But the barman, who she soon learned was called Kevin, kept bringing her drinks and Marisa worried it would be rude to say no. Her anxiety was mounting that she wouldn’t be able to pay the bill but then she remembered her dad’s credit card, which he had given her for emergencies and to pay for her driving lessons, and she relaxed. After the fourth rum and Coke, she began to feel very relaxed indeed. She started laughing at something Kevin had said, something involving a horse with a long face who’d ordered a drink and there was an ostrich in the joke because he started talking about a bird with legs all the way up to her arse, and Marisa found it so funny that she couldn’t stop laughing for a full minute.
At some point the older couple and the two men left the bar, she couldn’t remember seeing them go, and then it was just her and Kevin, who had now drawn up a seat to sit next to her, and when she asked him whether he should be working, he shrugged and said, ‘Shift’s almost over, anyway,’ and she saw that he had brought the bottle of rum with him, or maybe it had been there all along, she couldn’t recall, but he kept filling up her glass so that it was all rum and no Coke and she kept drinking it, not because she was anxious now, but because she wasn’t and she wanted to preserve the precious sensation of having nothing to worry about. She would have one more drink and then she would leave. One more, and then pay the bill and then walk out and go and do what she came here to do which was … what was it exactly? There was something important … and yet … why couldn’t she remember? It eluded her, slipping out of her grasp like a heavy necklace spiralling to the bottom of the sea. Oh yes, that was it. She was here to find her mother.
‘I’m here to find my mother,’ she said to Kevin, and when the words came out they were oddly cheerful.
‘What’s that, babe?’
When had he started calling her ‘babe’? Maybe it was the first time he’d said it but then it felt familiar, as if he must have done it before, as if maybe she had crossed paths with him in a past life and wouldn’t that be weird, wouldn’t it be weird if Kevin turned out to know her mother and this was why she had been led here, to this pub, which she saw now wasn’t welcoming and safe, but was dingy and grubby and the toilets, when she went to the loo, stank of stale urine and Red Bull, but she didn’t care. It was fun. She was having fun. So much fun! Wasn’t she?
Out of habit, she checked her reflection in the mirror. She looked bleary but fine. She applied some more lip gloss because you could never go wrong with more lip gloss and when she came back out, she saw that Kevin was holding out her denim jacket, waiting for her to slide her arms into the sleeves, which she did without asking why and then he led her out onto the street, which seemed to wobble beneath her feet so that, all of a sudden, she had trouble finding her balanceand this was even funnier than Kevin’s joke, which now she thought about it, wasn’t that funny at all but more creepy than funny but that didn’t matter because he had been so nice to her, bringing her all those drinks.
‘I haven’t paid,’ she said, the words bouncing off each other like dodgem cars.
‘Told you, babe. On the house. Now let’s get you home.’
‘Have to find my mother.’
Kevin laughed. ‘OK babe. This won’t take long. Then you can go and find whoever you want. Deal?’
She nodded.
‘Deal,’ she said, because she trusted Kevin. He was Australian, wasn’t he, like the boys onHome and Awayand he was wearing a shirt and he was kind of handsome when he turned his head into profile. She felt his arm tightening around her and was reminded of a boa constrictor she had been taught about in Biology, its cold flesh contracting and flexing until it squeezed hard enough to stop a rat’s blood pressure and heart function.
‘Are you a snake?’ Marisa asked, raising her head to his. She noticed that he was carrying her backpack where she had placed her phone after the second or maybe the third drink and she realised, then, that she had no way of telling anyone where she was. In fact, she did not know where she was because Kevin was guiding her through dark, unfamiliar streets and it was a ten-minute walk or maybe fifteen or maybe a couple of hours, she couldn’t be sure, and then he was in front of a door and he took out a bunch of keys and she saw a tattoo of an anchor on the inside of his wrist as he pushed it open and then she was in a hallway and he was turning on the lights, guiding her up a flight of stairs, to another door, which he also pushed open and then he started taking her clothes off and nudging her to the carpet and her knees buckled with the pressure and then he was spreading her legs with his hands – physically placing them wide apart as if she were a doll – and at that point, she tried to struggle and say no but it was too late and she was too drunk and too weak and too young and, suddenly, too scared. He loomed over her, so close that she could read the labelon the inside of his shirt collar and this is what she chose to focus on, the two words spelling out ‘River Island’ stitched white on black, while he pinned back her right arm and loosened his jeans with his free hand. She went quiet. Her muscles, betraying her, slid into compliance. There was a second of absolute silence and absolute stillness.
Then he raped her.
After it was over, after she had left Kevin’s flat the next morning, she couldn’t tell anyone. She had lied to her school to get the time off. Her father didn’t know what she’d been planning, and they weren’t close enough for her to confide in him anyway. She hated herself for having stayed the night, but there had been nowhere else to go. She had positioned herself at the very edge of Kevin’s double mattress so that he wouldn’t touch her again, but she needn’t have worried. He had lost interest as soon as he had withdrawn. He had seen the spots of blood on the carpet and said ‘Fuck. You could have told me,’ and Marisa had never worked out whether he meant that she should have told him she was a virgin or whether he had assumed it was her period.
She had stood up, feeling the trickle of him down her inner thigh and she had gone to the bathroom where she sat on the toilet, hunched over in an attempt to halt the brutal, slicing pain in her lower abdomen. She knew that tomorrow there would be bruises. She bruised easily, she reminded herself, still trying to make light of it, still trying to convince herself that she had wanted it to happen.
Later – much later – she learned that survivors of sexual assault talk of things being ‘snatched away’ from them – their dignity; their virginity, as in her case; even their identity – but Marisa always felt the opposite, as if something unwanted had forced itself into her, like shrapnel, and her entire self had to grow around it over the years that followed, warping the muscle and the skin out of shape until the scar became a misshapen part of her, something she simply had to live around.
She has never told anyone. She has never spoken about how she didn’t sleep at all that night, about how she cried without making a noise as grey daylight filtered into the room, about how Kevin snored as if it were normal – this most abnormal, most shocking of things – orabout how when she got up to leave, she was so terrified of waking him that she gagged and almost threw up, or about how her clothes, when she put them on, didn’t seem to be hers any more; they seemed instead to belong to an alien being, a person who was still so unaware of life’s ugliness that she had allowed herself to be raped. The fault, she thought then, was hers, not his. He had attacked her, but she had let it happen. She has revisited the moment when her muscles went slack again and again and again. In her nightmares, it is always this point she returns to: the carpet rough against her back, her jaw rigid, her entire body tensed, and then, like wind dropping in a sail – nothing. She is engulfed by shame.
She has never told Jake. Although she thinks about it every day, she also doesn’t think about it any more in a way that anyone else could understand unless they had been through it. Everything changed after her rape and there was no option but to accept the new reality wholesale. This she did. And when she started dating men in her twenties, she did so with a ferocity of intent. She was determined to plaster over the cracks Kevin had left in her soul with new experiences of intimacy. It meant she was difficult to understand; a little intense on first meeting; a complicated person who couldn’t master online dating precisely because of its innate simplicity. It was all so straightforward, she thought; so shambolically, dangerously innocent.
She had never found her mother. But with Jake, she had found someone who accepted her as she was without too many questions, and when she fell in love with him, it was not accompanied by fireworks and a surging feeling of rollercoaster stomach-leaping. It didn’t feel like a thunderbolt. It felt like something more beautiful than that. It felt like relief.
7
Kate is cooking dinner.She has ‘insisted’ and said it is ‘the least I can do’ and ‘you’ve been so generous’ and would Marisa please just let Kate show her appreciation? This last line is delivered with a laugh that requires a lot of comic pouting and a playful, semi-sarcastic tone that grates. She barely knows me, Marisa fumes. Jake is delighted, especially when Kate says she’s cooking macaroni cheese, ‘which I know is your favourite’.
She can only know about his penchant for macaroni cheese if either Marisa or Jake has told her. Marisa certainly hasn’t and so she assumes Jake must have done so. When have the two of them had a chance to talk to each other? Marisa is almost always in the house. She doesn’t like the thought of them having discussions without her.
Ridiculous as it sounds, Marisa is proprietorial over the macaroni cheese. In her head, she imagines telling Kate that her pasta dish won’t be necessary and that macaroni cheese is one ofherspecial dishes that she makes whenher boyfriend who she is currently trying to get pregnant byneeds cheering up, thank you very much. But of course she doesn’t say anything, and then has to endure the spectacle of Kate in the kitchen –herkitchen – moving around as if she owns it.
‘Now, where has Jake put the paprika?’ Kate says, as Marisa observes her from the sofa.
‘Cupboard to the right of the sink,’ Marisa says, just to prove the point that she knows the location of condiments just as well as Jake does.
‘Oh yes! Sorry.’ Kate looks at her oddly. ‘Didn’t know I was speaking out loud.’
Marisa is pretending to watch the television evening news. On screen, a politician with a florid face and narrow eyes is being interviewed about his plans for international development spending while the newsreader, sporting a blue and green tie, is interjecting with mounting incredulity.
‘Surely you can’t be serious …?’ the interviewer is asking, even though everyone knows the politicianisbeing serious and there’s no point in starting a question that way unless you’re deliberately trying to antagonise someone.
‘If you’ll just let me get a word in edgeways …’ the politician replies. Increasingly, this is what Marisa thinks politics has become: two men, overly fond of the pomp and ceremony of their own voices, talking in rhetorical non-sequiturs until one of them wins a spurious point that has vanishingly little to do with anyone’s daily reality. Normally she’d switch it off, but she wants to be able to see what Kate’s doing without making it obvious. So she stares at the screen, trying to zone out of the argumentative pitter-patter and slide her gaze discreetly towards Kate, who is bustling around the stove and taking out an unnecessary array of pots and pans. She is humming a tune under her breath, and it is this – the humming – that Marisa finds most objectionable for reasons she cannot fully express, even to herself.
