‘Just tired.’ I’d been staying late at work, it was easier than pulling myself away from the stories, easier than talking to Kit. I’d get the last tube home and slip quietly into bed beside him.
‘I thought Project Mozart was over.’ Smart, quick-thinking Kit, it was hard to get away with the smallest white lie when he was a corporate lawyer too. He was well aware that weeks of downtime followed the frenzy of a deal; I wasn’t leaving until past eleven. ‘Have they staffed you on something else?’
‘There’s a lot of loose ends.’
‘What are you reading?’ He tapped the outside of my phone. ‘You seem glued to the news. Anything interesting?’ He pulled closer, put his hand on my hip, the gesture asking for more than I could give, not then, not for months to come.
I rolled to the left, turned off the light. ‘True crime.’
Later, when I’d think about my twenty-four-year-old self, sitting alone in her glass office researching the producer, the absolute stillness of the department, the hum of a distant vacuum, the smell of the sour cream pooling from my unfinished burrito, I’d want desperately to travel back in time. Not really to change anything. But to push open the door and pull up a chair beside myself. Because it was lonely and tortuous. The education of my predation.
The language I learnt quickly from journalists, twitterati, the slogans scrawled on placards outside court buildings – #MeToo; believe women; break the silence; time’s up; power imbalance; grooming. That wasn’t hard. It was the other kind of learning that was hard. I kept it at bay as long as I could but it was impossible against the deluge of stories. Or perhaps I wasn’t trying to stop it, perhaps that was why I read so much, part of me wanted, needed to be brought to breaking point, for that singular moment when something in me snapped and the treacherous thoughts would flutter out of the locked box I’d kept them in.
His hand drifting up my back.
His thumb at the edge of my vest.
Vest. Skin. Vest. Skin.
Then everything I’d told myself would rise up in me, my inner voice coldly reasonable, like it was interrogating a witness too emotional to think straight. It was completely different. Yes,there was an age gap, a hotel, his thumb on your back, but he wasn’t flabby, disgusting, he was beautiful, don’t you remember the animal leanness of his body, he never pushed you down, never forced himself on you, you started it, you wanted him first, you loved him and he loved you, it’s different, utterly differentand then I’d shut the box, stop reading, go home.
But it never lasted long. Soon, I’d be reading, listening again. The stories were a drug I was addicted to, I was searching for something, although I didn’t know what.
Then, a few weeks later, I knew what. I found what I’d been looking for.
Twitter was ablaze with the latest story about the producer, another model had come forward, this time with a rape allegation. I read the article inVanity Fairand then settled down to read the comments on Twitter, which had already climbed to five hundred and twenty-six. Towards the last third, the tweets seemed to drift away from the model, turn to the issue of rape in relationships. That’s where I read it. It was a single tweet by @vplnskl243. Afterwards, I tried to find her but she was a person without a face, without followers, she’d posted no other tweets, she’d created an account just to say this, to set her own treacherous thought free:I was 14. He was 30 #MeToo.
Finally, I saw. What had happened to me.
20
Cottage
Then
He chooses the tiny fishing village at the foot of the valley because it is sandwiched between two gardens, a National Trust garden on one side, a private garden on the other. ‘I’ll get you passes to both. Then you can visit them as much as you like,’ he says as we drive down to the foot of the valley. ‘It’ll be just like London.’ He is worried that the change of scene will destabilise me, I am cracked glass on the brink of fracture. Perhaps I am. Because when Daniel gets out to ask for directions, I get out too, make my way towards the sea.
It’s the water. An aquamarine so astonishing that the desire to feel it is physical. Colour is fragile, anything can change it, the clouds rolling in, the sun dipping towards the horizon; if I want to savour it, it must be in the body, now. I pull off my trainers, my socks, leave them at the sea wall. Underfoot, I feel crushed shell, a cigarette butt, the crackle of dried seaweed – and then the shock of water, so cold everything falls away. I am knee-deep when Daniel calls my name. He is as close to angry as I have ever seen him.
‘How far would you have gone if I hadn’t called you?’ he asks when I reach him.
I don’t know.
He’s asked for directions; our cottage isn’t in the village but a two-minute drive away. He drives back up the road, takes the dirt track into a woodland of oaks. The cottage is a simple timber cabin with a thatched roof, something from a fairy tale, a woodcutter’s cottage perhaps, a gingerbread house without the gingerbread. A porch hugs the front with a picnic table that looks out to sea. Under the window is a generous pile of chopped logs.
He unlocks the front door. A pink sofa faces the fireplace, there is a desk with a lamp and a vase of wild bluebells. ‘Not what you’re used to, I’m afraid,’ he says and I think he has forgotten I do not live in his mews house or in Wyatt’s stained-glass windowed dormitories but in the flat above Oriental Supermarket, no log fires or sea views in sight. The cottage, to me, is beyond lovely.
‘Choose any room you want,’ he says. I drift upstairs. The master with its quilt folded at the end of the double bed and expansive dresser seems impossible, as is the twin bedroom – I don’t want to sleep in a place where there would be space for Mama. I choose the smallest; it reminds me of my box room at home. The wallpaper is yellow with cream roses and there is just space for a narrow bed, a chest of drawers. When he brings my bag up, puts it on the floor, there is almost no standing room. ‘This one? Are you sure?’
I nod. Give me suffocating spaces, freezing seas. Stop me feeling, missing, remembering.
From: Kit McDermott
09:36
I’ve even seen you take the pills, every morning with the glass of water I bring you. You told me they were vitamins. My God, Laurie. You didn’t hide them. You just lied about them.
21