I don’t respond.
When he receives no acknowledgement of the toughest letter, he rings and asks again if I will move ‘home’. I’m too distracted by Mum to answer. I can hear her voice, distantly at first, yelling from the kitchen: ‘Go ahead and invite her, but I want nothing to do with it.’ Soon she’s on top of the mouthpiece. ‘I do not want her home.’
Lie 48: I’ll take her home
This has happened before and that’s what makes it worse, my skirt up over my face in a single-bedded room. A dive bar on the Euston Road. I remember the deceit which led me upstairs by the hand. There was a view over the city to see.
On that occasion I blamed myself. The pub bouncer was a stranger, and I had been told not to go with anyone strange. I had also been counselled against bedrooms, for it was plain as the nose on my mother’s face that this was the place where things happened.
But it’s another story I need to tell. The one that is harder to put down.
I have a job in an interior design firm. Dropping out of college has led me here, as surely as the promise of a view. I am made Girl Friday. The receptionist, Gaby, is German and red-lipped. Often red-jumpered. She slams through the post each morning (because I cannot be trusted with it), a cigarette wagging between her lips. I am allowed a small perch behind her desk, an exposed and mean bit of melamine and a chair no one else wants. I shop and boil kettles, load envelopes, photocopy. In the evenings I tear across London to attend a secretarial course in a tired room on the Tottenham Court Road where the letters on typewriters have been blanked out.
Soon it is the Christmas party, and I don’t remember much about the crawl along Victoria Street to the Buckingham. Gaby has peeled off to her ‘good-for-nothing’ husband. There are only a small number of core drinkers left. As the Rusty Nail cocktails are lined along the bar, I remember only the face of the publican, the shot glasses held between his bitten fingers, as he fills each one with liquid gold.
He watches me, knowing what comes after this.
Perhaps I know too, but the men I am with dare me to. And so the Nails are drunk.
Outside in the cold night a taxi is flagged and I am put into it with Mr Hancock, an architectural technician, who is also heading north. Hancock is a small, bespectacled man in his late thirties with thinning hair and a paunch.
As we weave out of Westminster it becomes Christmas Eve.
Mr Hancock pays for that long journey back into the depths of London, and as the cab steers east, and away from home, I am sobering to another ignored piece of parental advice. There is no such thing as a free ride.
The cab takes a right off the Edgware Road. The architectural technician mutters an inarticulate reassurance when I remind him where I live.
It is the first lie.
The rest of the journey is made in silence, the lighted streets winding past the window. Mr Hancock helps me from the car.
A dead relationship is written across his Walthamstow flat. There is much that is missing, the evidence of it boxed at the foot of the stairs. The sheets, when I find myself on them, are loose with sleep. Black dreams stink the pillow.
I am drunk.
And I am nailed.
And the ‘No’ I whisper makes his doing it bearable.
Once he has finished, he sleeps.
It is hours till dawn and I lie awake, too scared to find my clothes in the dark. Instead I lie in the dirty bed, his despair weeping between my legs.
He barely speaks when he finds me trailing around the filthy kitchen looking for a phone. And his silence is proof of my ‘No’. He does not touch me again.
On the first day of January that the office is open, the reception area rank with stale cigarette smoke, Mr Hancock arrives, short and furtive. Before taking off his coat, he goes to the stationery drawer beside my desk and picks out a clean, white, self-seal envelope. And before dropping it on my desk he tucks something inside.
I hide it until lunch, for if Gaby sees it, she will take to it with her ash and her knife. The rest of the morning I hope that inside I will find a present, a small acknowledgement, a sorry. When Gaby leaves to buy her sandwich I open the envelope. All it contains is the plain white bra Mum bought me and a humiliation still difficult to voice.
Lie 49: I deserved it
The criminal justice system is an adversarial presumptive process in which it is assumed that at least one party is not telling the truth. The crime where this system seems to be failing us most is rape. An accusation of dishonesty is the only defence the guilty can furnish themselves with, and their barristers, with nothing else to go on, embrace this kind of argument with a desperation that is played out in long cross-examinations and an aggressive disbelief.
Ironically, for those who have been raped it has been hard enough to believe ourselves. Society has equipped itself with a surfeit of rape myths, which enable victims to accept what has happened to them by swallowing the idea that it has been their fault.
Under Section 1 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, a rape is committed when a person intentionally, with his penis, penetrates another. It has to be a penis. The vagina was the only orifice of merit in the original Sexual Offences Act of 1956. It wouldn’t be until 1994 that an amendment included the anus, and finally now we can mention the mouth.
This penetration must be without consent. The Rights of Women publication From Report to Court notes: ‘It is always for the prosecution to prove that the complainant did not consent and that the defendant did not reasonably believe he or she consented.’
The reasonableness is an important word to those who have petitioned for improvements in the rate of rape conviction in the UK. As cited by Lord Falconer when petitioning for amendments to the Sexual Offences Act, in 2001–2 only 41.2 per cent of alleged rapists who were put on trial were convicted. He compared this with the figure of 73.4 per cent for general rates of conviction across all crimes. In his arguments he said that it was fair to expect a person ‘to take care to ensure that his partner is consenting and for him to be at risk of a prosecution if he does not’.
Since the 2003 Act was passed, convictions have increased and more reported rapes result in prosecution. But still, only a very small proportion of rape cases that are reported to the police reach conviction, and 26 per cent of sexual offences that are reported are actioned as ‘No Crime’.
Like many rapists, Hancock was an opportunist. He was like a burglar trying out back doors, hoping to find one unlocked. The intention was merely to get inside, but without any clear plan about which door to use. Opportunists are difficult to find guilty. The intention is diffused. In this scenario it’s hard to prove premeditation, and after the burglary is completed there’s no evidence of breaking and entering. Only leaking semen, and an inexplicable sense of shame.
In court, neither the defence team nor the prosecution is particularly motivated to understand what actually happened between complainant and defendant. Rather the system is organised in such a way as to establish winners and losers. It’s a game in which the jury makes the presumption that when things kick off, it will be a fair and equal process, with both players starting from the same point on the board. But of course, like life, the criminal justice system is not fair. A well-financed defence team has more time and more resources at their disposal to win. But even without considerable cash behind him a rapist has a massive advantage. The victim is in the unenviable position of having to prove a case beyond reasonable doubt, while for the defence doubt is all that they need create.
Lie 50: Will you go out with me?
When they made their first reconciliatory visit, Mum and Dad were appalled by the keep-your-shoes-on-at-all-times living at Drayton Green. Immediately they put down a £3,000 deposit on a flat and guaranteed a mortgage. I was nineteen, with a salary of £8,000 per annum.
I found the flat on the A1, near to Muswell Hill, and to Violet. The Archway Road flat rumbled each time the Northern Line travelled north and south beneath it. A two-room bedsit, it crou
ched above an Asian newsagent, its windows facing east down Northwood Road. The night I got hold of the keys, I tore off my clothes and lay like a star on the empty floor. I was home.
The first evening Violet called round, the flat was still unfurnished, bar a second-hand fridge Dad had bought me and a Warren Evans double bed in pieces across the floor. It was already dark. She buzzed the intercom from the road, yelling up over the A1 traffic. She was in a rush.
I shouted back that I was still in my work clothes.
‘You’ll be fine.’
Down at street level her black Saab was thrown up against the pavement, hazard lights on, the Sisters of Mercy belting out the open windows. She hesitated when she saw my Laura Ashley pinafore dress, re-evaluating ‘fine’.
Violet was the kind of Goth photographed by Japanese tourists. Her wardrobe was designer, her white warlocks from the best salon. She had transformed herself from the frumpy uniform-wearing Sloane that Gordonstoun was so good at producing into an angular beauty, both edgy and cool.
I collapsed into the passenger seat, the music on so loud we had to shout, and she took off, heading south. We were on a mission. She’d spotted a guy the night before, and she wanted to catch him. He would be in the Snatch, a new club at the back of King’s Cross, she told me, and all I had to do was keep her company while we waited to see if he would turn up.
She parked down a residential street, perhaps Balfe or Northdown, and we wound down the windows, scouring the road for signs of a club. Last orders were being called in the pubs along Caledonian Road and soon a pair of Goths ambled past, disappearing into a lighted hallway between shop fronts. Stairs led down to a collection of domestic-sized windowless rooms, the DJ yellow-lit through a kitchen hatch.
It wasn’t until one thirty that Violet’s target arrived. With him was a friend, who had a menacing stillness about him, sharp cheekbones carving shadows beneath his eyes. Slowly he took in the room.
I watched him, like a mouse watches a cat. He took the seat beside me, leaning forward in his chair, elbows resting on his thighs. Violet pulled a scary face to the back of his head and gave her eyes a death roll. She yelled over the music:
‘Don’t look so fucking bored.’
This caught the cat’s attention. Perhaps he knew the deal. Everyone knows the deal. The friend gets the friend.
He watched me. Then leaned over and shook my hand. I probably apologised for what I was wearing, for that is the kind of dismal start to a conversation I was capable of. Soon we fell into silence. I can still remember the discomfort of it, trying to seem engrossed in the music, my Laura Ashley pinafore as noxious as a fart.
As soon as I could I tried to escape, thinking that he might want to find someone more desirable. Instead he caught my arm.
Though he would ask the question and he would sleep with me often, we never did go out. Presumably because I was prone to wearing Laura Ashley, he preferred to turn up first thing on a Sunday morning and join me in my Warren Evans bed that he had put together himself.
Perhaps then it was the cat who gave me the human papillomavirus, or more likely it was the man before. The one who came when I was too drunk on Nails to refuse. Whoever it was, there was a lousy smear result, and then a stirruped visit to an outpatient unit on Holloway Road. Pants off I was asked:
‘Are you sure you haven’t had any warts?’
The doctor held a huge pair of forceps, eyes narrowed.
‘Warts?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ his balding head disappeared between my knees, ‘warts.’
‘No.’
Though even now, Googling to find out what a genital wart looks like, I’m not really sure. Did I? Some pictures look horrible. My nether region was not something I knew much about, or took a lot of interest in.
‘No. Never.’
‘Hmm.’
There was the cold sensation of the forceps, and then the kind of inside hurt that feels as though the soul is being torn.
The laser treatment was a couple of weeks later. It was a fortnight in which I worked myself up into a lather. I had CANCER. (Or, though I never said it aloud, did I just have warts?)
Though Violet offered, it was Mum who came with me to the Whittington and waited outside as the abnormal cells were lasered away. Back home she tucked me up in bed. While we were out Dad had painted the entire flat, even the plug sockets, because nether regions were not his forte either.
Lie 51: Nemo me impune lacessit
My mother often told me that weddings were the best place to meet an eligible man. Tristan, whom I picked up at a Scots Guards nuptial, was a proof of principle and to her worth any disgrace. Dropping me off at the train station she was astute enough not to enquire where I would sleep after the wedding celebrations. All I had in my handbag was an empty wallet, my toothbrush and a clean pair of pants.
Googling Tristan as I write this, I find he’s now CEO of an indeterminate financial company, which marks him out as the only solvent ex-boyfriend of mine from that period. Most of the others have gone on to become drunk, destitute or dead.
He was pale, his face eager, and the only ‘date’ we managed that winter was Disney’s Little Mermaid at the Chelsea Cinema. It was a matinee. We sat at the front.
The rest of that autumn we held hands, arms locked at the elbows, his fingers so tight in mine my knuckles flared white. Nights, at Cavalry Barracks, we squeezed illicitly into mean army-issue beds, beneath scratchy blankets. Like children we were beating back the chill of institutional rooms, shabby curtains and sixty-watt bulbs.
Then in the December of my twenty-second year Tristan was put on Royal Guard at the Tower of London. He and eight men were playing Grand Old Duke of York-type nursery games with keys, and presenting arms, and shouting: ‘Who goes there?’
I was impressed. As was Mother.
What I regret most about Tristan, and would very much like to take back, is my ill-considered ‘I love you.’ Mum must have voodooed me into it. I could not have been in love by any stretch. It takes me years to work up to love, and even longer to admit to it. Anyway I was distracted. Besides Beefeaters, mermaids and single beds my diary narrates an untidy closure with a bass player recently signed to Elektra, and intermittent phone contact with a drunk I’d hooked up with on Camden Town’s Barnet-bound platform. It also transpires I couldn’t invite Tristan round to my flat because a baggage handler from Luton had moved himself in the week before (a ‘totally platonic arrangement’, one entry reads).
But my mother and I kidded ourselves that the only thing going on was a uniformed second lieutenant on Royal Guard Duty at the Tower.
The night of the Ceremony of the Keys and Who-Comes-There, two other officers and Tristan’s sister joined us for whisky in his quarters. It was a flat with ruched curtains and the pervasive stink of prep schools and torture that haunts much of the upper classes.
We waited for the goose-stepping up Water Lane to begin, the shouts to a Yeoman, the safe keeping of keys; a ceremony which has begun every evening for centuries at exactly seven minutes to ten. We waited. Tristan’s men laid on more whisky, and more, so by ten to ten he was very much the worse for wear, his bearskin askew.
Beyond the Tower walls the city had emptied. Gathered on the cobbles the night felt to me colder and blacker than any other corner of London. I wanted to go home. It was a long way, and I was still in my clothes from the previous night.
We stood on the Broadwalk steps flapping our hands against our sides in the cold, with the small band of red-coated Guards at attention outside the Queen’s House. In the darkness came the clang of the gates, and the shout of the sentry along Water Lane.
‘Who comes there?’
And the Yeoman’s answer: ‘The Keys.’
The boots of the Warder and his military escort echoed along the cobbles, up under the Bloody Tower Arch till they were beneath the steps.
Tristan bellowed some incoherent orders, the December air clouding in huffs around his face. Wobbling on his
about-turn, he provoked tuts from the Freemen of the City. One hissed: ‘Drunk!’
The keys were marched to the Queen’s House and over the wavering call of the bugle the Freemen filed off.
When we called by the flat to say goodbye, Tristan already had his bearskin off, the buttons on his tunic wrenched undone. He was bent over the laces of his boots.
Tristan hated to be left. When he was in barracks, although it was forbidden, he would beg me to stay. He was like the small child abandoned in a chilly prep school, desperate for his mother, and every other institution that followed mirrored the abject loneliness of the first. His pleas for me to stay woke the buried child in me. I did not care that I might be caught.
But the Tower was different. No woman stayed overnight. It was completely beyond the pale. For twelve hours every night, ten to ten, the Crown Jewels and their guards were, and are, locked in. Nothing transgresses this rule.
Tristan, drunk, pulled me down beside him, pleading in whispers, his eyes on my shoes. Bereft at the thought of a night alone he did not notice the uncomfortable departure of his sister and the two other officers, nor the clangs and jangles of the Tower going into lockdown for the night.
It says in my diary that I ran him a bath. That we shared it, and slept.
It was five forty-five when I woke, dawn still a long way off. Two hours till the office opened, a tube ride away in Bloomsbury, four until the gates unlocked. Again he pleaded. Please, please would I remain until the Tower was opened to the public at ten?
To save my job I couldn’t, and by ten past six on that December morning Tristan, on guard at the Tower of London, was back in uniform. Alone he marched me down towards Water Lane, a grave silhouette in front. His platoon, on guard, whistled in low tones as we passed, the darkness colder and blacker even than the night before.
A Book of Untruths Page 13