The Beloved Girls

by Harriet Evans

  ‘God, Hunter, you’re disgusting.’ Giles was behind him, the other members of the band flanking him.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I said. I felt prickly with panic. My swimming costume seemed to be shrinking, with me inside it.

  Giles had his hands on his hips. He looked down. I remember his face, seen from that angle. Flattened, wide, the black hair sticking out, the black stubble grey on his chin. He had jeans on, with a thin belt. He wore loafers without socks.

  ‘I came to see you. Don’t you want to see me?’

  ‘No,’ I said, looking up. ‘I don’t want to see you. You should have been here earlier, and you shouldn’t have got Joss this drunk. Look at him. What did you give him?’

  ‘Hi, Kitty,’ said Guy, as Janey hastily swam to the other side of the pool, away from Joss’s dispersing puddle of vomit, and jumped out, shivering. She looked like a half-drowned animal, her hair in patchy spikes. ‘Thanks for having us. We won’t stay long.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Giles. ‘I don’t know about that.’ He took a bottle of wine out of a plastic bag. ‘I think we might stay for a bit, don’t you, Kits?’

  Nico was giggling, rubbing his gums; Joss was still bending over the pool, hands on knees, trails of spittle swaying from his mouth. He was groaning, low. ‘Joss,’ Janey said. ‘Joss – oh God. That’s disgusting . . . Joss.’

  ‘I don’t feel well,’ Joss said, his face white, and he stared at me, our eyes locking, the two of us, once as close as it’s possible to be, that tiny connection still there.

  ‘Joss . . .’ Janey wrapped herself in a towel. ‘Come here . . . oh God, don’t be sick again. What the hell did you do to him?’ she demanded. ‘Joss! Come back!’

  Joss ran towards the door, stumbling as he went, and she turned back towards me, and shrugged. ‘Back in a minute.’

  I could hear her, calling his name, softly, across the lawn. I watched through the open gate, and then was grabbed from behind as Giles hauled me up, underneath one armpit.

  ‘We’re going into the pool house,’ he said to the others.

  ‘Are you OK?’ said Guy. ‘Catherine?’

  A man with a conscience. Or the beginnings of one. I often wonder what happened to him.

  I looked back but Janey was gone. I should have called out for her. She would have come, of that I’m certain. But I didn’t. Girls should, but they don’t. Girls should make more noise but they’re told not to. To box themselves in. Be loved and be quiet.

  ‘I missed you tonight, Kitty,’ Giles said, in a soft voice, but so the others could hear. He stroked my hair; those fingers on it again. I wanted to scream. He opened the pool house door, courteously, and I went inside. The smell of warm wood, of soft mildewed fabric curtains, of towels; it had always been one of my favourite scents, the aroma of home, what I dreamed of when I came back from school during the holidays. I loved this warm, safe, old room. I turned around, about to ask him to leave, and he shut the door. Then he kneed me in the stomach, catching me off-guard, so I buckled, and fell to the floor. ‘There,’ he said. ‘I don’t think you’ve been very nice to me lately, Kits. I thought you might want to be nice to me now.’

  He raped me, though at the time I didn’t think it was rape. I didn’t want him to stroke my hair, then my neck. I didn’t want him near me at all. I said no, but he said I wasn’t being friendly, that I had humiliated him. I didn’t want him to take the strap of my costume down, but he said I was too full of myself, that I had badmouthed him, shown him up, made him look stupid, that I owed it to him to be nice now. I didn’t want him to push me onto the ground where my little sister’s old red swimming costume from last year lay under the bench, kicked away and furry with dust. I looked at it as he covered my mouth, and pushed up inside me as I screamed in silence.

  ‘There,’ he said, ‘this is nice, isn’t it? If you just try, a bit. Last time you made no effort. Polly puts some effort into it.’

  I didn’t want his weight on me, his smell, of rancid sweet decaying alcohol and the pressure of him on my hips and breasts, his jigging, frantic fatness, the pain of it inside me, how raw it was. Red, hot, sore – people say those words to describe sex and I think how strange. He went harder and harder, clutching my breasts as though they were handles. That hurt so much too. But the penis inside me was the worst. It rubbed, every time a little more, until I started to panic, and believe it wouldn’t ever be able to get out. I couldn’t breathe. I kept trying to breathe. Giles wasn’t looking at me any more, his head was down. Like it was an endurance race. So I just stared at the edge of Merry’s swimming costume – I remembered the day we’d bought it, in Debenhams in Bristol, for some reason, where Mummy had taken us shopping. I tried to remember where we went for lunch and when the edge of the pain returned I pretended it wasn’t me. That this was happening to another person.

  I was not me any more.

  I took myself to another place. Ignored him pulling my fingers back, him yanking my hair, grabbing my breasts and squeezing them, the sound of it.

  He spat on my stomach when it was all over. I looked up at him, and didn’t say anything. I learned then, really then, the power of staying silent. I was wrong, of course, but to me it felt like power. He jammed two fingers inside me afterwards, and said I was disgusting, and as I stood up, looking down, trying not to think about how to breathe, I heard him laughing, as he wiped his fingers on Merry’s towel.

  ‘Bye, Kits,’ he said. ‘See you at the ceremony. Have a wash, will you? You stink.’

  The others had gone – vanished into the night. I stayed inside and then emerged into darkness. The Seven were still there, even lower in the sky than before. I wanted to swim but the pool was dirty now, everything was. When I was certain he had gone – I didn’t know how he’d get home, and I didn’t care – I crept up to my room. I stuffed torn-out pages of my old school books under the door, creating a wedge, and then climbed into bed. I went straight to sleep. Which was the strangest part of it all.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The following morning, I crept downstairs. Sun was stealing into the kitchen, along the passageway and out to the garden. I opened the back door and stood, inhaling the fresh air for a moment. There was a very slight breeze, but it was still too hot, already, though it was barely seven.

  My mouth was dry. I was so sore inside and my muscles were aching: my stomach, my hips. My hands hurt where he had gripped my wrists. My scalp stung, where he’d pulled the tufts of my shorn hair. My eyes were sore, though I hadn’t cried.

  No one else was up yet, it seemed. I picked up the car keys, and left the house.

  The sea was too cold for the early day trippers who squealed and stumbled away from the uneven shingled shoreline. Not cold enough for me. I swam for ages. The salt stung my eyes, sluiced my torn body with pain. The water across the bay looked calm, liquid grey velvet shot through with teal, but sometimes the strength of the tide pulled me violently in, towards the rising bank of grey stones on the beach. I didn’t mind, being battered about like this. I was a strong swimmer. I wanted to feel nothing, to feel numb.

  I came out of the water, wincing as I walked on the hard stones towards my jelly shoes and towel. I sat on the beach, aching all over, the stones digging into me. I liked it.

  I didn’t know that I was a victim, that he had done a bad thing to me. I felt it, inside, outside, but I wouldn’t have believed it if someone had told me. All my life I’d been told to put up with something or other: that I didn’t have a choice about where I went to school, what friends I made, what boys I dated, what clothes I wore, even where I went after school. What would it feel like to be in charge of one’s life? What would it be like? What would I choose to do, if I could?

  I could never go into that pool house again, I knew that. I could feel seawater, seeping through me into the thin old towel I had taken from the bathroom.

  I’d pushed so many people away. I had been living this lie of Kitty who is a goddess and in charge for so long that really
I would have to start again, unpick it all, become another person. I didn’t think I could. I wished the decision could be taken out of my hands.

  After a while, I realised I was shivering. I pulled a jumper over my head, looking at the bruises forming on my legs, and the scratches from the night Janey and I walked across the corn field.

  I looked up at the cairn on the top of Exmoor, the Vane Stones, black in the shade. The Reverend Diver was up there, I remembered. A suicide, therefore not permitted to be buried on church land. I thought about my young Aunt Pammy, dying outside the chapel, aged only twelve, her family drunk on honey and unable to help her, and the pamphlet her only legacy because we never, ever mentioned her otherwise. Later, in the afternoon, the Stones would turn fiery gold. I put my shoes on, stood up carefully and walked slowly to the car.

  As I came along the drive, I turned the radio off. All was silent and I knew the house was still sleeping. I eased myself out of the car, walking slowly, like an old woman. Something moved above me. I looked up.

  Janey’s face peered out from the window of her bedroom. When I got inside, she had obviously run down the stairs and was waiting for me.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, awkwardly. ‘Are you – OK?’

  ‘No,’ I said, with a smile. ‘Thanks.’ I bent over slightly, unable to stop a strong, aching pulse jabbing inside me. The saltwater stung badly now that the cold had worn off. Janey stared, her eyes huge.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Giles. Giles happened.’

  Realisation crept across her face.

  ‘Oh. Oh, Kitty. Did he h-hurt you?’

  You didn’t say rape, then. Rape was crazed strangers waiting for you in dark alleyways, it wasn’t neighbouring boys from nice schools with rich fathers.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, scrunching up my lips and nose, as if asked to comment on the weather. ‘Yes, he did a bit.’

  ‘I – oh shit.’ She was knitting her fingers together. ‘I went with Joss. To his room. He was in such a state. I wanted to go back, but Joss said you two were always like that, always fighting. Oh no –’ She saw, and I saw, we had been played.

  She reached a hand out tentatively towards me, but I moved away. ‘Shit,’ she said again. ‘I knew I should have stayed, Kitty – I’m so sorry.’

  ‘You could have asked. You should have.’

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘Yes, I should have.’

  ‘You could have come in. You’d have seen.’ I rolled the swimming costume up in the towel, squeezing the moisture out, as much as I could. I couldn’t look at her.

  ‘I – what if you didn’t want me to come in? You – you’d have been furious. I wasn’t sure . . .’ She started fingering her scalp again, anxiously. ‘Joss said –’

  ‘It’s the thirtieth of August,’ I said. ‘You’ve been here for what, five weeks? If you haven’t worked out that when Joss says something and I say something you should always listen to me over him then we’re not friends. I believed you before, when you said you were with me, not him. We’re not – whatever this is.’

  She was pale, her bottom lip caught in her teeth.

  ‘Anything, Kitty. I’ll do anything. I know. I messed it up. They –’ She shook her head. ‘No, it’s my fault.’

  ‘Look,’ I said, relenting at her expression. ‘Next time don’t stand by.’

  ‘I won’t,’ she said. She cleared her throat. I saw her blinking and nodding. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘You too, though.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I mean, you – oh, I don’t know.’

  I heard the creaking of the staircase, someone coming downstairs. ‘Come here.’ I dragged her inside, into the utility room, and unrolled the towel again. ‘You’re my friend. You’re the only one I trust. What the hell does that mean?’

  ‘I mean . . .’ She looked up, and her eyes were glinting with tears. ‘This – it’s getting out of control. You – me – Joss – what’s happened. Running away. This ceremony – I shouldn’t have come here.’

  ‘Go home then,’ I said, hugging myself. ‘Go back to your empty house.’

  ‘You know I can’t,’ she said. ‘Neither of us can now, Kitty.’

  I turned the washing machine on and moved closer towards it. Blood was drumming in my ears: I could not lose her, not now, not when I was starting to see what I had to do, what really had to happen.

  ‘But we’re not children any more. Polly Baring, look at her. She’ll meet some posh guy like her and marry him and settle down and never know what’s going on outside her door. We can’t choose that. We don’t want to choose that. We’ve seen something else.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Janey, quietly, and I felt her smooth, cool little hand slide over my other wrist. ‘I’m so sorry I didn’t help you.’ She rubbed her face.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said. But it wasn’t. I wanted her to be as strong as I’d imagined she was, and she wasn’t. How could she have been?

  ‘Whatever you want to do, Kitty. Tell me. Whatever.’

  ‘I’ve written to your mum,’ I said, suddenly. ‘I forged your signature.’

  She froze. ‘What did you say?’

  I put my hand on hers. All the time, I was warming up from the ice-cold of the sea. My heart was racing.

  ‘I’ve cut the ties, if you want. I did it well, promise. Promise. I said she didn’t need the hassle and that you were eighteen and could decide on your own future. And I sort of hinted that you were entitled to the money from the house, and that you had a solicitor ready to check it all over, and that you were willing to give her half.’

  ‘It’s not about money –’

  ‘It’s not, but honestly,’ I said, more brutally than I’d intended, ‘I don’t think she cares that much about you, does she? I honestly think she’d take that money if you didn’t point it out to her.’

  Janey nodded, her face pale. ‘No, sure . . . Sure.’

  ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have done it.’ I rubbed my eyes. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t. But we’re even,’ she said. ‘It’s OK. Jesus.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s OK, Kitty.’

  ‘I don’t care . . . baby . . . I don’t care,’ I sang, quietly, and we smiled at each other.

  I sank down onto the floor, raking my fingers through my cropped hair, sticky with sea salt. Janey sat down next to me. We were silent for a moment as the washing machine rumbled loudly, feeling the cool stone floor on our skin. Every moment that went by meant last night was in the past, and the ceremony, the moment of our release, was drawing closer.

  Chapter Thirty

  Mummy was in her study when I knocked, softly, the following day. One knew when she was working there because the radio crackled incessantly in the background. Mummy never seemed to notice: my father, Joss and I found it unbearable.

  ‘Come in.’

  Checking no one was watching, I went in and shut the door carefully behind me.

  She was at her desk, her mother’s old kitchen table, scrubbed and re-varnished, and pushed up against the wall where a fireplace had been bricked up. There were shelves on either side, crammed with battered King Penguins, other books on design and a few curios: ostrich eggs, a set of Russian dolls, a matchbox with a dead beetle, dead, curling leaves. A large white anglepoise lamp loomed up as if staring at you. Pots of pencils, tubes of paint, and other equipment were shoved to one side of the desk. It was organised chaos.

  This had been my grandfather’s study, and when Mummy came to the house in the sixties, she had boarded up the fireplace, painted the room white and put up the shelves. It wasn’t like the rest of Vanes, dark wood panelling, intimate, claustrophobic. It was spare, and cool. North-facing light. She had had framed some of her own textiles and hung them on the wall, like gold discs: ‘The Hive’, the one everyone had in the seventies, and the ‘Lost Garden’, the coiling roses. ‘Lion’, which she had designed for Joss for our seventh birthday, and which was now on duvet covers, placemats, even mugs. It was ‘The Hive’ th
at was the first one though, and it was everywhere, on curtains, cushions, oilcloths on kitchen tables . . . She’d signed a deal with the department store, which paid her a flat fee. She got no commission on any of those sales.

  On weekends back from school I used to do my homework in this room, curled up on the window seat. Mummy would tell me about her childhood in fifties London, freezing smog, her grandmother’s floor-length mink coat, seeing Winston Churchill being pushed along in a wheelchair in St James’s Park, and the happy, ramshackle life in her mother’s icy-cold house in Chelsea: the eccentric lodgers, how some of them became friends, about life after the war, leaping around bomb sites, the Festival of Britain, being taken to Harrods by her mother once a year to choose her birthday present.

  She didn’t ever tell me how and why she was taken away by her father, or what she had seen happen between her parents, or how it affected her. She didn’t really talk directly about her mother, always stories that danced around her. ‘Look at those peonies, Kitty. My ma loved huge, blowsy flowers like that. Adored them. Every spring she had to buy a bunch.’ ‘Ah, Genevieve’s on. It was my ma’s favourite film, you know.’

  After Eileen Lestrange rang her, back in March, to tell her that Simon had died, I’d found her in there, sketching, and when I asked her who it was she was drawing, she told me it was her mother. ‘I can see her, so clearly. But there aren’t any photos of her. I don’t have any, anyway. And when I’m gone, who will remember her? Everyone else is gone, really. And she should have been remembered.’

  It was the same with Pammy. And I thought it was the saddest thing I’d heard.

  ‘Hi, Mummy,’ I said, looking round, inhaling the soft scent of pencil shavings, of chemicals. There was something odd about the room since the last time I’d been in there, to type out the letter, but I couldn’t work out what it was.