by Clare Boyd
My body was sunken into a softness that smelt wrong. There was pressure in my hips and a deep throbbing between my legs, as deep as any kind I had felt before, pressing up into my stomach. The space around me, with no walls or boundaries, moved in fractured shapes, disintegrating. Yellows and golds and bronze. At the centre of this collapsed reality was a tunnel, narrowing into a white light. It offered a release, it offered the discontinuation of everything, it offered death. Tacitly, I allowed the exchange. Death was a fair deal for a cessation of this ordeal. I yearned to say goodbye to Sophie and to my mother and my father. And I aimed for the light.
My mind had given up its searing truth and the revelation had hit me, the revelation that I had been raped. Yes. Raped. Rape. I tried the word out in my mind. I had not been drunk or careless, I had been drugged and attacked. I had been raped.
Had I always known this?
Had I?
Not really.
Yes, I had. Back then. Sophie had told me.
Had she?
I had let it burrow deep inside me.
And now this. Now this rapist of mine was back inside me, in a different way, yet the same, and he was dead.
Killed. It was a more accurate word.
Had I wished for it? Had I asked her for it?
His eyes, those eyes, with little puffs of swollen, sleepy flesh under each, stared down at me, a shot of minty breath unleashed with each jerk. I hadn’t asked for this, but I was getting it anyway. Until it stopped; somehow, sometime, I woke up, with Sophie’s face looming in place of his, saying something, covering me up, asking me the name of the nameless man whom she had seen leaving my room. Sophie was always there. Always there for me…
I went back even further, to the hours before that, to a bustling student union bar. There had been a loud DJ playing hip-hop that had vibrated inside my chest, just as the Beethoven did now.
A handful of male faces encircled me and Sophie, up close, jostling for attention, laughing, drinking. There was Will, his ratty arm dangling over Sophie’s shoulders. There were three of Will’s friends. There was a face with narrow, pale eyes and sandy hair and clusters of angry spots on each cheek.
‘Hey. It’s my round. What are you drinking?’ he said, into my ear. Close up, he smelt of TCP.
I looked over at Sophie and Will talking. They had full drinks. There were many full drinks. I doubted it was his round, but mine was empty.
‘Sure. Great. Thanks. Jack and Coke. Double.’
I had not asked his name. I had not cared who he was. He was buying my drink. That’s what I cared about. I had taken it from him. I had drunk it.
‘What’s your name?’ he said, touching the rim of his beer glass with mine.
‘Cheers,’ I said.
‘That’s an odd name.’
‘Naomi,’ I laughed, looking over to Sophie and Will, who were kissing.
‘I’m Jay,’ he smiled.
And then the Jack and Coke made me woozy. The music was turned up. The lights turned down. The crowds swam and swirled, heads floating upwards. Time disappeared. He was in my room, unzipping his flies. Taking from me.
If I had refused that drink, my life would have been different. A good place to start the reworking of my life. That exact point. The knowledge that it was not possible to go back dug a hole in the pit of my stomach, filling it in with sorrow, like cement. I didn’t know what to do with these brief, badly ordered images of my past; where to take them. I wasn’t even sure they were mine to own. Perhaps I couldn’t bring myself to absorb it. If they were mine, I wanted to see them again.
They flared up, again. Mine, all mine. I didn’t want to see them and I wanted to; I wanted to reject them and I wanted to own them, greedily almost. Unbidden, they clicked into their rightful place inside me, slotting in, answering a distant question that I had never been courageous enough to ask.
In the corner of my eye, I caught Josh massaging the back of Meg’s neck. She tilted her head, letting her hand fall onto Josh’s upper thigh. While the music played on, while a rape played out in my mind, they were flirting with each other, dancing with each other in tiny, almost imperceptible movements, using the constrained environment of this closed auditorium as foreplay.
How I envied the ease with which they touched each other.
I could not touch or be touched like that. I had been raped. Thinking of it was a punch that I could not physically reel from.
Charlie and I sat tall and stiff. We could barely look at each other, let alone touch each other. I felt his reproachful sideways glance every time my plastic wine glass met my lips. He would not understand that my consumption of this warm, white wine was about survival rather than recklessness. I had been drinking when it had happened, and now I drank to forget it had.
I sensed the tension in Charlie’s body underneath his starched white shirt. His hand gripped his water bottle, tighter and tighter, until I feared it would crack and disturb the pianist’s flow. I imagined that my stress was a series of soundwaves diffracting from my brain across the audience to meet head-on with the roll of exquisite notes from the orchestra, the two conflicting, invisible waves coming up against each other, creating a wall, a blockage, a battle, one not letting the other through. My ugly flow of thoughts versus the sublime genius of Beethoven were in a clash of the bad and good.
I wanted to separate my head from my body. My breasts, my buttocks, between my thighs, all that he had touched, were hideous to me. I was disgusted by them.
I wanted to walk my mind away from my body, to enjoy the concert; I wanted to sink into the music as I might have done only weeks before. The simple pleasure of listening to live music had been spoilt. A note. A song. A symphony. Simple pleasures. A painting. A poem. A book. A sunset. A smile. A laugh. A hug. A hand in mine. Would they be permanently lost to me, my mind now crowded by ugliness? Might my smile become like Ilene Parker’s? Tight and mean, embittered and broken?
The applause thrummed and pushed at my eardrums. Charlie, Meg and Josh rose in a standing ovation for this energetic Russian and his orchestra. Forty minutes had passed already, and I had been trapped inside my own head.
As a delayed reaction, I stood too, smiling and clapping along with everyone else.
After three standing ovations and an encore of the second movement, the audience’s cheers turned to satisfied mutterings and mumblings.
We shuffled out. Bursts of praise could be heard all around us as we made our way out onto the Southbank. The lights of London gleamed across the surface of the Thames. I imagined what it might be like to fall in, and how cold the water would be, and how its slow churn would drag me down, swallowing me into its darkness.
‘That was absolutely wonderful, thank you, Naomi,’ Meg said, linking arms with me as we walked ahead of Charlie and Josh along the tree-lined bank. ‘Did you enjoy it?’
‘Of course! It was wonderful,’ I replied.
Meg continued to rhapsodise, telling me how in awe she had been of the conductor’s power and the orchestra’s energy.
‘Absolutely. That’s just how I felt,’ I agreed, trying to put some expression into my voice, trying to think of something intelligent to say about it.
We walked a few more paces before Meg said, ‘Everything all right, hon?’
I squeezed her arm with mine. ‘Sorry. I’m just a bit tired, I think.’
‘Been busy?’
‘Manic.’
‘Josh said Charlie was having some problems at work, or something.’
‘Did he?’ I asked, taken aback.
‘Nothing serious, I don’t think,’ she reassured me quickly.
‘He clashes with his boss. It might have been that.’
‘Yes. Possibly.’ But I could hear the doubt in her voice. I did not ask her for more information. I was too embarrassed to admit that I might know less than Josh.
‘He’s very closed off with me sometimes,’ I said, wanting to apportion blame, to deflect it from me.
‘That
’s public schoolboys for you,’ she tutted.
I laughed, enjoying the sensation in my chest, unfamiliar, like a muscle that hadn’t been used.
‘Seriously, I think Josh wishes he could have stayed at school all his life.’
‘That’s a bit sad.’
I wanted to turn back to look at both men, assess them again. On paper, Josh was a good fit for Charlie. They had both gone to good schools and good universities and now wore good suits as markers of both, proud of their status as family men, proud of their sacrifices. But I guessed that the conversation would be stilted and rather dull as they walked alongside each other. I thought of Sophie and Adam. Around Adam, Charlie was less tucked in. Around Sophie and Adam, we were both less tucked in. Or had been.
‘Honestly, Naomi, Josh is never happy, ever. Which is really sad, don’t you think? And it makes me feel a bit shit, quite frankly. Like he’s disappointed by me, or something.’
I stopped walking to gape at her.
‘No! How could he be disappointed by you? Look at you!’ I cried. ‘You’re clever and beautiful and successful. He’s lucky to have you.’
Meg laughed. ‘Thanks. It’s not true. But thanks.’
Meg had said it wasn’t true, but I believed she understood her own worth, on some level, deep down. Whereas Sophie did not. Her self-deprecation was not throwaway; it was genuine gold-standard self-loathing. Over many conversations, I had tried to boost her self-esteem. My praise would be an injection of love and encouragement that would last only so long. Each time the effects would wear off, and she would need another booster shot. I had learnt that there was nothing you could say to Sophie to change the blueprint of her: her mother’s rejection had been a needle inserted deep into her soul. Its inky poison had seeped in and spread throughout, wreaking its damage many years before I came along with a placebo cure.
And here was a friend, next to me now, who might have been good for me, better for me than Sophie had ever been, less insecure, less intense, less life-changing, but I could not be her friend now. I could not amble down the road, side by side, chatting with her lightly about our lives, complaining about our husbands, listening quietly without an agenda, offering advice that might sometimes grate and always come from the right place. It was too late for us. For every year that I had lived in denial, our crime had been further embedded into my life story.
There might have been a time when I could have held my hands up and accepted the part I played in a young man’s death, dealt with the psychological fallout of our actions, within context, with perspective, in the moment: I had been twenty-one years old, drunk, disorderly, dangerous, but there had been no intent. I had not been a murderer.
Every day that I harboured the secret about Jason Parker’s death, regardless of Sophie’s threats, I became guiltier, almost as guilty as Sophie.
Josh and Charlie’s presence was closer behind us. ‘You’ll have to stop talking about us now,’ Josh said.
Had we been? Yes, of course we had been. And yet we had also walked in a comfortable silence with each other, as our respective thoughts had drifted to our separate troubles. This, too, was friendship. Allowing the other space. Why had I not understood how unhealthy it had been within the confines of my bond with Sophie? Our friendship had been like a long, stressful conversation that would never end, where I offered my opinions and she mistrusted them. Every time we left each other, I would replay our chat, mostly regretting what I had said or how I had said it; constantly second-guessing her mood changes, trying to discern whether her sadness or crossness was my fault.
I realised that Josh and Charlie were talking to me and Meg, reiterating their enjoyment of the concert, saying their goodbyes.
‘You’re not getting the train with us?’ I said, surprised we were parting here, at the top of the tumble of steps towards the train station.
The three of them stared at me for a second. Meg said, ‘We’ve booked a hotel,’ she said, without a ‘remember?’ at the end of her sentence. It was kind of her. She had understood that I was preoccupied by concerns beyond tonight.
‘Oh god, sorry. I’m so distracted these days.’
I noted Charlie’s glance at Josh, and the flicker of Josh’s eyebrow. Seemingly, they had been talking about me.
On the way back to the train station, Charlie and I walked in silence. It was different to the silence between me and Meg. It was charged, just as it had been in the bedroom this morning. We had left home but we had carried our problems with us through the throng of London life.
We spoke about the train times, staring at the big board for too long, speculating on which platform would be displayed, eleven or twelve.
It was twelve. He put his hand in the small of my back when I stepped into the carriage.
We found two seats next to each other on the packed last train. There was a group of noisy, drunk teenagers eating McDonald’s and laughing at YouTube clips.
‘I need to talk to you about something,’ he said, echoing his statement this morning in the bathroom.
I sighed, resigned to the lecture. ‘Sure,’ I said.
‘I’ve been made redundant,’ he said.
Blood rushed the wrong way up my veins. I thought I might have misheard over the cackling from one of the teenagers.
‘What?’
‘I’ve lost my job, Naomi,’ he said softly, turning his head at me. His face was as grey as his hair under the strip lighting.
This could not be true.
‘No. Why? No.’
‘Cutbacks.’
‘Cutbacks?’
One of the girls turned to look at me, a French fry dangling at her plumped lips.
I scowled at her, wanting to gag at the smell of her greasy food. I hated her. She knew nothing of how tough life could get.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said, dropping my voice. ‘You work so hard. They’re so lucky to have you.’
He tried to explain to me the structures in place at his firm and their legal justifications behind his redundancy, in terms of restructuring following the effects of economic uncertainty. He sounded so calm about it. He could have been siding with his boss.
‘You’ll find another job, won’t you?’
He scratched his fingers up and down his trousers, taking too long to answer. ‘Yes, of course. I’ve already put the feelers out.’
‘How long have you known?’
‘A couple of weeks.’
‘And you’ve been trying to tell me, haven’t you,’ I said, pressing the back of my head into the seat, pressing away the headache that was forming. ‘I’m so sorry.’
He took my hand and squeezed it. ‘I’ve got a decent enough redundancy package.’
‘Does it give you enough time to find another job?’
‘My reference is a worry. I’m not Tina’s employee of the month.’
‘She’s the arsehole, not you.’
‘Nobody else will see it that way.’
‘What about our savings?’
‘That went on fixing the roof last year.’
‘I thought we remortgaged for that?’
‘They turned us down. Not enough equity.’
‘What are we going to do?’
‘If we live off your salary and the redundancy money combined, it’ll give me a couple of months to look.’ He had thought it through.
‘It took Cynthia’s husband at least a year to find another job, and they had to sell their house.’
‘But Cynthia isn’t a brilliant wine blogger,’ he smiled.
My heart began racing with fear. I saw the blink of Sophie’s white eyelashes. Her pale smile and thin limbs, frail but all-powerful. I pictured the FOR SALE sign in front of our home, and the girls’ school shoes too small for them, and a repossessed car, and ketchup and rice for supper. Rice and ketchup had been the meal we had eaten when my father lost his job in the 1980s. I saw my father’s depression and my mother’s fretting. I saw half a life. And Sophie wanted to take half of that a
gain. I wanted to bang my forehead on the front seat and howl.
Swallowing a few times, I geared up my voice box. ‘Yes, we’ll be fine,’ I managed to utter.
And his hand stayed holding mine, in my lap, for the rest of the journey home.
I had always known that happiness was temporary, that you had to grab onto it the moment it came your way, but I had never believed it was possible that I would lose it forever, that it might never pass my way again.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Kenneth and Martha Etherington had left Deda’s cottage in their electric car at 7 a.m. to catch the 10 a.m. ferry from Dover to Calais, from where they planned to drive to the Dordogne to stay with their son and their grandchildren. Sophie knew this because Martha had knocked on the door to the shack a couple of days ago to tell her of their plans. They would be away for seven days, and she had asked Sophie to keep an eye on the cottage for them.
On the afternoon of their departure, when they were guaranteed to be in France, Sophie had taken up the axe from the woodpile and dragged it over the shingle drive into the cottage. The wood pressed into her sore palm, which had blown up and turned to scabs over the last few weeks.
She left the axe where one might leave an umbrella, and wandered through the rooms, inspecting the walls, rapping on them with her knuckles, deciding which wall would be best.
The fruit shampoo smell of the Etheringtons was ripe in the air.
Having moved through each room, Sophie stopped at the dividing stud partition between the sitting room and the hallway.