Purgatory Is a Place Too

by Dominique Kyle

  “Because he was being so nice to me. It seemed really normal, as though he was really getting to like me. He didn’t try anything on, he smiled at me, seemed to have actually noticed quite small details about me like the colour of my eyes and what I’d been wearing the last few times, and things like me being anxious about my shoes being taken off.” I kept my eyes averted from hers and fiddled with the handle of my coffee mug. “When he laughed, or smiled at me it seemed like the real him, not like an act. He even seemed quite affectionate at one point.”

  “So how does that make you feel?” She asked neutrally.

  “Confused,” I admitted. “I’m a bit scared I’m getting sucked into thinking I’m a special case and he won’t really hurt me, even though I’ve been warned against him.”

  “So you can see how easy it is for a young girl to be really convinced that they’re being treated differently to all the others,” she agreed. “So ask yourself these questions, has he ever physically hurt you?”

  “Yes,” I said, glancing at her.

  “Has he ever made you do something you don’t want to do?”

  I nodded.

  “Has he made you do it, even when you have made it clear by your body language, or in words, that you don’t want to do it so you are pretty certain he knew you didn’t want to do it?”

  I nodded. I kept my eyes fixed on her face now.

  “Has he ever threatened you, either physically or verbally?”

  I nodded.

  “Has he tried to bribe you?”

  “Yes,” I agreed, thinking of the regular promise of presents.

  “And now, he’s already trying to control your actions. Telling you what to do, what not to do, what clothes to wear…” Her eyes were steady on my face. “All these things are the tell-tale signs of the beginning of an abusive relationship. This sort of thing happens in domestic abuse too, behind closed doors in what looks to the outside world to be a perfectly normal marriage. However in this case it’ll become more extreme because of the pimping set up.”

  I frowned. How could any fourteen year old work all this out? “He’s not trying to force me to drink or take drugs…” I pondered. “He allowed me to just drink tea when I asked for it…”

  “He doesn’t need to get you addicted to anything if he can condition you to do what he wants without that.”

  I thought about it. “He stopped to try to pick me up because I looked all tarty, and now he’s complimenting me on being pure. You know, liking the no make-up, and the longer skirt.”

  “He’s decided you’re going to be his now. And he’s going to impose stricter and stricter regimes on you to keep you to himself and make sure you stay clean for him. He probably liked the fact that you reacted against the sex scenes and that you refuse alcohol and even though he was angry at the time and threatened you, afterwards he probably was pleased that you’ve kept saying no to him touching you inappropriately. You’re pure enough for him to want you. But don’t imagine he’ll treat you any better than the others. Once he’s finished with you, you’ll become the same as all the rest in his eyes and he’ll be disgusted with you, and then the abuse will start in earnest. That’s what would happen to poor Ellie.”

  “Ok,” I said, and I sighed. “You’re right.” I paused. “I feel a bit straighter in my head now.”

  “Good,” she said with a kind smile at me.

  “But I’m going to delete the footage,” I said.

  “Why?” She sounded surprised.

  “It’s so humiliating!” I exclaimed. “It feels far worse than when he was forcing me to do stuff, because I was doing it voluntarily. Trying to please him!”

  “I understand how you feel,” she said in reasonable tones, “but seriously, I want you to keep that footage. It’s gold dust for helping explain how the groomers work to suck girls in. And there’s the warning against Crescent Cars on it – which is a very telling remark! Please just upload it with all the rest.”

  “Oh God,” I groaned. “It feels so icky now. I mean now we’ve unpicked it all. Before we talked about it, some of it actually felt quite nice which was making feel uneasy. But now I’ve gone from uneasy to queasy…”

  She covered my hand with her own, and then I saw her wonder if she should have done that, and the movement stopped being natural. Our eyes met and she removed her hand. I didn’t say anything either way. I wasn’t sure what I felt about it.

  In the end, I did upload the footage. I didn’t bother blogging. I’d done all the self-exploration with Chetsi.

  The World Championship Semi-Finals were at Hednesford. The track was brilliant for the F1 format with their powerful V8 engines but every F2 race there busted someone’s engine. With the velodrome style banking, races there tended to get faster and faster as the laps progressed with little chance for contact, so I’d already decided what my priority had to be.

  We’d brought Cody along to experience the Semis. Wentworth was here too, though not to drive. He came over and hung around. I glanced over and he smiled shyly at me. “Take Cody up to the stands will you and give her a running commentary on what’s going on?”

  He ducked his head and blushed.

  I glanced round at Pete who was creasing up. Then I looked at Paul whose lips were twitching. “You lot can just shut up!” I launched with my hands on my hips.

  Wentworth gave us all an odd look, and meekly escorted a bouncing Cody away.

  “It’s not true,” I defended.

  “Ok,” Pete teased me. “Let’s do an experiment. We’ll send Jo over to young Deane over there, and get her to ask him for a spanner, and I’m betting he just hands it over to her without even glancing round. And then we’ll send you over to ask for something and he’ll go to pieces and look like he wants to put a paper-bag over his head!”

  “Only if you send me over to ask for a screw,” I said sarcastically.

  Paul’s shoulders started shaking. I turned away with an annoyed toss of the head. “They’re probably just shit scared of me, that’s all,” I said.

  I stripped off down to a tee-shirt and shorts and got into my driving overalls. As I did so, Jo suddenly grabbed at my left arm. She stared down at the new raw blister on my inner elbow.

  “Eve, for fuck’s sake. You’ve been self-harming again! What the hell’s got into you these days?”

  I tried to yank my arm away but she held on hard. “Look Dad, look what she’s done to herself again!”

  Paul came over and frowned as he caught sight of what Jo was showing him. Pete looked worriedly at me.

  “I didn’t,” I protested.

  Jo stared at me. “You’re not usually a liar, Eve! Of course you did it, how else would it get there?”

  My lips parted, and then I realised that I couldn’t tell them that someone else had done it, because that would sound even worse. I compressed my lips and tore my arm out of her grip and shoved it down my overalls sleeve and zipped furiously up.

  “Come here,” Pete held his arms out to me. His eyes were kind. I hesitated and then I walked over and allowed him to wrap his arms around me. He held me into him and started massaging my neck. He’s oxywasitting me, I thought. I let myself relax and rested my head on his shoulder. Jo must still have been glaring from behind me because he suddenly said protectively, “Leave her alone, Jo, she’ll tell us when she’s ready.”

  He let go of me, held my face between his two hands and looked into my eyes. “Ok now?”

  I nodded and he let me walk away. Jo silently handed me my gloves, balaclava and helmet, and we all got into our cars.

  I arrived back to Jo and her arms were folded. Paul and Pete were being scrutineered with their respective first and second positions.

  “So what was that about? Were you knitting a pair of socks on the way round, or stopping for tea and a bath bun?” She said sarcastically.

  “No point in knackering my engine,” I said, as I hauled myself out. “I don’t want to have to start from scratch with only three weeks to
go.”

  I’d got up to the speed I knew the car would be comfortable with, and left it at that, resisting the pressure to keep up with the front of the pack.

  “And you do so hate Pole Position,” she said, eyeing me.

  “That too,” I said, and grinned.

  Finally Paul and Pete returned.

  “High five,” I said to them, and did first Paul and then Pete. “So my car has passed the Hednesford endurance test, huh?”

  Paul smiled. “Yes, she did great.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Oh, she is it? You’re as bad as Sue and her horses!”

  “No, Eve,” Pete explained patiently. “Horses really are male or female, it’s not anthropomorphising with them!”

  “Anthrowhat?” I said blankly.

  Pete opened his mouth to explain, then said, “Oh never mind Eve. Call everything ‘it’ if you want to…”

  “I was just telling her that she wasn’t being a good example to Cody with that performance, dawdling round and stopping to admire the scenery and take a nap…” Jo told him.

  “Which reminds me, where is she?” I said looking around. “She’s not back yet.”

  “She’s probably not stopped talking yet,” Jo drawled. “His ears are probably bleeding by now. He’s probably taken her to get an ice-cream into her gob in the hopes that filling the cake-hole will slow her down for a few moments.” She was in a right sarcastic mood today.

  On the way home Jo asked Cody what she thought of my impression of a snail that had just joined a hippy commune and spent the last week flat out on ganja. I pointedly ignored her and looked out the window.

  “Wentworth had a theory…” Cody proffered. Then she snuck a look at me out of the corner of her eye and decided not to repeat it to us.

  Jonny and Steve had their theories on Stoxradio that week too. Jo announced that my name was cropping up, so I came and listened with her. Tony was around, so he came and listened to.

  “So the way to get the Silver roof,” Steve was saying, “is to be consistent. If you’re the sort of driver that drives hell for leather every race, you’re going to have some big wins and some big crashes. But to get the Silver, you don’t have to win everything, you just need to come in the top five for nearly everything and steadily pile the points up.”

  “That’s why Eve McGinty is so good at it,” Jonny agreed. “You rarely see her in a big crash these days, she’s content to drop a place or two if it keeps her out of a conflict zone.”

  “So that brings us to the World Championship Semi-Finals,” Jonny linked. “There’s no obvious sure fire winner this year is there?”

  “Not with Satterthwaite Senior back in the ring and Eve McGinty actually looking like she’s got her eye on it this year…” Steve agreed.

  “What do you think of their relative performances?” Jonny queried.

  “Well, we’ve seen Satterthwaite Senior has still got what it takes, he even snatched the British Championship from under the nose of the Irish, and he’ll almost certainly be on Pole Position with his results from the Semi’s…”

  “His favourite place from what I remember of his previous career,” Jonny agreed.

  “But McGinty has thoroughly shafted him several times this season and got into the lead…” Steve mused.

  “Satterthwaite Junior’s performance has seemed a bit lack lustre this year,” Jonny commented.

  “Success in every kind of competitive sport takes place in the head first,” Steve opined. “Satterthwaite Junior doesn’t seem as confident as he did last year. Far be it for me to proffer an opinion as to why that’s happened, but from where I’m sitting, it seems more of an attitude problem, rather than any failure of driving skill.”

  “Which brings us to McGinty’s lack of performance in the Semis…” Jonny suggested.

  Steve laughed. “Lack of performance or tactics? You never can tell with her! She once confessed to me that her most hated grid position was on Pole. She likes to play more of a cat and mouse game in her races.”

  “Ok, so that leaves us back where we started. The Championship is wide open this year, and all bets are off. And as we know – in Stock Car racing, anything can happen on the day, and even the best can come a cropper…”

  Tony grinned at me. “You gonna get it this year?” He asked.

  “I can’t say ‘yes’ for sure,” I said, frowning slightly. “Because you heard what they said, anything can happen on the day. But if I go over and over my car and make sure there can be no chance of unexpected mechanical failure, and if I drive to the best of my ability, then I’ve got as good a chance as any of the other good drivers in the race.”

  “So is it worth us asking Entwistle if we can make it a works day out?” Tony suggested.

  I hadn’t even thought of that.

  “Your eyes just lit up then,” Tony reported with a laugh.

  “Yes, please ask him,” I said, suddenly feeling excited. “This is the first year I’m making a proper attempt on it. I really mean to get it if I possibly can. It would be great to have you all there to support me, especially as you’re my main sponsors. If I win it you can all come and have a photo taken with me and the cup and it can go on the website.”

  Tony got up. “I’ll go and put it to the boss right now…”

  I looked at Jo. “It’s suddenly getting real,” I said. “I’ve just got butterflies!” I took a deep breath to calm them down. “Just then, when Tony said they’d all come and watch me, I realised how big it was for everyone. Up until now it’s just been a personal matter of me and your Dad and can I drive better than him? But just then it turned into the World Championship, with the whole Stocks community holding their breath for the next few weeks until they know who’s going to be crowned!”

  Jo nodded. She put a hand on my arm and squeezed it. “Don’t let the pressure get to you. You usually don’t seem to care much what people are thinking. But the gaining of the Gold roof is the pinnacle of any driver’s career and it’s the only Championship that many of the fans are the slightest bit impressed by. It gets to fever pitch in the last few weeks. Huge expectations, endless speculations. Twittersphere, Forum bust-ups, bloggers blasting all and sundry.”

  I took another deep breath.

  “Keep your head together Eve,” she advised me, with meaningful gaze. “But don’t tune it out altogether cos if you win this, you want to really enjoy it. It’s a big achievement and I don’t want you acting like you’ve just come back from nothing more significant than a shopping trip like you sometimes do when you win! We want to see fierce joy and triumph on your face. Everyone wants to see that. That’s part of the fun of winning. Don’t be afraid to just burst with pride if you manage to snatch the prize!”

  She was right. If you defend yourself from the fear of the disappointment of losing, you also rob yourself of the triumph and intense high of winning. You have to lay yourself fully open to the experience or it doesn’t taste as good.

  Rob was being absolutely great. “Bring the car down as soon as they leave for Venray on Friday and we’ll strip the engine down and give it a complete overhaul.”

  “Are you sure you can spare the time?” It was a big ask.

  “For this, yes,” he said.

  We started the job together on Friday evening, but I had a World of Shale Qualifier at Coventry on Saturday. “Tony from my work has offered to help you on Saturday if you’d like,” I said.

  “Is he good?”

  “He’s never worked on one of my F2s before, but yes, he’s a good mechanic.”

  “Ok, then, send him down…”

  Normally I would have been cautious about feeling like I owed a big favour to someone at work, but on this occasion I knew they all wanted to be part of it, and Tony had been showing signs of being quite interested in the Stocks scene, so he might well turn out to be rather useful to us later on if he got bit by the bug.

  On Sunday, the only venue running was Barford. I skipped it for obvious reasons, becau
se my car was in pieces all over Rob’s garage, and Jo took Cody over on her own. I was still ahead in the points table, so could just about afford a day off.

  “Oh, and by the way,” Rob said at one point, glancing up at me. “Quinn’s gone silent now. I thought you ought to know…”

  My car was sitting innocently back in the barn by Monday evening when the men returned. We’d already heard from Pete that Paul had come third in the World Cup.

  “Well done,” I congratulated Paul and gave him a swift hug. “I really hoped you’d snatch it off Toon though!” Then I went and peered anxiously at my car. “But Jo said they’d rather trample you with a herd of elephants than let an English person have it…”

  Pete grinned. “It did rather look like a pack of wolves going in for the kill at one point,” he reported. “But don’t worry, she’s still in one piece.”

  “It,” I said, walking away with a disapproving sniff. “It!”

  Chetsi rang me up. “I went through the bits of footage that show the men’s faces with Sahmir,” she informed me. “And I also showed him the two men that you were forced to watch having sex.”

  “Oh, no – did you?” I was dismayed. I’d been relieved that he wasn’t watching the abuse.

  “Don’t worry,” Chetsi reassured me. “I got it all ready before he arrived and had paused them just at the moment when the men walk into the room and you turn your head to capture their faces, and I stopped it before anyone started doing anything embarrassing. He just got the minimum possible.”

  “Ok,” I sighed. “And..?”

  “He’s recognised some people…” Her tone was tantalisingly excited. “At first he wouldn’t say so, but I could tell from the shock on his face that he had. Then finally he gave up and admitted he knew five of them.”

  “And..?” I prompted, agog.

  “That first man with the two dressed up girls – that’s Zahoor Umrani’s Uncle!”

  “Seriously?” I paused. “The Uncle that’s on the Council as well, or one of the other hundreds of Uncles?”