The Safest Place

by Suzanne Bugler

I stared at Max. ‘Do you want to tell her or shall I?’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘Just some stupid misunderstanding.’

  ‘I don’t agree with you, Max,’ I said.

  ‘Max,’ Melanie said. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Maybe I should speak to Jane on her own,’ Max said, the ease flickering from his eyes now.

  ‘You’ll do no such thing,’ Melanie said. She turned from Max to me. ‘You don’t just come barging into my house talking to my son like this.’

  ‘Please, Mum, just leave it,’ Max pleaded.

  ‘I think Abbie might like to go upstairs,’ I said.

  Melanie narrowed her eyes at me then she gave Abbie a quick shove. ‘Go on,’ she said, ‘upstairs.’

  Abbie complained for just a second; of course I didn’t think at the time that she would hear it all anyway, listening from the stairs. Hear it all, and then tell it all to my Ella, at school. Oh no, I didn’t think of that, right then.

  ‘Well?’ Melanie demanded, hands on hips. ‘What the hell is going on?’

  I looked at Max. My heart was slamming inside my chest. ‘Shall we tell her what you’ve done?’ I said.

  He was really squirming now, like a rat in oil.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘This has all got out of hand.’

  ‘Indeed it has,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll apologize if that’s what you want,’ Max said. ‘I’m sorry, OK?’

  But I wanted more than a surly apology. I wanted an admission. I wanted Max to acknowledge what he had done.

  I jabbed my finger at the air in front of his face. ‘Sorry for what, though, Max? For what you did to me? For what you did to Lydia? For what you said to Sam?’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Melanie pushed herself between us, slapping my hand away from Max’s face. Automatically, Max slunk behind her. How close they were, this family; how tight.

  I leaned around Melanie so that I could still see Max. ‘There is a word for what you did to me. You know what that word is, don’t you, Max? That word is rape.’

  The colour drained from Max’s face. ‘I never raped anyone,’ he said.

  Melanie stared at me, as stunned as if I’d slapped her. ‘How dare you?’ she said. And then, as she realized the greater implication of my words. ‘You? You and my son – that’s absolutely disgusting.’

  ‘Yes it is,’ I said. ‘He came up to my room when he was staying in my house and he forced himself on me.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ Max said, half sobbing now.

  ‘Oh yes it was,’ I said. ‘You completely abused my trust.’

  ‘He’s only fifteen for God’s sake!’ Melanie yelled. ‘You come round here crying rape – you want to be locked up!

  ‘You know what you did to me!’ I said to Max. ‘You know and I know.’

  ‘Get out of my house,’ Melanie spat. She slammed her hands square into my chest, shoving me back towards the door. ‘You fucking . . . pervert. I’ll have the police on you. I’ll have them do you for child abuse.’

  ‘Just try it,’ I said. ‘And I’ll do him for rape.’

  ‘No one will believe you.’

  ‘Try me,’ I said.

  She literally pushed me out of her house, and slammed the door. I staggered backwards into the street, lost my balance and fell, smashing my knee down on the wet pavement. Pain seared through me. For a moment I could not move. I crouched on all fours, the rain hammering on my back.

  Slowly I turned and sat down. I’d scraped the skin right off my knee and the blood was running down my leg in rivulets, made more fluid by the rain. I could not stop shaking, my teeth clattering together like old bones. No one was out walking in that weather now that the kids had all gone home but there were still cars going by; their lights flashing into my eyes made me dizzy. Someone slowed up, and called out, ‘You all right, love?’

  I nodded a vague OK, and started forcing myself to my feet. The blood roared into my head, throbbing in my ears. I started walking back to my car in small, limping steps. God knows what I looked like, with the rain running off my head and my nightie clinging to my thighs. And people would see me, even if I couldn’t see them. From windows, from cars. They’d see me, they’d talk, they’d know.

  What had I hoped to achieve by having it out with Max in front of Melanie like that? I’d wanted his humiliation, but all I’d got was my own.

  Melanie wouldn’t take it any further; she was too smart, too protective. She’d never risk it, just in case I really did stand there in court pointing my finger, screaming rape. She’d never put a child of hers through that.

  And I wouldn’t take it any further either. How could I put my own family through that? I’d done my worst. If there was a pit of judgement I was right at the bottom of it, sliding in the mud.

  It took me a long time to drive home.

  I struggled to see, beyond the hell inside my head, beyond the rain. The windscreen wipers whacked and whacked back and forth, but outside was just endless, flickering blackness, and it wasn’t much after five. I gripped that steering wheel so tight that my fingers locked stiff, and I drove at a crawl, sliding the car through rivers of surface water. You could die on these roads, I thought. You could die, and for hours no one would know.

  I never wanted to drive this route again. I never wanted to go into that town, to see any of those people. I didn’t want them looking, talking. I didn’t want to have to hold my head high.

  I felt the cloak of the hermit, closing me in.

  Ella was waiting for me,

  ‘Where were you?’ she said. ‘I was frightened.’

  Frightened of what? The rain, the dark, the unbearable isolation? We could all die in this house and no one would know.

  ‘I thought you’d gone too,’ she said. ‘I thought you’d gone, like Daddy.’

  I sat on the sofa, still in my wet nightie, and she clung to me. ‘I don’t like it here any more,’ she said. ‘I want to go back to our old house.’

  We did not move from the sofa, Ella and me, for the rest of the day. Soon Sam joined us, curling up on my other side. None of us had dressed. None of us saw fit, now, to pretend. At some point somebody fetched biscuits from the kitchen for us to eat for our supper, but other than that we did not move. We watched TV in our pyjamas, the three of us; we stayed close.

  Only when David returned at gone eleven that night would they leave me. Only then would they go to bed.

  My nightie had dried by then, but so too had the blood and dirt on my leg. My knee had gone stiff; I didn’t want to move it.

  I didn’t want to move at all.

  ‘My God,’ David said as soon as we were alone, ‘what happened to you?’ He crouched down in front of me, looking from my knee to my face in horror.

  I could not seem to find my voice. My mind, my whole being, had slowed right down.

  ‘Jane,’ he said. ‘What happened?’

  I forced myself to speak. ‘I went to see Max,’ I whispered.

  In an instant he was on his feet, the sudden movement jolting me out of my numbness. ‘Max did this?’ he said. ‘I’m going round there. I’m going round there right now.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I fell.’

  He stared at me, mouth clamped tight, breathing hard.

  ‘I went to talk to him,’ I said. ‘And I fell over.’

  ‘God, Jane,’ he said. ‘I’m still going round there. I’m sorting this out.’

  ‘You don’t need to,’ I said. ‘I already have.’

  Our eyes locked. I could feel my heartbeat thumping against my ribs.

  ‘He’s not getting away with this,’ David said.

  ‘Please, David,’ I said. ‘You’ll make things worse. Leave it now. It’s done.’

  He made me sit there while he hunted through the house for plasters, antiseptic, anything else useful he could find. He brought warm water in a kitchen bowl, cotton wool, and a clean towel. He turned me sideways, and lifted my leg, laying it on the towel.
First he cleaned off the mud with wet lumps of cotton wool, dropping them down on the fireplace when he’d done. Then he dabbed at the graze itself, so carefully, so patiently, his hand shaking slightly with the effort. It must have hurt, though I don’t remember.

  I just remember the tenderness of his touch, and the pain on his own face when he looked up at me.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘Believe me, Jane. I am so, so sorry.’

  THIRTY-ONE

  We stayed around the house all weekend, regrouping ourselves, simply trying to cope.

  Together, we talked to Sam. We said all the right things, crowding out his bedroom with both our presence and our words. ‘This will pass,’ we said. ‘Rise above it, and Max will soon tire. Don’t give him the pleasure of seeing that you care.’

  This will pass.

  He didn’t believe us.

  To Ella, who didn’t really understand what was going on, we said ‘Just keep away from Max. Don’t believe what he says. He’s been spreading lies.’

  ‘And don’t listen to Abbie if she tries to tell you otherwise,’ I said, unable to stop myself. ‘In fact, keep away from both of them.’

  ‘But they’re our friends,’ Ella cried.

  On Monday David frog-marched us all in to school.

  The kids were dragged from their beds, forced into the car, shoved into the playground. He and I went in the front entrance for an impromptu appointment with the headmaster. We had to wait in the foyer while the secretary went to see if he was free. I could feel everyone staring at me. I was that woman Max Wilkins had fucked. I was that woman who’d come up to school in her nightdress, shouting for Lydia. Oh yes, I was worth a stare and a laugh.

  ‘The headmaster can see you very briefly now,’ the secretary said when she reappeared, ‘or this afternoon if you’d prefer a longer appointment.’

  ‘Now, thank you,’ David said.

  I had scrubbed up today. I was as clean as could be, in a skirt that covered the gash on my knee, a neat shirt, and boots. I sat in the headmaster’s office with my ankles together. Did he cruise on Facebook, I wondered. Did he keep in touch, check up on his pupils?

  The headmaster’s name was Mr Saunders. We knew that, though he did not know ours. We introduced ourselves. ‘We are Sam Berry’s parents; Sam Berry from Year 10.’

  He listened to our concerns. An incident of internet bullying, David called it, though I had not thought of it like that. I had thought of that Facebook business as a sort of byproduct, an undesirable result of a more undesirable occurrence. But David had worked out his angle; it is his forte after all. Not once did he mention the real issue, that his son’s friend had uninvitedly fucked his son’s mother. Oh no. That would be too much, for all concerned.

  It made no odds. I saw the blankness in the headmaster’s eyes as soon as we mentioned our son’s name; I saw him trying and failing to place him in this small school of his. David saw it too, as I could tell by the persistent pitch of his voice.

  ‘I should have been here,’ David said. He sat on the sofa with his head in his hands and his elbows on his knees; he had been crying, for quite some time. I sat beside him, trying to find some feeling in the ice plane of my heart.

  Earlier, he had collected the children from school on his own; I could not bear to go back there with him. He had had their misery to himself all the way home; he had seen it in the raw. His family was the subject of gossip and speculation; even Ella was suddenly friendless, cold-shouldered now by Abbie and therefore by the rest of Abbie’s gang. She ran in to the house when they got back, teeth chattering she was crying so hard.

  ‘Abbie said she hates me,’ she howled. ‘She said her and Max and their mum hate all of us. She said we were poison.’ She threw herself on her bed, inconsolable. She was still up there now; her sobs pumped through the house like the beat of a bleeding heart.

  What do you do when you are ostracized in a place like this? There is no other place to go. You cannot just turn the other cheek and carry on.

  ‘This is all my fault,’ David said now. ‘None of this would have happened if I’d been here. You’re my family.’ He lowered his hands from his face and looked at me, his eyes red-rimmed in his pale, drawn face. ‘You’re my wife,’ he whispered. ‘I should have protected you.’

  Tentatively I reached out a hand to touch his arm. I watched my fingers move as if they did not belong to me; clumsily, I patted his sleeve. How strange that it should be for me to have to offer him comfort now; for me to try and find comfort to offer at all when I had had none given to me. He let out his breath on a shuddering sob, and grabbed my hand in both of his. He put it to his forehead, then to his lips.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘So very, very sorry.’

  I let him hold me. He clutched me to him awkwardly, crushing my ribs. His breath came laboured against my neck whilst I could barely breathe at all. The familiar feel of him and the scent of him made me want to close my eyes and die, at that moment, in that fleetingly safe place. He loosened his grip and started moving his hands on my back, sort of pressing me with his palms, as if to remember.

  ‘Oh, Jane, Jane,’ he said over and over. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  I did not speak. I couldn’t. I had slipped inside myself where all was dark, all was quiet. I had no forgiveness to offer, and none to ask. I took the comfort of his body against mine, and let him take comfort from me. Comfort, that was all.

  He held me for a very long time.

  That night David slept beside me, on this bed that used to be ours. He lay there in his T-shirt and boxers, and I lay there in my nightie – a clean one, all modesty preserved. His arm was beneath my neck, and I rested my head uncomfortably on his shoulder. In times gone by we would have started the night like this, then one of us – usually me – would have moved away to sleep. This night we stayed as we were; a continuation of our embrace downstairs. And oh what a fragile embrace. Our lower halves did not touch. We could not part, yet nor could we move any closer than this.

  He slept, still with that arm beneath me. If I moved, his hand around my shoulder tightened; he did not want to let me go. He was beside me for his benefit as much as mine. I surely did not need protecting now. It was a little too late for all of that.

  I lay awake, trying to locate proper feeling. I listened to him breathing; such a familiar, forgotten sound. How much warmer it was in the bedroom with him there. I thought of all the empty drawers, cleared of his stuff. I thought of my body, naked beneath my nightie, and what had been done to it. I thought of his naked body; I pictured him with Diana. I thought of him loving someone else.

  Did any of it matter? Did anything matter now but what we had been through, and the easing of pain?

  THIRTY-TWO

  The summer we first moved here I planted a fig tree. I had always dreamed of having a fig tree one day; I pictured the large, drooping leaves shadowing branches bowed under the weight of such luscious, purple fruit. What could be more beautiful, more representative of nature at its most generous and bountiful and of the start of our new lives here? I had the perfect spot for that tree, against the outside wall of the den, where the L shape of the extension created a courtyard; a sun trap on bright, summer days, and in the winter sheltered from the cold northern winds.

  That first year my tree did not grow fruit, nor did it last summer really, apart from a few tiny green bullets, the promise of a harvest to come. Next summer will be its year. Next summer, someone will pick the first fruit, and open it, and eat its sweet flesh. That that someone will not be me is an irony too sour, too cruel to bear.

  David did not return to the London flat, other than to collect his stuff. He moved his clothes back into our bedroom, folding them away into the empty spaces in the drawers, hanging his suits back up in the wardrobe. He could not stay sleeping on the sofa bed. Step by step, he moved back into my room.

  Once again I was listening to him starting so early for the station in the morning, and waiting for him to come home ag
ain at night. I kept his supper ready for him; I asked him about his day. We moved around each other so carefully, each of us treading on glass.

  But where could we go from here? We could not go back; that was done for us.

  Sometimes, I took the children to school, and collected them again, though their silence in the car broke my heart. Other times, I had not the heart to take them at all, and I phoned the school instead with excuses about them being sick. Occasionally I had to go into town for the shops, out of absolute necessity. I kept my eyes down and spoke to no one. I learnt to blinker out the world. We three, Sam, Ella and I, we were not part of this place any more.

  ‘We have to carry on as normal,’ David said in desperation. ‘You cannot just give up and hide away.’

  But there could be no normal for us, here, now, however much we tried.

  David brought home with him the print-outs from various estate agents. Details of properties in places like Walton-on-Thames and Weybridge. Small towns, but not too small. And not so very far from London, though still far enough away from here.

  ‘There are schools nearby,’ he said. ‘There are trains to London; regular, frequent trains.’

  Eagerly, he showed me pictures of the houses he had earmarked in his quick-sought, quick-found suburban idyll. Houses with yellow window-frames; houses with ivy creeping up the walls. Small houses, in streets crammed with other small houses. In towns where no one knew us; where we could start again.

  I tried to imagine myself living in those houses, walking along those streets. Putting out the bins, going to the supermarket; knowing people. I pictured my children making friends, going to the park; and David marching briskly back from the station at the end of another ordinary day. It seemed like a different world.

  Living any normal life, now, seemed like a different world.

  ‘We won’t get so much for our money, of course,’ he said, apologetically, as if I even cared about such things. ‘But these are nice areas. We’ll have shops nearby; the schools. I’ll have the train.’

  We had come full circle. Here was the parallel hoop. I felt myself slip out of my life and into it again.