Magpie

by Elizabeth Day

  ‘What’s that, babe?’

  When had he started calling her ‘babe’? Maybe it was the first time he’d said it but then it felt familiar, as if he must have done it before, as if maybe she had crossed paths with him in a past life and wouldn’t that be weird, wouldn’t it be weird if Kevin turned out to know her mother and this was why she had been led here, to this pub, which she saw now wasn’t welcoming and safe, but was dingy and grubby and the toilets, when she went to the loo, stank of stale urine and Red Bull, but she didn’t care. It was fun. She was having fun. So much fun! Wasn’t she?

  Out of habit, she checked her reflection in the mirror. She looked bleary but fine. She applied some more lip gloss because you could never go wrong with more lip gloss and when she came back out, she saw that Kevin was holding out her denim jacket, waiting for her to slide her arms into the sleeves, which she did without asking why and then he led her out onto the street, which seemed to wobble beneath her feet so that, all of a sudden, she had trouble finding her balance and this was even funnier than Kevin’s joke, which now she thought about it, wasn’t that funny at all but more creepy than funny but that didn’t matter because he had been so nice to her, bringing her all those drinks.

  ‘I haven’t paid,’ she said, the words bouncing off each other like dodgem cars.

  ‘Told you, babe. On the house. Now let’s get you home.’

  ‘Have to find my mother.’

  Kevin laughed. ‘OK babe. This won’t take long. Then you can go and find whoever you want. Deal?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Deal,’ she said, because she trusted Kevin. He was Australian, wasn’t he, like the boys on Home and Away and he was wearing a shirt and he was kind of handsome when he turned his head into profile. She felt his arm tightening around her and was reminded of a boa constrictor she had been taught about in Biology, its cold flesh contracting and flexing until it squeezed hard enough to stop a rat’s blood pressure and heart function.

  ‘Are you a snake?’ Marisa asked, raising her head to his. She noticed that he was carrying her backpack where she had placed her phone after the second or maybe the third drink and she realised, then, that she had no way of telling anyone where she was. In fact, she did not know where she was because Kevin was guiding her through dark, unfamiliar streets and it was a ten-minute walk or maybe fifteen or maybe a couple of hours, she couldn’t be sure, and then he was in front of a door and he took out a bunch of keys and she saw a tattoo of an anchor on the inside of his wrist as he pushed it open and then she was in a hallway and he was turning on the lights, guiding her up a flight of stairs, to another door, which he also pushed open and then he started taking her clothes off and nudging her to the carpet and her knees buckled with the pressure and then he was spreading her legs with his hands – physically placing them wide apart as if she were a doll – and at that point, she tried to struggle and say no but it was too late and she was too drunk and too weak and too young and, suddenly, too scared. He loomed over her, so close that she could read the label on the inside of his shirt collar and this is what she chose to focus on, the two words spelling out ‘River Island’ stitched white on black, while he pinned back her right arm and loosened his jeans with his free hand. She went quiet. Her muscles, betraying her, slid into compliance. There was a second of absolute silence and absolute stillness.

  Then he raped her.

  After it was over, after she had left Kevin’s flat the next morning, she couldn’t tell anyone. She had lied to her school to get the time off. Her father didn’t know what she’d been planning, and they weren’t close enough for her to confide in him anyway. She hated herself for having stayed the night, but there had been nowhere else to go. She had positioned herself at the very edge of Kevin’s double mattress so that he wouldn’t touch her again, but she needn’t have worried. He had lost interest as soon as he had withdrawn. He had seen the spots of blood on the carpet and said ‘Fuck. You could have told me,’ and Marisa had never worked out whether he meant that she should have told him she was a virgin or whether he had assumed it was her period.

  She had stood up, feeling the trickle of him down her inner thigh and she had gone to the bathroom where she sat on the toilet, hunched over in an attempt to halt the brutal, slicing pain in her lower abdomen. She knew that tomorrow there would be bruises. She bruised easily, she reminded herself, still trying to make light of it, still trying to convince herself that she had wanted it to happen.

  Later – much later – she learned that survivors of sexual assault talk of things being ‘snatched away’ from them – their dignity; their virginity, as in her case; even their identity – but Marisa always felt the opposite, as if something unwanted had forced itself into her, like shrapnel, and her entire self had to grow around it over the years that followed, warping the muscle and the skin out of shape until the scar became a misshapen part of her, something she simply had to live around.

  She has never told anyone. She has never spoken about how she didn’t sleep at all that night, about how she cried without making a noise as grey daylight filtered into the room, about how Kevin snored as if it were normal – this most abnormal, most shocking of things – or about how when she got up to leave, she was so terrified of waking him that she gagged and almost threw up, or about how her clothes, when she put them on, didn’t seem to be hers any more; they seemed instead to belong to an alien being, a person who was still so unaware of life’s ugliness that she had allowed herself to be raped. The fault, she thought then, was hers, not his. He had attacked her, but she had let it happen. She has revisited the moment when her muscles went slack again and again and again. In her nightmares, it is always this point she returns to: the carpet rough against her back, her jaw rigid, her entire body tensed, and then, like wind dropping in a sail – nothing. She is engulfed by shame.

  She has never told Jake. Although she thinks about it every day, she also doesn’t think about it any more in a way that anyone else could understand unless they had been through it. Everything changed after her rape and there was no option but to accept the new reality wholesale. This she did. And when she started dating men in her twenties, she did so with a ferocity of intent. She was determined to plaster over the cracks Kevin had left in her soul with new experiences of intimacy. It meant she was difficult to understand; a little intense on first meeting; a complicated person who couldn’t master online dating precisely because of its innate simplicity. It was all so straightforward, she thought; so shambolically, dangerously innocent.

  She had never found her mother. But with Jake, she had found someone who accepted her as she was without too many questions, and when she fell in love with him, it was not accompanied by fireworks and a surging feeling of rollercoaster stomach-leaping. It didn’t feel like a thunderbolt. It felt like something more beautiful than that. It felt like relief.

  7

  Kate is cooking dinner. She has ‘insisted’ and said it is ‘the least I can do’ and ‘you’ve been so generous’ and would Marisa please just let Kate show her appreciation? This last line is delivered with a laugh that requires a lot of comic pouting and a playful, semi-sarcastic tone that grates. She barely knows me, Marisa fumes. Jake is delighted, especially when Kate says she’s cooking macaroni cheese, ‘which I know is your favourite’.

  She can only know about his penchant for macaroni cheese if either Marisa or Jake has told her. Marisa certainly hasn’t and so she assumes Jake must have done so. When have the two of them had a chance to talk to each other? Marisa is almost always in the house. She doesn’t like the thought of them having discussions without her.

  Ridiculous as it sounds, Marisa is proprietorial over the macaroni cheese. In her head, she imagines telling Kate that her pasta dish won’t be necessary and that macaroni cheese is one of her special dishes that she makes when her boyfriend who she is currently trying to get pregnant by needs cheering up, thank you very much. Bu
t of course she doesn’t say anything, and then has to endure the spectacle of Kate in the kitchen – her kitchen – moving around as if she owns it.

  ‘Now, where has Jake put the paprika?’ Kate says, as Marisa observes her from the sofa.

  ‘Cupboard to the right of the sink,’ Marisa says, just to prove the point that she knows the location of condiments just as well as Jake does.

  ‘Oh yes! Sorry.’ Kate looks at her oddly. ‘Didn’t know I was speaking out loud.’

  Marisa is pretending to watch the television evening news. On screen, a politician with a florid face and narrow eyes is being interviewed about his plans for international development spending while the newsreader, sporting a blue and green tie, is interjecting with mounting incredulity.

  ‘Surely you can’t be serious …?’ the interviewer is asking, even though everyone knows the politician is being serious and there’s no point in starting a question that way unless you’re deliberately trying to antagonise someone.

  ‘If you’ll just let me get a word in edgeways …’ the politician replies. Increasingly, this is what Marisa thinks politics has become: two men, overly fond of the pomp and ceremony of their own voices, talking in rhetorical non-sequiturs until one of them wins a spurious point that has vanishingly little to do with anyone’s daily reality. Normally she’d switch it off, but she wants to be able to see what Kate’s doing without making it obvious. So she stares at the screen, trying to zone out of the argumentative pitter-patter and slide her gaze discreetly towards Kate, who is bustling around the stove and taking out an unnecessary array of pots and pans. She is humming a tune under her breath, and it is this – the humming – that Marisa finds most objectionable for reasons she cannot fully express, even to herself.

  Kate empties a kettle of boiling water into a pot and mixes together paprika and something that looks like egg yolk into a bowl. What on earth is she doing with paprika and egg yolk? Marisa wonders. Well, at least her macaroni cheese won’t be as good as mine if she’s putting all that gunk in it.

  Since the yoga class, this antipathy towards Kate has crept up on her, like a fog over an incoming tide, and now there is no escaping it. Also, she’s about to get her period, so her hormones are making her spiky and intolerant. In the kitchen, Kate fishes around in her pocket, removing a hair clip. Marisa watches as she scoops up her short dark hair into a tiny twisted coil, placing the clip at the highest point so that strands fall from its grip around her flushed cheeks. She is wearing a striped Breton top and flared jeans which Marisa could never wear without looking absurd and out of proportion. But Kate’s narrow hips and boyish figure lend themselves to fashionable clothes. Marisa assesses her own clothes: a faded ochre sundress brought back from a Greek island holiday that is baggy and comfortable and paint-spattered from an afternoon’s work. She is wearing no make-up because she hasn’t left the house all day. Her hair is held up with a paintbrush and needs a wash. On one wrist, she wears a silver charm bracelet she never takes off, the loops hanging with lucky horseshoes and miniature compasses. It was an eighteenth birthday gift from her father and although she had moved out by then, although she barely made the effort to keep in touch, he sent it to her in a padded envelope, inexpertly wrapped in tissue paper, with a card written in his familiar copperplate saying that the bracelet had once been her mother’s and she would want Marisa to have it.

  In each of Kate’s earlobes she has several piercings, but the earrings she wears are delicate golden hoops, occasionally lined with tiny sparkly diamonds so that the overall effect is muted and elegant. Around her neck, she wears three thin chains in the same burnished gold and on the third chain – the longest – is a bulbous locket engraved with a single ‘K’. Marisa wonders what she keeps inside it. Paprika, probably.

  ‘Sorry, what was that?’ Kate looks over at her and Marisa realises that the snort of laughter she thought happened only inside her head did, in fact, make itself heard.

  ‘Nothing. Just something this guy said,’ and she waves at the TV screen.

  ‘Oh God, he’s such a fuckwit,’ Kate says, nonchalantly lobbing the swear word into the room, which is gradually filling with steam and the smell of melted cheese.

  Again, it’s not that Marisa is particularly prudish and it’s not that she doesn’t swear herself, but still – if she were a new lodger in someone else’s house, she’s not sure that she would do so with quite such a lack of self-consciousness. Maybe she’s being unfair. Maybe.

  ‘Jake should be back at about 7.30 p.m.,’ she calls over from the sofa.

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ Kate says, not raising her head from the stove.

  In the end, they hear the key rattling in the front-door lock at twenty to eight, by which time Kate has put the macaroni cheese in the oven, laid the table with napkins and wine glasses, and filled a jug with water and sprigs of mint from the herb pots in the garden – ‘I just find it tastes fresher,’ she explained. ‘Don’t you think?’

  Marisa, who had no strong opinions about mint in water, murmured a non-committal assent.

  ‘I’m back!’ Jake calls from the hallway.

  He walks into the kitchen and goes straight to Kate, seeming not to see Marisa as he strides past.

  ‘Oh my God, Kate, that smells fantastic.’ He peers into the oven.

  ‘No opening the oven door until it’s done, please,’ Kate says, playfully smacking his hand away.

  ‘OK, OK, I promise.’

  ‘Hi,’ Marisa says. She watches the two of them, side by side, and she gets the most curious feeling that she is the odd one out.

  ‘Oh, hi Marisa.’ Jake grins at her, raising one hand in greeting.

  He does not even come over to kiss her. She knows that if she doesn’t leave the room, she will embarrass herself by crying. She makes a bolt for the door and rushes upstairs, heading straight for her study, where she closes the door behind her and leans her back against it. The tears come, as she knew they would, and she doesn’t wipe them away. She allows herself a moment of mawkish self-indulgence, because she knows there is no reason to cry, not really, and it’s simply that she’s feeling frayed and anxious and tired. So tired. She’s been feeling tired for days now and can’t seem to shake it.

  There is a knock on the door.

  ‘Marisa?’ It is Jake, his voice concerned and pleading. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Yes, truly, I’m fine. I just needed a moment.’

  There is silence on the other side of the door.

  ‘OK, well if you’re sure.’ She hears his intake of breath and can imagine the expression on his face that she knows so well: loving and concerned and worried he’s made a mess of things without knowing why he has. In many ways, he is still the seven-year-old boy who got sent away to boarding school. He needs as much parenting as loving, she thinks. And so does she. It’s why they are perfect for each other.

  ‘Don’t worry, Jake. Nothing’s wrong. I’ll be down in a second, just after I’ve … I’ve … finished … answering this email,’ she concluded weakly.

  ‘All right. We’ll see you downstairs. No rush.’

  She hears his footsteps recede and slumps to the ground. She is so exhausted that the last thing she feels like is making polite chit-chat with Kate in her perfectly judged smart-casual Breton top. She’ll give herself a couple of minutes to re-group, she thinks, and then she’ll go back. She walks to the bathroom and splashes cool water on her face, and it’s then that she sees the pregnancy test in her washbag. She thinks about her period, which was due days ago, and the fact that she’s been feeling so tired, and she thinks about how they’ve been diligently trying to get pregnant, and she’s astonished, then, that it has taken her so long to realise what the explanation could be.

  She sits on the toilet waiting to piss and when her bladder begins to empty, she angles the lip of the pregnancy test into the stream of urine. After she’s done, she slides the
pink plastic cap back on and places the test on the edge of the basin where it sits for the allotted number of minutes, and once her watch tells her it is time to check, she allows herself to look at the aperture which reveals two lines – two clear vertical purple dashes that tell her with incontrovertible certitude that she is pregnant.

  She screams with joy and it is loud enough that Jake comes running back upstairs. This time, she lets him into the room.

  8

  After the initial thrill has subsided, Marisa finds the early weeks of pregnancy tiresome. She is shattered and heaviness oozes through her veins, settling slowly into the pit of her stomach where it gurgles and splutters at inopportune moments. The first trimester is a constant disconnectedness, as if she is not quite inhabiting her body. Her normal food proclivities shift overnight. The thought of a green vegetable makes her want to throw up. She can eat hummus and bread and anything else beige in colour and that’s about it. She does not feel the inner calm she had anticipated from all the baby books and the health magazines that talked about pregnancy glow. Instead, she is overwhelmed by the admin: the leaflets that appear through the letterbox as soon as she has informed her GP, the pamphlets in Comic Sans advising her to book into antenatal classes and proselytising the merits of breastfeeding. She dutifully attends all the requisite hospital appointments, Jake sitting next to her, puppyish in his enthusiasm. She goes back to the pregnancy yoga class and grits her teeth as Carys talks about Mother Earth and maternal energies and the goddess within all of us.

  At home, she spends a lot of time in bed or reclining on the sofa. She watches daytime television and subscribes to an internet service that means she can get the latest reality shows from America. There is one, following the lives of cabin crew on a luxury yacht, that she becomes inexplicably involved in and she finds herself opening up her laptop over breakfast to catch up on the latest romantic entanglements between the male and female deckhand, or the chef’s travails after being presented with a preference sheet listing the no-gluten dietary requirements of the next oligarch client.