‘You really fuckin think you are something, don’t you?’
She stood facing away from him. He turned her with a pull of her shoulder. The knife was in his hand, its point upwards.
Her voice had dried in her throat and no words would come out. She felt her legs turn to water.
Sometimes she ran, sometimes she walked. Always looking over her shoulder. Not believing. Checking. When she ran she clenched her fists. How awful. How utterly awful. The walking was mostly climbing the hills and the running was mostly on the down slopes, digging her trainers in so as not to go too fast and fall head over heels. To break a bone, to twist an ankle out here would be a disaster. She would probably die. Slowing herself down by planting her feet sideways against her own headlong downward rush. Sometimes to the left, sometimes to the right. Her arms out to the side, her hands splayed for a fall. This way and that – like herringbone – to slow her descent. What a nightmare. She had not slept but had kept the fire going all night. She’d sat or squatted, staring into its glowing heart, trying not to see the pictures it showed her. Her project destroyed. Her life wrecked. To have set out in the dark would have been too dangerous so she waited for first light. And when she rested from her running she cried. Her stomach was contorted, rigid and rippling with nerves. Full of gut knots. Stomach clenching. She had diarrhoea in the long grass. Afraid to look in case there was blood. It came, and she couldn’t stop it coming. From nerves. Like the crying. She couldn’t help herself. Too far from home to hold on. She remembered as a child wanting to cry – falling, or hearing something hurtful said to her – keeping it all in, holding her face straight until she got into her own room. Then letting it go. Always she kept going south, keeping the sea on her right-hand side. Sometimes it rained, sometimes the sun shone. And the whole time she tried not to think. Or to think local. Immediate. This is a hill. This is a descent. To think practical. Effort needs to be put into this particular climb. Agility needs to be the priority on these rocks. If I come across a sheep path it will get me to some sort of a track which will eventually get me to the tar road. Then a simple walk to the town. Oh fuck. She was so angry. She had never been as angry as this in the whole of her life. Had never used the word fuck, even into herself.
She didn’t know how long it took her – most of the day – but eventually she came to the brow of a hill and saw in the far distance a smudge of smoke from the town. It was still a couple of hours away.
It was good to feel tarmac under her feet. On the road into town she saw a doctor’s house. Set back off the road behind well-trimmed lawns. There was a brass plate on the railings. She read the surgery times and hesitated. Then walked on into the town. Down by the harbour she was aware that her knees were trembling. She didn’t particularly want it, but she knew she needed some food. Her blood sugar must be low. The clock in the grocery shop said 6.30. The Sunday papers were just arriving. At six thirty in the evening? When she opened her purse she saw that the guy had robbed her. With what change he’d left her she bought a sandwich and an orange juice.
‘The bastard.’ She found a place with her back to the pier where she sat eating and drinking in the sunlight. She was amazed at how utterly changed she was and how it didn’t show. In the shop she’d made sentences and spoken and asked for what she wanted. The elderly woman had listened to her and taken her money and smiled a little at the transaction. While she waited for her change she had turned her foot this way and that as if to admire her trainers and bit her fingernails and touched her ear lobe (as she had a habit of doing) and none of what had happened to her the previous day was apparent. Something had profoundly changed and she had no way of showing it. She had no way of talking about it. The outside and the inside. They were not connected. And never would be again.
She needed a plan, needed to take charge of herself. All her drive so far had been focused on returning to the place she started from. That had been simple. Move south. Keep the sea on her right. But now she had to make up her mind what to do.
The doctor’s wife cleared the plates from the table to the stainless-steel draining board. When it was just the two of them they ate in the kitchen. Her husband took what red wine remained in his glass to the other room to read the Sunday papers which had just arrived. The doorbell rang and his wife went to answer it. It was a girl.
‘Yes?’
‘Can I see a doctor?’
‘It’s Sunday evening. Can’t it wait till tomorrow morning?’
‘I’m sorry.’ The girl was hesitant. ‘I didn’t know what day it was.’
The doctor’s wife smiled and began closing the door.
‘Tomorrow morning – ten thirty,’ she said. The girl shook her head in some distress.
‘I need to see a doctor. I think it’s an emergency.’
‘What’s wrong?’ The girl was on the verge of tears and her hands were trembling. ‘Are you on holiday?’ The girl nodded that she was. ‘Just a minute.’ When the woman came back to the door she swung it open and ushered the girl in. Then asked her to take a seat in the surgery and left her on her own.
She tried not to think of anything. There was a desk against the wall. The chair she sat in was sideways on to it. On the desk, a blotting pad with leather corners. The room was silent. There were two framed prints on the walls – one of Matisse’s abstract coloured-paper cut-out, The Snail, the other, Dürer’s drawing of a hare. Made in 1502. The place was lit by a frosted glass window, the upper pane was normal. Blue sky, yellow clouds. She liked the way Dürer signed his initials, the way the legs of the A straddled the D. She could hear seagulls. In a distant part of the house, the click of plates and the rattle of a spoon on stainless steel. Against the other wall was a black examination couch covered with a fresh paper towel or sheet. The backs of her thighs were beginning to adhere to the leatherette material of the chair. They made a sound as she moved her weight. She stood when the doctor came in. He indicated that she should sit again, then lowered himself into the swivel chair at the desk.
‘What can I do for you?’ He was an overweight man in his forties with bushy hair beginning to go grey. His hands were podgy. She looked at his eyes – he had nice dark eyes – then down at her bare knees.
‘I’m not sure.’ She seemed not to know where to start. ‘Just recently I graduated from Art School.’
‘In?’
‘Drawing and Painting.’
‘Where?’
‘Edinburgh.’
‘My home town. How did you do?’
‘Well. At least, I think so,’ she said, then added with some hesitation, ‘they gave me the Manser Prize as well as a qualification.’
‘Congratulations.’
‘But that is not what’s important,’ she said. He smiled, still waiting for her to come to the point. She shook her head – no. ‘I wanted to get away from everything. To work. And I got a fishing boat to drop me off at the abandoned village up the coast at Inverannich.’
He nodded waiting.
‘I have – I was – several times I was bitten by ticks and I wondered . . . some people say you can become very ill . . .’
He stared at her then stood up from his chair. The lids of his eyes were heavy.
‘My wife said you led her to believe this was an emergency.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she began to cry, ‘but I think it is.’ The doctor extended his arm indicating the way to the front door.
‘If you come back in the morning I’ll see you.’ Still the girl sat. She was quietly crying making small wet sounds.
‘I’ve been raped,’ she said. ‘This guy raped me. But I don’t want to go to the police.’ The doctor was still standing over her. He touched her lightly on the shoulder and it made her crying all the louder. He gave a sympathetic sigh and sat down again. ‘He had a knife – a kind of dagger thing . . .’
‘Are you injured?’
‘I don’t know . . . I’m sore.’
‘I’m very sorry,’ he half shrugged, spread his hands. ‘I
n your own time . . .’ She heard him pluck several tissues from a box and they appeared beneath her downturned face. When her crying stopped she dried her face and said, ‘I don’t want a child out of him. Or a disease. So I came here.’
‘I can help with both. Let me get some details first.’ He put on a pair of half-moon spectacles and wrote down her particulars. Then he stood and took down a book and opened it flat on his desk. He studied it silently then said as he read, ‘We have two daughters of our own, older than you no doubt. Both of them up and away. Can you undress and lie here?’ He indicated the examination table. He reached into a cupboard and produced a paper hospital gown which he gave her. ‘You may get dressed in this wonderful outfit temporarily.’ He pointed to a grey canvas screen.
‘Everything?’
‘I think it’s best.’ Then he went out into the hallway and called his wife. There were lowered voices from outside the door.
Behind the screen she undressed, not daring to look into the clothes she took off, embarrassed and scared of what she might see. She put on the nightdress thing – shivering now, yet her armpits were wet with perspiration. She lay on the examination couch and felt it cold even through the paper sheet. The doctor came back into the surgery. He washed and dried his hands, put on latex gloves. The doctor’s wife came after him with the colour supplement from the Observer.
‘Would you like me to hold your hand?’ she said.
‘No, thanks. I feel not too bad.’ The doctor’s wife smiled and went to sit by the frosted window, her back to the room. The sound of her turning the pages made the silence of the room even more apparent. The doctor worked quickly – examining, taking samples, giving his patient commands and requests, asking her terrible questions, writing the answers on a pad on his desk. He gave her an injection in her hip which remained in her like a nugget of lead. Occasionally he went back to the desk and consulted his tome – as if it was a recipe book. He looked closely through his glasses at the bruising on her arms which she hadn’t noticed before – then over his glasses at her face and the scraped bruise on her forehead. He warned her before he did things – like when he used forceps to pluck a few hairs from her head and some from her pubes. He asked her about allergies, then gave her some tablets.
‘What are they?’
‘Antibiotics. I’ll prescribe the rest for you. It’s most important you finish the whole course.’ He handed her a small plastic tumbler full of straw-coloured water. ‘Sorry about the state of the water but it is perfectly safe – it’s just peat colouration.’ She put the tablets in her mouth and swallowed them down.
‘You’ve picked up another tick on the way here, I see.’ With the forceps he slowly drew the creature out of a skin fold at her stomach and pressed a pinch of cotton wool to the pinpoint wound. ‘That’s the best way to remove them. You shouldn’t burn them or put Vaseline on them. Just gently pull them off and treat the wound.’ He wiped the black spot onto a tissue and put the forceps in a jar of disinfectant. He gave a sigh and looked up at her. He tapped his temple.
‘We can perform effective damage limitation but the real hurt is in here. Very hard to get rid of. They say it keeps coming back. You have to work on the flashbacks. Where are you from?’
‘Edinburgh.’
‘Yes, yes of course – you said. I’ll give you some helpful addresses to contact when you go home.’ He touched his wife’s shoulder. ‘Thank you, love,’ and she left the room. On the way out she touched the back of the girl’s hand where it lay – gently with her own – almost covering it. Her touch was light and dry and motherly. The girl swung herself off the examination table and sat on the chair again, smoothing the strange textured paper garment beneath her.
‘I think the best thing to do,’ said the doctor, ‘is to proceed as if the law was involved. That way you can change your mind later.’
‘I won’t.’
‘Have you washed since . . . ?’
‘I’ve been in the sea.’
‘Is that not washing?’
‘It’s swimming.’
‘Do you have a change of clothes?’ She shook her head – no.
‘Not with me. I just ran first thing this morning.’
‘These are what you were wearing at the time?’ He looked over at the pile of clothes she had left on the table by the screen. She nodded – yes. ‘I’d like to hold onto them. Would you have any objections to wearing some of my daughters’ things?’
‘I won’t change my mind about the police.’
‘Fair enough.’ He looked her up and down. ‘You and my youngest are of a size. She’s in Australia.’ He excused himself and left the room. He seemed to be away for a long time. She could hear someone treading the floorboards upstairs because they creaked. The ceiling light was a double fluorescent tube.
The doctor came back and put the girl’s clothes into a brown paper bag.
‘My wife will look after you just now.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Have you money?’ She looked up at him startled. ‘Sorry, I mean would you like me to order you a bed and breakfast for tonight?’
‘Is there a bank I can go to in the morning?’
‘Yes – several.’
She smiled for the first time since she’d come in.
‘I thought you were going to charge me.’
In her presence he phoned a landlady from the town and booked her in.
‘You’ll like her – she’s a very calm and comforting sort of person.’
The doctor’s wife arrived with a pair of jeans, underwear and a maroon T-shirt which had been a handout at a conference on blood pressure.
‘There’s holes worn in the elbows of this sweater. But if it got cold you could push up the sleeves. That seems to be the style nowadays. You’re welcome to have a shower first.’
‘Then come into the other room for a cup of tea,’ said the doctor.
‘Or something stronger,’ said his wife. The doctor stood up.
‘Is that everything?’ He went to the book on his desk and ran his eye down the page. He touched his pockets as if it would remind him of something. ‘And what of him? The perpetrator?’
‘I threw boiling water at him but it missed,’ she said. ‘All it did was make him more angry. Gave him more excuses. He had a knife – all I kept saying was I do not consent to this.’ And again she was crying. Again he handed her tissues.
‘Where is he now?’
‘He just went on. To the north.’
‘Did you know him?’
‘No.’
‘You’re lucky to be alive, by the sound of it. Did you speak to him?’
‘A bit. He said he was on the boats.’
‘Everybody here’s been on the boats. Except red-haired women.’ The doctor put up his hands defensively when she looked up at him. ‘Apologies. It’s one of the fishermen’s superstitions.’
Even though it was after eleven the bedroom was filled with a milky light. Things could be made out – the mirror reflecting the not-completely-dark sky, the Victorian picture of cattle drinking, the wardrobe and fireplace. There were still slivers of light in the west. It had been the longest day recently but she couldn’t remember how long ago. The window was open an inch or two at the bottom and the net curtains furled and unfurled in the draught. The whisky was not doing the trick as the doctor had promised it would. Despite having had no sleep the night before she found it difficult to get over. She kept seeing him. Him. The fucking thug. To wrench herself away from such images was difficult. And the young men of the town did not help – gunning their engines and squealing their tyres as they cornered into the Square. When they drove off, in the silence which followed, she could hear the sound of geese. They were somewhere in the sea loch and the racket they made was halfway between lamentation and laughter. She’d never heard anything like it. Images of him kept leaping into her head making her angry. Sick, as well. She kept swallowing hard, keeping things down. It was hard to get rid of. His eyes. That uppe
r lip. His stupid boy’s knife. The pain he caused her. Maybe the urge to throw up was the tablets – or the alcohol – she wasn’t used to the taste of whisky. She remembered it from childhood – from her mother’s remedy for toothache. Whisky painted onto the hurting tooth. The doctor had urged her to a second drink and she knew she shouldn’t have taken it because he poured them large. But when she’d seen all the paintings on the walls – abstract landscapes by Barbara Rae, still lives by Elizabeth Blackadder and Anne Redpath – she felt at home, expected maybe to see some work by her own parents there. And all the pills he’d shoved into her. And that injection. What was it? When she closed her eyes the bed raced backwards and she had to snap them open again to stop the sensation.
No, she wouldn’t tell her mother – not a word. It would be too distressing for her.
The way he undid his belt with a kind of smirk. And set his binoculars on a rock. She jumped out of bed and closed the sash window, pushed it down with both hands. Thud. The sound of the geese lessened, the curtain was still. She got back into bed again. She smelt of something she did not recognise. The T-shirt belonging to the doctor’s youngest. It had been laundered but somehow when it was against the heat of her body it took on a smell of its own. A foreign smell – a maroon smell – a smell whose source was now at the other side of the world. It wasn’t offensive, just someone else. A woman. Having been raped and finding herself wearing another woman’s clothes she felt somehow representative. One size fits all. She endured the condition of women across the world. That buckle sound of the belt opening and her incredulous oh no, he’s not after that. There is no shame about being raped. If somebody punches you in the mouth or glasses you in a pub you’re not ashamed. You’re injured. It’s not about shame. As he was taking off his jeans she made a run for it but he easily caught up with her on the flat rocks by her swimming pool and dragged her to the ground.
Matters of Life & Death Page 14