Her Closest Friend (ARC)

by Clare Boyd

That’s your fault for losing your job, I thought, but I didn’t dare say something so cruel.

  ‘With Sophie’s input, and some paid content, we can make more money,’ I said. ‘We’re just about to make nearly a grand by posting one bottle of champagne.’

  ‘Naomi,’ he said, quietly. ‘What hold does she have on you?’

  Before I could stop it, my foot careered into the coloured pile, white-hot rage burning my insides. ‘You wouldn’t understand. Nobody would bloody understand. Nobody!’ I yelled, kicking at the laundry. The ordered piles were ruined. Blues, reds, pinks, whites, greys, yellows flew around the small room, colours magnified as though suspended inside the tears in my eyes.

  ‘Naomi! Naomi! Stop it! What are you doing? Calm down,’ he said, grabbing me around the waist, pinning my arms to my sides, holding me from behind. ‘You have to tell me! Please, Naomi!’ he pleaded.

  I struggled out of his grip. ‘Get the fuck off me!’ I hissed.

  He let go, shocked by my aggression. ‘Sorry. I just wanted to…’ he said.

  ‘What? Save me from myself? Is that what you wanted?’ I screamed.

  ‘No. You’re quite capable of looking after yourself.’

  ‘I don’t need anyone to take care of me!’

  ‘I know that!’

  ‘Do you? So why are you always telling me how to live my life? Do you really know what’s best for me? I know what’s best for me! I know who’s best for me! And it’s NOT YOU!’

  He stepped back.

  Under his breath, he said, ‘And who is good for you? Sophie?’

  ‘Yes, actually. She gets me. She is the only one who does.’

  ‘Sophie only gets Sophie. She couldn’t give a toss about anyone else.’

  I banged my fist on the washing machine behind me and through my clenched jaw, I blurted out, ‘She gave a shit when I was raped. Okay? She was there for me every minute of every day after that fucker attacked me. She missed her final exams to take care of me. It ruined her life.’ My legs felt weak and I sat down right where I stood, in the middle of the strewn laundry.

  Charlie’s throat rattled, ‘What?’ He fell onto his haunches and pulled my hands from my lap and held them between us. ‘You were raped?’

  I felt the pads of his fingers press into my palm and I felt my bones throb but I did not pull away. ‘Yes.’ As I saw his dismay, I felt that same dismay for myself. The dismay I had dismissed and denied myself, the dismay that made it real.

  ‘At Exeter?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you tell me what happened?’

  ‘I think it was Rohypnol,’ I began. It was all I had for now. The rest was too much.

  ‘You don’t know for sure?’

  ‘I was drunk. Very drunk,’ I said, with a strange smile. Nothing changes there.

  Charlie did not smile back. ‘Who was he?’

  ‘Some chemistry student. I met him in the student bar and I took him back to my room.’

  Charlie swallowed. ‘That’s where it happened? In your room?’

  He was doubting me. He didn’t believe you could be raped in your own room.

  ‘Sophie found me totally out of it, just after he left,’ I explained, recalling how disorientated I had been.

  Sophie arrived in my room a minute later. I was flat on my back. She covered me with a dressing gown and helped me to the chair. I slumped there, in a stupor, watching her change my sheets. She made tea and I crawled back into bed.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I repeated, for the hundredth time.

  ‘What happened here? You’re a mess.’

  ‘Did you see him leave?’

  The top I had worn that night was lying on the floor at the foot of the bed. Its mass of material could have fitted into the palm of my hand. The neck had been too low, the straps too flimsy.

  ‘I did see him,’ she answered, wrinkling her nose.

  ‘Not my finest conquest,’ I joked weakly.

  ‘He wasn’t very friendly.’

  I was confused. ‘No. Wasn’t he? He bought me a drink.’

  ‘Who the hell was he?’

  ‘Wasn’t he a friend of Will’s?’

  ‘No, we left with who we came with.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘What was he called?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘Do you remember anything?’

  ‘He stank of TCP,’ I shuddered. ‘And toothpaste.’

  ‘Try and think of his name.’

  Squirming, I put my fingers into my eye sockets. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘How many did you have last night?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I murmured, reaching for the lukewarm tea, sucking it to the back of my dry throat. ‘Too many.’

  ‘You were pretty drunk when I left.’

  ‘I don’t remember you leaving.’

  ‘You were on the dance floor. We hugged and you said you were staying.’

  I remembered colours and tilted floors and his bumpy, sweaty skin on my cheek.

  ‘I don’t remember… Until… I’m so sorry you had to see me like that.’

  ‘Did he force you…?’

  ‘No,’ I said, beginning to cry, feeling the stinging between my legs and the bruises on my thighs.

  ‘You have to go to the police.’

  ‘No way.’

  What would I tell the police? That I was revolted by the man I’d had sex with, that he had been rough with me, that I had made a bad decision after too many Jack and Cokes, that I had been too drunk to say stop?

  ‘The sooner you let someone examine you, the better.’

  ‘No,’ I replied, folding my body under the duvet. Never again was I going to let anyone see or touch me. I turned onto my back, and I saw his narrow eyes above me. Sophie might have changed the sheets but he was there, still. I flipped onto my side, away from the ceiling and from Sophie, who asked me, ‘Do you think he slipped something in your drink?’

  ‘I drank too much, that’s all,’ I said into my pillow, feeling the tears form behind my eyes.

  Even now, the very thought of my complicity, my flirtation, scraped up the deepest of the shame from within me. Looking back was like re-watching a horror film that I had seen in secret, behind my parents’ backs, too young. And the distressing scenes stunned me. I saw how ill-equipped I had been to cope with such a gratuitous attack on my senses, on my psyche.

  ‘Did you go to the police?’ Charlie asked now.

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Why not?’

  I was fascinated by how appalled Charlie seemed. It was indeed incredible that I had not reported it. How could I not have? Because I had exaggerated it? Because he had not really raped me? Because I had been too drunk to say no?

  ‘Sophie wanted me to. But I couldn’t face it. I don’t really know why I didn’t. I was too shaken up, I think.’

  Three weeks after his attack, Sophie had driven me to the police station.

  ‘This is definitely not the supermarket,’ I laughed, but I felt betrayed.

  ‘It’s been three weeks now. You have to go in and tell them,’ she insisted, presuming that I felt like the victims we had read about or seen interviewed on the news. But I did not. I did not have their certainty. They knew they had been raped. They called it rape, openly. Victimhood was simple, wasn’t it? The victim felt wronged and the guilty were in the wrong. But my conscience was not clear enough to accuse that man of rape. How I longed for that simple view to make clean lines of my memories of that night.

  ‘I’ve moved on,’ I told Sophie.

  ‘You think?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Panic attacks? Nightmares? That weird tapping you do,’ Sophie said.

  I sat on my fingers. ‘What tapping?’

  I was embarrassed by my fear. The tap of fear. The fear that I would see him again, that he would be at my door – the man with thin eyes and that TCP stench – and around every corner I turned. I wasn’t able to tell her that a coil of blood-red humiliation
had twisted up from my guts when I thought of seeing him, that I was degraded by him forever, that I had been disgraced by my open legs, by how dirty my nakedness had become under his touch. Thinking about it, I sickened myself. Talking about it to anyone was unimaginable, but Sophie persisted. ‘You can’t walk around scared for the rest of your life. You have to do something.’

  ‘I’m not scared!’ I laughed.

  ‘What about the other women he might do it to?’

  My heart slowed right down. ‘It wasn’t his fault that I was totally out of it.’

  ‘It really worries me that you say that.’

  ‘Seriously, Sophie! Drop it! I picked up a total dickhead and had bad sex. End of,’ I trilled, my voice high, too high.

  ‘Isn’t it worth talking to a police officer about it? Just in case someone else has come forward about him before? Or maybe you could see a counsellor?’

  I brought out my best smile, trying not to lose it with her, and I spoke clearly and slowly. ‘There is nothing to talk to the police or a counsellor about, Soph.’

  And I got out of the car and walked to the supermarket, where I bought gin.

  Later that same day, I filled up a hip flask and went out to a birthday party on the beach, without Sophie, to prove I wasn’t scared: a swig from my flask, a wash of relief.

  Around the fire that night, I noticed a handsome face flicker behind the flames. I moved closer, made eye contact. He asked me for a sip from my flask. We talked. He was a first year psychology student, whose name I forgot as soon as he had told me. I led him into the sand dunes and seduced him, playfully, naughtily. For the first time in weeks, I felt euphoric rather than traumatised. My enjoyment allowed me to forget. The spell was broken and I wanted more. I decided not to be a victim. I was Naomi. Happy-go-lucky, live-in-the-moment, dimple-smiled Naomi.

  How faraway she seemed now, as I sat on piles of dirty clothes in the laundry room.

  ‘Did you see him again?’ Charlie asked, sounding angry, as though he was angry with me.

  I spluttered, ‘Are you serious? Oh, right, yeah, I really wanted to hang out with him.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. Of course I didn’t mean that. I meant, did you have to see him on campus?’

  ‘No, I never saw him. There are over twenty thousand people at Exeter,’ I said, regurgitating Sophie’s fact.

  ‘I can’t believe you’ve never told me.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I stuttered. I was truly sorry about this.

  ‘Don’t be.’

  A pool of acid saliva formed in my mouth and I nodded, unable to speak for a moment.

  ‘Sophie was absolutely amazing when it happened,’ I said to Charlie, automatically.

  The drama had appealed to her, as had my vulnerability. My refusal to go into the police station had upset her. How she would later – only a few weeks later – take back control was then to become the defining incident of our friendship, the moment when we were joined in our guilt forever.

  ‘Is she the only person who has known all this time?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you ever think of going to the police now?’

  ‘Absolutely not. Don’t you even think about trying to persuade me. It’s in the past. Please, Charlie. Please don’t go on about doing the right thing. I’m telling you, nothing good would come of it.’

  He put his palms up at me. ‘Sure, sure. Don’t worry, I won’t. I promise you, I won’t.’

  I exhaled and he moved closer, saying, ‘You know the toothpaste thing…’

  ‘Yes. Yes, that’s what he smelt like,’ I said, beginning to cry.

  Charlie pulled me into him and I laid my head in his lap and he pinged a curl of my hair and held me there for a long time. A ribbon of pain stretched and twisted right back, back to Jason Parker, its frayed tip fluttering at his heels, the pulled-down trousers around his ankles, wrapping itself around his leg and along his penis and inside me, where we had connected as one malformed, repulsive entity. Until this moment, we had been a secret pairing, a shared, astonishing experience that had risen up in my mind but had never been recounted. There had never been a right time to tell Charlie, or anyone else. It was the sort of oversharing that would stop the fun, that would flounder around in the middle of the room, nobody knowing how to catch it and kill it.

  I wished, as I mourned the loss of my innocent self, that the rape had been the beginning and end of my pain, that it was the only story I had to tell.

  Lying here, on the lumps and bumps of laundry, my head cradled in his warmth, I appreciated Charlie’s love. Nevertheless, like an interrupted exhale, I knew there would be little long-term relief, and I wondered whether Charlie understood that the wickedness of that night had settled into my being, that its resurfacing, twenty years later, had made me feel dirty and unlovable all over again.

  ‘I can’t believe he got away with it,’ he said.

  Thanks to Sophie, he had not, I wanted to say. We had. But there was no joy in that. There was no joy.

  Sophie and I were stuck together now. Perhaps we always had been. Always, when her pale eyes were hangdog and her long fingers scratched at her palm, my instinct was to go to her, to take care of her, with my simpleton’s kindness. Now, she expected my gratitude for protecting me from Jason Parker; she expected my thanks for hiding our crime; she expected my guilty acquiescence in the face of her blackmail. She expected a tightened bond, a lifelong friendship, in response to her big reveal. And I wanted to die in the face of all of her impossible expectations.

  ‘Charlie, help me,’ I said, clutching his knees, pressing my face into his thigh.

  Could Charlie help me get away from her? Could he become an ally, my co-conspirator? Together, would we be brave enough to go to the police?

  ‘Of course, my love. You’re safe now. I’ll always be here for you,’ he said, kissing into my hair.

  But he wouldn’t be. His love was conditional, as it was in every marriage. My drinking had almost broken us before, and he had warned me that it could break us again. He wanted me to be happy-go-lucky Naomi with the dimple; he wouldn’t love me as much if he knew I had killed a man. If he suspected I had wanted Jason Parker dead, he wouldn’t love me at all. And I wondered whether he would love me a little bit less, now, if I poured myself a little tipple before bed, for sleep to come easier, pleading distress after my outpouring. Under the circumstances, anyone would need a drink, wouldn’t they?

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Hi Naomi – Haven’t heard from you for a while. Bring the girls over to meet the newest member of our family! He’s called Bear. Look at his eyes! Sophie x

  To accompany the text, Sophie had sent a photograph attachment, imagining that Naomi would call or text straight back, excited for them. While she waited for a response from her, Sophie arranged a vase of white gladioli in Deda’s kitchen, her kitchen now.

  As she snipped at the long stems, humming to herself, the sun warmed her back and she was heartened by the happy yelping sounds of Dylan and Bear getting to know each other outside in the garden.

  Last week, through the metal bars of a kennel at Battersea Dogs Home, Sophie and Dylan had fallen in love with Bear, a husky-collie cross, who had jumped up at them, wagging his tail, choosing them with one high bark and some enthusiastic panting. He had the clearest blue eyes Sophie had ever seen and a silky coat of white and cappuccino. She had felt a keen desire to free him. And that same day, Blue Bear, or Bear for short, had met them properly in the dog meeting room, before being microchipped and sent home with them.

  For the first two days, he had darted around the cottage with nervy, manic energy, keeping them awake at night with howls from his crate in the hallway. On the third night of this racket, Sophie had let him sleep with Dylan. The following morning, Dylan had explained to Sophie that he had cuddled Bear after his nightmare, and that his eczema had stopped itching as much. From then on, each time Sophie had peeked into his room at night, she would see Bear curled up at the bottom of his b
ed – in the same room that she had grown up in – and she would feel a deep stirring of love for them both.

  Sophie checked her phone again, making sure it was not on silent. It had been three weeks since Sophie had seen Naomi, since their celebration of the champagne collaboration. She texted Naomi again, desperate to arrange a date for them to meet Bear:

  Please call. Dying to see you. Sx

  Having placed the gladioli on the windowsill of the kitchen, Sophie moved to the sitting room to light incense, to snuggle onto her coral linen sofa with a cup of Earl Grey tea and lemon. She logged on to Wine O’Clock to look for a new post from Naomi, hoping it might hint at her whereabouts. There was nothing, and there had been nothing for three weeks. It was very unlike Naomi to miss her weekly post, let alone leave it for so long. She texted her again:

  Hi Naomi – You must be getting my texts. Why are you not responding? It’s not fair to keep Dylan waiting like this. He is dying to introduce Bear to the girls. Sx

  The last Wine O’Clock Instagram post had been Sophie’s. A week ago, she had posted a snapshot of Blue Bear with his translucent, ice-blue eyes boring holes in the screen. It wasn’t wine-related, but Sophie thought it was too beautiful to keep to herself. It had received 705 likes. In her first ever post, Sophie had worn a short, floaty dress and had sat on a log in the woods drinking a sparkling wine, which Naomi told her she had spelt wrong. In another, she held a glass of rosé, almost as clear as white, up close to her décolletage, brilliantly taken by Dylan, which had received 612 likes. After that, she had posted three other selfies with wine, which had received fewer than 60 likes each. This had humiliated her. The blog needed Naomi’s attention just as much as Sophie needed it. She texted again:

  URGENT. Call me back. Sx

  After a few more texts and calls, Sophie decided to try another tack. She emailed Diana, who had an account linked to Naomi’s, enclosing a photograph of Bear, asking her if she and Izzy would like to come over to meet him. Sophie hoped this would be a reminder to Naomi of how easy it was to get hold of her children. Diana immediately replied to say she would ask Mummy.