Herman Enfield
Every one of them still alive had to be taken. The
sight was hellish and the smell was even worse than that. I was well
aware that people unable to process past traumatic experiences often
fill the void by collecting things. I had seen that happen numerous
times. Most of the things people suffering from hoarding collect is
junk such as broken household items, excessive amounts of cheap
clothes and electronics that are never put to a use and still have
price tags on them. Piles of old magazines and news papers. Then
there is the genuine garbage no one could justify, for example
plastic litter, used paper towels, empty cans of food, basically any
kind of waste. But animals? Animals that are reliant of their owner,
unable to defend themselves. There were dozens of cats in the house
as well as dogs, and from most of them you could see that they had
not been properly taken care of. The dogs were caged outside without
water or exercise and the cats, none of them neutered, were kept
inside the house. They had defecated all around and some of them were
not getting along. There had been fights as was proven by cuts and
bite marks on them. We had already found couple of the cats dead
beneath all the stuff and litter. It was hard to identify them as
cats at first, so long had they been there. One of the cages outside
had a dead dog in it as well. I asked how all this was possible but
Mrs. Alborough could not answer since she was obviously ashamed. I
could feel my stomach turning. I had dogs of my own, you know, two of
them: a German shepherd called Chili and Bumba, who was a mixed breed
of Basenji and Norwegian elkhound.
The cleaning team was ready to start their
workload as soon as all the animals were removed from the property.
All of them were to be examined by veterinarian and I knew that some
of them would unfortunately be too socially unstable to be re-homed.
The youngest cats were not accustomed to be handled by humans and
some of the dogs were quite aggressive. I was furious. Who would not
be. Though I was aware, that as a psychologist, I could not afford to
pick sides and show to Mrs. Alborough the rage I was feeling towards
her, I was still just a human being. That was why I needed couple
minutes outside in order to calm my breath before going back in.
“Alright Mrs. Alborough. May I call you Emily?
What about a nice little talk? I imagine this must be extremely hard
for you.” She tried to dry out her tears on the sleeve of her
worn-out blouse and I could hear her swallowing loudly.
“Can you tell me how you feel when you see your
animals being taken away.”
“I feel bad. Those are my pets. How can someone
just come here and take them away? I mean, I know I haven't been
able to take care of them as much as I would have wanted to but they
are still mine. Maybe if the government paid me more fees. My
retirement money is not enough to take care of everybody. But
nonetheless, they are my children.” This
is how you take care of your children then, I
thought but answered instead:
“How did you
feel when we found that cat dead inside the walls? It must have upset
you. What about the other one that had died in the cellar? Or the dog
outside which had starved to death?” Pictures of dead, half-rotten
carcasses were going through my mind.
“Oh, I felt so
very ashamed. I didn't want anyone to see that. But I never meant
any harm to any of those animals.”
“But can you
not agree that if you are not able to take care of them all, maybe
you should give some of them to be relocated to a home where they
could receive the care they need?”
“Oh no, no.
They are all so very dear to me. They are my children. You wouldn't
give away your children, would you? I don't want to give them away,
any of them.” Mrs. Alborough was sobbing and I could see tears
running down on her round blushy cheeks. Strand of her greasy blond
hair was wet from the sweat on her forehead. She
is ugly, I
thought to myself.
It was midday,
and I was just leaving for lunch when I got the call. I tossed aside
my jacket, I had just seconds earlier taken from the coat rack to put
on. It landed on my oakwood desk. I sat down to my chair and lifted
the phone. I introduced myself and waited for a while to get an
answer from the other end.
“They found
another surprise in the house. The workers who were checking the
structures found a nice surprise underneath the cellar floor.” More
dead cats, I
guessed and rubbed my forehead.
“A dead baby.
Actually, born dead. There was not much of it left really, so it took
them a good while to figure out what they were dealing with. The baby
had been there for a long time. Someone had wrapped it up in a big
towel and then put into a plastic bag.” I could feel the collar of
my blouse tightening and I felt as if it was hard to breathe.
Suddenly, I was not hungry anymore.
“The police
have been in the house. They took Mrs. Alborough back to the station.
They would like you to interrogate the woman as they think you could
maybe get something out of her. So far she hasn't said anything else
but made a claim that she didn't know what was under there.”
“Alright, I'm
on my way as soon as I cancel my next appointment.” I took a deep
breath. I had no clue, whatsoever, what was going on in that woman’s
head, and I was not sure I could work that out.
The first
half-an-hour went by with me trying to get the woman to calm down.
Emily Alborough was in an incoherent state of mind. She was trying to
say something, I could not make sense of, and paced around the room
in a restless manner. I sat there in silence and waited. Finally she
sat down across me, wiped her face on a paper towel, that I had
kindly offered to her, and took a deep, trembling breath. Then she
waited for me to say something first but I stayed quiet since that
was often the best way to pressure someone into speaking. I waited
for her to feel uncomfortable enough so she would have to break the
silence. Mrs. Alborough scrunched the paper towel into pieces and bit
her lip anxiously. I waited.
“I don't want
to talk,” she finally blurted out. I kept waiting without opening
my mouth.
“It happened so
long ago, there is no need to talk about it really. I meant no harm
to anyone. I simply didn't know better. Moreover, it was my daughter
who had the baby. Janice was completely out of control. I didn't
know how to keep her disciplined.” I felt a warm feeling of
success. She turned out to be easy, after all. She seemed like a
person who had been so lonely for so long she had a natural need to
be heard. Perhaps no one had listened to her before. I figured, that
would be because it was obvious to anyone that she was not
particularly bright. I could sense that she had probably been a
misfit as a child. I tapped the surface of the table with my
fingertips making a rushing noise and then I looked her right into
her eyes. She looked back at me and seemed a bit taken aback by the
gesture.
“Well. I guess
I could tell you. But only you! And you have to tell the police I didn't mean anything bad to happen! I think they are intimidating. They
seem to accuse me before listening to what I have to say.”
“Sure Emily. I
will talk to them. I was brought here just for you.”
Janice
After my father
died I had kept no contact with my mother, whatsoever. So, naturally,
I was surprised to get a call from the police. I knew very well that
my mother had been struggling after my father died and I had told her
I wanted nothing to do with her. I had heard from my father’s side
of the family, that mother had started to take in animals from
shelters and it had turned into a messy problem. Mother had always
been obsessive about everything, including me. She had embraced me or
that is what she used to say to me when I was little. However, what
that really meant was obsessive control. I guessed, that after she
lost me, she had felt a need to have something to replace me and that
is why the animals came into the picture.
My mother treated
me like I was a baby even when I was a teenager. I had no permission
to leave the house alone. I was her only child so I understood she
wanted to protect me but it was more than that, though. I could not
even go to a store without my mother or my father going with me. I
mean, father would have let me go I am sure, but not my mother. That
is why I escaped through my bedroom window during nights, to go to a
house party or to some nightclub. I was underage but I was tall for
my age and looked older than I was so I could easily sneak into bars.
But mother caught me soon and put an end to it. She put a lock on my
door and my window, and outside school I was kept locked in my room
all times. It was too late though since I had already gotten
pregnant.
Mother told me, that if my father would become
aware of the pregnancy, he would throw me out. She had a lot of power
over me back then. So in order to hide the pregnancy from my father,
me and my mother tried our best to hide it. I used big, baggy clothes
to hide the tummy. At the time, I was hardly eating anything so my
belly did not even look as if I was pregnant. Mother was constantly
verbally abusing me and she also brought dozens of mirrors into my
room to shame me. I needed to see what I had become, she said. I
could not escape it. I was a sinner. Nevertheless, she loved me and
she would forgive me, she said. I felt like I was going mad and after
a while I broke all the mirrors in the room. I remember sitting on
the floor, covered with pieces of glass and blood on my hands.
When it was finally time to deliver the baby,
mother had boiled water, kitchen scissors and a string to tie the
umbilical cord with. She had brought me towels and placed them under
me on the bed. I went into labor and it felt like it lasted forever,
it was extremely painful. When the baby came out at last, there was
nothing but silence. It was not breathing. I had known from the
beginning that I would not be allowed to keep the baby, but this was
worse. I yelled at my mother and tried to get up but she just calmly
covered the baby with towels and said:
“It's already dead, Janice. There's nothing we
can do.”
The days went by and I grew more and more
depressed. My mother repeatedly told me that the baby had born dead
because of my sins and I started to believe it. I blamed myself for
murdering my own child.
After that, I wanted nothing to do with anyone. I
had been away from school so much I felt left out. Mother trusted me
even less than before. My father had to pick me up from school
everyday even though it was only two kilometers away from our house.
My father was the only one who seemed to care about me and then he
died in a car accident. My mother got even worse after that and I
knew I would not stay there. My only friend, who had gone everything
with me without judging me, was Missy, my big, fat cat who had yellow
stripes on her fur. I was trying to run away from mother with the cat
with me, but my mother and I got into a fight at the door and I had
to leave without Missy.
Herman Enfield
I had spent days with Mrs. Alborough, talking. I
had been right with my suspicions that she had a need to open up to
someone. She had never had a true friend in her life but now she
considered me as one. I had talked with her daughter, Janice, also.
All those dirty secrets the family had been hiding all these years,
were now coming into the light for the first time.
Emily Alborough had been an orphan who had
absolutely no information about her biological parents, none. She had
been raised in an orphanage were she had been abused by the nurses as
well as the other children. And that was the reason she had always
felt a great need to be loved. Emily had gotten married right after
she had turned 18 but the marriage did not meet her expectations for
intimate relationship. It had been a practical one as her husband had
supported her financially and she had not worked a day in her life.
Her social life had been non-existing. Soon after the wedding they
had discovered that Mrs. Alborough was not able to have children of
her own, so they had adopted a little girl. On paper everything
seemed to be okay and no one had been aware of Mrs. Alborough’s
compulsive behavior. She had smothered the child from day one, and
never told her, she had been adopted. That came to light only during
my sessions with her.
Janice Alborough had become pregnant when she was
a teenager. That is when the situation had escalated as Emily started
locking her daughter up to her room and severely abuse her. It was
clear from Mrs. Alborough’s words that she had been jealous of her
daughter’s pregnancy and had feared that she would lose control
over her if Janice was to become a mother herself. Nevertheless,
that problem had been taken care of when the baby was born dead.
Whether that was Mrs. Alborough’s doing, I could not be sure. She
never admitted having anything to do with that. Emily had wrapped the
baby and the placenta in a towel and then placed them into a plastic
bag. She and her husband had been renovating their home at a time and
so she managed to hide her dirty secret under the cellar’s floor
boards and kept it between herself and her daughter for all these
years. After her husband died and Janice Alborough ran away from her
mother, Emily started to fill the void by taking in animals to act as
a substitute for her lost daughter. Regardless, she would start
showing abusive behavior towards the animals as she had for her
child.
On paper, Mrs. Alborough received multiple
diagnoses but even so, they did not depict the whole nature of her
problems. Neither I nor anyone else could ever wholly understand her
actions and the reasoning behind them. This case was one that stuck
with me for a long time. And first time in my life, I could not feel
empathy for my patient. There was something utterly disgusting about
the woman. Of course, the way she had been abused as a child
explained something about her own actions but nevertheless, the way
she presented herself made me feel pure hatred for her. She had
clearly shown some abnormal tendencies even as a child and I had a
feeling that the abuse she had endured was partly due to her own
behavior. I strongly believed that something had been off about her
since birth. I could not help myself with those strong feelings about
the woman, even thought I knew I should not have felt them.
After the case, I decided to retire. I was already at that age anyway.
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