“You’re Robert Cannon?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m Robbie.”
For a fraction of a second, I felt sorry for him. It was the way he said his name, still using the diminutive. Robbie is a child’s name, the name of a little boy who runs around the back garden and climbs trees. It’s not the name of some overweight loser, some bankrupt running a dodgy garage in a shitty part of town. He stepped towards me and I caught a whiff of him, body odour and booze, and any pity evaporated as my body remembered the feeling of his, crushing the breath out of me.
“Look, love, I’m very busy,” he said.
My hands clenched into fists. “Is she here?” I asked.
“Is who here?” He frowned, then rolled his eyes, reaching into his jeans pocket for his cigarettes. “Ah, fuck’s sake, you’re not a mate of Shelley’s, are you? Because, as I told her old man, I haven’t seen the slag in weeks, so if it’s about that, you can just do one, all right?”
“Lena Abbott,” I said, my voice little more than a hiss. “Is she here?”
He lit his cigarette. Behind his dull brown eyes, something sparked. “You’re looking for . . . who now? Nel Abbott’s girl? Who are you?” He looked around him. “Why d’you think Nel’s girl would be here?”
He wasn’t faking it. He was too stupid to fake it, I could see that. He didn’t know where Lena was. He didn’t know who she was. I turned to go. The longer I stayed, the more he’d wonder. The more I’d give away.
“Hang on,” he said, placing a hand on my shoulder, and I spun round, shoving him away from me.
“Easy!” he said, raising his hands, looking around as though for backup. “What’s going on here? Are you . . . ?” He squinted at me. “I saw you—you were at the funeral.” Finally it dawned on him. “Julia?” His face broke into a smile. “Julia! Bloody hell. I didn’t recognize you before . . .” He took me in, head to toe. “Julia. Why didn’t you say something?”
He offered me a cup of tea. I started laughing and I couldn’t stop, I laughed until tears streamed down my face while he stood there, half giggling along at first, until his uncertain mirth petered out and he stood, dull and uncomprehending, watching me.
“What’s going on?” he asked, irritated.
I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. “Lena ran off,” I said. “I’ve been looking for her everywhere, I thought maybe . . .”
“Well, she isn’t here. Why on earth d’you think she’d be here? I don’t even know the kid, first time I laid eyes on her was at the funeral. Gave me a bit of a turn, if I’m honest. She’s so like Nel.” He rearranged his features into a facsimile of concern. “I was sorry to hear about what happened. Really sorry, Julia.” He tried to touch me again, but I pulled away. He took a step closer to me. “I just . . . I can’t believe you’re Julia! You look so different.” An ugly smile smeared across his face. “Don’t know how I could forget,” he said quietly, his voice low. “I popped your cherry, didn’t I, girl?” He laughed. “Long time ago now.”
Popped your cherry. Pop! A joyful sound, of balloons and birthday parties. And cherries, sweet on the lips, delicious and sticky; these things were a million miles from his slimy tongue in my mouth and his dirty fingers pushing me open. I thought I would gag.
“No, Robbie,” I said, and I was surprised by how clear my voice sounded, how loud, how steady. “You didn’t pop my cherry. You raped me.”
The smile slipped from his ruined face. He cast a glance over his shoulder before stepping towards me again. My head swimming with adrenaline now, breath quickening, I clenched my fists and stood my ground. “I what?” he hissed. “I fucking what? I never . . . I didn’t rape you.”
He whispered it, rape, as though afraid someone might hear us.
“I was thirteen years old,” I said. “I told you to stop, I was crying my fucking eyes out, I . . .” I had to stop because I could feel the tears filling my throat, drowning my voice, and I didn’t want to cry in front of the bastard now.
“You cried ’cos it was your first time,” he said, his voice low, wheedling, “because it hurt a bit. You never said you didn’t want to. You never said no.” Then, louder, definitive, “You lying bitch, you never said no.” Now he started laughing. “I could have whatever I wanted, don’t you remember? I had half the girls in Beckford trailing after me with their knickers wet. I had your sister, who was the hottest girl around. You honestly think I needed to rape a fat cow like you?”
He believed it. I could see that he believed every word he said, and in that moment I was defeated. All this time he’d never felt guilty. He’d never felt a second of remorse, because in his head what he’d done wasn’t rape. All this time, and he still believed he’d been doing the fat girl a favour.
I walked away from him. Behind me, I could hear him coming after me, swearing under his breath. “You always were a mad bitch, weren’t you? You always were. Can’t believe you coming in saying this kind of shit, saying—”
I stopped suddenly, a few feet from the car. Wasn’t there some part of you that liked it? Something shifted. If Robbie didn’t think he’d raped me, how could you have done? What were you talking about, Nel? What were you asking me? Some part of me that liked what?
I turned around. Robbie was standing behind me, hands hanging at his sides like slabs of meat, his mouth open. “Did she know?” I asked him.
“What?”
“Did Nel know?” I yelled at him.
His lip curled. “Did Nel know what? That I fucked you? You’re joking, aren’t you? Imagine what she’d have said to that, if I told her I’d banged her little sister just after I was done banging her?” He laughed. “I told her the first bit, how you tried it on, how you were drunk and sloppy and leaning all over me and looking up at me with your sad fat face and begging, please? Like a little dog, you were, always hanging around, always watching us whenever I was with her, spying on us, even when we were in bed you liked to watch, didn’t you? Thought we didn’t notice, didn’t you?” He laughed again. “We did. We use to joke about what a little perv you were, sad little fatso, never been touched, never been kissed, liked to watch her hot sister getting it.” He shook his head. “Rape? Don’t make me laugh. You wanted some of what Nel was getting, you made that very fucking clear.”
I pictured myself, sitting under the trees, standing outside the bedroom, watching. He was right, I did watch them, but not with lust, not with envy, with a kind of horrible fascination. I watched the way a child does, because that was what I was. I was a little girl who didn’t want to see what was being done to her sister (because that’s what it looked like, it always looked as though something was being done to you), but who couldn’t look away.
“I told her you tried it on with me and then you ran off crying when I knocked you back, and she ran off after you.”
There was a sudden tumbling of images in my head: the sound of your words, the heat of your anger, the pressure of your hands as you held me down in the water and then grabbed my hair and pulled me to the bank.
You bitch, you stupid fat bitch, what have you done? What are you trying to do?
Or was it, You stupid bitch, what were you doing?
And then it was, I know he hurt you, but what did you expect?
I made it to the car, fumbling for my keys with trembling hands. Robbie was still behind me, still talking. “Yeah, run along then, you lying slag. You never thought that girl was here, did you? That was an excuse, wasn’t it? You came to see me. Did you want another taste?” I could hear him laughing as he walked away, delivering his parting shot from across the street. “No chance, pet, not this time. You might have lost a bit of weight, but you’re still a fucking minger.”
I started the car, pulled away, stalled. Cursing, I started the engine again and lurched off down the road, putting my foot down, putting as much distance as possible between him and me and what had just
happened, and knowing I should be worrying about Lena, but unable to think about that because all I could think was this: You didn’t know.
You didn’t know that he raped me.
When you said, I’m sorry he hurt you, you meant you were sorry I felt rejected. When you said, What did you expect? you meant that of course he would reject me, I was just a child. And when you asked me, Wasn’t there some part of you that liked it? you weren’t talking about sex, you were talking about the water.
The scales fell. I have been blind and blinkered. You didn’t know.
I pulled the car over to the side of the road and started to sob, my whole body racked with the awful, horrible knowledge: you didn’t know. All these years, Nel. All these years, I attributed to you the most vicious cruelty, and what had you done to deserve it? What did you do to deserve it? All those years, and I didn’t listen, I never listened to you. And now it seemed impossible that I could not have seen, could not have understood that when you asked me, Wasn’t there some part of you that liked it? you were talking about the river, about that night at the river. You wanted to know what it felt like to abandon yourself to the water.
I stopped crying. In my head, you muttered: You don’t have time for this, Julia, and I smiled. “I know,” I said out loud. “I know.” I didn’t care any longer what Robbie thought, I didn’t care that he’d spent all his life telling himself he did nothing wrong; that’s what men like him do. And what does it matter what he thought? He was nothing to me. What mattered was you, what you knew and didn’t know, and that I’d been punishing you all your life for something you didn’t do. And now I had no way to tell you I was sorry.
• • •
BACK IN BECKFORD, I stopped the car on the bridge, climbed down the mossy steps and walked along the river path. It was early afternoon, the air was cooling and the breeze was getting up. Not a perfect day for a swim, but I’d been waiting so long and I wanted to be there, with you. It was the only way now that I could get close to you, the only thing I had left.
I took off my shoes and stood in jeans and T-shirt on the bank. I started to walk forward, one foot after the other. I closed my eyes, gasping as my feet sank into the cool mud, but I didn’t stop. I kept going, and when the water closed over my head, I realized through my terror that it did feel good. It did.
MARK
Blood seeped through the bandage wrapped around Mark’s hand. He’d not done a very good job of patching it up, and try as he might, he couldn’t stop himself from gripping the steering wheel too tightly. His jaw ached and a bright, startling pain pulsed behind his eyes. The vise was back again, clamped around his temples; he could feel the blood squeezing through the veins in his head, could almost hear his skull begin to crack. Twice he’d had to stop the car at the side of the road to throw up.
He had no idea where to run. He’d started off by driving north, back towards Edinburgh, but halfway there he changed his mind. Would they expect him to go that way? Would there be roadblocks at the entrance to the city, torchlight shone in his face, rough hands dragging him from the car, quiet voices telling him there’s worse to come than this? Far worse. He turned back and took a different route. He couldn’t think with his head splitting like this. He needed to stop, to breathe, to plan. He turned off the main road and drove towards the coast.
Everything he’d feared was coming to pass. He saw his future unravelling before him and he played it over and over in his mind: the police at the door, the journalists screaming questions at him as he was dragged, head covered with a blanket, to a car. Windows repaired, just to be smashed again. Vile insults on the walls, excrement through the letter box. The trial. Oh God, the trial. The look on his parents’ faces as Lena levelled her accusations, the questions the court would ask: when and where and how many times? The shame. The conviction. Prison. Everything he’d warned Katie about, everything he’d told her he would face. He wouldn’t survive it. He’d told her that he wouldn’t survive it.
• • •
THAT FRIDAY EVENING IN JUNE, he hadn’t been expecting her. She was supposed to be going to a birthday party, something she couldn’t get out of. He remembered opening the door, feeling the rush of pleasure he always got from looking at her, before he had time to process the look on her face. Anxious, suspicious. He’d been seen that afternoon, speaking to Nel Abbott in the school car park. What had they been talking about? Why was he speaking to Nel at all?
“I was seen? By whom?” He was amused, thought she was jealous.
Katie turned away, rubbing her hand against the back of her neck, the way she did whenever she felt nervous or self-conscious. “K? What’s the matter?”
“She knows,” Katie said quietly, without looking at him, and the ground fell away, pitching him into nothingness. He grabbed hold of her arm, twisting her round to face him. “I think Nel Abbott knows.”
And then it all came tumbling out, all the things she’d lied about, the things she’d been hiding from him. Lena had known for months, Katie’s brother, too.
“Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ, Katie, how could you not tell me? How could you . . . Jesus!” He’d never yelled at her before, he could see how frightened she was, how terrified and upset, and yet he couldn’t stop himself. “Do you understand what they’ll do to me? Do you fucking understand what it is like to go to prison as a sex offender?”
“You’re not!” she cried.
He grabbed her again (he felt hot, even now, with the shame of it). “But I am! That’s exactly what I am. That is what you’ve made me.”
He told her to leave, but she refused. She begged, pleaded. She swore to him that Lena would never talk. Lena would never say anything to anyone about it. Lena loves me, she would never hurt me. She’d persuaded Josh that it was over, that nothing had ever actually happened, that he had nothing to worry about, that if he did say something all it would do was break their parents’ hearts. But Nel?
“I’m not even sure if she does know,” Katie told him. “Lena said she might have overheard something . . .” She tailed off, and he could tell by the cut of her gaze that she was lying. He couldn’t believe her, couldn’t believe anything she said. This beautiful girl, who had entranced him, bewitched him, couldn’t be trusted.
It was over, he told her, watching her face crumple, disentangling himself as she tried to wrap her arms around him, pushing her away, gently at first and then more firmly. “No, listen, listen to me! I cannot see you any longer, not like this. Not ever, do you understand? It is over. It never happened. There is nothing between us—there was never anything between us.”
“Please don’t say that, Mark, please.” She was sobbing so hard she could barely breathe, and his heart broke. “Please don’t say that. I love you . . .”
He felt himself weaken, he let her hold him, he let her kiss him, he felt his resolve subside. She pressed herself into him and he had a sudden clear image of another pressing against him, and not just one but several: male bodies pressing against his beaten, broken, violated body. He saw this and pushed her violently away.
“No! No! Do you have any idea what you’ve done? You have ruined my life, do you understand that? When this gets out—when that bitch tells the police, and she will tell the police—my life will be over. Do you know what they do to men like me in prison? You know, don’t you? Do you think I’ll survive that? I won’t. My life will be over.” He saw the fear and hurt in her face and still he said, “And it will be down to you.”
When they pulled her body from the pool, Mark punished himself. For days, he could barely get out of bed, and yet he had to face the world, he had to go to school, to look at her empty chair, to face the grief of her friends and her parents and show none of his own. He, the one who loved her most, was not permitted to grieve for her the way she deserved. He wasn’t permitted to grieve the way he deserved to, because although he punished himself for what he had said to her in anger, he kn
ew that this wasn’t really his fault. None of it was his fault—how could it be? Who could control who they fell in love with?
• • •
MARK HEARD A THUMP and jumped, swerving out into the middle of the road, overcorrecting back again and skidding on to the gravelled verge. He checked the rearview mirror. He thought he’d hit something, but there was nothing there, nothing but empty tarmac. He took a deep breath and squeezed the wheel again, wincing as it pressed into the wound on his hand. He switched on the radio, turned it up as loud as it would go.
He still had no idea what he was going to do with Lena. His first idea had been to drive north to Edinburgh, dump the car in a car park and then get the ferry to the Continent. They’d find her soon enough. Well, they’d find her eventually. He might feel terrible, but he had to keep reminding himself that this was not his fault. She came at him, not the other way round. And when he tried to fight her off, fend her off, she just came at him again and again, shouting and clawing, talons drawn. He had fallen, sprawling on the kitchen floor, his carry-on bag skidding away from him across the tiles. And from it fell, as though directed by a deity with a sick sense of humour, the bracelet. The bracelet he’d been carrying around since he took it from Helen Townsend’s desk, this thing that held a power he hadn’t yet figured out how to wield, out it came, skittering across the floor between them.
Lena looked at it as though it were an alien thing. It might as well have been glowing green kryptonite from the expression on her face. And then confusion passed and she was upon him again, only this time she had the kitchen scissors in her hand and she was swinging hard at him, at his face, at his neck, swinging like she meant it. He raised his hands in self-defence and she sliced one of them open. It throbbed now, angrily, in time with his racing heartbeat.
Thump, thump, thump. He checked the rearview again—no one behind him—and jammed his foot on the brake. There was a sickening, satisfying thud as her body slammed into metal, and all was quiet again.