Fat Mo

By Suzanne Conboy-Hill

Mo is a young woman in the throes of depression, her vulnerability is exploited by the man she works for, powerful in his circles but with his own troubled relationships. Her story is a common one that has only recently come starkly to light with cases being brought against high profile men. Mo is not a celebrity; this happens to very ordinary women who have no resources to take action. The story is a fictionalised account of the author's own experience with some scenes and actions that did not happen but were constructed to carry the whole.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9780244576929

Book preview

Fat Mo

Fat Mo

By Suzanne Conboy-Hill

First published by Waif Sands 2018

Copyright © 2020 S.P. Conboy-Hill. All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the expressed written permission of the publisher and author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First eEdition 2020

ISBN: 978-0-244-57692-9

Suzanne Conboy-Hill asserts her rights as the author of this content.

Published by Waif Sands

Cover by Suzanne Conboy-Hill

Acknowledgments

The increasingly vocal women’s and minority status groups enabling victims of all kinds to speak out, speak up, speak truth to power, and those who opened the floodgates by doing so in October 2017, made it possible to bring this story to publication. Without their courage, I may not have found my own.

Foreword

Fat Mo is a story about sexual abuse. Sexual abuse perpetrated over a sustained period by a man of a woman. And not just sexual abuse, but sexual abuse of the most shocking kind, often accompanied by physical abuse and violence. This was sexual abuse that was perpetrated over someone who had been selected, not on the basis of her skills but on the basis of her being someone judged able to be abused. And this was the kind of abuse, as with so many others, where the abuser gets totally away with it - completely unscathed.

But Fat Mo is not just a story. Fat Mo happened. There was such a person as Mo, but with a different name. And there was an abuser, although he was not named Merv either. And everyone knew that the abuse was taking place. Others in the company. The cleaner. Possibly Mo’s parents suspected something too.

Suzanne Conboy-Hill writes very well, with the double insight that comes from one who has herself been a victim but also as one who later becomes a psychologist. We are completely transported back into that world of the 1960’s where we observe this horror taking place. And we see everything closely, perhaps too closely sometimes, from the point of view of an observer. Seeing everything, and yet being completely powerless to intervene.

I am a clinical psychologist who works with victims of abuse of all kinds and I found the voice of Fat Mo, and her story, to be totally authentic. Purely and simply because it is. And, as with all the many accounts that I hear, it got completely under my skin. And so it should. Because the abuse described in this book – the sexual abuse, the physical abuse, the abuse of power, the abuse of vulnerability, emotional, psychological, physical – is just so wrong.

But now Mo, like so many other women, thank goodness, has told her story, and her story, with many, many others, is out there, and no longer a secret.

And now what? And now it’s down to us, to all of us, to right those wrongs, to break the cycle of abuse and gender-based violence.

Jamie Hacker Hughes

Past President of the British Psychological Society,

Visiting Professor of Military Psychology in the Veterans and Families Institute Anglia Ruskin University, Visiting Professor of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, Visiting Professor at Northumbria University and Honorary Professor of Psychology at Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow.

http://www.jamiehackerhughes.com

Preface

This series of stories, centring on Mo and what happened to her in her workplace, was destined for a book of similar stories relating the fictionalised but historically recognisable experiences of other individuals trapped and victimised by more powerful people and organisations. All of them find a resolution of some kind which, whether those of us privileged to observe from a distance would agree with it or not, works for them. Victims they may be, but ultimately they are not helpless, they have agency.

Merv

The man in the pale suit steps lightly down the stairs to the tiny toilet. A hand basin is fixed to the wall at just the right height for him to wash away the girl upstairs and so, despite the cold, he sets to work cleaning her out of every nook and cranny. There is only a roller towel for drying and it is not so conveniently placed. He yanks at it and breaks the fitting, gathering the towel up before it hits the floor and attending to himself with brisk movements that almost have him thinking about going back to the office. He considers this for a moment; she was unconscious when he left, which would make matters efficient, but then her palpable fear and utter compliance are titillating in themselves and it would not be so interesting without those elements. He decides against it, jerks off in the sink, takes a leak, and assembles himself to leave for home.

They only half do Christmas, he and Sam; maybe because they only half do their own origins, but he has presents for her and the first, safely concealed earlier in the day, is the one he really wants her to like. The others are backups in case she does not. He heads out to his car, a midnight blue Jaguar with leather upholstery, a built-in radio, and just enough of the right paperwork to fool the local idiot constabulary. He walks around it – twice clockwise and twice counter-clockwise - checking as best he can in the ditch water dribble that passes for street lighting, that it bears no sign of the night’s activities, runs a finger over the passenger door handle and peers at it; it seems clean. Then he unlocks the car and opens the door. The interior light comes on which makes his job easier but also picks him out should anyone be passing and not in enough of a bone-chilled hurry to just keep going. He judges the likelihood to be remote, given the derelict nature of the environs; nevertheless he needs to be quick. Merv looks around inside, practiced and expert, he has done it often. There are no items of clothing, no odd earrings, nothing that looks as though it might have been torn off something else. Good. Stains and streaks? None visible but he takes a large cloth from the glove compartment, leans down to gather some snow into it, then squeezes it between large hands until it dampens the fabric. He uses this to wipe down the passenger seat because who knew what deposits might have been left there to give him away. He wipes the