She needs to be dressed and gone but on crawling into the bedroom she can’t see her own clothes, just a heap of parental clothes, spilling out of the walk-in wardrobe – the stiff-collared blue office shirts of Dad, the pencil skirts and tulle-frilled tops of Mum, all pulled off the rails, trampled and mangled between wood and wire hangers.
Becky is crying quietly, vision blurred, when she finally locates her jeans, folded neatly beside the bed, her shoes placed next to them, as if she’d just taken a swim in a beautiful lake. Was this some kind of parting gesture intended to make the aftermath easier? She pulls on the jeans – far too tight and close now for a frame that is so bruised and sore. She steals a soft plain jumper from a shelf and puts it on.
She isn’t crying now. She isn’t hysterical. She feels unsteady and ill, but her actions are precise. She needs to go.
She creeps downstairs.
There are people asleep on the living-room floor: a mess of bodies lying piled and entwined, heavy and asleep. Music plays at a low volume. All the shutters are closed. She sees nobody who is awake.
She opens the front door and steps out. It is very early morning. She notes this, another fact that lies outside of her.
As she walks the streets back home that morning she feels the edges of herself blur. She needs to find an anchor before she disappears entirely, needs to know whether she has lost something or whether she has been stolen from.
One is carelessness, and one is a crime.
One she blames herself for and one she can blame another for.
For all she knows it is not a crime. For all she knows she is the one who said, Yes, take me, fucking take my body.
But she doesn’t know for sure.
And she is sick, again and again. Where? She does not remember. She does not care.
If she goes to the police they will look at her face and beads and her spaghetti-strap top first, and listen to her voice second.
Did you have sex with someone you knew? Do you know for sure that something was stolen and not simply lost? Making an accusation? That’s someone’s life you’re playing with!
But whose life? And what will become of her life?
Even if she goes to a police station she will not be able to answer a single question: no who or when or how. She does not know anything. She can guess, but she does not know. Not for sure.
And if she reported it, and the story got out? Slag and slut is what they would say of her in the corridors at school. They would say they saw what she wore that night, that they saw the look on her face and heard the game she was playing, all that time, behind closed wardrobe doors.
Bringing it on herself, the slag.
Making it happen, the slut.
She arrives home, and takes a hot shower, and then goes to bed, where she cannot sleep.
After midday, Mary texts her to report that she and Brendan had sex and to ask where Becky got to. Was it Scott??!!
She lies under the covers and feels a dull ache somewhere in her arm. She holds her hand up to the light and sees that a chaotic line of fingerprint bruises has appeared round the top of her wrist, like a bracelet of small grey pebbles.
Was it Scott? Becky asks herself. Was it Scott?
She holds her wrist lightly, covering the pebble shapes with her hand and fingers. Closes her eyes but she still can’t sleep. It is like there is a high-voltage buzz in her head. She feels high, like adrenaline is making her alert to everything.
She draws her hand into her stomach and curls round it, and soon enough she falls asleep this way.
When she wakes into another day, in some ways nothing has changed. There are no new facts or anything like that.
But she remembers it as a new formulation now: I passed out and while I was unconscious somebody stripped off my clothes and had sex with me and then put my pants back on me and then left.
The numbness of shock has gone. Now the blame burns a boulder-sized hole into the middle of her.
Some weeks later, when she’s back at school, Becky runs into Scott in an empty corridor. He is in front of her before she is even aware of him. He smiles at her.
‘I heard about this,’ he says, indicating her stomach. ‘That’s a pretty huge thing.’
She pushes past him without replying. He tries to catch her arm and she evades it. She spends an hour shaking in the girls’ toilets.
She worries that when she gives birth to the baby she’ll be so full of hatred that she’ll grab it from the doctors and swing it by the ankle so that its head breaks on the delivery-room wall.
Where do these ideas come from? She has been polluted. Changed. She is a ruined person. Scott isn’t. Scott still mooches along with his friends.
A few days later, Mary asks again if Becky was all right at the party all those weeks ago. She keeps asking because Becky just hasn’t been her normal self since then. Becky shrugs and then Mary says she wasn’t going to say anything but she heard that Scott said they got off with each other and were maybe going to do more but then they both got so off their tits on these strong pills he’d got that they could barely sit up straight
