Dark Chapter

by Winnie M. Li

  That ought to put Quilligan in his place.

  Quilligan merely raises his eyebrows and looks at the jury. “Well, that’s what the lady says.” His voice is wry and patronizing, and she wants to bash him over the head with one of his thick legal books.

  He clears his throat. “Now, Ms Tan. Thank you for explaining so clearly why you did not stop walking, even though you had already been talking to the defendant for twenty minutes. I’d like to skip ahead to the second time Mr Sweeney approached you, which was when you were about to cross the stream.”

  It goes on. The same arguments, the same questions lobbed and directed at her from a slightly different angle. When he showed up a second time, at the stream, why didn’t she leave? She explains it was just the two of them, no one else around, and wherever she went, he could have easily followed. She did make it clear to him she wanted to walk on her own.

  “Very clever of you to say that, Ms Tan. But I suggest you were leading this young lad on. You mentioned you saw him looking at your legs. But it was you who decided to remove your shoes and socks to cross the stream, even though he had pointed out another way to cross it using the stepping-stones. You deliberately wanted to show him your legs. You knew he was a young lad who was interested in you, you wanted to see how much farther you could take this.”

  There’s a collective murmur around the courtroom. She doesn’t know if the audience are reacting for or against this suggestion, but she shakes her head slowly, her stare trained on Quilligan.

  “That’s the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard in my life. As I’ve already explained, I removed my shoes and socks because I didn’t want to run the risk of them getting wet. The last thing I wanted in the world was to lead this boy on. Just to reiterate, I do not have any interest in boys half my age.”

  Quilligan smiles snidely at this.

  “Ms Tan, you seem to be very astute at defending your honour in a public forum such as this. I’m trying to pierce into the heart of what your intentions really were on that afternoon. Here’s an innocent-looking young lad, with all the curiosity of a teenage boy. Surely, you must have been aware of the possibilities at hand. The two of you alone in a forest. An attractive, well-traveled woman like yourself-”

  “Those possibilities were the farthest thing from my mind. I only wanted to go on that walk. On my own.”

  Judge Haslam leans forward. “Again, Mr Quilligan, you need to phrase your case in the form of questions to the young lady.”

  The young lady. An attractive, well-traveled woman. The sorts of superficial labels that are always being pasted on her.

  “I think, Ms Tan,” Quilligan intones. “I think you are very good at presenting a certain smooth, accomplished exterior. Perhaps something you learned at Harvard or at these high-profile public events that you frequent. But underneath it all, you have a reckless desire for escape, for a thrill, shall we say. Travelling to new places on your own, meeting new men, even young boys. And when one of these encounters does not go according to plan, as it did with young Mr Sweeney, it was all too easy for you to blow the whistle and accuse the lad of assaulting you.”

  He nods a self-satisfied grin at her, and she realizes that any way she reacts – irate or assertive or articulate – he’ll be able to make her appear at fault. There’s almost no point in fighting. But still she tries.

  She leans into the microphone.

  “Is there a question in there, Mr Quilligan? Because you couldn’t be farther from the truth.”

  The cross-examination toils on. When he gets to the rape, the actual rape, she starts to breathe shallow again. Her heartbeat tripping at a faster tempo, her head starting to spin. She digs her nails into her palms to steady herself, while Quilligan seems to delight in her discomfort, drawing out his questions slowly and asking her yet again about the crude facts of what the boy made her do.

  “So that’s five or six positions you’ve mentioned,” he sneers. “Surely quite a lot. At no point during this did you try to fight back?”

  But she’s already explained it. She’d realized how violent he could be. It would be safer to let him have what he wanted.

  “I don’t get it.” Quilligan shakes his head in mock ignorance. “According to you, you allowed this boy to have sexual intercourse with you in these multiple positions. He didn’t have a gun, there’s no evidence he had a knife. At this point, he wasn’t hitting you anymore or being specifically violent. Why did you let him do that? You decided to let him have intercourse with you in so many different positions? You had in fact consented? You claim you feared for your life, but in this moment, what exactly was he doing to threaten you? I suggest, you were actually enjoying the sex, because it was you who had initiated it. ‘I bet you can go all night’… Who really says that while they’re being raped?”

  Quilligan’s remarks rain down on her. Try as she might to explain her way out of his sneering comments, he turns it this way, then the other. Out of disgust, she just wants to shut up, stonewall him. But she does her best to reply.

  “Mr Quilligan, I’m going to say this one more time. I sustained a lot of injuries during the attack. I was afraid I would sustain more serious ones if I didn’t go along with what the defendant wanted.”

  “I just fail to understand how a professional woman like yourself, independent, well-traveled, would allow this much younger boy to have sex with her in five, six different positions, if it weren’t without some consent on her part.”

  BECAUSE I FEARED FOR MY LIFE she wants to shout, but instead, she stays seated.

  “I’m sorry you don’t understand that, Mr Quilligan. But maybe you’ve never been in a position where you genuinely thought you were going to die.”

  Judge Haslam cuts in. “Once again, this is not meant to be a debate between the complainant and the defense counsel. Mr Quilligan, do you have any further questions for Ms Tan?”

  And of course he does. After the rape, after they’d put their clothes back on, why did she stick around? Why didn’t she leave when she had the first chance?

  “Because I didn’t want to turn my back on the defendant. I was scared what he would try to do.”

  No, because she wanted to continue talking to the boy, to make sure things were cool, things were normal. She wasn’t scared at all by that point.

  No, I wanted him to think things were normal so he wouldn’t suspect I might report him.

  A lot of double-crossing there, Ms Tan. Being rather deceptive to the boy, just as you are being to us.

  I was just trying to survive.

  Just as you’re creating the best situation for us to believe you were a victim of a rape, and not actually a woman fully in control.

  She’s shaking her head, staring straight at the barrister.

  “You’re entirely wrong. Your suggestions are insulting and nothing but false.”

  Some of the jury are shaking their heads, too, but she doesn’t know if it’s because they agree with her, or because they think she’s lying. This entire cross-examination is like some torturous farce allowed to run on for too long. How much longer will she have to put up with these questions?

  Because for every accusation, every insinuation, something pierces her protective hide, wriggles its way under her skin and festers like a parasite.

  Quilligan asks her about the following day, her flight back to London. A film premiere? She went to a glamorous party with celebrities the day after her alleged rape? He’s even produced a photo of her on the red carpet, the one from the publicist’s reel that evening. Judge Haslam rules out using the photo as evidence, but it’s too late – Quilligan’s already described it. Ms Tan is smiling, she’s wearing a fancy gown, she has a handsome date. She hardly looks like the victim of a traumatic assault that took place a day before.

  She seethes upon hearing this. They have no idea how difficult it was for her to attend that event. But she’s given no chance to explain.

  “Ms Tan, I suggest you knew exactly what you were doing
when you spoke to the defendant in the park that day. It was you who initiated the sexual activity with the young Mr Sweeney, and when things got a bit out of hand – when he got a bit too enthusiastic and those bruises and injuries began to appear – that’s when you started to regret this encounter you had initiated. He never yelled at you or held you against your will, and as we will see when Mr Sweeney takes the stand, it was him who was following your lead in this sexual encounter.”

  She looks at him sadly and says: “That is entirely incorrect.”

  “We shall see about that, Ms Tan,” Quilligan replies. He turns to Judge Haslam. “I have no further questions, Your Honour.”

  Quilligan sits, and there’s a palpable sense of relief in the room. She looks around at the jury, the public gallery, the journalists, and she slowly realizes she hates them all for coming to watch this, like it’s some form of gladiatorial combat.

  It’s entertainment for them.

  But I’m the one who has to live it.

  Lunch. She sits in the complainant’s room, the lavender candle burning and quietly spoons potato-and-leek soup into her mouth.

  Barbara, Erika, and Jen are hovering around her.

  “How’d I do?” she asks, almost devoid of emotion.

  Kind hands on her shoulders, stroking her hair.

  You did great.

  Amazing.

  I am so so sorry you have to go through this.

  But somehow, even their kind words hardly pierce the surface, when Quilligan’s inane suggestions managed to.

  O’Leary and Simmons step into the room, billow over to her in their robes.

  “You’ve done well. He was nastier than I thought he’d be, but you’ve done very well to discredit him firmly, while still carrying yourself in a respectable manner.”

  A respectable manner.

  “I should have cried, shouldn’t I?”

  Simmons says some platitude: there’s no should have, you react in the way that seems natural to you.

  Only there is nothing natural about this entire situation, she wants to say.

  O’Leary clears his throat and starts to explain the next steps.

  “Now after lunch, I’m just going to ask you a few more questions, just to re-establish your story a bit after the cross-examination. And then you should be free to go for the time being.”

  But she knows she won’t really be free, not while this trial’s still going, and maybe not ever.

  One of these days, she tells herself, she’ll be able to walk into a field on her own. An open field under the broad sky in the middle of the day. She’ll be able to lie down on her back, feel the grass beneath her, the sun on her face, close her eyes, and she will feel completely content. And she will feel no danger.

  Only then, will she really be free.

  They file back into Courtroom Eight, O’Leary working to repair some of the damage Quilligan has done.

  Perhaps it’s part of the show, but he looks at her carefully, solicitously now, weighing his words, and placing each question down, like a hand of cards laid one by one on a tabletop, a shared knowledge that each card she overturns will be one in her favor.

  “Ms Tan. Just to return to some things Mr Quilligan was implying, in all your years of traveling, have you ever met a much younger man and engaged in sexual relations with him?”

  “No, I’ve never done that.”

  “And once he became violent, how did you decide to enact your main thought, of trying to survive the assault? And that’s why you did certain things and said certain things during the assault, right?”

  She answers these easily enough, her confidence and sense of dignity slowly being restored.

  “And how have you felt since the assault last April?”

  “Pretty awful. I’ve been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. I have flashbacks and agoraphobia. I’m anxious and nauseous all the time. I feel like I’m a shell of the person I used to be. And I don’t know if I can ever really go back to being who I was before the assault.”

  O’Leary lets her last statement sit there, a somber bell-ring filling the air. He turns to the jury and looks at them.

  “Thank you, Ms Tan. No further questions, Your Honour.”

  Relief and a surreal giddiness roll over her, but she keeps this below the surface, sweeps her eyes around the room, over the jury. She searches for traces of sympathy. Maybe, perhaps, in the younger woman, the middle-aged mother, the Indian man. Or maybe she’s imagining it.

  Barbara, Erika and Jen beam proud smiles at her, and so does Detective Morrison.

  Emboldened by this, she looks further. Notices a couple of hardened-looking men sitting in the public gallery near the dock. Maybe the boy’s dad or brothers.

  And then she looks straight at the glass panel.

  He is sitting there, looking down, that ginger-brown hair she recognizes in a flash, the pale white skin.

  She assesses him coolly. He’s in a box. With security around him. He can’t do anything to her. There’s a roomful of people between them, law enforcement, the press, a judge and several barristers.

  Same two people. A different arena.

  And then he looks up. Straight at her.

  She shudders for a moment, but doesn’t flinch outwardly. She doesn’t look away. She looks straight back, what she hopes is a cold, remorseless stare. Her eyes piercing into his familiar ice-blue ones. She doesn’t care if the rest of the courtroom see this exchange.

  *

  Weren’t expecting her to glare straight at him like that. What’s gotten into this bitch?

  Almost looks like she’s gonna kill him.

  As if a softie like her could do something like that. But still, he don’t like it.

  Quilligan wasn’t able to trip her up, not really.

  So she sailed on through, smooth, and now at the end of it all, gives him that look.

  Ah, fuck her, and fuck all of them in the courtroom. He’ll get his chance. He’ll show them all.

  *

  The streets of Belfast look the same, once she steps out of the courthouse. Same grey skies and grey buildings, same unsmiling people on the sidewalks.

  Jen is walking with her, back to the hotel, and probably wondering why she’s so quiet. But the day’s proceedings have gouged her clean of coherent thoughts. She just wants to lie in bed in the dark, an inert being, devoid of emotion or life.

  Tomorrow, she knows O’Leary will continue his show: more witnesses for the prosecution. Barbara, Detective Morrison, Doctor Phelan, even some of the people who saw her and the boy in the park. As the complainant, she can’t sit in the courtroom, for fear her presence might influence what the witnesses would say. Even though the defendant is allowed to be present through it all. But Jen and Barbara will be there, her ears and eyes.

  At least the worst of it is over, that much she knows.

  She looks out to the hills on the horizon, the ones that fringe the other side of the harbor. The clouds hang low, flattened and bleak, above those hills.

  And she thinks, if this were a film, and this were one of those moments in a film there’d be a little chink of light in those clouds right now. Shining through to tell her everything will be all right, tomorrow is another day, all those wonderful things they tell you in the movies.

  As Jen walks alongside her, she keeps her eyes trained on those clouds, waiting for that chink of light to break through.

  But it never does.

  Later that evening, out of the blue, her mom calls. She’s lying on her bed in the hotel room, drowsing with the lights turned low, when her phone goes off. Unusual, for her mom to call her cell phone long-distance.

  She reminds her mom that she’s in Belfast on a business trip, just some meetings to prepare for a TV series they might shoot in Northern Ireland. She’ll be here next week, too, for further meetings. The lies lodge in her throat.

  “What’s the weather like over there?”

  “Kind of the same as London, maybe a bit c
older. Grey, rainy, you know, Ireland.” At least that wasn’t a lie.

  “But it’s safe in Belfast?” Mom asks. “I always think of all that fighting that used to go on there.”

  “Oh yeah, it’s safe,” she says, and the ridiculous irony of that statement catches her. “Most of that political fighting died down years ago,” she adds. “Remember, I came over here for that conference to celebrate the peace process, last year.”

  Why did she even say that? Such a morbid delight in her own ironies.

  They chat some more. Mom, relaying details of her life in Southern California.

  “You know, we got a new class at the senior center. This thing called zumba. Do you know it?”

  Yes, she’s heard of zumba.

  “I had the worst dream two nights ago,” Mom says.

  Something pricks at the back of her neck. “Why? What was it about?”

  “I dreamt I was in my old childhood home in Taipei, sleeping in the bed I used to share with my grandmother when I was a little girl.”

  She sinks further into the hotel bed’s duvet. An uncomfortable feeling is creeping into her, at the sound of her mom’s words.

  “…But this time, my grandmother wasn’t there. I woke up in my dream, all on my own. And this man came into the room… and he… he assaulted me.”

  “He what?”

  “He assaulted me, it was horrible.”

  She sits up. She knows her mom wouldn’t use the word ‘rape’, but she can read between the lines. Somehow that image – of a fictional, dream-rape – is enough to chill her. That her mom would have to experience that kind of terror, even in a dream.

  “Did you know the man in your dream? Was it anyone you recognized?”

  “No, no one I recognized. But it was horrible, I still can’t forget it. Now why would I have a dream like that?”