The Trial

by Laura Bates

  And for the first time she looks up and meets the fury in his eyes.

  ‘Shannon.’ His voice is shaking. Slowly, he starts to peel back the layers wrapping his useless leg. Rusty blood has oozed between May’s amateur stitches and dried in dark clumps and patches. Around one stitch the flesh is beginning to swell, standing up hard and angry. The long, dark slit of the wound dominates his entire calf. He speaks very slowly, like he’s struggling to keep himself calm. ‘I will be scarred by this for my entire life.’

  ‘Yes,’ Shannon says, simply. ‘Like me.’

  ‘I DIDN’T DO THAT TO YOU,’ Brian screeches, lurching forwards as if he would throw himself at her if he could stand up. ‘I told some fucking jokes. You don’t have a sense of humour? Fine, I can’t help you. But putting someone else in danger? That is a completely different thing. What you did is unforgiveable. The only monster here is you.’

  ‘And the glass?’ Jason’s voice comes, quiet and cold, as Shannon and Brian stare at each other. ‘What was my “crime”, please?’ His voice is dripping in sarcasm.

  For the first time, Shannon looks uncertain. She hesitates, her angular face turned slightly to meet the cool breeze as it blows in off the distant sea. She looks at Hayley.

  ‘How did the glass make you feel, Jason?’ Hayley asks.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘How did it make you feel, when you woke up that morning. And when you came back, with the rest of us, and it had gone?’

  Jason doesn’t answer. His eyes flit from Hayley to Shannon and back again.

  ‘I think,’ Hayley says carefully, not wanting to make things worse for Shannon, or put words in her mouth. ‘I think it made you feel scared, and on edge, and paranoid. Like you were treading on eggshells and couldn’t trust yourself. Like something awful could happen if you put a foot wrong. I think maybe those are things Shannon has felt in your relationship. I think maybe she feels them every single day. And I think maybe they came to a head that night.’

  ‘You have no idea what you’re fucking talking about, you nosy, interfering bitch…’ He lumbers furiously towards Hayley, but Elliot and Jessa leap forward, each putting a restraining hand on his shoulders.

  ‘I think.’ Hayley swallows, deliberately raising her chin, forcing herself to look him in the eye even though her heart feels as if it is about to break out of her chest. ‘I think that something in her snapped when you treated her the way you did that night, when you argued, and if it hadn’t, I don’t know… Maybe things would have been different. I think that’s the part you played.’

  Jason is about to protest again, but Jessa is tired of waiting for her turn.

  ‘What about the leeches? I knew they didn’t get out of that pool by themselves,’ she says, angrily, and there’s a hard edge to her voice. ‘What the hell did I ever do to you?’

  ‘I nearly told you,’ Shannon tells her, simply. ‘In the trees that afternoon. And then there was some part of me that couldn’t bring myself to say the words. So I told you the story, but I substituted someone else.’ Her voice splinters. ‘But then, when you talked about how it wasn’t really rape, how that girl changed her mind afterwards, how she was just trying to cover her own mistakes… it made me feel so ashamed. Dirty. Like I couldn’t ever wash it off.’

  ‘Hence the leeches?’ Hayley is nodding, understanding slowly. ‘To make Jessa feel dirty as well.’ Shannon nods.

  ‘And I guess you put them on all of us to deflect suspicion?’

  ‘It would have been too obvious not to. Sorry.’ She shrugs. ‘Part of me quite liked the idea of it, anyway. Cleaning the blood. Removing toxins. Or something.’

  ‘Wait,’ Jason says, ‘wait, back up. What did you say? About changing your mind?’

  ‘Is that what this is about?’ Brian is catching on, his eyes widening as he starts to join the dots. ‘That guy you were all over on the dancefloor?’

  ‘All over?’ Jason’s voice is deepening dangerously.

  ‘Are you telling me,’ Brian whispers, his voice menacing, ‘that this whole nightmare has been about you regretting a one-night stand with a Duke stud?’

  ‘You put out for him?’ Jason roars, turning furiously on Shannon. ‘How many fucking years have I waited for you, Shannon? Jesus Christ, what a cuck.’ He’s looking at her in disgust, as if he’s never seen her before. ‘What do you think you’re playing at? You’re sick, you know that? I think there’s something seriously wrong with you.’

  ‘Yes,’ Shannon whispers. ‘Something wrong.’

  ‘Guys.’ Hayley is horrified, watching them, their anger circling Shannon like a tightening fist. ‘We’re talking about a rape.’

  Jason gives a bitter, barking laugh.

  Shannon just stands there, looking out at the waves, letting it wash over her. It’s almost like they can’t reach her. In and out. In and out.

  And Hayley is thinking that it is Shannon’s life, Shannon’s injuries, Shannon’s pain they should be talking about, but they’re focusing on themselves. She doesn’t know how to make them realise that they’re looking at this all wrong.

  Quietly, before Hayley can find the words to say anything, Shannon stands up. She brushes the sand delicately from her fingertips. And she walks away.

  ‘So we know what to do now,’ Brian says, his voice flat and hard. ‘We watch Shannon 24-7. Or we lock her up. And if we ever get off this goddamn island, we turn her in to the police.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ May is standing now too, materialising next to Hayley. ‘Turn her in? Are you kidding me?’

  ‘No.’ Brian glares up at her defiantly. ‘She tried to kill me, May. I literally went swimming in shark-infested waters with shark bait in my pockets.’

  ‘It’s a deep cut, Brian, I know. But someone’s going to find us. You’ll live. If we’re talking about going to the police, it should be to report that Duke bastard, not Shannon. She’s the victim here.’

  ‘She’s not the only victim,’ Elliot chips in, quietly, rubbing the spot on his head where an egg-like bump had protruded for several days after his fall.

  ‘Right, because a bump on the head is the same as being assaulted,’ May retorts, sarcastically.

  ‘Okay. Maybe this is what we have to decide.’ Hayley says, slowly. ‘This was never only about protecting ourselves. It was about justice. So we sit here and we talk this through and we make a decision. What we’ll do if we ever get off this island. Whether we go to the police. And who we report.’

  ‘What’s the point?’ Jessa looks sullen, tired. ‘If we might never be found.’

  ‘All the more reason to decide,’ Hayley says, firmly. ‘If we’re going to survive here any longer, we need to know where we stand. We need to decide for ourselves, to give ourselves a moral code. Who’s to say something like this doesn’t happen again, here on the island? We decide this once and for all, for all of us, separate from home, separate from the law. We make our own decision.’

  ‘Like a legal judgement?’ Elliot looks doubtful.

  ‘Well, sort of. Majority rules. We all have to commit to that.’

  ‘What the hell happened to innocent until proven guilty?’ Brian splutters, angrily. ‘We all know Shannon attacked us but we can’t just decide this other thing, ruin some guy’s life, his reputation, without any proof, just take her word for it.’

  ‘Why is it innocent until proven guilty for him but disbelieved until proven true for her?’ May snaps.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be innocent or guilty,’ Hayley cuts in, holding up her hands for calm. ‘We’re not convicting him, we’re just deciding, as a group, whether to support Shannon by reporting him to the police. Okay?’

  ‘What are you, her lawyer?’ Jason’s voice is heavy with sarcasm.

  ‘Yeah, maybe I am,’ Hayley shoots back, defiantly.

  ‘You’re talking as if Shannon was ambushed,’ Brian complains. ‘That’s ridiculous. Why didn’t any of us hear her scream? She was only upstairs. If she was being raped up ther
e, we would have known about it.’

  For a long moment, they all seem to be digesting this, and there is no sound but the white noise of the sea and the swishing of the breeze in the palm leaves.

  ‘She knew exactly what she was doing!’ It bursts out of Brian, as if he knows he shouldn’t say it but can’t help himself.

  ‘Well, she did. She did,’ he croaks at Hayley, and it’s almost like he is pleading with her, like he needs this to be true for everything to stay the same. All the moments of his own past that will suddenly look different. The future that he will need a new map to navigate. It would be so much easier if Shannon would just say ‘Yes, I knew what I was doing.’ And the world he has always known could stay the same.

  ‘How did you feel, when the shark was closing in on you in the water?’ Hayley’s voice is trembling slightly.

  ‘What has that got to do with anything?’

  ‘Just answer the question.’

  ‘I was scared, obviously.’

  ‘Scared?’

  ‘Okay, I was really scared.’

  ‘Why didn’t you punch it?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Hayley.’

  ‘You were scared, right? It was bigger and more dangerous than you and the last thing you wanted to do was go on the offensive and risk provoking it.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘You didn’t swim away.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I noticed you were frozen there, in the waves, sort of waving, for over a minute. Why didn’t you start swimming for the shore straight away?’

  ‘I don’t know, I was— it all happened so fast.’

  ‘You were shocked, right? It was terrifying. You froze. Panic set in. You didn’t know what to do. Your body took over…’

  ‘That’s not the same.’

  ‘Why? What’s the difference?’

  ‘Brian didn’t dance with the shark before it attacked him,’ Elliot says, quietly. ‘I mean, Hayley, we all saw her draped around the guy’s neck, rubbing up against him, nobody had a gun to her head, did they?’

  Hayley watches a muscle tighten and twitch in Jason’s cheek.

  ‘Does it even matter?’ May has leapt to Hayley’s side. ‘It wouldn’t matter if she’d ripped her top off and started grinding on him, the point is what happened afterwards, isn’t it? When he raped her.’

  ‘It matters to me,’ Jason mutters, through gritted teeth.

  ‘Of course it matters!’ Brian splutters. ‘You’re asking us to make a judgement about what happened that night. I’m sorry, but I’m less likely to believe that someone was raped if I saw her all over the guy like melted butter on pancakes an hour before she claims he forced her to have sex with him.’

  ‘Raped her,’ May repeats, mulishly. ‘And it doesn’t matter how enthusiastic she might have been earlier on, if she changed her mind once they were in the bedroom and didn’t want to go through with it then it was rape.’

  ‘But she seemed…’ Jessa swallows. ‘I mean, wouldn’t we have known? She seemed okay, the next morning.’ Jessa studiously avoids May’s eyes. ‘Look, I want to support Shannon in whatever she’s going through, I really do, but I’m finding it hard to understand why she would’ve gone upstairs with that guy in the first place if she wasn’t, you know, up for it.’ She shakes her head nervously. ‘I’m sorry, but it doesn’t totally add up.’

  ‘Yes! Thank you!’ Brian applauds, and Jessa looks away uncomfortably.

  ‘I’m sorry to be the one who has to say this, but we’re also talking about someone making an active choice to put herself in a dangerous situation. What did she think was going to happen?’ Jessa can’t meet anyone’s eyes.

  ‘Maybe she thought she was going to fool around, maybe she thought she’d have a little bit of fun, maybe she never planned to have sex, but she wanted to do other stuff,’ May says, ‘Some of us like to have fun, you know, not all of us are married to our own fathers in weird, fucked-up ceremonies.’

  Jessa draws in a sharp breath. ‘That was a purity ball, and you know it meant something important to me. I can’t believe you’d throw that in my face.’

  May looks guilty, like she knows she’s gone too far. ‘I’m sorry, Jessa. I didn’t mean that.’ Jessa turns away from her, eyes filled with tears. May twists her fingers in frustration. ‘I just hate this idea that any girl who wants to experience some pleasure on her own terms is somehow asking for trouble and deserves all she gets,’ she bursts out. ‘You know? In this group of – what – four girls? You’re looking at one rape. And how many sexual assaults? Who here has been grabbed, or groped, or had a guy expose himself in front of you in the street?’

  Jessa sniffs, and raises her hand. May puts her own up as well. So does Hayley. ‘Four for four,’ she says, grimly. ‘Virgins included.’

  ‘Any of that happened to any of you?’ May looks at the boys, her glare like a laser. They all sit motionless.

  ‘It’s officially one in three for women,’ Hayley adds. ‘I looked it up for that article. It’s one in three in the records because those are the ones that have been reported. One in three women are physically or sexually assaulted.’

  ‘See?’ May says, angrily. ‘It’s not that you’re all just far more cautious than us. This isn’t some awful, rare accident that happens to careless girls who go to the wrong place on the wrong night or wear the wrong skirt or drink the wrong thing. It’s literally our day-to-day – you just don’t know anything about it because you’re not living it.’

  ‘Oh, come on, you’re not “living it”, May. I’m sorry that happened to you but stop exaggerating.’ Jason sounds like a patronising dad reining in an overdramatic kid.

  ‘I hold my keys between my fingers every time I walk home after dark,’ Hayley says, quietly.

  ‘Have any of you guys ever done that?’ The boys look back at her, blinking.

  ‘I call my mom so she’ll hear if anything happens when I’m walking at night.’ Jessa says, quietly. ‘I send her a tracker of my location so she would know exactly where I was if anything happened.’

  ‘I never come home through the park after dark,’ May chips in. ‘Even though it adds, like, twenty minutes to my journey. And on Thursdays I wait an hour at school while Jessa has yearbook club so we can walk home together.’

  ‘We go to the bathroom in groups if we’re out,’ Hayley puts up the five fingers of her right hand and starts ticking them off, one by one. ‘I carry pepper spray. I never wear headphones when I jog, so I can hear if someone comes up behind me. I cross the street if I see a group of guys up ahead. I check behind me before I put my key in the lock.’ She folds down her thumb, leaving a tight fist. ‘Shall I go on?’

  The boys are silent.

  ‘Like I said,’ May says, quieter now, ‘it’s our whole lives.’

  May puts her hands to her face, as if her head is too heavy for her neck to hold up. ‘And I made it worse. I did this to her. I put Shannon in that situation and took away her control.’ She shakes her head miserably.

  ‘I never said a word about those jokes. I just ignored them.’ Elliot is looking down at the palms of his hands, his forehead creased with guilt. ‘I didn’t know it could mean anything. And everything you’ve just described, it’s like… it’s like there’s a completely different world you’re all living in, and I’ve literally never seen it or heard of it before today. Even though it’s the world I live in too.

  ‘And I didn’t stop them. I saw him taking her upstairs, he was half dragging her, she was so out of it. But I was so caught up in my own thing…’ He looks at Hayley, cringing, as if she can somehow forgive him. ‘I was so busy trying to get into the bathroom to hide how sick I felt, so preoccupied with the fact I’d just kissed Jessa… I just gave the guy a grin as he went past. Jesus, I might even have fist-bumped him or something, I can’t remember.’

  ‘That’s just great, dude. Good to know you had my back.’ Jason mutters.

  ‘Your back?’ Even Jessa is looking indignant now.

&nb
sp; ‘Uh, yeah, Jessa. Mine. She went into the bedroom with this guy. She was laughing and joking with him. Everyone’s acting like this is all about Shannon and some guy and Brian’s leg, but what about me? I’m the one who had something taken from him that night.’

  Hayley and May exchange an incredulous glance.

  ‘So what exactly are we supposed to decide here?’ Brian demands. ‘That we condone revenge? That it’s totally okay what Shannon has put us all through? It’s okay that I can’t even walk? We all agree that it’s totally fine for girls to go psycho on everyone if they get “raped”.’ He does the air quote thing and Hayley feels a hot flash of anger. ‘That guys have to be mind-readers, and if they’re not, they’re automatically condemned as rapists?’

  ‘No, Brian. That’s not what Shannon wants. She doesn’t want other girls to go out wreaking revenge on people. She didn’t want to do that herself. She wanted justice. But she knew that wasn’t an option for her. Because we all know the story of Chad Maxwell. And we know a dozen other stories like it. We know what happens to the girl who accuses the star athlete. Or the supreme court judge. Or the President. We all know how that story goes.’

  ‘We’re supposed to decide that girls’ lives mean more than boys’ sports,’ May says, simply. ‘We’re supposed to decide there’s something wrong if we’re at a point where guys need to be mind-readers during sex because we’ve normalised sex where guys are so busy doing what they want to us that they don’t even notice what we’re feeling, or whether we’re into it or not. That it matters if a girl is raped at a party where her so-called friends spent the night joking and laughing about rape and she doesn’t think anyone will take her seriously.’ She chokes out a half sob.

  ‘What happened to your leg, Brian, it’s awful. The idea it might get worse, that it could get infected, that’s unbearable. But why is it that we can all see that, but we can’t see what’s happened to Shannon in the same way? Why are we okay with leaving so many girls so badly injured?

  Hayley nods and lets out a breath she feels like she’s been holding onto forever. ‘We should take the scars we don’t see as seriously as the ones we do.’