In the end, Adam is the first person she tells about what is growing inside her. He hasn’t stopped coming round to her house, asking to see her, even though she always says no. Mary gave up weeks ago.
Adam holds her in his arms, asking nothing of her, simply being her friend.
Soon after, like it has been biding its time, waiting to be brought out into the open, the size and shape of Becky’s body betrays her and she becomes the example to be avoided, the beaming red sign for how wrong things can go.
People give her a wide berth in the school corridor, like she’s got a contagious illness.
Adam walks her to and from school and holds back her hair when she is sick on her shoes outside the school gates.
Sometimes he says that if she ever wants to talk, then he is there for her.
At home she eats very little and then goes straight to bed and watches television. It’s easy at first, when her dad isn’t talking to her and her mum is smoking a lot at the kitchen table. Becky just has to endure the times between when her dad makes tea and leaves the room, if she is in it, and the times he conveniently finishes eating as soon as she arrives at the table.
But it becomes less easy to shut herself away as her parents’ responses grow more vocal and persistent, like a cancer metastasizing. Her father, in particular, who has spent a lifetime calling pop stars and actresses in short skirts ‘harlots’ and ‘sluts’, becomes consumed with the idea of his daughter having underage sex as a leisure pursuit. He fills with rage and shouts things like: How could you be so irresponsible? Becky finds this response particularly unjust and excruciatingly painful, sinking further into a kind of listless, inward blame – the very worst form of rage. As if it wasn’t enough to watch her belly fill to the brim with her own shame, she has to add her father’s to the mix as well.
Then come the endless stream of questions – questions that sound more like accusations: Did it happen at home? In our home? How many of them have there been?
They receive a congratulations card from a neighbour and a helium balloon printed with the words: You’re going to be grandparents! Her father bursts it with the tip of a carving knife.
She stops going to school.
She can’t read. She just wants to watch those soaps on television, to be held in the soft bubble of other people’s mistakes, conflict and intrigues.
Her mum and dad stand in the doorway of her bedroom, faces pinched with anger. They ask her the same questions every day.
Who did this to you?
Who is its father?
Chapter 8
It had been a post on Scott’s Instagram account that gave her the idea for her film.
Judging by his Twitter and Facebook, Scott had been in Birmingham for a weekend of clubbing and drinking with a friend of his. The next day he’d visited an art gallery in an attempt, he quipped in his caption, to experience more than the city’s capacity to get you really drunk. LOL Scott. His favourite painting had been one of Medea, made by an artist called Frederick Sandys. He took a snap and posted it on Instagram. Just one more image in a cluster of his weekend shots.
Becky had been transfixed by it. Wreathed in red coral necklaces, with desperate eyes, and an obsessively incanting mouth, Medea looks away as she makes her poison. To where does she look? The hours ahead of her? To infamy and damnation?
Becky had lost a whole afternoon to it. Medea. Studying the image, reading the play’s text. Some lines, over and over: Here are the women with ancient anger in their veins.
She obsessed over why this picture, of all the pictures in the gallery, had spoken to Scott: did he wonder if she, Becky, was still out there, coming for him some day? His own personal Medea, unstoppable in her rage. She had known within minutes that this character was one she needed to advocate for: in her research, she saw more meaning in Medea than she’d found in many years of therapy.
Her updated version would be a message to Scott that the consequence of what he did would never leave him, and a warning to men that their crimes against women, the injustice of their contempt for women, might be challenged. These men lacked her vision for pain. They could imagine her only as outcast and beaten, once they had no need for her. She was meant to be used, spent, and discarded.
But Medea would show them what power lies at the heart of rage.
These were some of the things Becky said to the screenwriter she hired and instructed to see what she saw.
Medea is Becky’s conduit, her dark avatar, her brutish foot soldier. Her outrage, her violated body, her sorrow, her magnet for the smashed and long-dispersed pieces of her self.
She must not let Medea down.
She is doing a good job for her, so far. She has leapt through another flaming hoop, having touched-down, checked-in and changed into an outfit suitable for her first night in Cannes.
And now, she stands on a stretch of grass in the forecourt of her hotel (five star, Matthew says literally everyone stays there) at the ready, surrounded by palm trees and steak-red beach umbrellas, swimming pool still as a mineral-blue pane of glass, looking out at the Croisette: the stage for the world’s most famous film festival.
Scott had been here two summers ago, holidaying on a roof-top apartment over-looking the sea. Sweltering, he’d called it. Posted a picture of a charred black and grey steak he’d barbecued on the terrace: I present you minute steak, cooked for ten minutes! Maths fail! Becky had spent ages tying up the visual clues and identifying the
