I Thought I Knew You

by Penny Hancock

  When Jules had got in from her morning run at eight, she had found Saffie up but curled on the sofa, her face puffy and streaked grey with mascara. She was in her school uniform but had made no effort to put on her shoes or to do her hair.

  ‘What on earth’s the matter?’ Jules had asked, sitting down next to her. ‘Aren’t you feeling well?’

  Saffie had shadows round her eyes as if she hadn’t slept. Her lips were sealed into a tight line, and drawn down at the edges.

  ‘Saffie. What is it?’ Jules’s heart had begun to thump. She hadn’t seen such a look of misery – or was it fear? – on her daughter’s face since, as a small child, she’d woken with a fever in the midst of a nightmare.

  ‘Please, darling, you need to tell me what’s wrong.’

  ‘I can’t say,’ Saffie whispered at last. She looked up at Jules. ‘It’s something really terrible, Mum.’

  ‘So terrible you’re prepared to miss the bus?’ Jules smiled. ‘It’s about to go, you know.’

  Saffie never usually missed the chance to meet up with her friends at the bus stop, to discuss the latest blogger craze or YouTube star.

  ‘I can’t go to school.’ Saffie’s breath came fast. Her hand when she grasped Jules’s was clammy. ‘I’m in terrible trouble.’

  ‘Come on, Saff.’ Jules pulled her daughter’s head to her. Kissed her hair.

  ‘Remember how much better you felt the time you stole that make-up after you admitted it to me and Holly? There’s nothing you can do or say that will shock me.’

  ‘There is. There is this time.’

  ‘Well, I’m not forcing it out of you. Speak if and when you’re ready. I’m here to help. To listen.’

  After a long silence, Saffie drew in a breath and said, ‘OK. It’s . . . Mum . . . my period’s late.’ Her voice broke as she uttered the words and she began to cry quietly.

  ‘Ah. Well,’ Jules had said, releasing her head, taking her face between her palms so she could speak into it, ‘you know periods can be very irregular at your age, don’t you?’

  ‘But this one’s later than it’s been before.’

  ‘All kinds of things can cause that.’ Stress, for example, Jules thought. Rowan pushing the poor child to go to extra classes after school. That could have caused her to miss a period. She felt a flicker of annoyance at the pressure her husband put their daughter under.

  ‘I’m afraid I might be pregnant.’

  There was a pause as Jules took this in.

  ‘What makes you think you might be pregnant?’ Jules asked softly. As far as she knew, Saffie hadn’t kissed a boy, let alone had a proper relationship. And Jules had always prided herself on the fact Saffie told her everything, always had done. Until the shoplifting incident.

  ‘You do know it’s not possible to get pregnant without having full sexual intercourse, don’t you?’ she soothed.

  ‘I know that, Mum. What do you think I am? An idiot?’

  Jules took a sharp breath. It was a relief, in some ways, to hear Saffie hadn’t lost her newfound capacity to snap, but what lay beneath the retort made Jules’s heart trip.

  ‘Ah. So who . . . ?’

  ‘I can’t say.’

  ‘Saffie, it would be better if you did.’

  ‘I don’t want to get him into trouble.’

  A chill ran from Jules’s head to her feet. She shut her eyes. There was a ‘him’ involved after all. The thought of her little girl sleeping with anyone was abhorrent. She thought back to her own teenage crush on Jozef, and the fumbled sex they’d had. She’d been a couple of years older than Saffie, which seemed far too young to her now. But they all grew up even sooner these days. She had the sense of her daughter’s childhood tumbling away on a rapid, out of arm’s reach.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘We’re going to sit down in the kitchen, and I’ll make you your favourite cappuccino, and you’re going to tell me exactly what’s going on for you. If you’ve been having some kind of a . . . relationship, and you’re out of your depth, you have to tell me. And then we’ll talk about whether or not you could possibly be pregnant.’

  In the kitchen, Jules threw a teabag into a mug for herself, poured boiling water onto it, filled the machine with coffee and pressed the button that made the espresso come out. She steamed the milk and spooned froth on the way Saffie liked it. All this gave her time to think things through. She was determined not to show how this revelation had thrown her. Knocked her assumptions about having done a good job bringing up the daughter she thought she knew better than anyone. The daughter who was outgoing, sunny, warm and very close to her mother. And open. Saffie must not be allowed to see how rattled – no, scared – Jules was about having, out of the blue, to deal with something for which she wasn’t in the slightest bit prepared. Saffie had had sex with someone?

  Jules placed the cappuccino in front of her daughter, sat on a bar stool and took her hands.

  ‘Saffie, have you got a boyfriend you don’t want to tell me and Dad about?’

  Saffie took the cup from her mother but didn’t drink from it.

  ‘It’s worse than that.’

  ‘Worse than having a boyfriend at your age who might have made you pregnant? How can it be worse?’

  ‘Because I . . . He isn’t a boyfriend. And I didn’t want it to happen.’

  Jules shut her eyes.

  ‘Are you telling me someone forced you? Are you saying . . . ? Oh my God. You have to tell me what happened to you.’ Jules knew she was losing her poise, and that this could make Saff clam up, but she couldn’t stop herself. ‘Tell me, Saff. Tell me who did this to you.’

  ‘He told me not to tell anyone.’

  ‘I bet he did!’

  Saffie just looked at her, tears in her eyes, her mouth turned down. She was trying her best not to cry.

  ‘You have to tell me.’ Jules fought back the urge to shout that she’d go and find the culprit and take him to task for it right now. She forced herself to steady her voice. ‘So I can help you.’ So I can go and throttle the person who touched you.

  ‘I’m afraid he’ll be angry if I tell you . . . He might do something.’

  ‘Saffie! No one will do anything to you. Not if I’m here. They wouldn’t dare.’ Jules was startled by the ferociousness in her own voice.

  ‘I tried to carry on as normal,’ Saffie was saying. ‘I was carrying on as normal, until I realized . . . it’s four days late, Mum. I’m so scared.’

  ‘Was this someone we know?’

  ‘I’m not saying.’

  ‘If you won’t tell me, then we’ll have to tell the police.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘We’ll have to. If someone assaulted you—’

  ‘OK!’ Saffie shouted. ‘I’ll tell you, but only if you swear not to tell anyone else.’

  Jules took a deep breath.

  ‘I swear I’ll do all I have to do to take care of you. I’m your mother. We’re in this together.’

  ‘OK, then . . .’

  Saffie’s words came out so fast Jules didn’t catch them.

  ‘What did you say, Saffie?’

  ‘I said . . . it was Saul.’

  ‘Saul? Holly’s Saul?’

  ‘I didn’t want to tell you,’ Saffie said. ‘He’ll be mad at me. He’ll do something to me . . .’

  ‘When did this happen?’

  Saffie looked at Jules imploringly. ‘Do we have to talk about it?’

  ‘I have to know, Saffie. When was it?’

  ‘When do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know . . . Was it at school?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘But when, then?’

  ‘Of course it wasn’t at school. It was . . .’

  Saffie paused and Jules found herself rifling back over the past couple of weeks, trying to envisage an occasion when Saul might have had an opportunity to lay his hands on Saffie.

  When Saffie next spoke, it all fell into place.

  ‘It was that night he came rou
nd here.’

  ‘When Dad was away? The night I went out with Holly? When Saul came over to use our broadband . . .’

  Saffie shrugged, then nodded reluctantly.

  The irony! Jules had been in the pub with all those women, laughingly discussing the first awkward times they’d had sex, while her daughter was having her virginity snatched from her in a truly vile way.

  ‘You’re telling me . . . you and Saul are having some kind of a relationship?’

  ‘No, Mum. Gross. You asked him to come over. Not my idea. If you remember.’

  Saffie looked up at her mother through her childish blue eyes, her lashes sticky with tears. Something about her had changed. Jules could see it now. Didn’t some women say they could see when their daughters lost their virginity? It was in their eyes, in their facial expressions. A kind of hardening. Or knowingness. No, that was it. A loss of innocence. All of a sudden, Jules knew for certain what it was about her daughter that had altered recently. She kicked herself that she hadn’t identified it sooner.

  ‘Tell me exactly what happened.’

  ‘I don’t want to. I don’t want to remember it.’

  ‘I know, my love, but you need to tell me.’

  There was a pause and then Saffie said, ‘I thought he was downstairs on the internet, but he . . .’

  ‘He what?’

  ‘He came upstairs. When I was getting ready for bed.’

  Goosebumps prickled all the way up Jules’s legs in the Lycra leggings she hadn’t had time to change out of yet. She had asked Saul to check Saff had gone to bed that evening. Was this her fault?

  She put her arm round her daughter. She stroked back the fine blonde hair from her forehead. Saffie smelled strongly of sweet perfume, as if she had been planning on a night out rather than preparing for a day at school. They all wore perfume, and hair and skin products these days, even the boys, or so Saffie argued. Some of Saffie’s friends had ‘been out’ with each other in year four, five or six. They didn’t really know what it meant, of course. But they still behaved as if they did, worrying about who liked whom. Fussing over their hair and their clothes and their nails the minute they were out of babyhood. Emulating the celebrities who posted all over Instagram. Jules didn’t like it – what mother would? She yearned for the days when Saffie would have preferred to spend a day practising her ballet positions in front of the mirror to painting her nails and straightening her hair.

  ‘He came upstairs,’ Saffie said again. ‘I didn’t know he was there. I was getting undressed and he must’ve been looking in my door.’

  Jules remembered Saffie saying the school kids called Saul a creep. Is this what they’d meant?

  ‘Then he came right in and he . . .’ She stopped again.

  ‘Oh, Saff!’

  ‘He came in and . . . he pushed me onto the bed and held me down. I thought he was joking, at first. I said, “Get off, Saul,” but then he . . . he said didn’t I realize I was asking for it. Letting him see me undressing like that. I couldn’t stop him and so I thought, well, no one has to know. It will stop and no one will ever know.

  ‘It was horrible and rough and I didn’t want it. But now there’s . . . My period’s late.’ Saffie’s mouth turned down at the corners and her lower lip trembled. ‘And so I had to tell you.’

  Jules tried to take in what her daughter had said. Her long-held image of Saul as a sweet, shy, if rather awkward boy had been turned on its head in a few seconds. Things Rowan, and Saffie, and her school friends had said about him hovered at the periphery of her mind.

  ‘You’re telling me,’ she’d said after a pause, ‘you’re telling me Saul raped you?’

  Saffie crumpled then and she began to cry quietly, a soft keening sound as she bent over and held her stomach as if in pain.

  ‘Are you hurt? Did he hurt you? Why didn’t you tell me, Saff? Why didn’t you tell me straight away?’

  ‘I don’t know . . . I was scared. And I . . . I didn’t know if you’d listen. Holly was there. You’d been out drinking. I didn’t want to spoil your evening.’

  Jules closed her eyes. ‘You could have told me anyway,’ she said. ‘Or you could have told me the next day. Any day between then and now.’

  ‘I thought you wouldn’t believe me.’

  ‘Of course I would have believed you. You wouldn’t lie to me, would you? Not about something so serious?’ Jules examined her. It was obvious Saffie had felt trapped. Terrified of what would happen if she told, terrified of what would happen if she didn’t. ‘You’re my daughter,’ Jules went on. ‘I love you. I trust you. I feel awful that you didn’t feel you could tell me straight away.’

  Saffie sat up suddenly and wiped her eyes.

  ‘But you have such a thing about Saul.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You think he’s so, like, perfect. You wouldn’t listen. I told you I didn’t want him here.’

  Jules took a deep breath. Guilt stirred deep in her gut. It was true. She had ignored her daughter’s reservations about Saul, let him come round while they were out. Then she’d had too much Prosecco with her friends and Saffie hadn’t been able to tell her on the evening it had happened. What kind of a mother did that make her? This was another thing Jules hadn’t told Holly. The guilt she felt. That she’d drunk so much Saffie hadn’t thought she could tell her that night.

  ‘Have you told anyone else?’ Jules asked at last, trying to think straight. ‘A teacher? A friend?’

  ‘I don’t want anyone to know. It’s horrible and embarrassing and I’d decided to forget it happened. My friends will think I’m desperate that I went with him. If my period wasn’t late, I wouldn’t have said anything to you. I’ve only told you because of this.’ She placed her hand on her abdomen.

  Jules looked at her little girl. Saffie had been trembling all this time, holding her other hand to her mouth, biting the back of it. She was crying again and dribble was running from her nose into her hand. What she’d gone through, what Saul had put her through made Jules shudder.

  ‘I’ll sort this out,’ Jules said at last. ‘What Saul did to you is not only violent, it’s a criminal offence. He has to be made aware of that. The school will have to take measures to—’

  ‘Mum, please don’t tell anyone.’

  ‘But he raped you, Saffie. My goodness, wait until Holly knows.’

  ‘It wasn’t . . . I don’t want him to get into trouble. I mean, I didn’t think it was rape. It probably was partly my fault.’

  ‘How on earth was it partly your fault?’

  ‘I should’ve shut my door, so he couldn’t spot me getting undressed.’

  ‘That’s absolute nonsense, Saffie. It’s outrageous that he barged into your room. And you must know it’s rape unless you tell a boy you actively want it, out loud, and mean it, and are in the right state to say you want it!’ She stopped. She was echoing Holly. The lectures she’d practised on Jules for the consent workshops. Had she never had this conversation with Saff? She softened her tone. ‘And you won’t understand how that feels until you’re much, much older. Saul has done a terrible thing. He has to know that. And he has to suffer the consequences.’

  Jules looked at Saffie, at the desperation writ large across her face. Of course it was all too much for her to take on board at once. The rape, the fear she was pregnant. The idea of having to explain it all to strangers. Jules wasn’t a hundred per cent sure whether she should inform the school. She had no idea, she realized, who she should tell.

  ‘I don’t want Saul to get into trouble,’ Saffie repeated. ‘Really, Mum. I’ll just keep away from him from now on.’

  Jules decided not to pursue this, since it was only adding to Saffie’s distress.

  ‘We’ll need to make sure you’re not pregnant,’ she said softly, instead. ‘I’ll get a test and we’ll check you’re OK as soon as possible.’

  ‘What will we do? If I am?’

  ‘We’ll sort it,’ Jules said. ‘It’s early days. We’l
l go to a well-woman clinic and they’ll take care of you . . .’

  ‘Mum, please. I don’t want to go to some horrible clinic. Everyone will know. Couldn’t we just go to Dr Browne?’

  ‘You’d rather go to Donna?’

  ‘I think so. At least I know her. She won’t tell anyone, will she?’

  ‘She’s a doctor. She isn’t allowed to. But listen. I don’t want you to worry about that. I want you to leave it all to me. The main thing is we look after you. You’re to stay at home today. You’ve been through an ordeal and you need time to recover.’

  ‘You won’t tell anyone?’ Saffie begged again, plucking at Jules’s sleeve. ‘I don’t want anyone to know.’

  ‘Not even Dad?’ Jules asked.

  Saffie’s face froze, her eyes wide.

  ‘Especially not Dad,’ she said.

  *

  Jules suggested Saffie watch one of the films she’d loved as a child, The Parent Trap, to take her mind off things. Once she was settled under a blanket on the sofa, Jules went back to the kitchen. She cleared up the mugs, opened the dishwasher to stash them inside, wanting to restore some sense of normality to the morning. Outside, a pale autumn mist closed in on the skylights of the extension, bathing the kitchen in a soft yellow light. Sometimes this house felt almost afloat in the fens, only a thin veneer of glass and breezeblock protecting them from the weather outside. She had tried not to overreact in front of Saffie, but inside her thoughts were bubbling away, tripping over themselves, coming to the boil.