by Rosie Price
She woke at eleven to an empty house. The windows had been opened again, and there was a note on the kitchen table from Alison, who was working at the council that day. Kate remembered her late-night anxiety and, though in the light of day it seemed far less likely that she could be pregnant, she left the house without breakfast, locked the door behind her, and walked down the hill into the town. It was the last week of the school holidays, and on the pavements were skateboards and bicycles. A house had balloons tied to the door, and chalk on the pavement outside spelt out in white and pink letters, in adult’s handwriting, “Sophie’s Seventh Birthday.”
Last night, in her child’s bed, she had been struck by the feeling that she was too much a woman to be lying there. Just as when she had lost her virginity as a seventeen-year-old and had felt a proud perverseness in using a large, yellow duck-shaped sponge to wash in between her legs in her mother’s bath, she felt now that she had lost not just her virginity but some essential goodness she’d never managed to appreciate.
* * *
—
The pharmacy was on the high street, and the medicine counter was on the first floor. Kate queued for five minutes behind a woman who insisted on taking three different behind-the-counter eczema creams from their boxes and inspecting their labels before returning all three to the shop assistant and then paying for a packet of lozenges with silver and bronze coins. As the woman emptied out her purse, the assistant asked her if she had a loyalty card.
“I used to have a loyalty card,” the woman said cryptically, before adding, for clarity, “but I don’t anymore.”
“That’s fine,” the assistant said firmly.
“No I did, I used to have one, I came back from holiday,” said the woman, looking up at the polystyrene-tiled ceiling, “musta been, 2007, 2008?” She had, at this point, ceased to count her coins so as to give her full attention to the accuracies of her narrative. “No, 2007. I came back from holiday, and there was a letter saying that it had been expired due to inactivity. Expired due to inactivity,” the woman repeated, unaware of the queue lengthening behind her.
“Next please!” Another frantic assistant had opened a second till, beckoning toward Kate, who shuffled past the coin-woman toward him.
“Hi,” said Kate, in a quiet voice. “I need the morning-after pill.”
“You need to wait here for the pharmacist,” said the man, gesturing to a semi-enclosed area filled with plastic chairs. Clearly he was relieved that he could not help her. Before Kate had even moved away, he turned to the next customer. “Next please!”
It was another fifteen minutes before the pharmacist saw Kate. When at last she nodded that Kate could come into her office, she had seen three other people already, who had all been waiting for less time.
“I’m sorry,” said the pharmacist, “but they all made appointments.”
“Oh,” said Kate. “I didn’t know you could.”
“Well, only a week in advance. So, no, for the morning-after pill you can’t make appointments.”
“Not unless you schedule your sex?”
The pharmacist did not laugh; it was not really a joke. She pushed her clipboard to the center of the table.
“How many hours ago did you have sex?”
Kate counted. Twenty-four hours since she’d arrived home. Another two since she’d left. Another ten before that since she’d been untouched, unfucked.
“Thirty-six,” she said.
“And did you use a condom?” said the pharmacist.
“No,” said Kate. “He didn’t.”
Pause, tick.
“Is he a regular partner?”
“No,” said Kate. “He isn’t.”
Pause, tick.
“And are you taking any form of oral contraception or do you have any kind of contraceptive implant, coil, or mechanism installed?”
“I do not.”
The pharmacist paused again. From a small cupboard above her desk she took a paper cup and a cardboard box, which contained a single pill packet.
“Drink this and take this. If you vomit or have diarrhea in the next twelve hours, come back and see me.”
Kate popped the pill from its packet and swallowed it with the water the pharmacist gave her. The pharmacist got up again and took a leaflet from her desk.
“There’s no replacement for a condom when it comes to protecting yourself against sexually transmitted diseases, but you might at some stage want to consider the coil.” The leaflet was dark pink, and on the cover was a diagram of a uterus. “The Giselle is the newest model. I’d recommend it.” She turned the leaflet to face Kate and opened it, pointing to the lists of side effects and benefits. “A lot of women object to putting chemicals in their body but the dose is really very low; they’ve developed a spermicide-releasing technology that destroys semen before it reaches the womb, so the protection works on a defensive as well as an offensive level. The installation is painful, but brief, and it only needs replacing once every five years.”
Kate looked closely at the drawing of the piece of metal, trying to fathom where exactly a five-year supply of spermicide might be stored.
“Right,” she said. “Thanks.”
“Take it,” said the pharmacist. Kate took the leaflet. At the door, she paused.
“Can you give me something to stop it hurting?” she said. Kate watched the pharmacist carefully, for any sign of recognition, and, for a split second, the pharmacist looked back at her. But before she had time to reply, Kate spoke again. “It was a bit, you know, rough.”
“Paracetamol,” the pharmacist said. She looked back down at her notes. “You can buy it over the counter. And there are creams, if necessary.”
Kate waited, in case there was anything else.
“Perhaps you should see a doctor,” said the pharmacist as Kate opened the door.
14
It was hot, and the nights were still. Kate slept with the windows open to let in the cooler air, but even the still air stirred the fabric of the curtains and woke her to the conviction that there was somebody standing over her. A weight on her chest pinned her to the bed and obscured her vision. Though she blinked and opened her mouth, no sound came out, and the figure above her pressed down harder and harder until, unexpectedly and without warning, it released her and she rolled over and turned on the light.
“It’s like that painting,” Kate said to her friend Claire, one night when they were alone together in the pub. Other than her mother, this was the first time Kate had seen anybody—or even properly spoken to anybody—since it had happened. Max had texted her a few times, but she’d sent him only short replies back. She did not phone, and neither did Max challenge her distancing. When Kate had arranged to meet up with Claire, she’d half entertained the thought that this might be the moment to tell her what had happened. Claire did not know Lewis, after all. But now that they were in the pub, Kate kept thinking about how long it was since they’d last spoken, and she found it impossible to articulate anything other than dreams. “It’s like that painting, The Nightmare, with the little devil thing on the chest of the sleeping woman.”
“My little brother used to sleepwalk,” said Claire. “Once he pissed in King James’s Castle.”
Claire had three near indistinguishable younger brothers, all of whom played rugby for Claire and Kate’s old school. Somehow, this anecdote did not surprise Kate.
“Pissed in what?”
“It was this Lego castle he built. Battlements and a moat and everything, with a drawbridge he used to close at night. He was really upset when he realized what he’d done.”
“Yeah, it’s not really the same,” said Kate, level.
“No. Yours sound fucked, man.”
Kate had to agree. But the dreams went on, and at night she existed in a state of immobilized terror, while in the day she
was restless, exhausted. The deadline for her to put in her film school application came and went, and she did nothing: she had left the camera she’d meant to borrow from Max in its box in his bedroom. Instead, she drank, and disposed of the empty bottles in the dumpster at the end of their road so that she wouldn’t be tempted to count how many there were. Printed on the dumpster’s side was RIPPON, a word that stopped Kate’s heart every time she saw it. She threw each bottle into the dumpster with increasing force so that it shattered on whatever debris was contained there, and walked on, guilty and anxious.
Kate learned very quickly that there was no subtle way of explaining that she had been raped. There was no oblique way of putting it, and because there was no halfway point between having been raped and having not, there were no means of testing the water, of hinting at her condition to measure the response of any potential confidante. There were only the raped and the un-raped.
And so instead she said nothing, hoping that if she chose not to voice whatever it was that lodged itself in her chest, somewhere between her lungs and her heart, it would diminish; that its toxicity might find its own means of excreting itself from her body, in her sweat, her blood, her spit, and her shit; that by simply breathing and being, she might gradually cleanse herself without the horror of ever having to give it a recognizable shape and, unarticulated, perhaps it might recede.
* * *
—
In the middle of September Kate moved to London. She had started sending longer replies to Max’s messages, and they had arranged to have a takeaway on the night she arrived. There would be a whole week of them living alone together before Nicole moved in, and the flurry of communication in anticipation of their next meeting made Kate feel, at some moments, as if nothing had changed: she would arrive in London in a few days, they would eat Chinese food at the kitchen table of their new flat, they would drink cheap wine. But when she thought about the last time she had seen Max, the excitement congealed. On the designated day, Kate packed clothes and kitchen utensils into a rucksack, to the outside of which she strapped her bulkiest belongings—leather trainers, two pans, and a colander—and Claire, who had given her and her enormous suitcase a lift to the station, helped her onto the train.
“You look so fucking intrepid,” Claire told her.
“Come and visit me,” said Kate as the doors closed.
When the train lurched away from the platform, she felt bare, but as soon as she arrived in the high-ceiling two-floored flat she knew that nothing she already owned belonged there, and she was glad that she had only brought two bags with her; Claire would have said that the place resembled an asylum, with its white walls and cream carpets—and they were cream, rather than the ugly beige of Alison’s ex–council house—and its windows that opened only halfway so as to prevent its inhabitants from taking the quickest (the easy) way out.
Max had left a key for her under the rug, and he’d forgotten to shut the balcony doors, presenting a challenge to opportunistic thieves. But rapists didn’t break in via rooftops, Kate thought, as she searched the house for intruders with one of her kitchen knives held tightly in her right hand; rapists had front-door keys and security codes, so she needn’t have worried. Once she’d scouted the flat twice, she took a shit, nervously, watching the handle of the door in case her intruder chose this moment to humiliate her. She still had the knife, balanced on the side of the bathtub, and as she pulled up her knickers, she felt the urge to turn it blade up and to push it inside herself, if only to remember—really remember, without the sudden panic but with full cogency—what it had been like.
Instead, she unpacked her kitchen things, went out to the shops and bought bread for breakfast, and drank two-thirds of a bottle of wine while she waited for Max to come home, trying to make the television work before giving up and sitting in silence on the floor of the living room, watching the sky darken through the balcony windows and wondering whether anybody was looking in. By the time it was fully dark he still had not arrived, and neither had he replied to her messages. She ate toast to quell her hunger. Several times she half thought she heard a key turn in the lock, and although it was always nothing, she held her breath, waiting for him to enter, to apologize for his lateness, to sense some fundamental change in her: to come to her side, to let her rest her head in his lap, and to talk to her about his day until she was at ease, until she could trust him enough to tell him what had been done to her. But she waited, and he did not return. By midnight, he was still not back, and because she had not yet made her bed, she fell asleep on the sofa.
15
Max had not seen Kate since the party at Latimer Crescent. He’d hardly seen her on the night of the party either, and he couldn’t remember how much of a state he’d been in. He had a suspicion that he’d abandoned her, as he had a habit of doing when he was a bit too pissed. He knew she’d slept in his bed because the pillow was indented and the cover pulled back when he woke in the morning. She’d left already, William said when at last Max made it downstairs. Max wasn’t quite sure how, but he knew that at some point he had ended up at the bottom of the garden, climbing up onto the trampoline—the pride of his teenage years but now long neglected—where Nicole and her friend Elias were doing lines. Max rolled onto the canvas, which bounced, and Nicole and Elias both turned and shouted at him to be still.
“You know this thing is basically a sieve,” Max said, sliding on his belly toward them so as not to disturb the pile of powder Elias was gathering. “Watcha doing there, sis?”
“My birthday present,” Nicole said, watching Elias beadily.
“You want one?” Elias said.
“Elias,” Nicole said, “that’s my baby brother.”
Elias waved his hand without looking up. “I won’t make him pay,” he said.
“Maxie doesn’t do drugs,” Nicole said, pinching him hard on the cheek, “do you?”
“Yes please,” said Max, batting Nicole’s hand away.
Max had done purer coke than this, and the bump Elias gave him was more like a shot of espresso than the buzz he’d been after. Elias, who had been watching him for a reaction, appeared to be impressed by his lack of one, and lined up another. Max stayed on the trampoline with Elias for a while after Nicole had gone back to the party. Elias had been at university with Nicole, but he’d been living abroad, on and off, for the last few years and had only just returned.
“You should have come to see me,” Elias said when Max told him he’d been studying in Colombia a year and a half ago. “I was living in Rio then.”
“I’ve been wanting to go back to Latin America for ages. I tried to persuade Kate—”
“Kate?” Elias flicked the dead ash at the end of his cigarette onto the trampoline.
“My friend. She’s here, somewhere.”
“Why doesn’t she want to go?”
Max shrugged. “Money.”
“Go on your own, then.”
That night Elias had stayed in one of the spare rooms and had hung around for most of the next day after everybody else had gone. They ate brunch out in the sunshine, and after Nicole had gone to nap, Elias went to find some beers for him and Max. Later in the day, William came out to sit with them, but he didn’t take his glasses off and hardly spoke, soon returning inside and shutting himself in his office.
“Did Nicole tell you what’s going on with our uncle?” Max said to Elias. He wasn’t sure if he needed to excuse his father’s mood or to elicit sympathy for it. Elias was wearing sunglasses; it was hard to make out his expression.
“No,” he said. “What is going on?”
Max shook his head. “Family shit.” They sat in silence for a while before Elias spoke again.
“You know what we should do. Tonight. We should go to the Royal China Club. The duck is fucking incredible—better than you get in Shanghai. I know a guy so we won’t have to queue.”
&n
bsp; * * *
—
Max started spending more time with Elias, and they would meet in Moorgate when Elias finished work, standing on the pavement outside crowded bars drinking cold beer and smoking. The day he was supposed to move in with Kate, Max had been on his way from the new flat to Latimer Crescent when Elias had phoned, asking what time he was free.
“I can’t,” Max said. “I haven’t even starting packing.”
“Just one,” Elias said.
It had got to ten P.M. before they agreed it was time to schedule a hiatus from drinking and to eat something. Elias negotiated them the best table by the window of a vegetarian curry house and, without looking at the menu, asked for a lamb biryani.
“Or chicken,” he said, batting away the menu the waiter tried to hand to him, “chicken is fine if you can’t do lamb.”
“This is a vegetarian restaurant, sir,” the waiter explained patiently.
“Oh, yes,” said Elias, with the grace of a self-proclaimed prodigy explaining to his teacher that two plus two equals five, “but I said I would have chicken.”
Max, sensing that Elias was not quite in control of the situation, took the menu from him and leaned blearily toward it.
“Paneer,” he said, moments before his nose collided with the card, “we’ll have it with paneer.”
“This is gonna be you and me,” Elias said, as the waiter took the menu away. “When we’re rich. Dining out every night on Embers.”
Max frowned. “Dining on Embers?”
“You’ve got to start owning this, Max; your idea,” Elias said. He filled up Max’s water glass, sending ice cubes tumbling from the jug and skittering across the wooden tabletop. Neither man was aware how loudly he was speaking, nor of how quiet the rest of the restaurant was.