by Tina Seskis
The walk up the cliffs to the cottage was steep, and although it wasn’t far it puffed Elisabeth out; she smoked too much even in those days. She stopped for a second, panting, looking back the way she’d come, and she could see the people, small now, still settled in their deckchairs, and a dog cavorting across the sand after a ball, and the green of the sea, reaching out for ever, to the end of the world. She shook her head back and shut her eyes and put her face to the sun, and it still felt warm, like it was blessing her. And that was when she felt a hand over her mouth, and something cold and hard against her throat, and that was when she got pulled off the path and into the bushes, down into the thorny bushes that scratched and hurt her, but not as much as he did.
85
Cleveland
While her friends were still out at the bar getting drunk, and Stephen was downstairs waiting to continue where they’d left off, Renée was standing under the shower, watching the grit from her body run red into the tray. The fierce streams of water penetrated through the alcohol and sobered her up very slightly, made her heart a little steadier and her legs a little stronger.
Renée felt ashamed of her behaviour now, and not only because of Juliette. Although she knew rationally it wasn’t her fault, she couldn’t stop thinking about the man in his kitchen, couldn’t stop blaming herself: ‘So all I need you to do (giggle) is sign here.’ (Provocative lean forward – had she been fucking mad, she’d known he was a weirdo; she must have been on auto-pilot, irrefutable proof of the book company’s fail-safe training methods.) She’d been unbelievably lucky to have got away, she might even have been murdered if she hadn’t managed to fight free of him – what man does that in his own home unless he’s going to kill you, dump your body, destroy the evidence?
And now here she was, less than two weeks later, drunk, making out, rolling around in the dirt like a sow on heat. And with Stephen of all people.
Renée realised as she stood there, water pouring over her like from a bucket, that she wasn’t falling for Stephen after all, absolutely not. What had she been thinking? She must simply have been lonely and drunk and depressed – unnerved by bookselling, freaked out by the double dose of trauma on that terrible day a fortnight earlier, what with almost drowning too. It couldn’t have helped her state of mind, and this line of thought comforted her in a way. It really wouldn’t do to sleep with Stephen, he was her best friend’s boyfriend after all. She had her standards. OK, it was embarrassing, but they hadn’t done anything much more than snog, thank goodness, and she knew that Juliette would eventually forgive her if she left it at that – she and Stephen were officially on a break, after all. Thank God Stephen had tripped over in the driveway, pulling her down with him like a lassoed calf. Getting all that orange grit over her bare legs and arms had brought her to her senses, had bloody hurt for a start. Who knows what would have happened if they’d ended up in the house still all over each other? They wouldn’t have fallen into bed though, seeing as there weren’t any beds to fall into, maybe they’d have jumped into floor together.
Renée stopped herself. She knew it wasn’t funny. She couldn’t bear to lose Juliette’s friendship for a start, she was far more important to Renée than Stephen ever would be, but it was more than that. She was vaguely aware that her attitude to men had been somehow changed since the attack – she needed to be careful, she thought, she mustn’t get unhinged by what had happened, as though she were an open door to push against these days. But then again, what was the point of saying no when no-one listened?
As she pulled back the shower curtain she was swaying again. It was almost as if the streams of water had created a force field around her, keeping her upright, and now she was standing just in air she found she was still horribly drunk.
I need to go to bed, she thought. No, not bed, floor, and she giggled again. Get a grip, Renée. She pulled her towel around herself and unlocked the bathroom door to find Stephen standing outside on the landing, big and bulky, in only a towel too, as if he were waiting for the shower. He took one look at Renée, barely covered, and grabbed at her and started kissing her again, and although in her head she didn’t want to any more she found herself snogging him back, there was something about the alcohol and the steamy heat and his solid-looking body that made the desire build in her all over again, and he propelled her along the corridor and into the room he shared with Jason, one of the other (mainly under-tree-dwelling) booksellers – but Jason wasn’t there, he was still getting hammered at the bar. Stephen pushed the door shut behind him and started kissing her even more passionately, and she didn’t much like it now; his breathing was heavy and ragged, and anyway her towel was coming down, they should stop, and although she tried to push him away he bent her backwards until she thought she was going to hit the floor, but he managed to get down on one knee and catch her somehow, and before she knew what was happening he was heavy on top of her and she could feel the roughness of the carpet beneath her, and he carried on kissing her like he was trying to eat her, his tongue rigid and choking, and then she realised he was pushing himself into her and although she screamed at him to stop his face was vacant and his eyes were cold, and he started moving backwards and forwards, hard, fast, and each time he thrust into her he hurt her deep inside herself and she beat her fists against his chest and screamed at him to stop, get off her, but he didn’t seem to want to hear, he was in his own world, looking down at her as if he owned her, and it was only once he’d finished that he seemed to realise she was even there, and he sank down next to her and muttered something although she couldn’t work out what, and then he turned over and went to sleep.
86
Wood Green
Elisabeth never broke down, just spoke slowly, mechanically, for the first time ever, of the events on the last day of her honeymoon, and as she spoke she felt like it had happened to a different girl, in a parallel life. She never faltered, even as she described to her daughter how she hadn’t screamed, because of the knife, how much it had hurt, how she had run back to the cottage and locked herself in the bathroom, shouting through the door that she’d just fallen over, that she was fine; how she had scrubbed at herself, had screwed her torn costume into a ball and disposed of it later in the dustbin; how she’d finally come out, smiled, dressed, cooked dinner, but said sorry, she was too tired for anything else tonight, after all. She’d been too tired for anything for weeks, apparently. Elisabeth told her daughter how much she desperately hadn’t wanted to be pregnant, had wanted to be sure she wasn’t, before she resumed anything like that with her poor bewildered husband. But then when her period hadn’t come she’d been terrified, and she’d told Alan she didn’t want to have a baby, and she’d even tried to abort it (abort me, Juliette thought), but it hadn’t worked, and so she’d suggested they have it adopted, and her husband had gone mad and said no. But he gave in, in the end, Elisabeth had been so insistent, and even though they arranged the adoption she thought secretly she still might keep it – what were the chances of it being the rapist’s rather than her husband’s after the honeymoon they’d had? But when the baby had been born and she’d seen that unmistakable curly red hair, even at birth, that had been it. It had destroyed her marriage, she told Juliette. She left unsaid what it had done to her.
Juliette tried to process what Elisabeth had told her. She and Camilla had guessed right: her father was a rapist. She, Juliette, was a product of rape, a mistake, the end result of a vile act, an unnatural aberration. As Elisabeth looked bleakly, helplessly at her daughter, Juliette felt like she was brittle, might even break.
Juliette thought of her own husband then, with whom she had shared a bed for so many years, raping her best friend long ago in America. She’d known for two months now, since the night of the picnic, when Renée had screamed it out through the trees and across the water, that it was Stephen who had raped her, not the stranger she’d always claimed – although he’d tried to as well – before collapsing in hysteria. Juliette had been trying to deal
with the fact that her husband was a rapist, and now it turned out her father was one too.
Juliette sat for long empty minutes in the kitchen of her mother’s grim little council flat. To her astonishment she found that, in a place beyond the horror, she started to feel oddly exhilarated, free even – of guilt that she hadn’t ever really loved Stephen, at least not how you should love your husband; of rampant hatred for her mother, whose actions she could finally understand – and although she knew it was the shock (the pain of who her father was, what he had done, the way she’d come into the world not yet able to sink in), she felt in this moment a connectedness at last, an understanding. She felt desperately sorry for Elisabeth then, and for Renée too. She spoke gently.
‘So that’s why you were so against poor Mum having me.’
Elisabeth flinched at the word Mum and it surprised Juliette. Usually she didn’t react to things.
‘Maybe it sounds selfish,’ Elisabeth said. ‘But I didn’t want any reminders in my life. How could I look at you, and not think of how you were conceived? I tried to get Cynthia to understand, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell even her the truth – I felt so ashamed, and besides I couldn’t bear poor Alan to know – and when she wouldn’t listen, insisted on carrying on with the adoption, I just cut myself off from her and the rest of the family. I’m not proud of it, but it’s all I could think to do.’
‘But why did you have another child so soon afterwards?’
Elisabeth hesitated.
‘I don’t know, that’s what people did I suppose. And it must have been to do with my body as well. It had carried you and then it had nothing. My milk drying up was excruciating.’
Elisabeth looked far away, as if deciding what to say next, if anything – and then she continued, but almost like she was talking to a ghost, a phantom daughter, a gorgeous girl from another life, not the one sat opposite her now in her miserable kitchen in North London. She had never said the words out loud before, it was as if they bewitched her.
‘Once you were gone I found that I craved you, Mandy, and I so wanted to believe you were Alan’s, but when I saw you I knew you weren’t, I just knew it. So I had another child, another daughter, to … to take your place I suppose.’
Juliette said nothing, just stared at her mother. Amanda Lily.
‘You just called me Mandy,’ she said.
Elisabeth seemed young again, girlish for an instant, and then it was gone. She looked straight at her daughter.
‘You’ll always be Mandy to me, Juliette.’
And that’s when Juliette cried, and instead of scolding her for a change, so did Elisabeth.
87
Cleveland
Late on a putridly hot night in a furniture-less house in Midwest America, Renée found herself back in the grimy shower, barely ten minutes since she’d last been there. Her party mood had vanished, to be replaced by feelings of helplessness and revulsion. She sobbed drunkenly as she scrubbed and scrubbed at herself, as if willing the fluid out of her, repulsed yet again at what had happened, trying to work out just what it was that had happened, why it had happened. As the water grew half-heartedly tepid and then fully cold, she was finally able to put a label to it. Rape. That was the word. She had been raped.
Renée was shaking as she turned off the shower, unable to stand the onslaught, and she leaned her back against the cold cracked tiles and slumped down to a squat, head between her legs, long dark hair sodden and straggling in the tainted water that hadn’t yet gone down the plughole. She cried and cried until she couldn’t seem to stop, the snivels coming in strangled little pants, her heart beating frantically like it was about to stop. It was only when she heard the front door go and realised the others were home, and in drunken high spirits at that, that she pulled herself together. She ran naked from the bathroom up to the room she shared with Sissy, and hauled herself into her sleeping bag although she was still soaking wet. She lay quietly shivering on the horrid green carpet, and although there was no mattress to comfort her and her bones stuck into her at funny angles she didn’t mind the pain, perhaps she deserved it. She rolled over in the now-sopping bag, onto her side, away from the door, trying to pretend she was asleep in case Sissy came in – although if anyone were to look closely they would see that her body was trembling through the nylon, like a giant brown caterpillar shaking on a leaf in the breeze.
Stephen awoke suddenly and there was a body snoring next to him, and he couldn’t work out whose it was. He lay there, uneasy, feeling like he’d been run over, his head especially, but yes, his body too. His knees were sore, the flesh tender, and as he sent his hands down to check on them he could feel the still-sticky wounds, on his right knee more than the left. What were they? How had he got them?
And then he realised – carpet burns. He didn’t need to wonder at where they’d come from. As soon as he worked out what they were, his memory of the evening flicked back in, as if a channel in his brain had been switched on by remote control. He felt sick, aware of exactly what had happened now, although he refused to put a name to it. What the fuck had he done? What would Juliette say? What would Renée say? What would the police say?
Stephen’s body spasmed and his eyes started to prick, threatening tears of self-interest, so he knew it must be serious. He tried not to think them but the thoughts came anyway. Why hadn’t he stopped, when it was clear that she wanted him to, when he’d heard her screaming the house down for him to get off her?
Stephen had always been aware of how much he liked to get his own way, right from when he’d been a little boy, but he knew what had happened last night had taken his inherent sense of entitlement a step too far. She’d seemed so keen though, and then had changed her mind at the very last minute, the fucking prick tease. What did she think men were like? Didn’t she know that beyond a certain point there was no turning back? Stephen felt a little better when he took this line of thought – phew, it was her fault, not his – but deep somewhere inside himself, where his heart still resided in those days, he knew it wasn’t true.
Stephen lay sprawled on the floor, trying to think straight, attempting to work out what to do, how to make sure Juliette never found out – and through the thickness of his headache he realised his first task was to stop Renée telling anyone. Who would she tell though? After all, it didn’t look good on her either – out of her mind on cheap booze, barely dressed, one provocatively short towel loosely fastened. Maybe she wouldn’t say anything, it was too damaging for her as well, on so many counts.
He wondered whether he should acknowledge to Renée what he’d done, admit it was rape – and before he had time to even get to the end of that thought the voice in his head swooped in and said, ‘Noooo …’ and so he never admitted it again, which was a shame, as a genuine apology then, a proper confession, if only to himself, might have saved him from his ultimate path of never feeling obliged to tell the truth, of going for what he wanted at any expense, of no moral code being too sacred.
Maybe this was the moment that made him.
Stephen knew on that stifling morning in Ohio that there was only one option open to him to get him out of trouble, in the short-term at least: he had to cry, grovel to Renée, pretend he’d completely misread the situation, had thought she wanted it too, tell her the last thing he’d wanted to do was hurt her, take advantage of her, etcetera, etcetera – and he needed to do it fast. It might just work, if he played it right. He lay next to Jason, who was snoring and farting in gaping boxers on top of his grubby-looking sleeping bag. He couldn’t possibly do it here. Sissy would be in Renée’s room, he couldn’t risk a confrontation in front of her either, she was such a goody-two-shoes, and far too close to Juliette to risk knowing anything. He would just have to camp out outside their bedroom door, wait for one or other of them to come out, so he could get Renée alone. Yes, that’s what he’d do – the girls’ room was at the top of the house so no-one else would see him, and Sissy would just think he was being lovesick if sh
e came out first. As he lumbered to his feet, a crack went through his skull. He bunched his sleeping bag in front of him, the nylon sticking to his weeping knees, and staggered towards the stairs.
After Sissy got up, assuming her friend was still asleep, Renée continued to lie on the thinly carpeted floor of their bedroom, contemplating exactly how she felt about what had happened last night. She found that her feelings kept evolving as the morning sunshine invaded. At first they’d been pretty clear-cut, unequivocal, but it all seemed more complicated now. She kept trying to label her feelings, choose words to explain them, as though that might make it better somehow. She chose carefully: helplessness, disbelief, as Stephen pushed her to the floor; fear, revulsion, as he forced himself into her; anger, fury, as she beat her fists into his chest when he refused to stop; repugnance, disgust, as his face contorted when he ejaculated inside her; shame, revulsion, as she staggered away from him and into the shower; guilt, shame, but not at him, at herself this time, that maybe she’d encouraged him, had even been asking for it; shame, responsibility, as she realised it must be her fault, she must give off some kind of signal. It was all she deserved. She was a slag.
Renée knew emphatically that if she couldn’t respect herself, how could she expect men to respect her – no wonder her father never had, no wonder men came onto her like they did. She hunched into her sleeping bag although the room was too hot for it, ignoring the knocking at the door, as she tried to decide what the overriding emotion was, the single word, above all the others, that she could use to explain her feelings, and she lay there and lay there until in the end – that was it – she decided unequivocally what the word was, and the word was shame.
