“I don’t understand.”
“Stuart Rees abused you when you were a vulnerable minor. Since then you have been clinically depressed and have struggled to cope.”
“What are you saying?”
“I am saying you need to think about your best course, Tabitha.”
“You think I murdered him.”
Mora Piozzi stood up. “One week,” she said. “Think about it.”
Fourteen
At secondary school, Tabitha had been good at math, chemistry and art (though she liked drawing more than painting). Small, strong and wiry, she had been good at cross-country running. But she hadn’t been good at making friends or joining in or keeping her head down. She hadn’t been good at being sweet, or flirting with the boys, or giggling with the girls, or buying the right trainers, or knowing the latest dance moves, or going out on Friday night, or boasting about sexual experiences she’d never had, or getting the right amount of drunk or the right amount of stoned, or sharing secrets. She hadn’t been good at being a teenager, especially after her father had died. At its best, school was a lonely business for her; sometimes it was much worse than that. She coped by pretending she didn’t care, and bit by bit she actually didn’t care. Or not really. Not so that it hurt and shamed her as it used to when she was younger.
Tabitha lay in her bunk and remembered herself at fifteen, half her lifetime ago: an awkward and fiercely cross only child, short and flat-chested and looking much younger than her age, disguising her shyness by being grumpy and taciturn. Gradually, people stopped picking on her until at last nobody really took much notice of her at all—until Mr. Rees the math teacher singled her out. For several years, he was just another teacher at the school, not one of the charismatic ones who the girls giggled about, nor one of those who were bullied, like Mr. Wheedon with hair combed over his bald spot. Mr. Rees didn’t have trouble keeping order. He sometimes got angry but not in an uncontrolled way like some of the others who would shout and flail their arms. His anger was deliberate, contemptuous and effective.
He had never taken any notice of her either, until she was fifteen. Then she suddenly found herself the focus of his attention. At first, it was just about her work—she was his star pupil, and he used her as an example to others who were struggling (which hadn’t helped her popularity). Then he started keeping her back after the end of class. He gave her more advanced work, told her she should study math at university. It seemed to Tabitha that he had recognized her like no one else had done.
He wasn’t young and handsome. She didn’t have a crush on him. She didn’t think of him like that at all. He was just kind to her at a time when she was badly in need of kindness. A friendly face.
When he had put an arm around her shoulder, she had let him. When he placed a hand on her knee, she didn’t push it away. When he told her she was the reason he looked forward to coming to work, she had believed him. When one wet day in winter he offered her a lift home and drove instead into the woods and lifted up her skirt and pulled down her knickers and in the muggy darkness of the car slid on a condom and deflowered her, her blood spotting the seat, she hadn’t protested, just turned her head away and watched the rain. Numb, just waiting till it was over. She had never thought of telling anybody what had happened. Nor the next time, or the ones after that. Eleven Wednesdays, Tabitha thought, as she lay in her bed beneath Michaela who mumbled in her sleep, and remembered those days. Or was it twelve?
Then there was the Wednesday when she had waited behind in the class and he had walked past her without looking at her, and it was like she didn’t exist anymore. She had gone to the window and watched him drive away in his car. That was how it ended, as if it had never happened, like he had simply erased her. She sat week after week in his lessons while his glance slid over her and felt she had disappeared. In her place was just an absence, a hole where Tabitha Hardy used to be.
She had felt neither relieved nor upset. She had felt nothing at all.
It was like a dream—a dream in the darkness and she couldn’t piece the fragments together into a story that made real sense.
Why had she—small, cross, fatherless Tabitha Hardy who stood her ground against the bullies and read passionate books about women’s rights—let it happen? Why hadn’t she thought about it for all of these years, not even mentioning it in her therapy sessions? Why hadn’t she been upset, angry, ashamed? She was a fighter, but she had never once thought of fighting for herself.
She stared out into the night. Perhaps she had been wretched, she thought; perhaps she had been damaged; perhaps she had minded so much that she had pushed it down as deep as she could. Maybe Mora Piozzi was right and it was abuse and she was traumatized. Of course she was right: she had been fifteen and he, what, something like forty-five?
And now the person who had abused her was dead. Mr. Rees the math teacher. Stuart Rees her neighbor. The pillar of his little community. His body in her shed, his car parked outside, his blood all over her.
She bit her lip so hard that she tasted iron in her mouth. She put her hands over her eyes to make the darkness darker. She couldn’t remember that day, or only a few snatches. It had been a day of wild weather and of a crouching fear. The kind of day she had to crawl blindly through, just to get
