Asking for It

by Louise O'Neill

  ‘Please, Mam, don’t—’

  ‘Please don’t what? What, Emma?’ She laughs. Why is she laughing at me?

  I don’t know what to say.

  ‘Do you know what happened today at Mass? I’m surprised you didn’t see something on Facebook.’

  I haven’t been online today. Sundays are the hardest, when photos from the night before are uploaded, the girls glittering like prizes to be won, short skirts and high heels and I feel so very afraid for them (don’t they know what could happen? Don’t they know that they need to be careful?) and I feel so jealous of them. (Why me? Why did it have to happen to me?) And Sean and Paul and Fitzy are always there and they are always smiling, laughing. (I have ruined their lives.) Smiling and laughing and smiling and laughing. (I have ruined their lives.)

  ‘So you don’t know what I’m talking about?’ She shakes her head. ‘Of course you don’t. We have to protect little Emma. We have to make sure little Emma is OK, don’t we? But what about me? What about me, Emma? Who is making sure that I’m OK?’

  I don’t know what to say. Tell me my lines, please.

  ‘He shook their hands,’ she says. ‘He actually went up to them and shook their hands. Some days I really wish . . .’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I ask her.

  ‘And after all the times we’ve had him to the house,’ she continues, as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘He baptized you. He gave you your first Holy Communion. I arrange the flowers for the cathedral. And he went and shook their hands.’

  ‘Whose hands, Mam?’

  She looks up at me. ‘Are you sure you want to know?’

  I don’t know what I want.

  ‘Because I can tell you if you really want to know,’ she says. ‘Well? Do you? Do you want to know what happened today?’

  I don’t know what I want any more.

  ‘But I’m not supposed to tell you. Don’t want to upset Emma, do we?’ There’s a pause, both of us staring at each other, and her eyes narrow. ‘Well, I think you should know.’ She grabs the page of the album, as thick as a board, and starts to tear at it.

  ‘Don’t!’ I cry out, but she ignores me, pulling the page from the old wooden book-frame, the spine of the album tearing, letting the other pages fall loose too. She throws the offending page at me, and the sharp corner of it hits me square in the forehead.

  ‘Take a good look at it,’ she says. ‘That man, that man gave a speech at our wedding talking about love and gentleness and kindness—’

  ‘Please—’

  ‘And then today, do you know what he did? Do you?’

  ‘Please stop—’

  ‘His sermon was about not judging others, and how important it is to assume that everyone is innocent until proven guilty. He didn’t use any names – oh, he couldn’t do that, could he? – but everyone knew who he was talking about, and your father and I like idiots in the top pew, after giving fifty euro to the collection plate.’

  They are all innocent until proven guilty. But not me. I am a liar until I am proven honest.

  ‘As if we can afford fifty euro at the moment, when we don’t even know if your father is going to get fired—’

  ‘What?’ My throat closes up and I can’t get enough air in. My father is going to lose his job? (My fault.)

  ‘And everyone staring at us, and muttering under their breath—’

  ‘Please, Mam—’

  ‘And I passed Ciarán O’Brien on my way to take Holy Communion, and he winked at me, he actually winked—’

  ‘I don’t want to—’

  ‘And then, oh, I’m keeping the best till last, young lady. Just wait until you hear this. Then Father Michael waited at the church door until Sean Casey and Paul O’Brien . . .’

  (What was Paul O’Brien doing at Mass?)

  ‘. . . came out, and he shook their hands, and offered his condolences.’

  Father Michael has been the Monsignor in Ballinatoom for twenty years. He christened me, he heard my first confession as I listed off the fights I’d had with Bryan and the time I had found a five-euro note stuck down the back of the couch in the TV room and didn’t tell my parents. He was there for my first Holy Communion and Confirmation. He would come to our house for dinner and he would tell me how pretty I looked. When he gave me his plate after he had finished eating, he would smile and tell me that I’d make some lucky man a fine wife someday.

  He doesn’t believe me. None of them believe me.

  ‘It’s pretty obvious he’s chosen sides,’ my mother says. ‘And it isn’t yours.’

  Yours. Not ours.

  I try to think about what the therapist told me. You’re not going to die, Emma, it’s just a panic attack. Breathe in love, slut, liar, breathe out fear, skank, breathe in love, bitch, breathe out fear. Whore.

  I try and remember but my brain is crammed up with that word and those photos and those comments (her tits are tiny, aren’t they?) and I don’t have any room for anything else.

  Slut, liar, skank, bitch, whore.

  I turn my back to her. I need to walk away. I need to go upstairs and pull the duvet over my head, diving into the darkness as if I was diving into water.

  But I can’t. I am full of this shame, and it is weighing me down, holding my feet in shackles. I can see Father Michael shaking their hands, and I do not know if I can survive this. I just want it to stop. I just want it all to stop. I want the opinion pieces in the newspapers to stop, and I want the phone calls at 3 a.m. to stop, and I want #IBelieveBallinatoomGirl to stop trending on Twitter.

  All of those strangers who believe that I am a victim, that I am innocent. (And they are the only ones.)

  I stare at my wrists. (I want them to bleed.) I imagine my life oozing away from me, my body weakening, until this could be over.

  My mother is gasping, sorry, sorry, sorry, begging me to talk to her.

  ‘Please don’t tell your father, please, Emma, I didn’t mean to tell you, I swear.’

  But she did mean to tell me. She wants me to hurt as much as she does.

  ‘Please, Emma? Promise me. He’ll kill me, he’ll, well, I don’t know what he’ll do.’

  He’ll divorce you, I think. He’ll pack his bags, and leave this house, without a backward glance. He would be happy to have an excuse to escape. He will leave you alone with me.

  ‘I can’t take it any more,’ she says, ‘I just can’t take it any more, I can’t, Emma, I can’t take this any more, I just can’t, I can’t take it any more . . .’

  She babbles while I stare at a photo on the wall. It is the four of us, taken before Bryan’s grads ball in sixth year. We look happy.

  I want to rip it from the wall and smash it.

  She whimpers, then starts to cry again, but it’s softer now, a low gurgling in the back of her throat. I stay still. I hear shuffling, the thud of something heavy hitting the ground, and then my mother’s breathing eases from tightly wound gasps into longer, slower sighs. I wait until I hear the chafing sound of snores before I turn to look at her. She’s stretched out on the sofa, her mouth slack, a little pocket of fat gathered at her jawline. Her glass has tipped over on to her chest, the liquid seeping into her dressing gown. I bend down and collect all the sheets of photos, hiding the wine glass behind the sofa so my father won’t see it when he comes in. I take a photo out of the old biscuit tin. My father with a pint of Murphy’s in one hand, a cast on the other from a broken bone during a GAA match. My mother in a shapeless dress, a long pearl necklace around her neck, holding her glass of orange cordial out to the camera. They look so young.

  I take the patchwork quilt from the back of the sofa and shake it out, tucking it around my mother’s body and up as far as her chin, and she curls into it like a child. I make myself walk away from her.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I say on the landing. Bryan is closing the door of my room, a laptop stuffed under his armpit. ‘What were you doing in my room?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You’re not
supposed to go in there if I’m not there,’ I say. ‘I’m entitled to some privacy.’ Even if the lock has gone from my door, removed after the last time . . . after the last time. ‘Is that mine?’ I ask him, pointing at the laptop.

  ‘Sorry.’ His jaw is moving back and forward as if he’s grinding his teeth. ‘I had to . . .’ He breaks off. ‘Well, I had to, and you weren’t there.’

  ‘Is that mine?’ I repeat myself.

  ‘Yes,’ he squeaks, and he coughs to clear his throat. ‘And, eh, I was wondering if I could borrow your laptop?’

  I need it. I need it to block out the argument with Mam and all the other images and those photos and the comments, and no, no, no. I need it.

  ‘Well,’ I try to be calm but I can feel the panic climbing up my throat, ‘I can’t sleep and I was thinking of watching—’

  ‘No,’ he yells, and I back away from him. ‘You’re not even supposed to have it anyway, are you?’

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘I just need to borrow your laptop.’

  ‘But you have your own laptop.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. But, it’s, eh, it’s, eh . . .’

  ‘It’s what?’

  ‘Broken. It’s broken.’ He swallows hard. ‘And I need to do research for a project.’

  ‘A project?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What type of project?’

  ‘What do you mean, what type of project?’

  ‘Well, what’s it about? What subject is it for? Are you working in a group or are—’

  ‘It’s just a project, OK?’ he snaps. ‘Just a project for college. End of.’

  ‘OK.’ I don’t like it when Bryan gets angry with me. ‘Just take it. You can sign in as a guest. I’m not giving you my password.’

  Closing my bedroom door behind me, I go to the vanity table and fumble around in the top drawer. There’s a pile of diaries there, cheap hardback copybooks that my mother buys for me. The therapist says that I should try and use the journals as a way of processing this experience. As a way of remembering. They all want me to remember. (I don’t want to remember.)

  The phone is hidden beneath the diaries. My mother forgot to take it from me, again. I sit on the ground with my back pressed against the door in case Bryan decides he needs to come back in.

  I have thirty new emails, and as I scroll through them (m248sh@hotmail.com, thisbetheverse@gmail.com, youareaslutandeveryonehatesyou@gmail.com) I only recognize two names – so I delete the rest. (How did they find my new address?) One is from Conor,

  Emmie,

  I was thinking about you today. I saw you getting out of your car on Friday evening. I wasn’t going to say anything . . . I don’t know why I am saying anything. It was nice to see your face. I miss you. x

  I read the email three times before making myself delete it. The other email is from Maggie.

  Hey hunnie,

  Listen, I just wanted to tell you to ignore all that crap on Facebook, people are so pathetic. It’s this stupid town, they have nothing else to do with their time, you know? Please phone me. I really want to see you and make sure you’re doing OK. I need to talk to you about something too.

  Love you. xxx

  I shut down my email, and I click into the Facebook app. There are about one hundred new private messages, but I don’t look at them. I know what darkness they will hold. Kill yourself. Run away. Leave here forever. Everybody hates you. Slut, liar, skank, bitch, whore. I promised my parents that I would shut down all my accounts, but I can’t. I would be erased. It would be as if I never existed. (Isn’t that what I want?) I’m tagged in ten new photos.

  I am afraid every time I open my computer or look at my phone.

  I know I shouldn’t look. Of course I shouldn’t look. I am afraid of looking but I am afraid not to look too. (I am afraid all the time.)

  In each of the photos there are girls, loads of them, each picture with a different group, all of them wearing plain white T-shirts. I know most of them. There’s Sarah Swallows and Julie Clancy, surrounded by six or seven other girls from my year. In another there’s Susan Twomey, and a few of her friends, and I can barely make out the rest, my eyes blurring. Scrawled on the T-shirts in black marker are the words #TeamPaul, #TeamDylan and #TeamSean, one or two have #TeamFitzy, but not as many. I look at the comments underneath.

  Slut, liar, skank, bitch, whore. Slut, liar, skank, bitch, whore. Slut, liar, skank, bitch, whore. Slut, liar, skank, bitch, whore.

  Over and over and over.

  She was asking for it.

  What did she expect?

  I see legs splayed. I see pink flesh, delicate. Bruised. Ripped apart.

  Any #TeamEmma T-shirts? someone had written, and Julie Clancy replied, Bitch, please.

  I blink, and I can see Jen Casey, her face paler than I remember, fingers pointing at the #TeamSean across her chest.

  ‘I wish you would get together with Sean,’ Jennifer said to me. It must have been two years ago. She and I were watching TV, waiting for Bryan to come home after football training. Her mother had come off her meds without telling anyone again. She began showing up at school in her pyjamas, she started bulk-buying tinned tomatoes until their garden shed was full of hundreds of cans. She had gone back to hospital for a ‘rest’, and Mam insisted that Jen come and have dinner with us as often as she wanted. ‘I would, you know I would, Jen,’ I told her. ‘But Ali really likes him, and I wouldn’t do that to a friend.’ The truth was, I would do that to a friend, and I had done that to a friend. But not for someone like Sean, someone whom no one else wanted.

  If this was a movie I would start crying now. Wouldn’t that be the normal reaction?

  My eyes are dry. They are burned out.

  (I wish I could cry.)

  All I have now is a feeling of falling, like you do in a dream, where you are falling and falling and falling into a pit of nothingness, and you keep waiting to wake up before you hit the bottom, before your brain splats all over the concrete floor of your nightmare. But I don’t wake up. I’m falling, falling forever, always waiting for the ground to meet me.

  Monday

  My dreams are heavy, bloated things. My crusted eyelids peel apart as I wake, my mind a-shimmer with the haze of disintegrating images. It’s always the same these days, the world turning sideways, oily black ink spilling down the walls and flooding the square box that I’m trapped in, pooling around my ankles, then my knees, then my chest, until it’s over my head and I can’t breathe.

  There you are. There’s a good girl. You like that, don’t you? Don’t you?

  ‘Emma? Are you awake?’ It’s my mother, the door opening just a crack, a strip of light opening into the room. I remember what happened last night. I remember her face and her words. And remembering feels like gathering pieces of broken glass in my hands.

  I wonder if she can smell it, if the darkness has its own particular scent, or if my room smells the way it always did in the morning, of stale breath, vanilla candles and traces of perfume. People always asked me what perfume I used. I would refuse to tell them. I wanted to be unique, to stand out. I wanted to be different.

  Now all I want is to fade away.

  I slow my breathing down, making my inhale catch in a whistle at the back of my throat. Does she know I’m pretending to be asleep? Is she pretending to believe me? Is it easier that way? The door closes with a gentle click behind her. I curl up underneath the duvet, holding my knees into my chest, rubbing my belly. The therapist says it’s important to process the memories, it’s important to feel your feelings, Emma, but if I don’t even know what I actually remember, what are real memories, what are mine, and what’s been implanted inside there by the Easy Emma page, and Ms McCarthy, and the guards, and Bryan, and Ali and Maggie, and my parents, and the newspapers, and the outraged callers to The Ned O’Dwyer Show. What if I am just making it all up, like Paul claims? Veronica Horan wrote about the increase in false accusations, how women were claiming that the
y had repressed memories of sexual abuse, when in fact it was all in their imagination. Fathers thrown in jail. Mothers devastated. More lives ruined.

  ‘The intransigence of memory’, that article had been called. I read it ten times.

  I think of my mother last night, her voice with that edge in it, somewhere between a sob and a scream. I think of how she looked at me. I know that this memory is real, this one is mine, and it feels like desperation standing before me, whittled skinny and hungry for me.

  What will the trial be like? The book they gave me at the Rape Crisis Centre said it could be a ‘traumatic experience for the victim’. What does that even mean? My therapist uses the word ‘trauma’ to explain away everything that is happening to me.

  I can’t eat. That’s because of the trauma.

  I can’t sleep. That’s because of the trauma.

  I can’t breathe. That’s because of the trauma.

  What sorts of questions will they ask in court?

  How much did you drink that night? Did you take drugs? Witnesses say they saw you leading Paul O’Brien into the bedroom, do you admit that? Do you admit that you consented to have sex with him? How many other people have you had sex with? Would you say that you’re promiscuous?

  I imagine my parents, my father looking at me with those new eyes of his, faded, listless. I want to climb up his body like I did as a child, feel his arms around me as he carries me. I want to hear him call me his princess, just once more. When was the last time he said it to me? Another thing I can’t remember.

  I’ll have to go to Dublin. ‘Rape (don’t say that word, don’t use that word about me) and aggravated sexual assault are tried in the Central Criminal Court,’ Aidan Heffernan told me. ‘The court case could last up to two weeks at least,’ he said. But they do not know how long it will take this time, with all ‘the photos, and the media attention, and the complex nature of the case’. ‘There is no precedent,’ the reporter will say on TV, small boys in tracksuits jumping up and down in the background, making grotesque faces and waving at their mams watching.