He stares down at his kneecaps.
‘Are you honestly still trying to make me believe you’re a decent man?’ she says, her words short with anger, incredulity.
‘I am,’ he says, and she watches his hands travel to his waist and his elbows bend and his chest widen a little. ‘I know I am a decent man.’
The sound of familiar voices in the road outside hauls Becky, drained and disoriented, back into the present. Time has gone quickly. Adam hears them, too.
‘What about us?’ says Adam. ‘What happens now?’
The doorbell goes and Becky, now dazed, leaves the room to answer it.
Maisie’s face creases with worry. ‘Mum! What’s wrong?’
‘Something happened to someone we used to know,’ says Adam, from up the hall behind Becky. ‘Someone from a long time ago. It’s nothing you need to worry about.’
‘From how long ago?’
‘School days,’ says Adam. Becky can’t speak. She can only hold Maisie and try not to break into pieces.
The next day, Becky goes to the local police station.
The woman behind the counter is hunched, pressing a pen onto a pad, midway through writing a sentence, when Becky leans in and says, ‘I want to report a crime.’
‘I’ll be with you in just a minute,’ says the woman, glancing up. Blue shirt, black pullover. Practical blue. Police black. Black and blue covering every part of her.
But Becky does not move until the woman looks up again and this time she speaks clearly and slowly and too loud for the size the room. She speaks the words that will change everything for her.
‘I want to report a rape.’
Chapter 28
Hackney and Islington
One year later
At two in the morning Becky wakes with butterflies in her stomach thinking, No, I can’t go through with it. But then, by daylight, in her little kitchen up on the third floor of this ex-council block overlooking the park, after coffee has been drunk and fingernails picked at, she thinks, all right then. It is another deep breath, in a year that has been full of them.
It is a warm, bright day. In the park, the leaves on high branches catch the light and sway softly. Morning dog walkers make conversation with each other as their dogs sniff and wag. Nobody is in T-shirt and shorts quite yet. She’ll dress for a light breeze, she thinks. This flat is half the size of their old place, but has twice the view. Is that a kind of parity? Might she really have lost nothing after all? Enough time has passed that she can half-smile at the thought.
Maisie’s friends think her new neighbourhood is awesome. It’s where any number of struggling music producers and would-be fashion moguls have moved, in search of cheap rents while they chase expensive dreams. The neighbourhood is beginning to get written about in those pockets of the internet seemingly made to be unfindable by anyone over the age of twenty-five. To Becky’s eye, these stories are somewhat overselling a remote, scuffed corner of Hackney, where the shops sell milk and noodles and table tennis bats. Still, she has seen octogenarians with hard East End vowels queuing in the post office alongside wasp-waisted girls with nose rings and asymmetric hair, so perhaps it’s true. Or becoming true.
What matters to her is that the flat is hers. There will be no help with the bills here.
She dresses in front of a door-hung mirror.
She looks different to the Becky of a year ago. Her limbs have lost their pale and sinewy skittishness. She has become rosier, rounder, even dimpled in places. She has been cooking, making slow stews and sugar-dusted cakes with which to welcome her daughter home. ‘Like something out of the 1950s,’ says Maisie, only where is the pipe-smoking paterfamilias proudly washing his car in the driveway?
Becky sets out for the first bus stop that she’ll need. The cinema that she is heading to is not the closest cinema, but it’s the nearest one still screening Medea, so it’s where she must go if she wants to catch it on the big screen which, she decided only this morning, is something she wants. She suspects it will hurt, and with further hurts undoubtedly in store for the late afternoon, why not get it all over with? A full day of horrors, but ones she has chosen.
She walks rather than runs now. She has tried running softly and slowly but she can’t connect to this way of moving, not after seventeen years of pushing her body to the point of agony. The urge to burn until she is spent is no longer there. Still, with her newfound ardour for cooking hearty dishes, her jeans were getting tight, and she couldn’t afford a new wardrobe, so she has taken to walking, which is just as well considering the irregularity of the buses.
Walking has taken her long miles around their new area and she already knows it better than their old patch. It’s harder now, because she is working again and the daytimes no longer belong to her, but as the evenings lighten and lengthen, on those days where after-school things keep Maisie out late, she still tries to walk home, picking a new route as often as possible. Sometimes she thinks of nothing as she strolls through the streets beneath the pointed and mirrored buildings of the City of London, feeling only the sting of particles in her nostrils as she turns on to the pollution-choked A-road in the direction of home. And sometimes, more often than she would like, she feels the still-warm embers in her marrow as she winds through a market selling blackened bananas and haunches of meat wreathed in flies, as her thoughts return to Medea. Was it enough for Medea to watch her husband collapsing with grief at the loss of his children? Did it satisfy, even fleetingly?
On a good day Becky tells herself it was enough that she walked
