Celeste had deleted her Tinder dating app. Knowing that Ben was back in town had disrupted her precarious mental equilibrium. It was no use pretending otherwise. That excruciatingly embarrassing incident with Steve had made it clear to her. She was not in the right frame of mind for dating or romance. In fact, in the past week Celeste had deleted all her personal social media accounts (except for the ones that were not in her real name). It was bad enough being stalked in real life without having people stalking her in cyberspace. Just about everyone was a stalker these days when you stopped to think about it – herself included. Until the recent upset, Celeste had enjoyed many a hilarious, drunken evening with Anya and Jessi, the three of them ‘stalking’ some guy that they agreed was fit, through his Facebook page or Instagram account.
From now on, as far as her own social life was concerned, she would stick to texting and WhatsApp. If it wasn’t a direct message, she wasn’t interested, she had decided. Her privacy was more important to her than boosting her capital in the social media popularity stakes by growing the numbers of her followers and ‘likes’. However, the fact Celeste had deleted her own personal social media accounts did not mean that she was no longer active online. On the contrary, she was more invested than ever with her fake (or as she preferred to call them, ‘pseudo’) social media accounts.
Celeste had bailed on meeting Ben at the pub that Saturday night. She had intended to go. She’d even dressed up for the evening – all in black – black polo neck, black jeans and black thigh-length heeled suede boots. She’d got as far as walking round from her flat to the pub entrance, repeating the mantra, ‘I am strong, I am free, I can do this. He has no power over me anymore’. But when she pushed open the door of the Cricketers Arms and saw him sitting there, scowling fiercely at the screen of his mobile phone, she lost her nerve.
God he must be so angry with me, she thought. His glaring eyes and furrowed brow said it all. He must have seen the tweets she’d been sending out on a daily basis since that night at Heavana when he crashed back into her consciousness on his return to London. She had set up a fake Twitter account called FeministFlowerPower (@FemFloPow) in which she interspersed tweets and retweets of floral designs and arrangements that pleased her with posts related to the #MeToo movement and her own survivor’s story and reflections. She had come to the conclusion that the best defence was offence at least where her mental well-being was concerned. With every tweet she sent out relating to predatory behaviour or sexual abuse she made sure to put him in the frame by adding the hashtags #survivor #Ibelieve #predator and #MeToo alongside the hashtag #BenJohnson. He was at liberty to block @FemFloPow from following him but he couldn’t do anything about the hashtags that linked his name to predatory behaviour and sexual abuse.
So that explained why he was so desperate to meet her, Celeste concluded. He was trying to save his reputation. Celeste guessed that he had worked out she was behind the fake Twitter account she’d set up to taunt him, since her tweets were peppered with intimate and embarrassing details from their past that only she could know. Having been on the receiving end of his temper as a child, it made her scared to think how he might try to punish her if ever he was able to get her on her own. But she was fired up by what was going on all around her in the media and determined not to back down.
She’d only caught a glimpse of him that night at Heavana and hadn’t dared to put her head round the door when he came to Seventh Heaven, and she knew you could never trust social media photos, so now, standing in the doorway of the pub, she took a long, hard look. He was as handsome as ever, with a full head of brown hair dropping across his brow and a firm, arrogant jawline. His profile picture on Tinder was a fair representation. He had always been the pack leader at school as much for his dominant personality as for his clean-cut good looks marred only at the time by teenage acne. His complexion had cleared up and his face had matured: any gawkiness now morphed into intense, rugged features – he could pass for a male model, with the kind of face and torso used to advertise razors or aftershave – the essence of masculine, the breed of man every woman in her twenties would like to wake up to in her bed.
Before heading out to the pub, she’d had a drink with Jessi and Anya at the flat. Anya had made her a Tom Collins ‘for Dutch courage’ and because it gave her an excuse to have one herself. They’d looked up Ben’s social media accounts to check on his latest posts.
‘Oh my God, you’re cyberstalking him.’ Anya laughed as she glanced over Celeste’s screen at her fake Twitter accounts. In addition to @FemFloPow she had opened three other Twitter accounts that (if Ben bothered to check) would look like innocuous accounts forming part of his extensive fan club of followers (five thousand plus) and would arouse no suspicion.
‘I’m not prying,’ said Celeste defensively while she searched up his account and scrolled down through his tweets. ‘I mean, it’s not as if he’s hiding anything. He wants us all to know exactly how important he’s become, and how much money he’s made and what a great guy he is!’
Anya reached for her own phone and searched for ‘Ben Johnson’.
‘Looks as though he’s been making himself unpopular recently,’ said Anya. ‘There’s a whole #MeToo Twitter storm against him, calling him out as a bully and a sexist.’ Celeste said nothing.
When Anya had finished looking through the torrent of online abuse, whipped up anonymously by Celeste, she looked at Ben’s own Twitter feed. Ben’s recent tweets revealed his promotion to the position of ‘Vice President’ at the London office of the private hedge fund he had worked for in New York since graduating from Yale, and splashed pictures of his newly acquired company car – a red Ferrari coupé – clearly the biggest perk of his new job and the one that made his heart sing.
‘That beast must be worth more than a quarter of a million pounds!’ squealed Anya who was pretty clued up on such things.
‘That’s disgusting!’ said Celeste.
‘Car porn,’ said Jessi.
‘Better than sex!’ said Anya in admiration. ‘Not bad for a welcome handshake to the London office.’
‘If you’ve got it, flaunt it!’ chipped in Jessi.
‘I’ve got to meet him,’ said Anya, undeterred by the negative posts. ‘Can you give me an intro?’
‘Don’t go there,’ said Celeste grimly. ‘Anyway, I think he’s seeing someone. He was with some woman at Heavana that night.’
*
Celeste didn’t envy his success. She couldn’t imagine anything worse than ‘selling your soul’ to a financial institution. Learning the skills of floristry had unleashed a creative passion in her own soul, and she could feel herself gradually unfurling like a tight spring bud coming into bloom. She was now an attractive and confident young woman – or at least, she had learnt how to wear that mask. The years of therapy had helped to some extent. She couldn’t escape the legacy of the past, but she refused to be Ben’s victim any longer. In recent months, all the media coverage of the #MeToo movement had given her a new sense of purpose and self-worth. Though she had never had her day in court, there were other ways. His return to the UK was a pivotal moment. She had been steeling herself to confront him tonight at the Cricketers Arms, to start the conversation that should have been had seven years ago.
‘He wants to talk… so let’s talk,’ she said to herself. ‘It is long overdue.’ For too many years they had been locked in an unspoken, shameful pact of silence.
And yet, at the last second, she couldn’t face it. Before he had a chance to look up and see her standing there, she turned tail and fled…
In those dreadful black weeks after the party, she had imagined taking her own life and had made several abortive plans. She had wanted to hide in the dark, better still to disintegrate and disappear. The last thing she could contemplate was opening up to her mother or to the police about what Ben had done to her. She believed that whatever she had suffered down in the woods was nothing more than she deserved. She hated herself and she hated
Ben.
Now seven years older and wiser, she despised herself for her cowardice in being the one to flee the premises of the pub. There was no logic to it. With the passage of time, she understood that he was the one who should be hanging his head in shame. Nothing could exonerate him for what had happened in the woods that night. Ben had never said he was sorry or made atonement for that crime. He was her aggressor. Perhaps she had been a willing party when he led her down to the woods – but she hadn’t been in a fit state to give her consent to what had happened on the bare earthen floor of the boathouse. She was drunk. She was high on weed and God knows what else that he had spiked her drink with. He had used brute force to pin her to the ground.
By force of concentration and reflection, Celeste had recovered certain memories from the night. Now she could remember that he had been the one to ply her with drinks on the dance floor. He had painted a very different picture of her at the inquest. But in truth he was the one who had made her drunk and high. It made her uneasy to wonder what else he could have lied about.
She still struggled with her inability to remember. There was no amount of mindfulness that could break through the fog of uncertainty shrouding what had taken place. But yet there were certain scenes in the boathouse that she could now recall vividly. Flat on her back, she had fought him to escape, and he had held her down. He should have been prosecuted. He had raped her – it was as simple as that.
With this new lucidity, she could see that her own weakness and stupidity that night did not excuse his crime. Her punishment had been her suffering. It wasn’t right that Ben should pursue his carefree life of privilege and power scot-free, unpunished for the wrongs he had committed in the past. He had not been prosecuted. But did that mean he should never be punished? It was not too late.
Those words, she’d heard Anya say in jest on more than one occasion in response to some spat with her friends, came into her head as she turned on her heel:
Revenge is a dish best served cold.
Crossing the road, an expensive-looking low-slung red sports car caught her eye, parked on the other side of the street. She approached the car to be certain. Of course, it was his red Ferrari, parked on double yellow lines.
‘Typical,’ she said out loud. If your car’s worth a quarter of a million pounds, I guess you don’t worry about parking tickets, she thought bitterly.
She was about to walk on, when she noticed the number plate.
‘BJ 696’
To her mind, there was nothing more cringey than a personalised number plate. Obviously, it was ‘BJ’ for Benedict Johnson. But then there was the crass double entendre clearly intended and coupled with the sexual connotations of the numbers on the plate. It felt like a punch in the face. So, he was still the same old Ben she remembered from their school days – the old joke – putting himself out there as deserving of sexual favours from girls. He hadn’t learnt a thing.
That is just so Ben and so beyond pathetic, she thought. How much did he have to pay for that absurd, pretentious number plate? Clearly, the message of the #MeToo movement had passed him by. Suddenly, she felt empowered and incandescent with rage. The red mist came down. It was a good feeling.
She was holding her house keys in the palm of her hand inside the pocket of her coat as she always did when walking home alone late at night. She always planned ahead – it made her nervous standing at the front door with her back to the street fumbling in her bag. Now, on impulse, she took her hand out of her pocket, glanced behind to make sure no one was following, then braced her arm to scrape her house key along the full length of his car as she marched off briskly in the direction of the flat.
When Celeste got back, Anya and Jessi had already gone to bed. She made herself a cup of tea and remembered that she hadn’t eaten supper. She took an apple from the fruit bowl and a sharp knife from the drawer. She held the blade up and watched the light glinting off the metal. For a fleeting second, she held the knife against her arm where the faint lines of old scars were visible on her skin. Then she smiled to herself and cut the red apple into quarters. She put the knife out of the way and ran her fingertips gently, almost lovingly along the scars. The apple was sweet, crunchy and cleansing. It was a simple pleasure that made her feel like a normal person once again. It was good to feel calm and in control – free of the old compulsion. Defacing his car with a deep, metallic gash had been so much more satisfying than the painful and bloody act of seeking to relieve the anger and angst etched into her brain through self-harm.
That night she slept better than she had slept in weeks. It was as if her act of vandalism had lanced a boil. She woke at dawn, refreshed and full of optimism, looking forward to her Sunday outings in the van driving around London delivering flowers to the dead. But before that, she was going for a run. It was time to get fit.
With a new sense of focus and determination, Celeste ripped open the Amazon package that had arrived for her the previous day and took out a pair of black Nike running shoes. She couldn’t wait to try them on. She tied the laces in a double bow. They fitted perfectly.
PRESENT
29
I’ve seen off Steve, now that man from the club is on your tracks. There’s something about You, some vulnerability that drives men crazy. They just can’t leave You alone.
I wasn’t counting on company when I placed the order on CelestialHeadstones.com. It cost me a whole week’s food allowance on my student budget, so You can imagine that I was disappointed when he turned up at the church. I was hoping for the chance to speak to You alone.
Men harry You like wild dogs circling a wounded gazelle. It’s hard loving You.
Being so sentimental, I had a hunch You wouldn’t turn this order down. I found some news items about the ten-year anniversary of this girl’s death. It seemed fitting somehow. I knew her story would touch You.
Even so, I almost thought You were going to disappoint me when I saw You taking off across the park in your new black trainers at the crack of dawn. I was in my usual place behind the bins when You came out of the front door. I could see that one of the laces was loose and it bothered me to think You might trip and tumble down the steps. But You noticed, and You turned away from me to tie your laces. And I was rewarded with a symphony of black Lycra, bending and stretching, that set my heart pumping and made my eyes water as I watched You tie each trainer in a double knot.
Anxiously I watched You jogging down the pavement. You looked so lost and lonely on that empty street. I would have followed You into the park, but there’s not much in the way of trees and vegetation close to the paths – just wide, open grass. And, anyway I’m not in training. I don’t want to make a fool of myself, puffing and panting after You.
He was watching You too. Later. He was there when you chained up your bicycle outside Seventh Heaven after your run and your breakfast and your shower. He was parked in a side road, sitting behind the wheel. He must have seen You going into Seventh Heaven, and he must have seen You later getting into the company van and then followed You here. Sick bastard. Does he think he can turn your head with a fancy set of wheels?
He isn’t right for You. He doesn’t know You like I do…
Just when You were sitting comfortably on the bench… just when I had You in my sights… just when I was working up the courage to break cover and declare myself… right then, he had to rock up and spoil everything.
He got what he deserved.
Perhaps those hammer blows will teach him not to chase after You in his flashy red car.
*
Meghan had allowed Celeste to take the Tuesday off shop duties and to borrow the van for the whole day because she had a CelestialHeadstones.com order that involved a two-hour drive from Pimlico to the Oxfordshire village of Astridge. The village lay on the western boundary of the county, closer to Birmingham than Oxford. This was beyond her usual cut-off distance for accepting orders, but she didn’t want to turn this one down. She knew from the notes in the booking that the
grave was that of a teenage girl whose life had been cut short in unspecified circumstances and that Tuesday was the tenth anniversary of the month of her death. She was moved and disturbed by the story and it felt right to be facilitating a gesture to cherish and honour the memory of the young girl’s life.
What had first caught Celeste’s attention when the order popped up on her screen was that the girl had died aged only seventeen, the same age at which her own life had been devastated. This added poignancy to her task.
It was almost noon by the time Celeste arrived at the church. When she found the grave, she read the inscription and shivered to see that the time of death engraved on the headstone was simply given as ‘April 2008’ – the actual date must have been unknown, suggesting that the poor girl’s life had ended in appalling circumstances.
In Loving Memory
Susan Alison Slade
21st March 1991 – April 2008
The granite headstone was cut in a simple design that stood out from the others in the historic parish church of St Mary’s, Astridge, which were mostly ancient, sunken, crooked graves covered with lichen and moss. Usually on her visits to remote country churchyards, Celeste arrived to find the grave bare and neglected. But she was surprised to see that the plot and the headstone were clean and tidy and already adorned with several floral tributes and memorials sparkling in the spring sunshine.
There were poignant handwritten messages from family members. Celeste bent down to read a note written in a childish script that was pinned to a red velvet heart, hand-stitched with silver sequins and beads:
No Smoke Without Fire Page 15