‘Mum!’ Ella cried. ‘Stop!’ And she started wailing now, loud enough to compete with Sam.
‘Get out,’ I yelled at her again, so fiercely that she did. I heard her howling her way up the stairs.
‘Sam,’ I said. ‘He’s not going to get away with it. He’s not!’
‘What are you going to do?’ Sam shouted at me. ‘You’ve done enough, haven’t you, already? None of this would have happened if it wasn’t for you! My life’s over.’
‘No it’s not. For God’s sake, Sam,’ I said in desperation, ‘you don’t give in to bullies. You stand up to them.’
‘You think that’s all this is? Don’t give in to bullies? You don’t know anything at all!’
He pushed past me, out of the den. As soon as I could get my legs to move I followed him, up the stairs. He was already in his room, stuffing clothes into his kit bag.
‘What are you doing?’ I said.
‘I’m leaving.’
‘Don’t be stupid, Sam, you can’t.’
He grabbed a handful of T-shirts from his drawers, and shoved them into the bag.
‘Sam, you can’t,’ I said again. ‘You’re only fifteen.’
‘I’ll go and stay with Dad.’
‘Sam, you can’t do that.’
‘Why? Doesn’t he want me either?’ He looked up at me then, his face an open pit of pain.
‘Sam, we both want you. You know that.’
‘I know my life here is finished,’ he said.
‘Sam, it’s late,’ I said. ‘It’ll be dark soon. How will you get to London?’
‘I’ll walk if I have to.’
‘Please . . . you’re being stupid.’
He pressed down on the contents of that bag, squeezing them in. ‘Well that’s me,’ he said. ‘Stupid, stupid Sam.’
‘Sam, you can’t go to London. Please, just stop this.’
He zipped up his bag. ‘No,’ he said.
I stood in the doorway, blocking his way.
‘Move,’ he said.
And I said, ‘No.’
‘Move,’ he said again, louder this time, but he didn’t touch me. He didn’t force me. My Sam is a kind and gentle boy, too good, far, far too good for this rotten world. His eyes filled with tears. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to be here any more.’
I put my hands on his arms. ‘Let me call your dad, first, please? Let me call him, and if you want to go there, we can make arrangements, safely, properly. Please. I can’t let you just go off like this. Please, Sam, for me.’
‘OK,’ he said at last, and he sat on his bed with his bag beside me while I went downstairs to phone David.
It was twenty past five. I registered that in the part of my brain that will always register such things, that will always observe the practicalities; I am, after all, a mother. David did not answer his direct line and I got put back to the receptionist.
‘I need to speak to David Berry,’ I said.
I waited while she tried the line that I had already tried myself. ‘He isn’t available,’ she said. ‘Can I take a message?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I need to speak to him. It’s important.’
Within seconds he was on the line. ‘What’s wrong?’ he said.
I said, ‘You need to come home.’
‘Why? What’s the matter?’
‘It’s Sam,’ I said and I started crying then, all those tears that had banked up inside me for so many miserable days.
‘What is it?’ he said, alarmed. ‘Is he ill, hurt?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘but something’s . . . happened. He’s . . . upset. He wants to go to London . . . now . . . says he’s going to stay with you . . .’
‘But he can’t,’ David said.
‘I know, but I can’t stop him. I said you’d come here . . . ’
‘But, Jane—’
‘Please,’ I said, my head, my throat too full of tears.
Seconds passed. At last he said, ‘OK. Give me ten minutes here. I’ll go back to the flat and get the car.’
Sam was still sitting on his bed when David arrived nearly four hours later, exhausted by the traffic and his own insular fears. Poor Sam, it was too long to wait for a lift; he knew we had conspired against him. ‘I’m not staying here,’ he said to us both with all the helpless terror of someone caged. ‘I’ll go on my own if I have to. I’ll go anywhere.’
‘OK, Sam,’ David said. ‘Let’s talk about it.’
‘I mean it,’ Sam said.
David sat on the bed beside him. ‘What happened?’
But Sam did not want to go through it all again. He did not want to talk about it at all. ‘Can’t we just go,’ he pleaded. ‘I’ve got my bag. I’m ready.’
David looked at me, the frown deep between his brows, and I could see in his eyes the calculation, the realization, that he would not just be up and out at the crack of dawn tomorrow, back to London and work. Oh no, he might need to stay a little longer than that; a few hours more at least. How very inconvenient, how very unplanned.
He’d called me on his mobile from his place in the predictable, endless traffic jam, crawling its way out of London, wanting to know what this was all about.
‘It’s something to do with a girl,’ I said evasively.
And he said, ‘A girl? I’m rushing home because Sam’s upset over a girl?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re rushing home because you’re Sam’s father and he needs you.’
‘Look, Sam,’ he said now. ‘It’s a long drive back to London. And it’s dark. Let me sleep here tonight. Let’s all get some sleep. We’ll talk about it tomorrow. We’ll sort something out. I promise.’
And Sam stared at his knees, disappointment and despair etched pitifully on his face.
‘Tell me,’ David said, so concise, so economical with his words. We’d left Sam in his room and Ella in hers, each of them miserable behind their closed doors. It was late, and we were tired, too tired surely to talk tonight. I stood at the sink and filled a glass with water. I drank it down, and filled it again, playing for time. The darkness of the night pressed against the window, solid, black as the coat of a bear.
‘I suppose you haven’t eaten,’ I said, though nor had we. ‘Do you want a sandwich or something?’
‘I’m fine,’ he said. He pulled a chair out from the table to sit down, scraping it noisily on the tiles and my nerves rattled. ‘Now tell me,’ he said again, ‘what’s going on.’
I turned to face him but I could not bring myself to sit down. How much would I have to tell him? How much would he find out anyway, from Sam, from Ella, from someone, somewhere along the line? I thought of those pictures being bandied about on Facebook; I thought of Max hideously bragging. And oh how I wished this would all go away.
‘Sam and Max had a fight over a girl,’ I said.
‘Is that all?’
‘Pretty much.’
He sat there, frowning, considering me and my words.
‘I cannot believe you got me up here tonight just because Sam had a fight over a girl,’ David said.
‘I got you here because Sam was going to leave and try and find his way down to you in London if I didn’t,’ I said thickly. ‘I didn’t know what else I could do. I do apologize if I have put you out.’
He winced, just slightly. ‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ he said. ‘You were right to call me. And I’ll always be here for Sam and Ella. You know that.’
I could feel the tears prickling at the back of my eyes. I was too tired for all this talking. I wanted to just hide myself away, and sleep.
But David wanted to know more. ‘Who’s the girl?’ he asked.
‘She’s called Lydia,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t know her.’
‘But you do.’
‘A bit. I’ve met her a couple of times.’ And I could picture her with her wavy blonde hair and light-brown eyes. She’d seemed like such a sweet girl; quiet and smiley; certainly not the type that would just go upstairs with a boy l
ike Max at a party. But perhaps I was wrong; you never can tell. And yet tiny fingertips of unease pressed their way up my spine.
‘So when was this fight?’ David asked.
‘Last Friday,’ I said. ‘At a party.’
‘Last Friday?’ I could see him, working this out now. And the realization that we kept things from him clouded his face, as if it actually hurt him, but what did he expect? ‘I knew something was wrong,’ he said, more to himself than to me. Then, ‘It’s not like Sam to get into a fight, though.’
‘Yes, well,’ I said.
‘Yes, well, what?’
I looked at him, sitting there like a detective, sifting through whatever information he could glean from me. Time was that I would have trusted him with anything. Time was that he would have been there for me, no matter what. But his betrayal had ruined all that. There was a barrier between us, impenetrable.
‘Just I expect he had good reason,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’
‘Do you have to be so cryptic?’ he said. And when I didn’t reply he sighed.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘I’ll talk to Sam in the morning. I’m sure things will seem better then.’
And oh how I wished he might be right.
TWENTY-NINE
David went off to the den to pull out the sofa bed for the night, and I went upstairs to fetch him some bedding. When I came back down he was standing there, waiting for me. In his hand he held the partially severed lead to the computer, with the plug dangling from its end.
‘What the hell happened here?’ he said.
I stopped short, duvet and pillow bunched in my arms. I had forgotten about the computer. Not about those pictures on it, not about those oh-so-witty captions no doubt circling now among all of Sam’s peers, but about what I had done with the scissors. Did I really think that by hacking at the lead I could make the damage disappear?
‘There were pictures on Sam’s Facebook page,’ I said. ‘I didn’t want him to see them.’
He shook his head in disbelief. ‘Couldn’t you have just turned off the computer? Did you have to physically break it?’
‘I didn’t want anyone seeing them,’ I said, my mouth dry, my heart beating all over the place, erratic, too fast.
‘But why?’ he said. ‘What were these pictures?’
‘They were just . . . horrible,’ I said, my voice breaking on the word. I sat down on the sofa bed, still clasping that duvet, my legs too weak to hold me.
‘But what were they of?’
‘That party,’ I said.
He stared at me, face like stone. Then he started scrabbling around in his overnight bag, and dug out his Blackberry.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I want to see these pictures,’ he said.
‘You can’t.’
‘What’s Sam’s password?’
‘I don’t know.’
He tried to log in anyway, swearing angrily when he failed. ‘I’ll ask Sam in the morning,’ he said.
‘No. You can’t. Please.’ I threw down that duvet and tried to snatch his Blackberry away from him. ‘I don’t want you to see them. I don’t want anyone to see them.’
‘Then tell me what the hell is going on,’ he said, too loudly now, and automatically we both flinched, listening for sounds from upstairs. But the house was silent apart from us, trapped together in our private midnight hell. David closed the door, and sat down on the desk chair, facing me.
I felt like I was on trial.
‘Sam and Max had a fight at that party,’ I said.
‘You told me that.’
I swallowed hard but my throat was raw. ‘I think Max might have . . . forced himself on this girl Lydia.’
David’s eyes narrowed. ‘Is that what Sam said?’
‘He said she was drunk. He said she went up to the bathroom and Max went up after her, and when she came down she was crying.’
‘That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,’ David said. ‘Perhaps Max just wanted to go to the bathroom, perhaps she was crying about something else.’
Oh that I could leave it there. That I could agree, say, ‘Yes, I’m sure you’re right.’ But I knew he’d find out the rest eventually, and how sordid would it seem then, second-hand? Besides, I had no reason to be ashamed.
‘Yes, but . . . Sam seemed to think something had happened. I think Max was . . . boasting.’
‘Jesus,’ David said now. Then, ‘Weren’t there any parents at this party?’
I hugged my arms across my chest and said nothing. The truth is I didn’t know. ‘I got rid of the last of them in the early hours,’ that man had said to me, but it didn’t mean he’d been there all night.
‘What was Sam even doing at a party like that?’ David said and I stared at him, taken aback.
‘What do you mean “at a party like that”? Do you expect him not to go out?’
‘Not to parties where kids are drunk and having sex, no, I don’t. Not when there are no parents there keeping an eye on things.’
‘Look, I don’t know if there were any parents there or not,’ I said. ‘But that’s not the point.’
‘Well it is the point,’ he said. ‘You let him go to this party and all this happens.’ He spread his hands expansively. ‘They shouldn’t be out drinking at all at that age. He’s fifteen, he’s too young. I don’t want him—’
Anger, white and sudden, flashed behind my eyes. ‘You’re not listening to me!’ I jumped to my feet, my heart racing so fast I was shaking. ‘The point is I think Max raped Lydia. I think he raped Lydia because he did the same to me.’
David recoiled as if I’d spat at him. Bizarrely, I was reminded of that long ago day when he came home from work to find me sitting at the table with my newly chopped-off hair. Then, too, he had recoiled, the shock stripping his handsome face bare.
‘Max raped you?’ he said, slowly, as if he could not process the words.
I wished I had not told him. I wished I had not told him because creeping into the shock on his face I could see the shadow of disgust now, though whether for me or what had been done to me I did not know. But I saw, and I felt it like a fist in my heart.
‘He raped you?’ he said again.
‘Yes,’ I said, through teeth clamped tight together.
He put his hand through his hair, a distancing, guarded move. ‘When?’ he said. ‘How?’
‘What do you mean, how?’
‘I mean – ’ still that hand was in his hair, his arm raised, a barrier between us ‘– where?’
He did not believe me. I do not know what he thought, but I saw his disbelief. I could see it in his eyes and I could hear it in his voice. Why else would he say when, how, where? What did he think; that I would make something like this up? I sat back down on that sofa bed, my whole body cold. ‘Does it matter?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes it does. My God, Jane.’ He sat down beside me, as if to do so was to offer me empathy. As if he didn’t know what else to do. His closeness both drew and repelled me. I’d wanted him to take me in his arms; I had. I’d wanted him to hold me tight and comfort me, but the only person to do that was Max.
And Max had violated me. ‘He was staying here,’ I said. ‘He came up to my room.’
David stared at me, appalled. ‘And?’
‘He raped me.’
‘But he can’t have just . . . surely?’ He shook his head in stunned disbelief. ‘Didn’t you stop him, didn’t you . . . I mean, what was he doing even going up to your room?’
I know that he was hoping for me to take it all back; for this to be some low trick, a ploy of some sort. As if I would pull such a stunt. As if.
‘I don’t know, David,’ I said, my heart so suddenly chilled. ‘I think he was trying to cheer me up. I was upset, you see, because of you.’
‘I cannot believe this,’ he said, and there was the truth. He shook his head again as though to clear it. ‘Max is just a kid.’ Did I imagine it, or was there a needle of accusation in his
voice?
‘Max is not just a kid,’ I said.
David rested his elbows on his knees, and cradled his face in his hands, thus removing himself from me. ‘My God,’ he muttered into his fingers. ‘What the hell has been going on in this house?’
His words hit me like a slap in the face; the sting, so unexpected, the ensuing numbness flooding in. I began to feel strangely, floatingly detached. ‘In this house . . . let me think. Ah yes, my husband ran off with someone else,’ I said. ‘My children’s father decided he’d rather live elsewhere. As a result we are having to sell our home. My kids are miserable. I am miserable. It’s been quite a barrel of laughs lately in this house.’
‘For God’s sake, not that again, please.’ He looked up, irritation now added to the many other emotions gathered upon his face. ‘I know things have been tough. They have been tough for me too. But that is no excuse for . . . ’ He stalled.
The heat burned in my face, electric.
‘For what, David?’
‘I don’t know, Jane. I truly don’t know. But I come here and I don’t recognize this place. I see empty cans and bottles lying around and teenage boys just coming and going—’
‘I’m sorry? Are you saying this is my fault in some way? Are you saying I actually encouraged him?’
‘No. No I’m not. Of course not.’
‘You think I’d be interested in a 15-year-old boy? You think that?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘But . . . maybe with everything else going on in this house . . . maybe he thought . . . Oh, I don’t know, but where are the boundaries, Jane?’
I stared at him, too stunned to speak.
At some point, we each retired to our separate beds, though I doubt if either of us slept. Certainly I didn’t. I lay on my back, eyes wide open, staring at the dark. My whole body was rigid, my heart thumping hard and fast.
This was worse than what had actually happened, this . . . aftermath. This questioning, and doubt; here was the true abuse. One quick fuck; that’s all it was for Max. So easily done, with a little taking off guard.
Did he rape me?
Max didn’t think so. I saw it in his eyes when he removed himself from me. He’d done what he wanted to, that’s all. Whether I wanted it or not wasn’t much of an issue; after all, what’s a little coyness, a little playing hard to get?
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