‘No, stop! Don’t, please don’t do that.’
My voice is so weak now. A hopeless whisper.
‘You want it, you know you want it. You’ve been smiling up at me ever since I came in. Hello, Mr Quinn, hello, Mr Quinn. Yeah, I know girls like you.’ And then his other hand is up under my skirt and he’s pulling at my tights, ripping them. He tears them away and his hands are in my knickers and now he’s touching me –
I can’t move at all then: all I can feel is my heart beating to the vibrations of fear in my body and my eyes are closed, but tears are leaking out of the corners. His hands are hurting me, abrading me. Like a pulse in my brain, I think if only someone can come and rescue me.
‘Touch me,’ he says.
I shake my head and he slaps my face and again, the pain almost doesn’t register. I don’t know how he manages it but somehow his trousers are open, he’s forcing himself inside me and then, I feel pain that makes the earlier handling like nothing.
I keep my eyes closed, let myself fall entirely numb because I can’t allow myself to think. If I think, my mind will drop into some place it can never come back from. I’m fully animal now – prey gone silent with fear.
I can only scream silently in my head until I feel his strain. He groans and collapses onto me.
‘You’re a good girl,’ he says.
He’s panting and he pulls himself off and away from me. He gets up, adjusts himself. I’m lying there splayed, clothes ripped obscenely and my hands pull my skirt over my body. I drag myself into the corner of the couch and I’m shaking. It’s like I’m there and I’m not there. Still the animal knowing the predator is watching, waiting. Still not safe.
‘Clean yourself up,’ he says, looking at me. ‘Maybe next week, a little more wine, be nice.’ And he leans down to kiss me and I fall off the couch, moving away.
‘No, get away from me.’
‘Oh no, you’re not going to do something silly now, are you?’ he says. There’s menace in his voice. How had I ever thought he sounded charming? ‘You wanted it. Don’t tell anyone otherwise. I’m going, and you need to get out of here before me. Fix yourself up.’
My fingers are shaking as I pull my coat on and gather my belongings together. My clothes feel tattered under the coat, so I do up my coat buttons.
‘This is between you and me, right?’ he growls.
I leave the room and then I’m out on the street, shaking.
I run.
43
Sid
Coming out of remembering is like entering back into a new world and I’m enclosed in Finn’s arms and he’s holding me so tightly and he’s shaking. I’m shaking too.
‘I’m going to kill him,’ he says. ‘I want to kill him, for what he did to you.’
‘My mum always thought people were good,’ I say. ‘And people think rapists are strangers, stranger danger. You know, when you get off the bus and walk strong on the street and things like that. You don’t think it happens where you work, you don’t expect that. And I’ve had a lot of time to think about it and a lot of time not to think about it. And I was just there. I was ready for a predator. He saw me, he marked me off.’
‘But what did you do?’
‘I gathered my stuff and I never went back. I left a note on Lois phone. Said there was a family emergency and I wouldn’t be back. Daisy wasn’t there in our flat when I got home. She’d gone out for the night with some friends. I got into the shower and I scrubbed everything I could. I had a loofah, I was very proud of that loofah, because they were dear and I scrubbed myself till I was raw, till I bled. In the morning I went to the Family Planning Clinic and I got the Morning After Pill, which made me really sick. They begged me to report it but I said no. I’d studied law. I knew how it worked.’
‘How?’ he says and he’s genuinely confused. Finn thinks fair should work all the time but it doesn’t, not with rape cases. The number of known reported rape cases and the number of actual rape cases are always vastly different, all over the world. The number of convictions is always a tiny number. I knew this fifteen years ago. How could I have known that and not known how to avoid someone like Alex Quinn? But book knowledge and actual inherent, body memory knowledge are two very different things. I’d known nothing, as it turned out, for all my years in college. So clever and yet so dumb all at the same time.
‘Can you imagine trying to get him on the stand?’ I asked. ‘A big shot lawyer and me, just a little girl who’d come to work in his office. They’d rip me to shreds in court. I didn’t want to be exploited a second time. Now, I’d do it. Now, I’d tell everyone.
‘But I told nobody. Not my flatmate, my family –’
‘Why not your family?’
‘The shame,’ I whispered. Shame was the hardest thing to explain to someone who didn’t understand. ‘The sense that it was my fault too, that if I’d been smarter, if I’d known more, I could have avoided it. If I’d cried out, if I’d hit him ... if I hadn’t gone into his office. All the ifs you go through. That’s shame. That you are culpable.’
Finn is silent but his eyes stay on mine, warm with love.
