Dark Chapter

by Winnie M. Li

  She describes his white jumper, his jeans, his shoes. Jaysus, that bitch has a good memory. They asked him and he couldn’t remember much about what she was wearing. Except that bra he ripped.

  “There seemed to be something strange about him. Like he was a little disoriented, or just out of it.”

  Oh, fuck off. Who is she to say I was out of it?

  “I couldn’t quite get a handle on him. He wasn’t really giving a straight answer to anything, and even when we were talking, he’d keep on changing his story.”

  She talks about walking under the road, then having to call her friend. Then her trying to cross the stream. So weird hearing it from her mouth. And so different. Fucking creeps him out, how calm she seems to be on the stand, explaining all this.

  “At this point, what were you thinking in regards to the boy?”

  “At first, I thought he was strange and I suppose, annoying.”

  He balls his hands into fists.

  “But, by this point, I guess I was getting a little scared. I didn’t know why he was still hanging around me.”

  Stupid bitch. Serves you right for wandering around that park on your own. You and your fancy schooling and your book you were looking at. How much did that help you?

  *

  She’s been keeping it under control until now. Sentences are coming out easily, even though she has to keep the panic at bay. O’Leary is feeding her questions one by one, laying out a lifeline for her to follow, hand over hand, heading into the murk. So far so good.

  “When you got to the top of the slope, what did you see?”

  She closes her eyes for a minute and imagines herself in that moment again: catching her breath, the spreading view of Belfast in the shifting sunlight, the false sense of escape.

  “You didn’t see the defendant?”

  “No, I didn’t see him. I thought I’d lost him, and for that reason, I was relieved.”

  “Why were you relieved?”

  “I thought… I wasn’t sure what he wanted from me, but I felt uncomfortable having him around. So I was relieved he was gone.”

  “You just wanted to get on with your walk, did you?”

  “Yes, that’s correct.”

  There’s a pause. She draws in a breath, aware of what’s coming up.

  “So, please Ms Tan, tell us what happened next.”

  “So, I…” She sees the path in her mind and her voice falters. The jury notices this. She notices the jury noticing this.

  Her breath shortens, her throat swells.

  O’Leary is nodding at her, not entirely sympathetic, more like a vaguely tolerant uncle. Let’s get on with it, shall we?

  The trees overhead. The edge of the ravine.

  “So, I thought for a moment, that he was gone. And because the view was so nice, and I was on my own with just the trail ahead of me, for the first time that afternoon, I was able to really enjoy myself. I thought I had finally gotten free of the boy and the city, and I could just hike.”

  “And then?”

  “Well, then I was walking, taking in the surroundings. Kind of excited about it all. But then I looked down the slope and I saw him.”

  “You saw the defendant?”

  “I saw his white jumper. It was unmistakable, it was so bright against the trees. He was down below me on the slope, but it was like he was trying to hide while climbing up towards me.”

  She remembers the fear from that moment, and it grips her anew. Her vision blurs, and unseen by anyone else, she grips the padded seat of her chair to root herself.

  “And what did you think when you saw him?”

  “That was when it hit me. I thought, this kid is definitely following me.”

  “And what did you do?”

  “I wanted to get away from him as fast as possible. So I just started running…”

  She describes the run to the open ground, and how when she got there, she saw just an abandoned wasteland with nowhere to go. She describes him coming out of trees, and her confronting him, tired of his tricks.

  “So you explained to him one more time how to get to Andersonstown?”

  “Yes, I did. Even though by then, I guessed it was just a ploy.”

  “What do you mean by a ploy?”

  “Well, if he was really lost and trying to get to Andersonstown, he would have gone in that direction ages ago. So I suspected he was after something else, which made me scared, and I wanted to, I guess, confront him about it.”

  “And how did you do this?”

  “So after I gave him directions, I said, ‘Listen I already told you how to get to Andersonstown. What do you want?’”

  “How did you feel about saying that?”

  “I was scared, of course. But I was tired of whatever game he was playing. I wanted to know what the score really was.”

  She’s conscious of using these slang Americanisms… the score… whatever game… Doesn’t know how receptive the Belfast jury will be.

  “So what did he say?”

  Pause. Remember to breathe. Up until now, it’s just been her walk in the park, followed by this strange boy, but nothing horrific. You say these next words and everything changes.

  The nausea of that afternoon reclaims her in a flood. To say those words, his words, will be to begin the descent anew. This time, with an audience.

  She steadies herself. Tell them. Force them to come with you on this journey.

  “He said, ‘Do you like to have sex outdoors?’”

  She cannot bring herself to look at the jury now. The shame is too great.

  *

  ‘Do you like to have sex outdoors?’

  He forgot about that. He’d asked her, when he couldn’t keep playing the lost card anymore. When he’d run out of ideas, and it was now or never.

  He asked her, and she said no, all fucking self-important like she is now. And that’s when he got angry.

  *

  The struggle, the weird stand-off under the sun, on the field that afternoon.

  “And then what happened?”

  “And then, I don’t know, I must have either slipped or fallen or he pushed me down. I’m not sure. The next thing I know, I hit the ground.”

  “So you were on the ground?”

  “Yes, I had fallen, almost sitting down, or lying back but my backpack was between me and the ground… and he was over me… and he… and he…”

  Stop to breathe. There’s a rushing sound in her ears, and her heart is hammering uncontrollably.

  Everyone’s staring at her. They always have been, but now it’s as if the intensity of their staring has increased – jury, judge, public gallery, figure behind the glassy wall. All focused on her.

  She finds her voice again.

  “And he was shouting things like ‘Shut the fuck up, bitch. You say anything, I’ll slit your throat, I’ll bash your head in.’ He picked up a rock and he was threatening to hit me.”

  It seems so surreal to be channeling his anger somehow, investing that kind of energy into his words when she speaks them.

  “And what else did he do?”

  “Well, I was struggling to get away from there, I was trying to get up from the ground, but he was physically stopping me from doing that. He… he punched me in the head, and that hurt a lot. He took two fingers from my left hand and bent them back. And he… he…”

  Here she has to stop. She struggles again to get the words out, they become garbled in a sob, caught in the back of her throat. She can feel the tears welling up in her eyes, and she wills them away. How humiliating it would be to break down in front of the jury.

  And then, she remembers, this is what they want to see. The crying rape victim.

  So she goes there. She stops holding back.

  “And then he started choking me. His hands were wrapped around my throat and I couldn’t breathe.”

  The tears have begun to spill over, streaming down her face, but she doesn’t care. Let them see how miserable you become when you
are raped.

  In therapy, this is always the moment in the narrative when she breaks down. For weeks in a row, she’s had to come in and tell the story of the attack over and over again to Doctor Greene. Go home, listen closely to the tape of her telling it, and find ‘the point of greatest distress’ for her. What part of the story makes you the most upset?

  The part when he’s choking me.

  And why is that upsetting?

  Because I thought I was going to die.

  Well, you didn’t die. You still have your life.

  That’s right. I still have my life.

  This is her life, right now, every second of it suffused with misery and shame, sitting in this courtroom for everyone to see.

  And because I have my life, I’m going to put this kid in jail, where he belongs.

  “Ms Tan.” The judge is saying this now. “Ms Tan, are you all right?”

  She looks up at him and doesn’t know what to say.

  “Shall we take a ten-minute break?”

  “No,” she manages to say, her voice thick and low.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “It’s not a problem, we can easily…”

  “No. No break. I want to finish this.”

  *

  Oh boo hoo, don’t we all feel sorry for the poor posh girl crying her eyes out now in the box. See how the whole room eats it up. But that’s women – always end up in tears when they don’t get their way.

  Girl shoulda known better. Beour like that shouldn’t go walking on her own, certainly not near where the likes of me hang out.

  But even Da and Michael are caught up in what she’s saying.

  Once, Da breaks away from looking at the woman, shoots an eye over in his direction.

  It’s not an angry look, but it’s not nice neither. It’s a look that says ‘What the fuck were you even thinking?’

  *

  Now the worst part. Once she’s broken down, they move onto the actual rape.

  “What happened after you decided to relent, so to speak?”

  “I didn’t want him to lick me… down there… because I suspected that once he got my underwear down, he’d want to do more than just that.”

  She can sense the courtroom squirming in embarrassment.

  “So… I… tried to bargain with him instead. I offered to give him a blow job. I thought that if I could at least get him off with a blow job, then he’d have gotten what he wanted, and the danger would be gone.”

  “When you say ‘get him off’…?” O’Leary moves in to dissect further.

  “I mean, get him to come. To orgasm.”

  O’Leary nods.

  She tries to take a deep breath, to keep the queasiness at a manageable level. How much longer will she have to stay up here? She imagines hours. Take your time, make them listen to every single last humiliating detail. Make them feel the shame you feel.

  “And then what happened?”

  She describes her unsuccessful blow job. In her mind, she is reminded of the sour jab of his cock in her mouth. That cock, that boy sitting behind that wall of glass, only meters from her. The thought of this is enough to bring the bile to her mouth, but she forces it down.

  “And after this, what happened?”

  O’Leary’s questions are relentless.

  The first position the boy wanted, the next one, the next one. His ridiculous schoolboy demands.

  The catalogue of sexual positions is embarrassing for everyone in the room, but O’Leary dissects them with clinical precision. She knows he is just doing his job. Still, a part of her begins to resent him intensely for subjecting her to this kind of ruthless indignity.

  “So just to reiterate, there was oral, vaginal, and anal penetration during the assault?”

  “And how many different sexual positions would you say he subjected you to?”

  She has counted this out multiple times in the past few months, even drawn stick-figure diagrams to remind herself what they were. But now she finds herself silently counting on her fingers, holding her hands out of sight from anyone else.

  “At least five. Maybe six.”

  “Other than demanding these various positions, did the defendant say anything to you during the assault?”

  “At one point, he said…” She trails off, reluctant to reveal this ultimate disgrace, but knows it will help her case. “At one point, he said, ‘Nice tight Asian pussy.’”

  Perhaps she feels a collective, silent shudder around the courtroom. A quiver of combined disgust and pity. Or perhaps these mainly white faces just stare on at her, implacable, the racial insult hardly registering for them.

  “And how were you feeling throughout this whole sequence of events?”

  “Scared, of course. I was just doing whatever I could to survive. So that meant trying to appease him. Let him have whatever he wants and he won’t hurt you so much.”

  She realizes she will have to talk about her own underhanded tricks, the demeanor she took on to convince him she was on board. The pretense of being complicit, when really she was not. This could be a sticking point for the jury. Here’s where she’s not an innocent, helpless rape victim, but a woman consciously crafting a plan, acting deceptive in order to live.

  “I felt like I had to flatter him. If this kid was trying to act out whatever twisted fantasies he had, then playing into those fantasies might make it seem less like I was resisting.”

  O’Leary nods. “And you felt like you had to do this?”

  “Yes, I felt like it was my best chance for survival. To keep him appeased sexually would keep him away from physical violence.”

  She’s not sure if the jury are buying this, but it’s the truth.

  “So at one point I said… I said something like, ‘I bet you could go all night.’”

  She notices a change in the jury then. No innocent rape victim says something like that – only someone more brazen and knowing.

  But O’Leary and Simmons said to tell them as much as she could remember. The more details the better.

  Still, she wonders if that was a mistake.

  *

  He sits up through all of this, forehead against the glass, and the guard has to keep reminding him to sit back.

  He can’t really remember every single thing the woman is saying. Is she making it up?

  Don’t matter either way. What matters is if them jury believe her. Right now looks like they’re finding some things hard to believe. Like when she said ‘I’ll bet you can go all night to him.’ Them women didn’t look happy.

  Oh, she said that all right. He remembers.

  And when she says it was five, six different positions, the men raised their eyebrows.

  Probably better than you ever get from your wives back home, eh?

  Oh no, this weren’t no ordinary roll in the hay.

  *

  O’Leary takes her through the aftermath. The strange, pathetic conversation the boy had with her after the rape. How she got out of there, calling Barbara on the phone, waiting for the police to arrive.

  She is exhausted, but O’Leary has someone produce the clothes she was wearing on that day, and lay them out on a desk. Exhibits TM 8-13. Her blue hiking shirt. Her black bra, torn. Her underwear, smeared with mud. She wants to be sick, just looking at them. They seem like garments long ago peeled from a dead person. But she nods, yes, she wore those on April 12th last year.

  O’Leary plies her with more needling, hair-splitting questions. Again, what kind of bodily harm did he inflict upon you? And you did state explicitly that you did not want to have sexual intercourse with him, correct?

  “Yes, several times. When he asked about having sex outdoors, before he became violent. Then later, I was trying to get away, screaming for help. And again, when I suggested the blow job instead.”

  There, how’s that, O’Leary?

  There is a slight twinkle in O’Leary’s eye. As if to say, ‘Good job’.

  “I
believe I have no further questions for the time being, Your Honour.”

  O’Leary bows towards the judge, and he sits down, his tall, robed form folding behind the desk.

  There is silence in the courtroom.

  “Well,” Judge Haslam says. “Thank you very much, Ms Tan. I know this is not easy for you, and I gather you must be quite exhausted after that long session. We certainly appreciate what you’ve done, coming all this way to give evidence.”

  Unexpectedly, these few words cause her to well up again.

  The Judge seems slightly taken aback at the sight of fresh tears, but he continues, in a gentle, paternal voice.

  “Now, as you know, this is not over. The defence still needs their turn to ask you their questions. But what I suggest is that we finish for today. You go home, get plenty of rest, and we’ll start with you first thing in the morning, if that’s all right?”

  She nods, and wipes away a tear from her cheek.

  “Okay, Your Honour.”

  And those three words sound so out-of-place, she adds, as if to correct herself: “Yes.”

  *

  After the jury leave, and the judge too, then he can relax. Da and Michael come up to the glass.

  “Don’t be worrying about her,” Michael says. “Your man will tear her apart tomorrow.”

  Later, Da and him, McLuhan and his barrister, Quilligan, talk in one of them tiny private rooms. Is there anything else he should be asking her about tomorrow? Any details she left out?

  But the problem is, her memory’s better than his. It’s just a blur to him – trees and mud and shouting and pussy. She even brung up when she said, ‘I bet you can go all night.’ She even said that.

  McLuhan takes off his specs, rubs his eyes.

  “As you have chosen to plead not guilty, I need to remind you that your version of the events must be rock-solid in your mind. You need to know exactly how your story differs from hers.”

  “It’s the same as what I said before. You need me to tell you again?”

  Quilligan shakes his head. “No, no. But just think, in the same way that I’m going to try and undermine her version of events tomorrow, they’re going to try and do the same to you when you’re giving evidence. You understand?”