by Fiona Neill
Although it turned out these were as much for herself because Ben told me during one of his visits where he chatted and I listened that Mr Harvey had unexpectedly broken up with her. He asked if I wanted to play Cluedo and looked downcast when I said no because it required too much analysis. So I suggested he get down my old game of Operation from the shelf. We played the best of three. During the last match he lay flat on my bed, chewing his lip, and successfully removed the final rib.
‘What exactly have you done wrong, Romy?’
I stroked his hair and he closed his eyes in pleasure, like Lucifer. He clung on to the rib in his hot little fist. Poor Ben. Until the Miseries started last year his life had been completely carefree.
‘I trusted someone I shouldn’t have trusted.’
‘I don’t believe what people are saying about you.’
‘What are they saying, Grub?’
He was silent for a while.
‘Bad stuff.’
‘How so?’ I was curious.
‘That you’re a ho.’
‘What’s a ho?’
‘I don’t know. But I can tell it’s bad from the way they say it.’ He threw his arms around my neck and clung on to me like a monkey.
‘It’s all right, Ben,’ I said, my voice muffled by the force of his hug. He started crying and didn’t stop until I offered to play another game of Operation.
Marnie stayed away. I’m still hurt by that. Initially I assumed she hated me because of what had happened with Marley, but when Becca came to visit she let slip that Marnie’s mum didn’t want her associating with someone like me. Apparently I was a bad influence. The gulf between how other people saw me and how I saw myself made me feel dizzy with anxiety because it was too big to bridge.
Becca brought me a present. It was a poster of a self-portrait by an artist called Frida Kahlo. It showed the artist’s body lacerated with hundreds of self-inflicted tiny knife cuts after her husband had betrayed her by shagging another woman. Why didn’t she leave him? I wondered. If someone treated you like that they weren’t worth the pain. It was a strange choice of gift but I appreciated the gesture.
Becca was full of righteous anger on my behalf. She spoke about female exploitation and how the Internet was the last safe haven for women-haters like Jay. Jay doesn’t hate women, I wanted to explain. But she wouldn’t have believed me. Besides, she had already moved on to the hypocrisy of Stella Fay calling me a slut when she was the one who had had sex with seven boys in the year above. The hypocrisy lay in referring to girls as sluts and boys as players, I wanted to say. Because this was where there was no equality. I was beginning to realize that my opinion counted for nothing because everyone had already scripted their own version of events.
This was really brought home when I turned on the radio one day and tuned into a heated debate about teenage girls and oral sex. Apparently there was a blow-job epidemic in Britain. There were accounts of schools where teachers took turns to patrol toilets during breaks, parties where girls competed to see who could blow the most boys. The female presenter made it sound deadlier than Ebola. They interviewed a doctor who explained the link between oral sex and cancer.
As I listened I realized that the programme had been inspired by what had happened to me. At least I think it was me, because although they couldn’t be specific they kept mentioning an oral-sex sexting scandal at a British secondary school. Too much alliteration, I told myself to quell my rising sense of panic at the sheer scale of it all. I had caused all of this. It was terrifying, as if I suddenly possessed superhuman powers.
I started getting up really early so that I could have a shower before anyone else in the house was awake. After that I went back to sleep for a while until Mum came up with breakfast on a tray. She cooked food that I used to eat when I was a child. Things like fish fingers with a bread roll or baked beans on toast. At first I thought it was to make me feel secure. Then I realized it was to reassure her that I was still her little girl. I got it. She sat on the end of the bed and watched in silence as I forced myself to eat a quarter-slice of toast. Jam, no butter. I appreciated her restraint but her eyes were full of unanswered questions and I couldn’t wait for her to leave. We were separated by our dread.
I avoided food partly so that I could restrict trips to the toilet in case I bumped into someone, but mostly because I knew from Marnie, who described herself as a high-functioning anorexic, that not eating was the simplest way of re-establishing some control amidst the chaos. Most of the day I lay on my side under my duvet with the curtains closed, drifting in and out of sleep. I didn’t get dressed. I didn’t read.
I spent a lot of time considering what Jay had done to me. I wondered if he now understood that causing me pain was no cure for his own. This was a good lesson to learn early in life. It occurred to me that my future relationships might be damaged by what had happened. I would get the wrong kind of attention from the wrong kind of boys, and the nice ones would avoid me. Maybe I would turn into a voyeur? Ironically Jay and I had more in common than ever before: now we were both dysfunctional. My gift to him turned out to be the agent of my own destruction.
I wondered if he thought before pressing send or if it was an impulsive action that he immediately regretted. Who did he send the clip to first? Was it to a group of people or a single friend? I guessed it was Stuart Tovey because Jay knew he would do something twisted with it. According to Becca, Jay’s irresistibility factor among some of the girls at school had tipped off the scale. How did he seem? I had asked her. Like a deer caught in the headlights, she replied thoughtfully. He didn’t seem to be exploiting his new-found popularity. And he walked away from the boys who wanted to high-five him.
I made lists in my head of all the people at school who would definitely have watched the video. I realized that for the rest of my life, every time I met someone new, I would wonder if they knew about it. I decided that I could no longer be a doctor because there would always be a risk that a patient would find out. I told Mum this so that she didn’t have to worry about delivering the bad news to me.
Perhaps I could do research. I could work in a lab where my face was covered with a mask. I would investigate where traumatic memories were stored in the brain in the hope that I would find a way to eradicate my own.
Dad didn’t come up for days. I thought maybe he saw the scandal as Mum’s territory, like one of those rites of passage such as the start of my period or the chat about birth control. When he finally knocked on the door yesterday and came in carrying a plate of pasta, I realized that I had read him all wrong. Blinking away tears, he tried to find the words to tell me that he knew I had found the phone in his office with the messages between him and the other woman. To begin with I thought that he was about to tell me off, then I realized that he was looking for forgiveness. He opened and shut his mouth as he presented his evidence but he couldn’t bring himself to say the words I had appropriated from her so I filled in the gaps and he started crying again.
‘I’m so sorry, Romy.’
‘It’s Mum you betrayed. Not me.’
‘Did you make the video to get back at me? For revenge?’
He stood by the window, tears streaming down his cheeks. Somehow his self-pity made it easier to deal with him. For a moment I thought about lying. But I took pity.
‘Don’t be ridiculous. Apart from the ending, I’d planned it before I read the messages. It had nothing to do with you.’
‘Why did you do it, Romy? Why would you risk everything for this?’
‘You did. You lost your job. We had to move house. You almost lost Mum. And your pre-frontal cortex is fully formed.’
I turned on my side and faced the wall. There was a whole chapter in his book that could answer his questions. Our conversation was over. Shortly after that Aunt Rachel unexpectedly turned up at the house. This must be bad, I thought to myself as I heard Rachel explain to Mum that she was here to support her through this crisis.
Ben told me
later that Rachel had offered to go to school to help Mr Harvey with his research and cried when he had turned her down. I understood that was more about being close to him than helping me. I didn’t mind. After all, I wanted nothing more than to feel Marley Fairport’s arms around me again, telling me that everything would be just fine. He was the only person who could have made things right for me. I could never tell anyone that.
This morning Rachel came into my room without knocking. She sat cross-legged on the floor with her head cocked at an empathetic angle and explained that she wanted to talk. Off the record, she emphasized. Just between her and me. She promised that she understood better than anyone else what had happened. She sounded sincere but I couldn’t help wondering if she was doing research for something she was writing. I was certain, however, that even with her powers of imagination she couldn’t possibly understand what it had done to me to know that my first big sexual experience had been seen by most people I had ever met and millions more that I hadn’t.
I pretended to be asleep. She didn’t give up. She said that she knew I had taken to my bed in order to rebuild myself. She used terminology that sounded as if it had been taken from the Lego website. She started banging on about Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian and music videos simulating oral sex and how they might make you think you could become famous by making a sex tape. I couldn’t work out if she was stupid or trying to provoke me into some kind of reaction. I’ve got more brain cells in my bum than Kim Kardashian has in her head.
‘Give me some credit,’ I said, my back still facing her. ‘Actually give most teenage girls credit. This was never intended for worldwide release.’ Her history of failed relationships might have heightened her empathy but it diminished the credibility of her advice. It was like that moment when I heard Mum and Dad had discovered that their marriage guidance counsellor was twice divorced.
‘What’s that noise?’ Rachel asked, turning towards my bedroom window. I heard the sound of raised voices. Someone was shouting. Rachel stood up and opened the curtains. At first I thought it was Mum and Dad rowing. I knew that what had happened to me would open up all the old wounds in their relationship. They would probably get divorced and it would all be my fault.
‘Holy shit,’ muttered Rachel.
Another voice I didn’t recognize joined in. Then lots of people were shrieking and shouting all at once, like an opera. I got out of bed and went over to open the window. I couldn’t resist glancing over to Jay’s bedroom. His curtains were shut tight. The noise was coming from one of the rooms downstairs at the Fairports’ house. There were a few more dull thuds followed by silence.
I headed out of the room before Rachel could talk me out of it. By the time I reached the back door of the Fairports’ house the row had started again. No one noticed me open the front door or my staccato breathing as I stood at the half-open door into the sitting room. Wolf was yelling at someone.
‘Slow down, cowboy, slow down, cowboy,’ he kept saying, over and over again in a tone that was meant to be appeasing but ended up the wrong side of patronizing.
It took a moment for me to realize that Dad was the cowboy. But then Wolf was an Indian. Sacred Warrior Coming Down was his Lakota name. Absurd, but not as absurd as Dad being referred to as a cowboy. Dad couldn’t even change a spare tyre. He was more cowgirl than cowboy. Actually in our family Mum had always been the cowboy. I thought about the messages on the phone in the briefcase in Dad’s office and the way he spent hours peeling the skins off tomatoes to make pasta sauce and got competitive over card games, even Snap. I tried to fit all the different pieces of him together and found that I couldn’t. Maybe all of us were enigmas even to ourselves.
I jumped as I heard more thuds followed by music.
I felt someone’s breath on my bare shoulder, and when I turned Jay was standing beside me, as close as you could be without actually touching.
‘They’re talking about us,’ he whispered.
‘Everyone is talking about us. Everyone.’
I don’t know why we were whispering because no one could hear us above the commotion in the sitting room. I was about to ask him why he had done it but I was aware of Mum’s voice. She sounded surprisingly calm as she threatened to call the police. It was an empty threat. The fight will be over long before the police get here, I thought to myself.
Through the gap in the door I saw Dad give Wolf a half-hearted shove as if he had been miscast as the baddie in a pantomime. People wearing reading glasses don’t push people, I remember thinking as Dad’s glasses wobbled on the end of his nose. It was the kind of niggling one-handed older-brother type shove that Luke might give me. But Dad caught Wolf off balance, and because he was wearing socks that slipped on the wooden floor he skidded into the bookshelf, which took the full impact of his weight. One by one the tiny hand-painted glass eggs fell to the floor and smashed.
Wolf crab-walked towards Dad, crunching the broken glass. He lunged and half-heartedly tried to hit him, but missed. Dad gave Wolf a shove. He fell back against the music system and Bob Dylan started playing.
Loveday followed in Wolf’s wake. I noticed she was wearing a long purple dress and her hair was loose. She was screaming but over the noise of the music I could only catch odd words – performance, pleasuring, context. She shuffled in her bandaged feet towards Mum, who I now realized was standing in the corner by the door. I pushed my way into the room just in time to see Loveday raise her hand in front of Mum’s face.
‘Which service do you want?’ a voice kept asking from Mum’s phone.
‘Stop it! Stop right now!’ I ordered, insinuating myself between Mum and Loveday. I had never felt more part of my family than at that moment.
The voices fell silent but the music played on. I realized that Jay had followed me into the room and was standing behind me, slightly to one side, using me to protect him from Dad. I had never seen Dad look so angry. Even the tips of his ears were alert with tension. He was still wearing his reading glasses, but they were all steamed up so I couldn’t see his eyes. At least if he tried to land a punch it would miss its target.
‘You little shit,’ said Dad, heading in our direction. ‘If I discover that you forced her to do this, I will kill you.’
I glanced at Jay. His fringe manically bobbed up and down as he had an attack of nervous blinking. Wolf came over and put a protective arm around his shoulders. Jay shook him off and moved behind me.
‘Did you ask her to do this?’ Mum asked Jay. Her voice was ice-cold with menace. Jay’s gaze flicked from Dad to Mum. His blue eyes were wild with fear.
‘N-no,’ he stammered.
‘Did you threaten to stop going out with her if she didn’t make this video for you? Because I’ve done some research and I know that’s the usual modus operandi in these situations, isn’t it?’ Mum continued.
Your pain doesn’t help, I wanted to tell them; it just makes everything worse.
‘Ailsa. Please. We need to protect the children from our anger,’ said Loveday in a deliberately smooth tone that sounded as though she had dipped her vocal cords in honey. It was completely the wrong approach with Mum.
‘How can you talk about protecting Romy after what your son has done to her?’ asked Mum so coldly that even I shivered. I had forgotten how anger made her even more articulate. ‘This isn’t the kind of situation that you can remedy by lighting a couple of scented candles and dousing yourself in lavender oil.’
‘It’s all right, son,’ Wolf said several times over, more to steady himself than Jay.
‘Except it’s not, is it?’ interrupted Mum. ‘It’s not all right at all. It’s worse than not right. What your sick son has done is illegal and he needs to face up to the full consequences of his actions.’
‘You seem to be forgetting that your slut of a daughter created this problem by getting between my sons,’ Loveday sneered.
‘Stop, Mum,’ said Jay. His voice was a husky whisper. ‘Romy was trying to help me.’
�
��How does getting with your brother help?’ Loveday spat out the words.
‘I have some problems,’ said Jay, clearing his throat. ‘Big problems.’
‘Don’t say anything, Jay,’ Loveday warned him.
That was when I realized that Loveday already knew. In my head everything went silent. Loveday and I shared a common idea: we both thought I could cure Jay. Our shared sense of purpose and her faith in me counted for nothing as I grappled with the fact that Loveday had permitted this to happen. She had used me to try and save her son from himself. I caught her eye. There was fear, desperation and anger all wrapped up in a single look, the Horsemen of the Apocalypse when it came to parents behaving irrationally. I realized that there was no love stronger than a parent’s love for their child and that every adult in the room was united by similar emotions. Fear for their children, for themselves, for their unborn grandchildren. There was nothing they wouldn’t do to protect their offspring. We are all animals.
‘Romy made the video to help me,’ said Jay, clearing his throat over and over again. ‘It was a selfless act.’
‘It was completely my idea,’ I said. ‘Jay didn’t ask me to do it.’
My parents and Wolf and Loveday closed around us in an arc like a lymphocyte about to gobble up bacteria. Jay moved closer to me until our shoulders were touching. He did all the talking. Once he had found the right words he couldn’t stop.
When he told them he thought he was addicted to Internet porn, Loveday used the hem of her purple dress to wipe her eyes and didn’t stop crying until we left the house. Wolf stroked his beard and shook his head in disbelief. ‘Sex is about freedom, not being a prisoner,’ he said. ‘Men need to preserve their yang energy. Have you learned nothing from your mother and I?’
I waited for Mum to correct his grammar but she didn’t. Wolf took Jay’s problems personally. I wished they could all stop relating everything back to themselves and consider the crisis in isolation.
Jay explained how I had come up with the idea to make the video after researching addiction. He described how I had wanted to create new neural pathways in the pleasure-seeking region of the brain. Dad stared at the floor, recognizing the truth of what I was saying. At one point I think we were all crying.
