Always

by Nicola Griffith

  Suze gave Kim a superior look.

  “And Kim’s bread knife,” I said to her, “while it might not be very sharp, nor have a stabbing point, can be used, with sufficient force, to take your nose, or your head, right off.”

  They nodded, but they had no notion of the sheets—the rivers, the lakes—of blood, or how much muscle it took to saw through flesh and then bone.

  They were waiting for me to continue. I forced myself back into their southern lady shoes.

  Suze’s ice pick was traditionally a tool of men, or sexually predatory women in the movies. A bread knife was a tool of the home and hearth, something they handled every day, or that their mothers, at least, had. Not hard to guess which these women found more frightening.

  “Next you have to ask yourself how expert the attacker is likely to be with the weapon. We’ve already seen how difficult many of them can be to wield. Bear in mind that very few people are experts with things like razors or bread knives or ice picks. Remember that a weapon has no power of its own. It depends entirely on its user.” And the magic the victim invests in it.

  “What’s the point of all this thinking?” Pauletta said.

  “Assessment. You can’t know what to do in any situation until you’ve assessed it. Keep your eye on the weapon and remember: It’s just a tool. Not magic.”

  None of them looked as though she believed me.

  “Once you’re breathing, we go on to other questions: What does your attacker want? Will you be in more or less danger in a few minutes? Pick your moment to act. When you do act, begin with a distraction.”

  “Wait,” Pauletta said. “Can we go back to the part about—”

  “I’ll take questions later. An attacker with a weapon will be concentrating on that weapon. It will be a kind of talisman, a psychological crutch. The armed attacker’s focus will be very narrow indeed.”

  “I’m getting lost here,” Pauletta said.

  “Sandra, give Pauletta your razor. Pauletta, come and stand here. Threaten me with the razor. Sandra, where were you, as the attacker?”

  “Getting my oil changed.”

  “And what did you want from Pauletta?”

  “To make her weep,” Sandra said matter-of-factly. Weep. Very biblical. Very melodramatic. I’m special, her tone implied. My life is worse than anyone here can possibly imagine. Except you, of course. But I was tired of her nonsense.

  “All right,” I said to Pauletta, who was staring at Sandra. “We’re in a garage. Pauletta, you’re going to try and make me weep.”

  “I don’t . . . Okay.” She waved the polystyrene self-consciously. “Kneel down, bitch. Kneel right here.”

  “Okay,” I said, putting my hands up in the universal “Hey, whatever you say” gesture. “Just tell me what you want.”

  “I’m gonna make you cry.” Her hand went to an imaginary zipper. Always the same. Too many movies. “Get on your knees.”

  “Right,” I said, pretending to be about to go down on one knee, and then started to retch.

  “Eeeuw!” Pauletta said, and stepped back.

  “There. That’s a distraction. Other distractions could include picking your nose . . .”

  “Gross!”

  “. . . drooling, shouting, acting like a crazy person. The point is to break your attacker’s vision of the event. Don’t let him orchestrate. Don’t, ever, buy into his world.” They weren’t getting it. “In this instance, as soon as my attacker gestured towards his fly, it was clear he wanted close personal contact. He was having some kind of power and sex fantasy. Vomit has probably never figured in them. Vomit is visceral: wet and hot and stinking. Nothing like the vision he’s been constructing for months, years, decades. The point of vomiting or picking your nose is to break his vision of you. You are not a victim. Don’t act like one.”

  Jennifer looked as though she wanted to cry. Tonya seemed confused. “Which part don’t you understand?”

  “Me, I don’t understand why you’re so pissy today,” Nina said.

  “Pauletta wanted to ask a question earlier and you just steamrollered over her.”

  “Yeah,” Pauletta said.

  It was true. I didn’t want to be here, in the closed basement. I wanted to be outside, bare feet in the grass, breathing fresh air. But I had agreed to teach these women. No one else would. “I apologize. Pauletta, what was your question?”

  “I was wondering, when you said you have to know what they want and pick your moment to act. What did you mean? How do we know what he wants?”

  “Yeah,” Nina said. “You said no one is a mind-reader.”

  “That’s right. No one is a mind-reader. You don’t have to be. With an attacker with a weapon, you most probably won’t even have to ask. Just listen.”

  They were nodding even before I could explain, taking my word for it. I said, “Most attackers who arm themselves do it because they’re nervous. If they’re nervous, they’re very likely to be verbal. They’ll be talking from the first second they threaten you: ‘Give me your purse, lady, give me your purse, put the fucking purse on the ground,’ and so on. That’s the simple situation; if someone says that, nine times out of ten the best thing to do is to give them the purse and they’ll go away. But you can’t always trust what someone is saying. For example, if your attacker is saying, ‘Don’t scream, don’t say a word, I’m not going to hurt you, keep quiet and I won’t hurt you,’ you might not want to believe them, because, generally, if someone is saying something over and over again, it’s for a reason. It means they’re thinking about it.”

  “Even if they’re saying the opposite thing?” Kim sounded more puzzled than skeptical.

  “Yes. You’ll be able to tell the difference.”

  “How?”

  “You will know. You’ll feel it.” The body always knows. “Feeling it, knowing it, is the easy part. The hard part is trusting that knowledge and acting on it.”

  “I don’t understand,” Therese said.

  “It’s women’s intuition,” Katherine said.

  Suze snorted.

  “Women’s intuition makes it sound like magic, and it’s not. In reality such knowledge, a visceral understanding of a situation—you could even say empathy itself—is based on a biological system. Your mirror neurons.”

  They looked perfectly blank.

  “Tonya, you and Suze and Christie, go get me three of those chairs, and, Pauletta and Nina, bring the bench. Chairs here, bench here, as though these are stools by a bar. Sandra, bring me my satchel, please, then sit opposite me. Therese, you sit there, you’re drinking quietly, idly watching me and Sandra talking while we drink.” I rummaged in the satchel, found a big flat-ended Magic Marker, and set it on the bench so that it stood up. “Imagine Sandra and I have shot glasses and this”—I gestured at the marker—“is a bottle of whiskey. We’re just drinking and talking. Everyone is relaxed. We’re talking quietly. Therese can’t hear a thing we’re saying.” I leaned confidentially towards Sandra, and she adopted a matching pose. “I pick up the bottle, like so, to pour. Then suddenly I stiffen, and start to hold the bottle differently.” When I changed my grip Sandra swayed slightly: a sudden, instinctual urge to move backwards, out of harm’s way, negated by her conscious mind. “What’s going on? Therese?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Trust your first instinct.”

  “Looks like you’re about to slam that bottle across his, her face.”

  “Anyone disagree?”

  None of them was ready to commit, either way, though it was clear from their body language—tilted heads, hands clasped in the small of the back—that they knew what Therese knew, they just didn’t understand how they knew and they weren’t ready to say so.

  “Therese is exactly right. I was getting a better grip, getting ready to break this bottle on Sandra’s face. You all knew that, instinctively.” Sandra in particular, but she had also learnt from long experience not to fight back because she was never going to make her defiance
permanent, never going to run away and get to safety, and in the long run, the more she resisted, the worse her beating would be. “You saw the way I changed grip, and the act of watching me do that triggered a cascade of signals in your inferior parietal cortex.”

  And I’d thought they’d looked blank before.

  “You’ve probably all seen the way children imitate things to understand them. They’ll pretend to roll out a pie crust right along with you, they make noises and pretend to change gears as you drive. This happens in your brain, too. When we see someone pick up a bottle, a whole set of nerve fibers, called mirror neurons, pretend to be picking up the bottle, too. Whether you’re actually picking up the bottle or just watching someone do it, those neurons fire in the same pattern. Your body understands intimately how it feels. So when I shift grip, your brain shifts grip, too. And these mirror neurons are hooked into your limbic system, to the part of your brain that handles emotions. So your brain knows what it means when I’m turning the bottle like that. You know, deep down, in that intuitive part of you, what’s going on, in a way that your conscious mind probably doesn’t.”

  Katherine looked thoroughly confused.

  “You can look it up when you go home. For now, think of the mirror neurons as re-creating the experience of others inside ourselves. We feel others’ actions and sensations in our own cortex, in our own body, as though we ourselves are having those sensations, doing those things. In a very real way, we are doing those things. Think of your mirror neurons, your hunches, your intuition as a powerful adviser, an interpreter.”

  “So,” Nina said slowly, “when you said the first week that no one is a mind-reader, you lied.”

  Next time I taught this kind of class, I was going to do things differently. Completely differently.

  “Well?”

  Next time. I set that aside to consider later. “Think of the two concepts as complementary. The body knows, the body doesn’t lie. But our conscious mind doesn’t always want to believe what it knows. It’s not convenient. This is true for an attacker, too. They will tell themselves a story about how the attack will go. They’ll ignore what they know—they’ll ignore the mirror neurons telling them that you don’t want to talk to them, that you don’t want to be their friend—and believe what’s convenient. Because they don’t want to hear what you have to say they’ll pretend you’re not saying it, so it’s good to state your wishes and intentions clearly.”

  “Loud and often,” Kim said with the half smile that meant she was thinking of her children.

  “If you say something clearly and specifically to a potential attacker, two things will result: One, he won’t be able to pretend to himself that he doesn’t know you don’t want his attentions. Two, you yourself won’t be able to pretend that everything’s fine. Your conscious and subconscious mind will be aligned. That’s a very powerful feeling.”

  “The power of the righteous,” Sandra said.

  Silence.

  “It could be described that way, yes: knowing you’re doing the right thing, even if others don’t understand. Sometimes self-defense or the defense of others requires actions that no one understands. Sometimes you have to do them anyway.”

  Everyone pondered that.

  “Now, let’s go back a little, to the importance of knowing what your attacker intends. Any ideas about why that’s important?”

  They all shook their heads.

  “It’s important to know what they intend so that you can judge whether the situation will get more or less dangerous, more or less opportune for you to act. For example, Suze, what do you want?”

  She blinked.

  “You’re threatening Christie with an ice pick. Why? What do you want?”

  “Okay, yes. Her money.”

  I looked at her polystyrene. She raised it menacingly. “All right. Christie, what did I say about ice picks?”

  “Good for stabbing, not cutting or throwing or bludgeoning.”

  I smiled. I hadn’t said anything about throwing; she’d come up with that one all on her own. “All of which means your attacker has to be very close indeed to do you any terrible damage. So what would you do?”

  “Throw my purse on the ground and run.”

  “Good. Why?”

  “Because.”

  “Think about it.”

  “Just because.” I waited. “Because he’s mentioned money?” I nodded. “So throwing the purse would be a distraction?”

  “Yes. Excellent. Because even if he wants more than money, you know money is on his mind because he’s mentioned it. If you judge it’s time to act immediately—and this sounds like a situation in which it might be—a distraction is often a good first step. Then you remove yourself from danger. Nine times out of ten that will mean what?”

  “Run,” Katherine said.

  “It depends,” Tonya said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “But which?” Jennifer said. “It can’t be both.”

  “It is both. Everything always depends. In the absence of other data, in this imaginary mugger scenario, leaving if you can is a good option. This is an example of a situation where it appears to be a good idea to act immediately, whether by running or engaging. Other examples of times to do that are when you think your attacker plans to put you in an even more dangerous situation, where your options will be narrowed. For example, if he traps you by your car and instead of saying, Give me your keys, he says, Get in the car and drive me.”

  “What about, what about if . . .” Jennifer couldn’t bring herself to say it. She was very pale. The make-believe KA-BAR hung loosely in the hand at her side.

  “What if he wants to rape or torture you?”

  I think she nodded but her neck was so stiff with tension it was difficult to tell. I’d never had this problem with rookies. I thought for a moment.

  “Jennifer, I want you to relax, if you can, and breathe. I’m going to ask you to imagine some bad things, but they’re not real.” I looked at the others.

  “We’re all right here,” Nina said, and stood close enough for Jennifer to feel her body heat. “No one’s going to hurt you.”

  Suze stepped up, too. “We’d kill the fucker.”

  Jennifer smiled tremulously.

  “So. Jennifer, you’re planning to rape Therese.” I raised my eyebrows at Therese: Are you all right with this? She nodded and, too late, I remembered that Therese was probably one of those who had answered yes on the have-you-been-assaulted exercise. There again she was confident and contained, she had trained with guns, she had what-iffed. With luck she wouldn’t have a meltdown. “You have a KA-BAR. It’s big, it’s frightening. You have it at Therese’s throat. You want to rape her. She knows that”— again I checked with Therese, who nodded minutely—“and she’s too frightened to do anything but what she’s told. What do you do now?”

  “I don’t, I don’t . . .”

  “Rape. What does it involve?”

  “Sex.”

  “How can you have sex if you’re both fully clothed?”

  “Oh. Well. Okay.” She jabbed her polystyrene in Therese’s general direction. “Take your clothes off!”

  Therese, also pale now, put her hands to the buttons of her polo shirt.

  “See how we’re all staring at that, waiting to see if she’ll actually take off her shirt? Someone who is contemplating rape will be staring, too. His focus will be split now between the weapon he’s holding and the delicious-ness of getting a grown woman to be his puppet. This would be an excellent moment for Therese to act. But let’s say she understands that there will be an even better moment soon. So let’s imagine that she’s taken off all her clothes. Now what?”

  “Now I guess I rape her.”

  “So will you push her against the wall? Onto the ground? Let’s try the wall.” The class parted like the Red Sea and Therese walked to the wall.

  Most stranger rapes are fast and brutal, an overwhelming battering force, with no time to think, only to act imm
ediately. Violence, like love, always happens when you least expect it. But that was not an analogy I wanted to use in a self-defense class.

  Therese stood, back against the wall.

  Most rapists who preyed on a stranger literally couldn’t face their victim. But this wasn’t a real-life reenactment. This was a lesson.

  “So, Jennifer, now what?”

  Jennifer swallowed.

  “To fuck her from there your dick would have to be about a yard long,” Pauletta said.

  Jennifer looked involuntarily at her crotch and everyone grinned.

  “Pauletta’s right. You’re going to have to get very close. Let’s . . . Therese, you step out. I’ll take over.” Therese, stiff-legged with tension, pushed herself away from the wall. “Jennifer, would you like someone else to take over for you?”

  She shook her head.

  “All right then,” I said to her. “You know I won’t let you hurt me. You know I won’t hurt you.”

  She nodded.

  “Where’s your knife?” She showed it to me uncertainly. She was going to need some direction. “Put it against my throat.” I turned to the rest of the class. “Now what would he do?”

  “Whip out his whanger,” said Nina.

  “Can you pretend to do that?” I said as gently as I could to Jennifer.

  She looked down again at her crotch.

  “At this point he’s distracted again. This would be a good time to take some action.”

  “But what if he was strangling you, too?” Katherine said.

  Pauletta hooted. “He can’t strangle her, hold a knife at her throat, and pull out his dick at same time. He’s a rapist, not a three-armed superschlong. ”

  I could have kissed Pauletta but settled for smiling with everyone else. “That’s absolutely right. So this is an ideal moment to do something. What?” Blank. “Let’s try it. Everyone without a weapon, against the wall. Everyone with a weapon, put it against your partner’s cheek. Closer, Suze, you’re not even touching her face with that ice pick. So, now, those against the wall. He’s fumbling with his zipper—everyone, put your hands on your fly.” No one moved. Southern women. I sighed. “Okay, just hook your thumb into your waistband and let the hand dangle in roughly the right place. Good. Now, remember, a weapon has no power in and of itself. If you knock away the arm holding the weapon, you’ve knocked away the weapon. Give that a try.”