Killing Me Softly

Twenty-one

She was easy to track down. There was the letter that I had stared at until my eyes ached. I knew her name; her address was on the headed notepaper in curlicued lettering. I simply rang directory inquiries from work one morning and got her telephone number. I spent a few minutes staring at the digits I had written down on the back of a used envelope, and wondering if I was actually going to call her. Who should I pretend to be? What if someone else answered? I went down the corridor to the drink dispenser, fetched myself a polystyrene mug of orange tea, and settled down in my office with the door firmly pulled shut. I pushed a soft cushion under me, but still felt sore.

The phone rang for a quite a long time. She must be out; probably at work. Part of me was relieved.

‘Hello.’

She was there, after all. I cleared my throat. ‘Hello, is that Michelle Stowe?’

‘Yes, it is.’

Her voice was high and quite thin, with a West Country burr to it. ‘My name is Sylvie Bushnell. I’m a colleague of Joanna Noble’s at the Participant.’

‘Yes?’ The voice was cautious now, tentative.

‘She passed your note on to me, and I wondered if I could talk to you about it.’

‘I dunno,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have written it. I was angry.’

‘We wanted to get your side of the story, that’s all.’

There was a silence.

‘Michelle?’ I said. ‘You would only need to tell me what you felt able to.’

‘I dunno.’

‘I could come and see you.’

‘I don’t want you publishing anything in the paper, not unless I agree to it.’

‘There’s no question of that,’ I said, accurately enough.

She was reluctant, but I pressed and she agreed and I said I would come to see her the following morning. She lived only five minutes from the station. It was all so easy.

I didn’t read on the train. I sat still, wincing with the jolting of the carriage, and stared out of the window as the houses of London petered out, and countryside took over. It was a dank grey day. The previous evening Adam had rubbed me all over with massage oil. He’d been very gentle round the bruising, stroking the swollen purple abrasions tenderly as if they were glorious battle scars. He had bathed me and wrapped me in two towels, and laid his hand on my forehead. He had been so solicitous, so proud of me for my suffering.

The train went through a long tunnel and I saw my face in the window: thin, swollen lips, shadows under my eyes, hair awry. I pulled a brush and an elastic band out of my bag and tied my hair back severely. I remembered I hadn’t even brought a notebook or a pen. I’d get them when I arrived at the station.

Michelle Stowe answered the door with a baby clutched to her breast. It was feeding. Its eyes were screwed shut in its wrinkled, reddened face. Its mouth was working voraciously. As I stepped in through the front door, it lost its grip for a second and I saw it make a blind instinctual movement, mouth gaping, tiny fists uncurling and scrabbling at air. Then it found the nipple once more and settled back to its rhythmic suckling.

‘I’ll just finish feeding him,’ she said.

She took me through to a small room filled with a brown sofa. A bar fire glowed. I sat on the sofa and waited. I could hear her cooing softly, the baby whimpering. There was a sweet smell of talcum powder. There were photographs of the baby on the mantelpiece, sometimes with Michelle, sometimes with a thin, bald-headed man.

Michelle came in, without the baby now, and sat down at the other end of the sofa.

‘Do you want tea or anything?’

‘No, thanks.’

She looked younger than me. She had dark curly hair, and full pale lips in a round, watchful face. Everything about her seemed soft: the glossy curls in her hair, her small white hands, her milky breasts, her plump post-natal tummy. She looked both voluptuous and comfortable, wrapped in a shabby cream cardigan, feet in red slippers, a trace of milk on her black T-shirt. For the first time in my life I felt the tug of maternal instinct. I took the spiral-bound notebook out of my bag and put it on my lap. I picked up the pen.

‘Why did you write to Joanna?’

‘Somebody showed me the magazine,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what they thought. I’d been raped by somebody famous.’

‘Do you mind telling me about it?’

‘Why not?’ she said.

I kept my eyes on the notepad, and occasionally made a scrappy little doodle that might look like shorthand. Michelle spoke with the weary familiarity of somebody telling an anecdote they’d told many times before. At the time of the incident – she used that odd word, maybe because of the police and court proceedings – she had been eighteen years old, and was at a party in the country just outside of Gloucester. It was being thrown by a friend of her boyfriend (‘Tony was my boyfriend then,’ she explained). On the way to the party, she’d argued with Tony, and he’d left her there and driven off with two mates to the nearby pub. She was cross and embarrassed and she’d got drunk, she said, on cider and cheap red wine and an empty stomach. By the time she met Adam, the room was spinning. She was standing in a corner, talking to a friend, when he and another man came in.

‘He was good-looking. You’ve seen his picture probably.’ I nodded. ‘There they were, these two men, and I remember saying to Josie, "You have the blond one and I’ll go for the dish."’

So far, this was Adam’s story too. I drew a droopy flower in the corner of the pad.

‘What happened then?’ I asked. But Michelle didn’t really need asking. She wanted to tell her story. She wanted to talk to a stranger and be believed at last. She thought I was on her side, the journalist-therapist.

‘I went up and asked him to dance. We danced for a bit and then started kissing. My boyfriend still hadn’t come back. I thought that I’d show him.’ She looked up at me to see if I was shocked by the admission, by the sort of statement that must have been brought out under cross-examination. ‘So I did start it all off. I kissed him and put my hands under his shirt. We went outside together. There were other people outside already, kissing and stuff. He pulled me towards the bushes. He’s strong. Well, he climbs mountains, doesn’t he? When we were still on the lawn, with all these people watching, he unfastened my dress a bit at the back.’ She gave a sharp little intake of breath, like a half-sob. ‘It sounds stupid, I’m not naïve or anything, but I didn’t want –’ She stopped, then sighed. ‘I just wanted a laugh,’ she said lamely. She put up both hands and pushed back her dark hair. She looked too young to have been eighteen eight years ago.

‘What happened, Michelle?’ I asked.

‘We moved away from the others, behind a tree. We were kissing, and it was still all right.’ Her voice was very low now, and I had to lean forward to catch what she was saying. ‘Then he put his hand between my legs, and I let him at first. Then I said I didn’t want that. That I wanted to go back inside. It felt all wrong, suddenly. I thought my boyfriend would come back. He was so tall and strong, and if I opened my eyes I could see his eyes staring right at me, and if I closed them then I felt horribly sick and the whole world lurched. I was pretty drunk.’

While Michelle described the scene to me, I tried to concentrate on the words, and not make any picture out of them. When I looked up at her to nod encouragingly or make some affirming grunt, I tried not to see her face properly but to let it become an unfocused blur, a pale expanse of skin. She told me that she had tried to pull away. Adam had pulled her dress off her, thrown it behind them into the darkness of bushes, and kissed her again. This time it hurt a bit, she said, and his hand between her legs hurt, too. She started to get frightened. She tried to get free of his arms, but he held her more firmly. She tried to scream, but he put his hand over her mouth so no sound came out. She remembered trying to say ‘please’ but it was muffled by his fingers. ‘I thought if he could hear me begging him, he would stop,’ she said; she was near to tears now. I drew a big square on my notepad, and a smaller one inside it. I wrote the word inside the smaller square: ‘please’.

‘Part of me still didn’t believe this was happening. I still thought he would stop in the end. Rape doesn’t happen like this, I thought. It’s a man in a mask jumping out of a dark alleyway, you know the kind of thing. He pushed me down on the ground. It was all prickly. There was a stinging nettle under my calf. He still had a hand over my mouth. Once he took it away to kiss me, but it didn’t feel like a kiss any longer, just another kind of gag. Then he jammed it back. I kept thinking I would be sick. He put his other hand between my legs and tried to make me want him. He really worked hard at that.’ Michelle looked through me. ‘I couldn’t help feeling some pleasure, and that made it worst of all, do you see?’ I nodded again. ‘To want to be raped: that makes it not rape, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Then he did it to me. You don’t know how strong he is. He seemed to enjoy hurting me as he did it. I just lay there, all limp, just waiting for it to finish. When he’d done, he kissed me again as if it had all been something we’d agreed to do. I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t do anything. He went and found my dress, and my knickers. I was crying and he just looked at me as if he found me interesting. Then he said to me, "It’s just sex," or "It’s only sex," or something like that, and he just went off. I got dressed and I went back inside. I saw Josie with her blond man and she winked at me. He was dancing with another girl. He didn’t look up.’

Michelle looked numb, almost unmoved. She’d been through this too often. I asked, in a neutral voice, when she had gone to the police. She told me that she had waited a week.

‘Why so long?’

‘I felt guilty. I’d been drunk, I’d led him on, I’d gone behind my boyfriend’s back.’

‘What made you decide to report it then?’

‘My boyfriend heard about it. We had a row and he walked out on me. I was confused, I went to the police.’

Suddenly she looked round. She got up and left the room. I took a few deep breaths to calm myself before she returned, carrying her baby. She sat down again, with him bundled into the crook of her arm. Every so often she put her little finger into his mouth, and he sucked it contemplatively.

‘The police were quite sympathetic. There were still some bruises. And he… he did things to me, there was a doctor’s report. But the trial was awful.’

‘What happened?’

‘I gave evidence and then I realized that it was me on trial. The lawyer asked me about my past – I mean my sexual past. How many people I’d slept with. Then he took me through what had happened at the party. How I’d had a row with my boyfriend, what I’d been wearing, how much I’d drunk, how I’d kissed him first, led him on. He – Adam – just sat there in the dock and looked all serious and sad. The judge stopped the trial. I wanted the ground to swallow me up – everything was dirty suddenly. Everything in my life. I have never hated anyone so much as I hated him.’ There was a silence. ‘You believe me?’ she said.

‘You’ve been very honest,’ I said. She wanted something more from me. Her face seemed plumply girlish and she gazed at me with an urgent look of appeal. I felt so sorry for her, and for me too. She picked up the baby and pushed her face into the squashy concertina of his neck. I stood up. ‘And you were brave,’ I forced myself to say.

She lifted her head and stared at me. ‘Will you do something about this?’

‘There are legal problems.’ The last thing I wanted was to build up her hopes.

‘Yes,’ she said, in a fatalistic tone. Her expectations seemed low. ‘What would you have done, Sylvie? Tell me.’

I forced myself to look into her eyes. It was as if I was staring down the wrong end of a telescope. A fresh sense of my double betrayal flooded me. ‘I don’t know what I would have done,’ I said. Then a thought occurred to me. ‘Do you ever get up to London?’

She frowned in puzzlement. ‘With this?’ she asked. ‘Why would I want to?’

She seemed quite genuine; and anyway the phone calls and notes seemed to have stopped.

The baby started crying and she lifted him so his head was butting up under her chin. He lay against her chest, arms akimbo, like a little climber pressed against the rockface. I smiled at her. ‘You’ve got a gorgeous little boy,’ I said. ‘You’ve done well.’

Her face broke into an answering smile. ‘I have, haven’t I?’