I Thought I Knew You

by Penny Hancock

  I never realized my son had this side. But why did he feel he had to hide it from me? I rifle through the smaller drawers. Halfway through his carefully folded pile of T-shirts, I stop. There’s a tiny plastic bag containing what looks like weed. I open it and recognize the distinctive smell that sends me rocketing back to my student days. Rich and vegetal and heady. A wave of heat washes over me. My heart races, thumping against my chest. My son does have a life I know nothing about.

  I tuck the packet back between the T-shirts. Then, my heart galloping, I continue to look about his room. I’ve given him his own laundry basket, and rummaging through it now, I spot the grey lambswool jumper he was wearing the night he came with me to Jules’s. I remember the little flicker of pride I’d had that he was, beneath his hunched and uncoordinated self, going to be handsome just like Archie. I put the jumper instinctively to my nose and breathe in. It’s there. The unmistakable sugary fragrance that Saffie was wearing the night we left them together. Juicy Couture. I close my eyes, feeling my pulse quicken.

  I rummage faster through his drawers. I shouldn’t be surprised that my teenage son has pornographic images ripped out of men’s mags enclosed between the pages of one of his school textbooks. Jules would have said, before all this, that I should have been surprised if he hadn’t. Jules is, and always was, by far the more open-minded of the two of us when it comes to anything to do with sex. It’s nothing too hardcore. But it’s porn none the less. And I am surprised. I’m disturbed and angry with myself for opening a Pandora’s box and coming face to face with things I have refused to see about my own son. Then I look at his iPad. The screen reveals he’s been playing things on iTunes, and when I click on the icon, the song that comes up and hits me in the face is a Nirvana song and it’s called ‘Rape Me’.

  4

  JULES

  Lying sleepless next to her husband’s hefty form the night after Saffie’s revelation, Jules could not stop turning over in her mind what her daughter must have gone through.

  She found it was like pulling up weeds, thinking you’d got the lot and then realizing they’d thrown out another network of taproots that needed pulling up too. There was Saffie’s obvious distress. She hadn’t been physically hurt, she said, thank goodness, but the psychological damage could be irreparable. Then there was the possible pregnancy. And who could say whether Saul had already been sleeping around? They all assumed he was a loner and there was no way he had a girlfriend, or a boyfriend, but who knew? Rowan thought Saul took drugs. Saul might have been out there, stoned and shagging at festivals. He might carry all manner of STDs and have no idea – many of them had no symptoms.

  Jules was out of touch with the world of sexual risk-taking. It threw into relief how very monogamous and sensible her relationship with Rowan had been for the last twenty years. Apart from one minor dalliance she’d worked hard to forget. Now she was going to have to inform herself, and fast. Should she take Saffie to a clinic for tests?

  Jules turned onto her side and tried to sleep. But sleep wouldn’t come. She sat up and looked at Rowan, who continued to snooze, blissfully oblivious. She got up and went to the kitchen. Made herself a camomile tea. She sat at the counter, drinking it, hoping it would induce drowsiness, but it had no effect. She went back upstairs, opened Saffie’s bedroom door to check on her. She was asleep. Jules got back into bed and lay on her back, staring at the ceiling. They should have done the pregnancy test straight away, and got help if it was positive, even if Saffie was, understandably, terrified of the result. It was too bad it was now the weekend and that Donna Browne was away until next Friday.

  Then she thought of Holly and what this must feel like for her. Something was going horribly wrong with Saul to make him think he could assault Saffie and get away with it, although presumably he didn’t think of it as rape. Holly had mentioned her concerns that he didn’t fit in that night on the way to the pub. But it was clear his problems ran way deeper than that. Holly had always been very close to Saul. Closeness between a mother and son could be a good thing in theory, but with Holly it was different. There had been an almost Oedipal feeling at times. Had it been at the expense of allowing Saul to develop a natural and healthy interest in girls? To read the signals they were actually giving him? Had he suppressed all his instinctive sexuality to please Holly, so that now it was popping out in this perverse and predatory way? These thoughts raced through Jules’s mind until at last, when she could see the first blue light splitting the dark clouds over the fens across the river, and her eyes felt dry from lack of rest, her clock told her it was half past seven.

  Unable to lie still, Jules got up, pulled on her pink body warmer, Lycra leggings and trainers, and tucked her phone into her iPod sleeve.

  Rowan stirred, looking at her fondly from their king-sized bed as she prepared herself.

  ‘Where are you off to?’

  ‘Thought I’d do the park run. I’ll nip to the supermarket first, get some stuff for breakfast.’

  ‘Rather you than me this morning,’ he said. ‘Looks freezing out there.’

  ‘You’re a pathetic fair-weather runner,’ Jules said. ‘It’s best when it’s cold. It’s invigorating and it makes you run faster. Tea or coffee before I go?’

  ‘Shame you can’t persuade Saff to come with you,’ Rowan said. ‘She could do with losing a little weight.’

  ‘Please. Don’t let her hear you say that.’ Jules tucked her hair into her sweatband. ‘I don’t want her developing body dysmorphia. Her weight’s not a problem, Rowan. She’s just growing up.’

  ‘You taking Holly?’

  She could see Rowan in the mirror. He’d sat up now and was flicking through the catalogue for pool accessories he kept by the bed. They would have a fully constructed self-cleaning swimming pool by next summer. He’d been made redundant a few months ago and Jules had worried about going ahead with it, but Rowan insisted there was no way he was changing his lifestyle just because he’d been given the heave-ho by his company. That he didn’t intend to be out of work for long. There was no hint that he was concerned about his daughter apart from the comment on her weight, which Jules believed was an inability to accept that Saffie had developed hips and breasts and was becoming a woman. Which he couldn’t fail to have noticed each time he sat her on his lap in front of the TV.

  ‘Holly’s not coming this week.’

  ‘Given up, has she?’

  ‘Don’t know. She’s probably had a stressful week at work.’

  ‘She still got that Twitter troll?’

  ‘I . . . Not sure.’

  ‘She brought that upon herself, if you ask me,’ Rowan said. ‘She should keep her views to herself instead of ranting all over the internet.’

  ‘If her troll had bothered to read her article, he would have seen her concerns are as much to protect men as women.’ Despite everything, Jules’s instinct was to stick up for Holly.

  ‘My point is, she gets men’s backs up with all her feminist clap-crap.’

  ‘Rowan, that’s unfair.’

  Jules felt her stomach churn. He had no idea. She wanted to tell him that she and Holly had fallen out, but was afraid to. Even without knowing the details, he would say, ‘I told you so. You and she are polar opposites.’

  Rowan and Holly were civil to one another, but Rowan had never understood Jules’s friendship with her. He always said Holly was too earnest by half, and that Jules put her on a pedestal just because she worked in a university and had been published in the papers. He mocked Holly when she got on her high horse about women’s rights, joking with Jules behind her back that it was men who needed rights when Holly was around. Rowan didn’t have much time for Pete either, despite the fact that it was because of him that he and Holly had met in the first place: Saffie was close friends with Freya, and after Pete and Deepa had split up, Rowan had introduced Pete to Holly at one of their summer parties.

  ‘Poor old Holly,’ Rowan had quipped when he heard they’d become an item, ‘to have l
ost Archie and found Pete!’

  Archie, too, had been quite different from Rowan, but he at least had the kudos – in Rowan’s eyes – of being a dashing London lawyer from a North London intellectual background. He and Rowan had got on in a man-to-man mutual-respect kind of way, able to pass the time talking about cricket even if they had different outlooks on politics, the economy, the world. Pete, in stark contrast to Archie, was overweight and sedentary. A couch potato compared to Rowan and the other menfolk around here, who were all into cycling, golf, cricket and football. Holly had smiled when Jules asked what sport Pete did and admitted she didn’t think he moved many muscles apart from his facial ones. ‘Even those he keeps still half the time!’ she had laughed. ‘It’s a requirement in his work.’

  Pete had no drive, no ambition, according to Rowan. And in addition to that, he was the worst sort of woolly liberal. Pete wasn’t the kind of guy Jules would have put Holly with either. Archie had been tall, handsome and cultured, while Pete was short, rounded and unsophisticated. He had a kind face, but he wasn’t what you could call good-looking by any stretch of the imagination. Rowan was right, Jules had thought – Pete wasn’t a substitute for Archie. However, he was gentle-natured and unassuming, which would, Jules supposed, be good for Holly, especially as she had been so raw, so thin-skinned ever since she’d been widowed. And at least Holly wasn’t lonely anymore. She had been distraught with loneliness in the years after Archie died. Besides, Holly clearly adored Pete, as he did her.

  *

  Jules did the supermarket shop in a daze, piling things into the trolley without much attention. It was a quarter to nine by the time she got back into her shiny new Fiat, bought since she had franchised her children’s clothing brand, and set off towards the country park.

  Now Jules wondered if she should have told Rowan straight away about the rape. Having a daughter who was growing up meant she was entering uncharted territory where her loyalties were bound to be divided at times. But was it fair to keep from Rowan something he would argue he had the right to know? Keeping secrets from him felt counterintuitive. Jules and he shared everything (well, almost everything. He would never know, must never know, about her affair with Rob) and always had done since they met at a ball at uni all those years ago. But Saffie had begged Jules not to tell her dad, and she had to respect her daughter’s wish. Didn’t she? What if he were to find out anyway? He would never forgive Jules for remaining silent. As a devoted father (and he was almost overly devoted to Saffie, if such a thing were possible, Jules thought), he had a right to know his daughter had undergone an assault. Saffie, with her distressed pleas, had placed Jules in an impossible position.

  At the park, Jules left her car and walked across the mud to the starter line. She usually loved the convivial atmosphere here. Everyone was out with their families or dogs, chatting and in a good mood. Jules had a pang of nostalgia for the days when Saffie had come with her, before she started secondary school.

  It was cold this morning. There was frost in some places, a fragile layer of ice over some of the puddles. A wind had got up, which shook the smaller leaves from the trees. Jules was positioning herself near the thirty-minute marker (though her aim was to get her time down to under twenty-five) when she spotted Saul on his bike. He was impossible to miss over the heads of the families. He had his ear buds in and wore a beanie, and his skinny frame was exaggerated by the trackie bottoms he wore as he pedalled past the runners gathering at the edge of the track. It gave her a sick feeling in her stomach to see him. Cycling past so nonchalantly after what he had done to her daughter and all he had left her to sort out. Jules felt a mixture of emotions bubble through her. Rage and upset and indignation and . . . bewilderment. She hadn’t doubted Saffie for a minute. And yet for a second, as she watched him, her old affection rose to the surface and for the first time she wondered, Could he really have raped Saffie? Was it possible, rather, that they were seeing one another? That they’d taken the opportunity to use the empty house to have sex, and that Saffie had panicked when her period was late, not wanting her friends to know . . . but then Jules remembered Saffie’s violent objection when she told her Saul was coming round to use their internet, calling him a creep. Hardly the response of a girl in love. Doubts flooded her again.

  Jules realized she had no idea really what kind of person Saul had become these days. She had the urge to approach him, to question him herself since she guessed Holly hadn’t done so, judging by his nonchalant demeanour.

  ‘Jules?’ She turned. Tess was coming across the park towards her, flanked by her two daughters.

  ‘How are you?’ Tess said, drawing alongside her.

  ‘Good, thanks,’ Jules lied.

  ‘I’m going for a personal best,’ Tess said. ‘How about you?’

  ‘Just wanted to get out, to be honest,’ Jules said. ‘I’m going to take it easy.’

  The starter whistle blew. Jules looked around. Saul had vanished.

  ‘See you at the end,’ Tess said.

  Jules was trembling with pent-up feeling as she began her run. She put on her playlist, told herself the exercise would help. A flock of ducks took off from the lake as Jules rounded the corner and set off down the track past industrial storage units. The problem was, she’d known Saul since he first slithered into the world.

  She relived the day she had gone with Holly to the maternity unit to help her friend give birth to him. Archie, unlike most men around that time, had expressed a desire not to be at the birth. Holly had been upset. Jules had convinced Holly she ought to forgive Archie; after all, it was only in the last generation it had become the norm for men to attend the births of their children.

  ‘Better that he recognizes his limitations than forces himself through some spurious sense of what it is to be a “new man”, to attend something he won’t be able to cope with,’ Jules had said to Holly.

  ‘So it means I’ll be all alone,’ Holly had said. ‘I’m frightened, Jules. I don’t want to give birth alone.’

  ‘I could be there,’ Jules had said, and Holly had looked at her with gratitude and said, ‘Oh, Jules. I hoped you’d say that. I didn’t want to ask, in case you felt obliged. If you really want to, I’d so appreciate it.’

  They’d prepared the birth plan together, the three of them, Jules, Holly and Archie. Jules had read up about natural childbirth techniques and how to support a mother in labour. They joked that she had become more excited than the actual parents about the whole event. And Jules had been unprepared for how moving she would find it. How much love she would feel for her friend’s newborn baby. The midwife had wrapped his hot, vernix-streaked body in a towel and put him straight into Jules’s arms while she dealt with the umbilical cord and then the placenta, and Jules remembered the amazement she had felt as his bluish skin turned pink, at how alive he had felt, how warm and wet and light. And squirming. And real. He had eyes that peered quizzically into hers. He had a little red mouth that was moist when he opened it. He smelled of newly risen bread. She had fallen for Saul before his own mother held him. It was Saul who had convinced her to have a child of her own. She had really felt love for that newborn baby.

  But babies change. And it was hard for anyone to accept that one’s beautiful newborn would turn out differently from what you had in mind when they were a blank slate, an unformed piece of human Play-Doh for you to shape. Which, anyway, was a misconception. You couldn’t mould your child. Did what you fed and read and said make any fundamental difference in the end? Coercing and rewarding Saffie for going to extra lessons would never make her Child Genius material, however much Rowan would like it. Nurture, Jules now believed, was just one small part of the process of creating a human being, and even that was a random stab in the dark. The secret was to accept your child, to encourage their strengths, not to force them into a shape they weren’t ever going to fit.

  They had their own personalities from the word go. You had to let them be who they were. You could steer them, or try t
o. You could guide them and rein them in and do your best to set an example. But if what you got was a long way from what you hoped, if, on the way, something you unconsciously said or did, or some quirk of genetic material hidden way back in the ancestral DNA meant you produced a psychopath, or a terrorist, or a rapist, well, wasn’t your role then to deal with it? Not to put your head in the sand and deny it? As Holly was doing with Saul?

  Saul had been a gentle, quiet young soul, easily humoured and unusually thoughtful for a little kid. She and Holly had always managed to distract him when he headed for a two-year-old tantrum simply by getting down to his eye level and pulling funny faces. Once, when Jules had gone to see Holly in tears about another failed pregnancy, Saul had brought the baby doll he had been playing with (Holly had always insisted he should have dolls) and placed it in her lap, as if he knew. He couldn’t have been more than two then, but he had a kind of intuition. He was by nature very sensitive, very thoughtful. And had continued to be so throughout his boyhood. Always the quiet one, always happy to play alone. But with moments of uncanny perception, in which he revealed an awareness that was beyond his years. Could he have changed so dramatically now he was a teenager?

  Jules’s playlist finished and she flicked her music onto shuffle. James Taylor began to sing ‘You’ve Got a Friend’ – one of Holly’s favourite’s. The irony, Jules thought. Holly was the most sympathetic friend Jules had ever had, but there was a side of her Jules had not experienced first-hand yet. And that was the side that closed off completely when she was affronted. Holly was estranged from her older sister, Suzie. They had fallen out years ago over something Suzie had said about Archie after he died. Holly had never forgiven Suzie. Her sister and their mother now lived in close proximity in Glasgow, and Holly visited them rarely. So Jules knew Holly had it in her to cut people off when she felt she had been wronged.