I always woke up scared – but I felt far more normal than before. I was a nervous, introvert kid who was afraid of the dark, of strangers, of... well, pretty much everything. It was hard for me to make friends and very difficult for me to trust and confide in someone. But my life had so much more freedom and so many possibilities.

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Most of my time at the halfway house varied from contentment to happiness. I only recall one incident that troubled me deeply. It wasn’t one of the occasions when I got picked-on by bullies – it was a quiet conversation with another kid:

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“Hey, Luke,” he had begun, while we wolfed our lunches. “You know those years you can’t remember...”

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“Yeah. My ‘missing years’?”

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“Well, you reckon some really bad shit happened to you, don’t you?”

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“Mmm...” My mouth was full. “The doc’s say it was so bad I forgot it all on purpose.”

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“I just wondered, what if it wasn’t that something bad happened to you..?”

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“Uh?” I frowned. “Then what..?”

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“What if you did something so bad, you forgot it?”

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 That conversation has haunted me every day since.

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What if that blurred female face with the screaming voice wasn’t my monster? What if my monster was me? What could I have done..?

 

*     *     *

 

At nineteen, I discovered it wasn’t just me who had forgotten my past.

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The world had too.

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I was working at a fruit stall, earning just enough to live on, and sharing a tiny apartment with a cannabis-addicted asshole called Mikey. I was getting increasingly irritated by my roommate. You know the type: always short of cash; never remembered to pay me back; borrowed anything I owned without asking; left the place like a dump; lazy beyond belief. My job was also as mind-numbingly boring as it was laborious. And my social life? I was still so nervous and awkward, I could barely chat with shop assistants, let alone relax in the company of others or attempt dating. Plus, being permanently broke narrowed my options to nil anyway... But I needed something to stop me going crazy and I thought of those ‘missing years’...

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I was close to my twentieth birthday. Half my life was a mystery. The other half had been spent accepting that mystery and avoiding it. Whenever I began to wonder ‘what could have happened...’, an instinct within me clamped down and forbad the subject. Not knowing might be a constant ache – but knowing could possibly destroy me. People tell you to confront your demons. My plan had always been to leave them well alone...

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Until frustration sent me back to the halfway house, then back to the hospital where my earliest surviving memories began. Frustration persuaded me to try to peer behind the dark curtain of my mind.

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The halfway house was only able to tell me that I had been released into their care from the Brunswick Mental Care Hospital. They had no information on file that I didn’t already know.

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A bus ride and a two-mile hike got me to the Brunswick Hospital. Good fortune brought me into the company of one of my former nurses, now a senior member of the records office. Dotty Milton was as cheerful as a sunrise and almost as big as a bus, though much more rotund. She brought me my file. Or rather, the cardboard sleeve that was supposed to contain it. My records were gone.

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Refusing to give up, my former nurse made a flurry of phone calls. At first, Dotty sought copies of records. This line of enquiry dried up faster than piss in a desert. No one had any old paperwork on me anywhere. Secondly, she called everyone who might have been involved in my case during my two-year stay at Brunswick. Anyone else would have given up – Dotty went after information like a bloodhound.

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What we learned only deepened the mystery.

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I had been transferred from another hospital in another state. One retired doctor had a vague memory that the re-location was planned to give me a fresh start in life, when my condition improved.

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During the transfer, my name was also changed. I became Luke, after the famous character from Star Wars. My last name of Smith was fake too, and hardly took much imagination to make up. Given that the re-naming was official, legal authorities were no doubt involved. Probably, Dotty suggested, the decision would have been made at a closed court hearing.

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The third revelation was the weirdest. When I arrived at Brunswick, nurses had tended to fresh skin grafts across my back. No one knew why the grafts had been needed. Had I been burned? Wounded? Tortured..?

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Later that night, when I got home, I would try to peer at my back using a pair of mirrors. It looked blank and smooth – erased of evidence, just as my mind was erased of memory.

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Dotty stayed at the hospital with me after her shift ended, in order to access the internet with a computer there. For an hour, she searched online records and came up empty. I was, it appeared, a ghost, born-again as Luke Smith. I asked her to do a search for the kind of incident I might have been involved in...

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“Like what?” she had asked, still sunny despite our repeated failures.

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“A child taken from an abusive home, with back injuries... dating, I guess, from about nine years ago.”

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“Probably longer,” she replied. “Those skin grafts would have taken time to do... And for all we know, you were in hospital care in another state for years.”

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“Holy shit,” I exclaimed. Quickly, I apologised to her a like an errant child: “Sorry. I mean ‘darn’.”

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Dotty grinned broadly. “Holy shit is probably more like it. Let’s have a look.”

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Her fingers raced across the keyboard. Grim news scrolled up the screen.

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I had never considered just how many children are pulled out from abusive families each year. The scope of the results made me sick to my stomach. These many thousands were perhaps all kindred spirits of mine.

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We tried a few other searches, but both of us knew it was hopeless. Finally, I told her to stop so that she could go home.

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Dotty, despite the late hour, insisted on driving me back home first. She was that kind of person: good to the very end. As we pulled up near my apartment block, Dotty offered me some good advice.

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“Luke, all those files on you didn’t just get lost by accident. People got rid of them to separate you from your past. These were good folks – no doubt, some of them were doctors. They wanted you to be free of whatever happened and I think you should accept their wisdom.”

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I smiled. “Is this were you warn me about re-opening old wounds?”

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“Only if I have to. What I hope you’ll do is live in the present and look forward to the future. Make a good life for yourself... Whatever you’re missing, you don’t want back.”

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“Thank you,” I said, and added with total sincerity: “And I will take your advice. I promise.”

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I just wish I had been able to keep that promise.

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But now that I had scratched at the surface of my own personal horror, my subconscious mind wasn’t going to allow me to walk away.

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