Making his way over to her, he said, ‘It’s time we said hello, don’t you think?’
‘I thought you were one of those shy types,’ she’d said, playing along, ‘and didn’t have the nerve.’
He smiled at her with amusement. ‘So, the tricky part over, tell me your name. Mine’s John.’
They danced and chatted and drank some more for the next hour. He told her that he played rugby. ‘You do like rugby players, don’t you?’ he asked. By now the volume of the party had increased and he had to shout in her ear.
‘I do as of tonight,’ she shouted back with a drunken giggle. He was just leaning in to kiss her, when a couple of his mates appeared behind him.
‘Can’t you see I’m perfectly happy right here working my charm on this gorgeous girl,’ he told them with a wink when they suggested they move on to a new club that had opened in town.
She’d been drunk enough to think how sexy he was to claim her like that.
She was still thinking the same when she found herself upstairs with him and he was kissing her, his hands finding their way under her top. He took her into one of the bedrooms and just as he closed the door and turned the key, something clicked inside of her and she knew that she didn’t want to be there. It didn’t feel right.
The only light in the untidy room came from the harsh glare of the street lamp directly outside, and it revealed all too clearly the look of eager expectation on his face.
‘Let’s not hang about then,’ he said, unbuttoning his jeans, ‘there’ll be others who’ll want to use the room.’
Suddenly he didn’t seem so attractive to her, or so sexy. He was just a big sweaty man towering over her. She stepped away from him and moved towards the door. ‘I don’t think this is a good idea,’ she said, offering up an apologetic smile. ‘Let’s go back downstairs.’
He stared at her. ‘It doesn’t work that way.’
‘Yes it does,’ she said with more confidence than she felt.
A vein ticked at his neck, a thick neck that now she was seeing him through different eyes, gave him the look of a bulldog. He continued to stare at her and just as she had her hand on the key to unlock the door, he grabbed her and swung her round so he had her in his grasp.
‘I know your type,’ he said, ‘you’re all the same, you lead a guy on and then say you’ve changed your mind. But like I just told you, it doesn’t work that way. Not with me at any rate.’ He pressed his mouth hard against hers and shoved her onto the bed.
‘Please don’t,’ she said as she struggled to push him off. But she was no match for his strength, or his intent as he ripped at her clothes. She tried calling for help, but that only made him clamp one of his large hands over her mouth. Barely able to breathe, and with the volume of music downstairs turned up even louder, as though to disguise the awful grunting sound he was making as he rammed against her, she had no choice but to let him get on with it. All the while in her head she was screaming for him to stop.
Thankfully it didn’t take him long and afterwards, when he was buttoning his jeans, he said, ‘Try telling anyone that was against your wishes and nobody will believe you. Everyone saw you come up with me quite willingly. You knew exactly what you were doing.’
She left the party straight away and back at the empty house, she ran herself a bath and cried and cried. But no matter how thoroughly she scrubbed herself, she could not wash away the stain of her stupidity. Why had she drunk so much? Why had she been so easily flattered by somebody who had proved himself to be no better than a savage thug?
In the days and weeks that followed, she withdrew from student life and rarely left her room other than to go to the nearby shop for food. Her housemates worried about her, but she wouldn’t tell them what was wrong. Who would believe her anyway? She had gone up those stairs with John quite willingly. People would remember her dancing with him and kissing him beforehand. They would say she had wanted him as much as he had wanted her. That’s how it would appear to anyone who had seen them together. So no, she kept quiet rather than be called a liar out to cause trouble.
But trouble lay in store for her when she realised she had missed her period. She wanted to believe it was caused by anxiety and not eating properly, but a trip to the chemist followed by a pregnancy test soon put paid to that hope.
She didn’t hesitate. Not for a moment. She would not let guilt stop her from doing what she had to do. No one was going to persuade her to give birth to the child of a man who was no better than a rapist. So she found the information she needed – there was plenty of it about on the university campus – and two weeks later she swallowed the first of the two tablets she had to take. The next day she took a couple of painkillers as advised, and then the second tablet the clinic had given her. She then waited for the medication to rid her body of the unwanted thing inside her.
Yet just as she had not been able to wash away the stain of her stupidity, nor could she rid herself of the worthlessness that consumed her from then on. It made her abandon her degree course, and whatever sense of direction or ambition she’d previously possessed was now gone. It all seemed so pointless. And confirming what her father had always said about her, that she could never stick at anything and see it through,she drifted aimlessly through a series of dead-end jobs and boyfriends.
Then twelve years later, she met Rick, who everybody believed was the perfect boyfriend for her. A boyfriend who would provide some much-needed stability in her life.
Chapter Fifty-Five
‘It’s all my fault, Ellis,’ Naomi had sobbed. ‘Everything that’s happened to Willow is down to me. I failed to do the single most important thing a mother should do, and that was to keep her safe.’
Ellis had listened in horror to what Naomi had reluctantly shared with him when they’d come up to bed. She hadn’t meant to tell him, but the burden of it had been too much and she’d broken down and told him everything. Afterwards, and out of respect to Willow, she’d begged him not to breathe a word of it to anyone. A man of his word, he’d promised her faithfully that he wouldn’t.
To his great sorrow there was nothing he could say that would shake Naomi out of the erroneous belief that she was to blame for what had happened to her daughter. All he could do was hold her and let her cry out her distress. For Willow’s sake she had held her emotions in check throughout the day and evening, but alone in bed with Ellis, her strength had given way to tears of self-recrimination and anguish. Her heart, she’d said, was shattered into a thousand pieces by what Willow had shared on the beach with her and Martha, and she would never forgive herself for what her youngest daughter had gone through.
Eventually she had succumbed to emotional exhaustion and fallen asleep, but next to her, Ellis lay wide awake in the darkness, his mind too restless to switch off and call it a day. He kept thinking how wrong it was that victims frequently ended up blaming themselves, while the likes of Colin and Rick – the perpetrators of the abuse – never did. Did their declarations of remorse and pleas for forgiveness ever have an ounce of genuine sincerity to them? Ellis didn’t think they had, for how else could they do what they did?
Naomi’s justification for blaming herself was on the grounds that she had put Willow, at a young and impressionable age, in a position whereby she had witnessed acts of violence which she had then absorbed as being normal, simply part and parcel of being in a relationship. Ellis had tried to reason with Naomi that if anyone was to blame it was Colin.
‘If Colin were still alive,’ Ellis had asserted, ‘wouldn’t you hold him accountable for what Willow saw as a child? Does he not have a part to play when it comes to apportioning blame?’
