Killing Me Softly

very low now, and I had to lean forward to catch what she was saying. ‘Then he put his hand between my legs, and I let him at first. Then I said I didn’t want that. That I wanted to go back inside. It felt all wrong, suddenly. I thought my boyfriend would come back. He was so tall and strong, and if I opened my eyes I could see his eyes staring right at me, and if I closed them then I felt horribly sick and the whole world lurched. I was pretty drunk.’

While Michelle described the scene to me, I tried to concentrate on the words, and not make any picture out of them. When I looked up at her to nod encouragingly or make some affirming grunt, I tried not to see her face properly but to let it become an unfocused blur, a pale expanse of skin. She told me that she had tried to pull away. Adam had pulled her dress off her, thrown it behind them into the darkness of bushes, and kissed her again. This time it hurt a bit, she said, and his hand between her legs hurt, too. She started to get frightened. She tried to get free of his arms, but he held her more firmly. She tried to scream, but he put his hand over her mouth so no sound came out. She remembered trying to say ‘please’ but it was muffled by his fingers. ‘I thought if he could hear me begging him, he would stop,’ she said; she was near to tears now. I drew a big square on my notepad, and a smaller one inside it. I wrote the word inside the smaller square: ‘please’.

‘Part of me still didn’t believe this was happening. I still thought he would stop in the end. Rape doesn’t happen like this, I thought. It’s a man in a mask jumping out of a dark alleyway, you know the kind of thing. He pushed me down on the ground. It was all prickly. There was a stinging nettle under my calf. He still had a hand over my mouth. Once he took it away to kiss me, but it didn’t feel like a kiss any longer, just another kind of gag. Then he jammed it back. I kept thinking I would be sick. He put his other hand between my legs and tried to make me want him. He really worked hard at that.’ Michelle looked through me. ‘I couldn’t help feeling some pleasure, and that made it worst of all, do you see?’ I nodded again. ‘To want to be raped: that makes it not rape, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Then he did it to me. You don’t know how strong he is. He seemed to enjoy hurting me as he did it. I just lay there, all limp, just waiting for it to finish. When he’d done, he kissed me again as if it had all been something we’d agreed to do. I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t do anything. He went and found my dress, and my knickers. I was crying and he just looked at me as if he found me interesting. Then he said to me, 'It’s just sex,' or 'It’s only sex,' or something like that, and he just went off. I got dressed and I went back inside. I saw Josie with her blond man and she winked at me. He was dancing with another girl. He didn’t look up.’

Michelle looked numb, almost unmoved. She’d been through this too often. I asked, in a neutral voice, when she had gone to the police. She told me that she had waited a week.

‘Why so long?’

‘I felt guilty. I’d been drunk, I’d led him on, I’d gone behind my boyfriend’s back.’

‘What made you decide to report it then?’

‘My boyfriend heard about it. We had a row and he walked out on me. I was confused, I went to the police.’

Suddenly she looked round. She got up and left the room. I took a few deep breaths to calm myself before she returned, carrying her baby. She sat down again, with him bundled into the crook of her arm. Every so often she put her little finger into his mouth, and he sucked it contemplatively.

‘The police were quite sympathetic. There were still some bruises. And he… he did things to me, there was a doctor’s report. But the trial was awful.’

‘What happened?’

‘I gave evidence and then I realized that it was me on trial. The lawyer asked me about my past – I mean my sexual past. How many people I’d slept with. Then he took me through what had happened at the party. How I’d had a row with my boyfriend, what I’d been wearing, how much I’d drunk, how I’d kissed him first, led him on. He – Adam – just sat there in the dock and looked all serious and sad. The judge stopped the trial. I wanted the ground to swallow me up – everything was dirty suddenly. Everything in my life. I have never hated anyone so much as I hated him.’ There was a silence. ‘You believe me?’ she said.

‘You’ve been very honest,’ I said. She wanted something more from me. Her face seemed plumply girlish and she gazed at me with an urgent look of appeal. I felt so sorry for her, and for me too. She picked up the baby and pushed her face into the squashy concertina of his neck. I stood up. ‘And you were brave,’ I forced myself to say.

She lifted her head and stared at me. ‘Will you do something about this?’

‘There are legal problems.’ The last thing I wanted was to build up her hopes.

‘Yes,’ she said, in a fatalistic tone. Her expectations seemed low. ‘What would you have done, Sylvie? Tell me.’

I forced myself to look into her eyes. It was as if I was staring down the wrong end of a telescope. A fresh sense of my double betrayal flooded me. ‘I don’t know what I would have done,’ I said. Then a thought occurred to me. ‘Do you ever get up to London?’

She frowned in puzzlement. ‘With this?’ she asked. ‘Why would I want to?’

She seemed quite genuine; and anyway the phone calls and notes seemed to have stopped.

The baby started crying and she lifted him so his head was butting up under her chin. He lay against her chest, arms akimbo, like a little climber pressed against the rockface. I smiled at her. ‘You’ve got a gorgeous little boy,’ I said. ‘You’ve done well.’

Her face broke into an answering smile. ‘I have, haven’t I?’

Twenty-two

‘You did what?’

Until then I had always thought that the expression about jaws dropping was a metaphor or a poetic exaggeration but there was no doubt about it: Joanna Noble’s jaw dropped.

On the train back, already shocked and distressed, I had suffered a virtual panic attack as it occurred to me for the first time what I had actually done. I imagined Michelle ringing the Participant and asking to speak to Sylvie Bushnell in order to complain or add something to her story, and discovering there was no one of that name, and then talking to Joanna instead. The trail to me was hardly long and winding. What would Michelle feel about what had been done to her? A further, and not entirely irrelevant, question was what would happen to me. Even if I hadn’t exactly broken the law, I imagined myself explaining to Adam what I had done.

I settled the matter, to the extent that it was possible, immediately. I phoned Joanna Noble from a call-box on the way home and was at her flat over in Tufnell Park at breakfast-time the next day.

I looked at Joanna. ‘Your ash needs tapping,’ I said.

‘What?’ she asked, still stupefied.

I found a saucer on the table and dangled it under the teetering cylinder of ash at the end of the cigarette in her right hand. I tapped the cigarette myself and the ash snowed down on to the saucer. I braced myself to amplify the stark sentence of confession I had just spoken. I had to be as clear as I could possibly be.

‘I feel very ashamed, Joanna. Let me tell you exactly what I did and then you can tell me what you think of me. I rang up Michelle Stowe and I pretended to be a colleague of yours working on the newspaper. I went and talked to her and she told me about what happened between her and Adam. I couldn’t stop myself from wanting to find out and I couldn’t think of any other way of doing it. But it was wrong. I feel terrible.’

Joanna stubbed out her cigarette and lit another. She ran her fingers through her hair. She was still in her dressing-gown. ‘What the fuck did you think you were doing?’

‘Investigating.’