Pretending: The brilliant new adult novel from Holly Bourne. Why be yourself when you can be perfect?

by Holly Bourne

  We kissed again. I started it, to change the subject. We kissed and hardly ate anything. We kissed and were shouted at to get a room. We kissed every twenty or so paces as we walked back to the Tube, and, once there, we kissed some more.

  On the next date, we went to London Zoo for their Zoo Nights event. Joshua paid, which was just as well because it’s bloody expensive to get in. We walked with our arms around one another as we skidded around groups of excitable drunk twenty-somethings to look at lions dozing in the heat that still won’t go away.

  ‘Look at that otter,’ Joshua said, leaning his chin onto my head as he pointed one out. ‘He so thinks he’s better than the other otters with that rock.’

  ‘I think his name is Jarvis,’ I replied.

  ‘Jarvis the cocky otter. Sounds like a great children’s TV show.’

  Several minutes of our lives were lost to imagining Jarvis’s day to day existence. Giving him a back story and a narrative thrust, and, ultimately, a redemption arch. Then Jarvis appeared to give another otter his little rock and we both squealed in delight that our story had come true. This required a celebratory kiss that was so intense someone threw an empty bottle at us and we moved on giggling, like teenagers.

  ‘So, it’s rather frustrating that you’re not very stalkable online,’ he said, as we walked holding hands and licking overpriced but lacklustre ice cream. ‘Literally you were nowhere to be found on social media.’

  I grinned as I imagined him typing in the word ‘Gretel’. ‘I’m not on any social media,’ I said. ‘Why? Are you on it? Doesn’t it just make you unhappy?’

  It occurred to me that, like him, I usually would’ve checked by now. If I’d had a quiet moment at work, or a low moment at home, I’d have typed his name into the search bar of various websites, feeling uneasiness and guilt in my stomach, like he could sense I was doing it. Feeling sicker if I found an album still open from the holiday he went on with his university girlfriend in 2009 because people didn’t use privacy settings back then. Wondering if she was the best sex he’d ever had. Knowing he’d been to Croatia, but when he brought up the place in a real-life interaction later on, having to act surprised to learn he’d been to Croatia, rather than say, ‘yes, I know, you went with your ex, didn’t you? Tell me, are you still in love with her and only dating me because she dumped you, but you’d drop me the moment she returned? Did you do a sixty-nine together? And, can you remember what shampoo she uses because her hair is really nice?’

  ‘Yes, for my sins.’ Joshua took a lick of his vanilla cone, as I reflected on him being the sort of person who actually says ‘for my sins’ out loud. ‘I just assumed it’s something everyone is on, whether they like it or not. It didn’t occur to me there’s an option.’

  ‘There’s always an option. You don’t have to do everything the world expects of you.’

  It was such a Gretel thing to say, and it went down a treat. He stopped us next to a sign that explained how deforestation works and kissed me next to it, ice cream rolling down our hands. ‘You’re so right,’ he half-whispered. ‘Right, that’s it. I’m deleting Facebook off my phone so I can be carefree like you.’

  I almost choked on my cone. I’d never been called carefree in my entire existence no matter how hard I have tried to hide my anxiety. The adjective people most use about me, and when I say ‘people’, I mean men in the process of dumping me, is ‘intense’.

  No, the dates couldn’t be going better. Joshua has surprised even me in his lack of aloofness – how happy he seems to be that this is quickly heading into relationship territory. Revealing vulnerable things like the fact he’s tried to stalk me online, rather than playing it cool. I’ve had the occasional thought blip that maybe it’s because he’s actually nice, but mostly I marvel at the Gretel effect, and how easy a man finds it to give his heart to a unicorn. Either way, I have felt like I’m walking three inches off the pavement by having so much power, by seeing him fall for me, by knowing it’s false and I’m not the one who is going to get hurt here.

  But when I look at the latest message I feel scared for the first time.

  Because …

  Because …

  I could only keep it up for so long. We’re entering date five. He’s been patient. He will worry something is wrong if we don’t have it soon, and nothing’s wrong with Gretel in that department thank you very much.

  Gretel needs to have sex with Joshua, which means I need to have sex with Joshua.

  • Fucking Without Fucking It Up — Gretel’s Guide to Hot Sex

  * * *

  First-time sex with anyone new is nerve-wracking, so it’s natural to be apprehensive which, sorry, is really unsexy. Confidence is what he desires. A woman who loves her body, and loves his body, and has no hang-ups and is totally up for anything. Make sure you get ready ‘down there’ and now’s the time to dig out that super-hot lingerie. It’s bound to make him go wild. The most important thing is to relaaaaaax and enjoy it and be up for anything and maybe hum when you go down on him and blah blah blah blah …

  * * *

  Sex after rape is a complicated beast. First of all, it’s worth making it clear that rape isn’t sex. It isn’t sex at all. Yes, it involves the components of sex – a body entering another body – but rape is not sex, rape is violence and rape is power. Rape is the entitlement someone feels to someone else’s body, regardless of the consequences on the soul inhabiting that body, who has to spend every moment of the rest of their life knowing their body is not as important as someone else’s entitlement. And because sex is so very different from rape, what people don’t understand is that you can have been raped and still really want to have a sex life. You can have been raped and still desire. You can have been raped and still desire angry, hot, thrusty, sex. You can have been raped and still want to initiate. You can have been raped and be sexually aggressive yourself. In fact, take every weird and wonderful thing that human beings desire on the giant spectrum of sexuality – the fetishes, the fantasies, the toys – a victim of rape can desire any of these things and it has nothing to do with their rape. You still want the things you want, crave the things you crave. Because sexuality and rape have nothing to do with each other.

  What’s strange about your sexuality after being raped is that it changes nothing and yet it also changes everything.

  Sex is never the same, not quite. Because once that act of violence is ripped into you, it’s almost impossible to not let it bleed into sex. On an intellectual level you know this is different – loving, consensual, hell you’re on top and you’re the one who started this thing. But, emotionally, your body remembers, it wonders if it’s happening again. And even though rape has nothing to do with sex, it still takes your sexuality away. It’s snatched from you. In your head, much as you don’t want to admit it, you are now a victim of rape. Well, you think you are. You’re never quite sure if you’re allowed to use that label. Not for you, not for your violation. Not when so many women are violated much worse. This messes with you on so many levels. How can you be a victim of rape when the rape itself was quiet and by someone you know and maybe you’ve just been overreacting? How can you be a victim of rape when you weren’t dragged into an alleyway? How can you be a victim of rape if you still want sex? Surely that diminishes it? Surely you’re taking a label away from someone, someone more deserving of it?

  But you were raped. You know you were. Your body and soul knows you were.

  On your bad days you curl up into a ball and sob uncontrollably about the fact you were. Or you know you were but you can’t handle it and don’t want to open up that box thank you very much because you’re terrified it will destroy you when you finally do, so you push it down and numb it out and continue getting on with this torturous business of living a life hoping eventually that the big ball of shame and confusion and pain will erode away, rather than blobbing after you quietly, tapping you on the shoulder every so often, saying, ‘I’m here because you were raped, and I’m sorry but
I don’t think I can go away.’ And you bat it off and numb it out and drink too much and fuck fuck fuck men to prove how well you can do it, even though the blob of emotions is hanging like a limp balloon in the corner.

  Or you have learnt to wear the label, to talk about the label, to get up and say ‘I am a victim and this happened to me’ and other people say you are brave and other people are wondering if maybe you are making it up. And you tell people you want to have sex with and hope beyond hope it doesn’t change how they see you, how they screw you, but, also, at the same time, you secretly want them to be more gentle, more caring, more understanding, but also really fancy you and not see that label ever, and not let it change how they have sex with you. And you know it’s an impossible task and you wonder whether it’s better not to tell anyone, because you are so much more than a victim of rape, but then, also you are still a victim of rape. You are both, and that is inescapable.

  You wish every day that you’d just never been raped.

  You feel sick with jealousy at women who have never been raped. You fantasise about how amazing their sex lives must be without all the ‘rape clutter’ that you’re constantly rummaging through and trying to make love through, and you hate them for having it so easy. Then you start talking to other women and realise there are hardly any women you’ve met who haven’t been raped. They say one in five and I call bullshit, probably more like four out of five.

  But people get uncomfortable when you say things like that.

  The thing about being a victim of rape is you are constantly a source of discomfort. To yourself, as well as others. So many men have sex with women who have been raped, and yet they do not know it. Because the women don’t tell them, because, here’s the thing: it’s so hard to admit … Being raped is the least sexy thing ever.

  It has nothing to do with sex and yet everything to do with sex.

  It’s too complicated and painful and there’s nowhere for the shame to go, so you bury it and bury it and try to be like the other women. The other women who do not carry this ball of anger and shame and can fling their legs open and pant and scream. You pretend to be them. Sometimes you can con yourself, and him. Other times you can only con him. You tuck your sexual trauma away to make yourself sexier to the species who took your sexuality away from you.

  There are so many of us, and yet maybe there aren’t. And you don’t want to be the broken one. Especially as it wasn’t your fault this happened to you, although, of course, sometimes you worry it was your fault.

  So you pretend, a lot, that you’re fine. That you’re like the other girls. But … maybe you are pretending to be a woman everyone else is pretending to be too?

  I take the morning off work.

  I shave my legs. I sit in the bath and do it properly, with shaving foam and everything. And a new razor blade, even though they cost a fortune. I lift my arms out from the bubbles and scythe off the regrowth in my armpit. It takes me a while to decide what to do about my pubes. In the end, I decide that perfect Gretel would have a perfect amount of them. Enough so she doesn’t look like a child, because men can feel a bit guilty about that, even though porn has trained them to crave it. But not too much because she’s a grown woman. It’s so hot I hardly need a towel to dry off. But I still roll myself up in one, like a jam roly poly, and spend several minutes sitting in the sunlight that is chucking itself through my window, having lots of thoughts about what I’m planning to do, and how I know it’s such an act of self-harm, but I’m going to do it anyway.

  I stay in my towel and stare at the wall. Even with the morning off, I may still be late for work.

  ‘Get ready,’ I say out loud. ‘Get up April and get ready.’

  I don’t get up.

  ‘No,’ I reply to myself. ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘But you’ve got to go to work.’

  ‘Living life and being an adult is terrible. Why does nobody tell you how terrible it is?’

  ‘April. Stop being weird and get ready.’

  ‘FINE then, I WILL.’

  I rub scented body lotion into my skin, and lie naked on my bed waiting for it to sink in properly while I look at the crack in the ceiling and wonder if anyone would do anything about it if I were to scream. I should probably use my trainers to ‘prep the area’. In all the sex advice, ‘prepping’ usually refers to trimming your pubes with a pair of IKEA scissors or something like that, but, in my case, it involves stretching the muscles of my traumatised vagina. I roll off the bed and open the drawer under it, sifting through all the things I hide under there: my vibrator, lube, condoms that I rarely get the chance to use. Right at the back I find the ghastly pink bag of equipment the NHS gave me two years ago. My stomach tightens as I pick it up – just the gross hue of pink is enough to ignite several painful memories associated with this bag and the things inside it. I get out my hand mirror and a cotton bud from my dressing table, then reach into my bag and unscrew the small bottle of lidocaine numbing gel. I examine my genitals for a moment. It’s always a shock, looking at your vulva in a mirror. Even with all the practise I’ve had through using these trainers over the years. I always find it vaguely grotesque and worry it’s different and wrong. Which, considering I need to use vaginal trainers, it sort of is. I squeeze the lidocaine onto the Q-tip, then, using my mirror, I apply the gel around the entrance of my vagina like I was taught to at the hospital clinic. It burns like it always does. I get a flashback to my first appointment. My legs in stirrups. Screaming as they tested me because it hurt so much. ‘I can’t even use tampons any more,’ I cried at them. ‘What’s happened to me?’ They looked sympathetic. They told me how normal this is for survivors of rape. They reassured me the trainers would help, but they also said, ‘You may not ever be able to have penetrative sex again.’

  Now in my bedroom, one tear drizzles down my cheek but I pretend it hasn’t, even though I flinch as the cotton bud hits each gland. I get out the dilators while I wait for the effects of the gel to take hold. They slide out of each other like white plastic Russian-doll dildos. I pluck out the smallest one, the size of a mini tampon, and hold it between my thumb and forefinger. I lay back on my pillows, open my legs, and, like I was taught to, take three deep breaths to relax my muscles. On the last breath, I push the plastic inside my body. It slides in fine with not even a wince. Relief gushes over me. The success of this relaxes me enough to go up one size and repeat the process. It slides in fine too. I go up a size and up a size, stretching myself bigger with each one. ‘A bit like driving a car’, they told me. ‘Always go up through the gears, never start with the largest dilator.’ After five minutes, I’m ready for it. ‘Mr Big’ as I’ve affectionately nicknamed him. I extract the giant, white, plastic penis-replicate from the pink bag, rub a little lube onto the end, take another deep breath and push it up slowly. It’s slightly uncomfortable as it’s made of hard plastic, but it’s up it’s up it’s up. I lie back on my pillow, legs askew, and leave it in there for fifteen minutes like I was taught to do. Smiling.

  I can still do this, I can still let things into my body. You didn’t take it away from me after all, no matter how hard you tried, you rotten bastard. I won’t let you win. I’ll never let you win.

  When the time’s up, I slide the trainer out, collect them all up and give them a big wash in the sink, drying them with a clean towel before replacing everything into the pink purse. I’m feeling triumphant when I open my top drawer and rummage for my good pair of matching underwear. I pluck out the black lacy bra and knickers and shove them into my bag. It’s still too hot today and I want to put them on fresh after work. I know, of course, that what I’m planning to do later is potentially really stupid. Giving myself to someone who doesn’t even know my name – for what? An end-game of revenge? But it’s not just that, I think, as I shrug on my short-sleeved shirt dress. Every time I have sex with someone, part of me feels like it’s payback against Ryan. Like I’m proving that he didn’t win.

  Eventually, I’m re
ady to leave the house. I step outside and it’s like being slapped in the face by the heat. No breeze offers any respite. People walk slowly on the pavements, sweat pulping down their foreheads, suits ruined before lunchtime. The cold showers of the morning seeming like a million years ago.

  They say it might rain later. Finally rain.

  ‘Hi everyone,’ I announce to the office when I get in just after 1 p.m.

  A few people raise their heads from their keyboard in vague acknowledgement of my arrival, but most remain glued to their screens. The Friday vibe is yet to hit. I mouth ‘hello’ to Matt and Katy and sit down at my computer, getting right into my shift.

  Message received: 08:43

  I’m probably overreacting but I’ve been thinking a lot about something that happened a few years ago. My boyfriend was 18, and I was only 15, and one night, when I was staying at his, he just had sex with me without talking about it, without asking. His parents were out and I went over and I was expecting us to do some stuff, but not that because we’d not been going out very long. But he just did it, and I was so shocked I just went along with it. I didn’t know how to say no. I figured it was obvious I wasn’t ready, but it clearly wasn’t because he did it anyway. We went out for a year after that and had consensual sex throughout our relationship. But now I can’t get that first time out of my head. I’ve struggled to be in a relationship since. Am I weird?

  Message received: 12:37

  I was kissing some guy in a club the other night when he just shoved his hand up my skirt and into my vagina. I pushed him off and he laughed and I cried when I got home. Not sure why I’m typing this. Just feel a bit strange.