Audio: Pat Barker reads.
By the time I left the cathedral it was already dark, mizzling, the kind of rain that looks like mist but drenches you in minutes. I walked quickly, head down. In the marketplace, the Friday-night bonanza was well under way, girls in tight dresses and vertiginous heels, teetering along in noisy groups, watched by boys who pretended indifference and turned back to their mates, laughing. How did girls walk in those things? I could barely manage in the heels I was wearing, and they were nowhere near as high. Mind, I don’t normally wear heels. Jeans and trainers, that’s me. Only, that afternoon I’d felt the need to make an effort, because I’d been supervising the hanging of my paintings in the Galilee Chapel. My first solo exhibition.
As I turned into Silver Street, I was hardly aware of my surroundings; I was still walking around the exhibition in my head. All recent work, all on the theme of metamorphosis. Women turning into hares, foxes, crows, cows, fish, seals, trees. I’d been looking at these paintings for so long I couldn’t see them anymore. Sometimes, when paintings first leave home, they seem a bit weak, clingy—as if all they really want to do is get back to the studio as fast as possible—but these felt different. Strong, independent, even a bit supercilious. What have we to do with you? they seemed to be asking, sitting there, smug inside their sleek black frames. A good sign, perhaps? Out of the corner of my eye I caught a movement, but it was only my own shadow flitting across the blank windows where Marks & Spencer used to be.
Was it there that I picked up a second shadow? I don’t know that I did, of course.
By the time I reached home I was wet and cold. I kicked off the tormenting shoes, threw off the skirt and sweater, and wrapped myself in my dressing gown. Then I knelt, lit the fire, drew the curtains, looked around me, and thought: tea. And then, rebelling: No, bugger tea. Wine. Being an artist is at best a chancy, unrewarding business, and one of the few ways I’ve found of coping is to celebrate every little good thing that happens. And, actually, the exhibition wasn’t all that little.
Going into the kitchen, I discovered four or five plastic bags piled up by the door waiting to be taken down to the bins. I’d had a real clear-out earlier in the day, had meant to take the bags out then, but in my rush to get to the cathedral on time they’d been forgotten. Probably they could have waited till morning, but they looked unsightly and I wanted to start the following day with the sense of a new beginning. I opened the door a crack and held out my hand. Still pouring, but it would only take a minute. Picking up the bags, I elbowed the door open further and stepped out into the night.
To begin with, I couldn’t see a thing, though I caught the glint of a cat’s eyes stitched onto darkness, but then, as I moved away from the shelter of the house, the security light flicked on. Slanting silver rods of rain beat down onto the wet gravel. I opened the yard door and stepped out into the lane. As usual, the bins were full to overflowing, surrounded by a mess of eggshells, pizza crusts, foil trays with cruds of yellow curry around the rims. Something—a rat or a fox or even, perhaps, the cat I’d just seen—had ripped a bin liner open. Rain came down, gleaming in the folds of black plastic. I opened the bin lid, releasing a sudden pungent whiff of decay, and heaved the bags inside. And then, out of some absurd sense of civic duty, I picked up the pizza crusts and foil trays and stuffed them into the bin as well. The rain was heavier now. By the time I’d finished, my hair was plastered against my skull and, God, was I looking forward to that wine! I ran all the way up the yard, hurtled through the open door, and was just reaching for the bottle when I heard a sound behind me—perhaps no more than a breath—and turned back into the room.
And there he was.
I knew I hadn’t met him before: he had pale-blue eyes, tow-colored hair, a slack, full-lipped mouth. At first, the shock of seeing him wiped my mind clean, but then I realized that he must be one of the students from No. 47, across the road. I’d taken a parcel in for them a few days ago, and they still hadn’t been round to collect it. “Have you come for the parcel?” I said.
He didn’t reply. Keeping his gaze fixed on me, he reached out with one foot and kicked the door shut.
Oh, God. Of course he wasn’t one of the students; they’d have come to the front door. I had to get out—but I couldn’t get out, he was between me and the door. My eyes went to the knife block and I started edging toward it, but he got there first. And now, suddenly, there was a knife in his hand, and that changed everything. It was like another person in the room. I saw him staring at the blade and the light’s glinting on its serrated edge and his pasty, thick tongue coming out and flicking around his lips. He looked nervous, but excited, too, like a young dog that’s got a baby rabbit in its jaws and can’t work out what to do with it. He’d get there, though. He’d get there.
Say something.
“I’m Erin.” Individuate yourself, force them to see you as a person, start a dialogue. From somewhere—a color supplement leafed through years ago on a boring Sunday afternoon at home—came these few, possibly life-saving tips. “What’s your name?”
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“What d’y’wanna know that for?”
“Oh, I don’t know, it just seems a bit . . . ”
Friendlier, I had been going to say, but the word died in my mouth.
“Steve.”
I could see him fingering the name, trying it on for size. “Steve.” I forced a smile. “Why don’t we go through there? I’ve got a bottle of wine.”
I was thinking that if I could only get into the hall I’d make a run for the front door. Since he said nothing, I grabbed two glasses, picked up the bottle, and began, inch by inch, to back away from him, around the table—very slowly, doing nothing to startle him—and into the passage. Still clutching the knife, he followed. Without even being aware of it, I’d started memorizing everything about him. Short—three or four inches shorter than me—but bulky round the chest and shoulders. He worked out. He was wearing a T-shirt a size too small, showing off his pecs—and he’d rolled up the sleeves. Tattoos on the bulging biceps—crossed swords? A torch? I couldn’t see the whole design. Right-handed, index finger stained orange, stank of cigarettes. Other smells: wet hair, peppermint, sweat. Halfway down the hall now—and it’s going all right, nearly there—smile, smile. The minute I’m level with the living-room door, I’ll run. Another step, another—
And then I tripped. I tripped over the bloody parcel I’d taken in for No. 47, flat on my back, every bit of breath knocked out of me, bottle rolling away across the floor, one glass smashed, the other out of reach—and the fall seemed to liberate something in him. Immediately, he was on top of me, wrenching my dressing gown open, scrabbling at the front of his jeans, his weight was pinning me down, grinding my shoulder blades into the floor. But it wasn’t that, it wasn’t that, it was the knife. He was still holding it—I could see it out of the corner of my eye. He was gripping it so hard his knuckles had gone white, and now he’d got a knee between my thighs and he was prizing them apart.
I wasn’t frightened now. My mind went clear and cold. When he was finished with me—that would be the time of maximum danger. When he was ashamed and frightened, thinking about me ringing the police, how detailed my description was going to be—that was when he’d panic and use the knife. The thrashing on top of me reached a climax—and stopped. I tried to inch out from underneath him, but he raised the knife. I started prattling away, telling him I hadn’t lived here very long, didn’t know many people yet, just my housemate, Jenna, how I was looking forward to the weekend, when my parents and my brothers were coming up for my birthday. “Jack’s got a job in London and George is all the way up in Aberdeen, so this is sort of midway.”
Needless to say, none of this was true. Jenna was my best friend, but she didn’t live with me. My father was dead. I had no brothers. I was desperately trying to make myself sound less alone, less unprotected, than I really was.
Gradually, he lifted his weight off me, but even then I didn’t try to stand up. The knife, the thought of what it could do to my face, my body. He looked uncertain, nervous, but that could go either way. We stared at each other; he swallowed, his Adam’s apple jerking in his throat. Spots on his neck, I noticed; none on his face. Then, outside, footsteps, voices, laughter, singing—a bunch of drunken students on their way home from the pub. Wait till they’re closer, scream for help? Risk him panicking?
The voices were louder now.
“That’s Jenna,” I said. At least one of the voices was male. “Sounds as if she’s brought Mike back with her.”
Abruptly, he pushed himself up, hesitated as the voices got nearer; the hand holding the knife had begun to shake. He looked down at me, then at the front door. They were right outside now, another few seconds and they’d be past. I shouted “Jenna!” at the top of my voice—and he turned and ran. My instinct was to follow him into the kitchen, make sure he’d gone, but instead I made myself open the front door and yell, “Hi, Jenna! Hello, Mike!” The group of students was further up the hill. I wondered afterward why I didn’t ask them for help, but it never occurred to me. My whole focus was on locking doors. I raced into the kitchen—which was empty—but he might be out there in the darkness, watching. I slammed the door shut, locked and bolted it, then ran upstairs, checking windows, pulling curtains back, looking inside cupboards. I knew that he hadn’t gone upstairs, and yet I still checked the bedrooms three times before I was satisfied. Downstairs, in the living room, I pulled the curtains back and seconds later closed them again. Closed felt claustrophobic; open, dangerously exposed. Nowhere and nothing was right.
All this time I’d been talking to myself. Shouting, rather. Where had it come from, this awful, bullying voice, barking orders, telling me what to do? All anger, not a shred of sympathy. phone the police. I don’t see why I should put myself through that. phone the police. I don’t have to. you do. you know you do. there’s no choice. And of course she was right, the stroppy, belligerent cow. If he got away with it this time, he’d do it again. And now, thanks to my stupidity, he had a knife.
don’t get in the shower. I’ve got to get clean. don’t get in the shower. No, I thought. I wasn’t going to let myself be bullied. My first responsibility was to myself, to survive, and the thought of being poked, prodded, swabbed, interviewed, interviewed again, forced to relive every minute detail of what I’d just gone through was more than I could bear. I got in the shower. I binned my dressing gown, crept into bed, and lay there, frozen, watching the crack between the curtains until years and years later it started to get light.
Who to tell? Well, not everybody. In the end, I told only my mother and Jenna. The following Monday, I went in to work as usual—I was teaching at the Art College three days a week—and, once the day got under way, I didn’t feel too different. The routine carried me through. I did agree, though, to go to my mother’s as soon as term was over. After I’d put my suitcase in the car, I went back into the house and climbed the stairs to the small back bedroom I used as a studio. I hadn’t painted anything since it happened, so I stood there for quite a while, breathing in the smells of oil paint and turps, then ran my fingers over the brushes lying ready on the table and told them, “I’ll be back.”
My mother was waiting in her front garden. I saw her waving at my car as I turned into her road and when I drew up her boyfriend, Derek, came to the door. Once the hugs and greetings were over, nobody seemed to know what to do with me, and I was no help, because I didn’t know what to do with me, either. “Would you like to lie down?” my mother asked, timidly. “No,” I said, after a moment’s blankness. We sat around watching bad television that nobody wanted to watch and then I said I thought I’d go for a walk, but the canal towpath was too quiet, the streets leading off the marketplace too noisy, so I came back home, watched more television, and went to bed.
Counselling, my mother said. Counselling. So off I went to counselling. By then, I’d have done anything to shut my mother up, but the process quickly began to irritate me. “You seem to be blaming yourself,” the counsellor said. “No, I’m not. I know who’s to blame. Doesn’t alter the fact that I behaved like an idiot. Going out and leaving the back door open. For God’s sake. Do you know I actually got undressed with the curtains open?” “Erin,” she said, toward the end of another session, “you’ve got to decide whether you’re a victim or a survivor.” “I’m a painter,” I said, grinding the word out. Things finally came to a head when she referred to the attacker as “your rapist.” “Mine?” I said. “What do you mean, ‘mine’? He’s got nothing to do with me. It was a crime, not a fucking relationship!”
“Perhaps she’s got a point?” my mother said. “You do seem to be blaming yourself a lot.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Why don’t you get angry with him?”
“Because there’s nothing to get angry with. He was just a miserable little . . . twerp.” Now, that was a Dad word if ever I heard one. Until I said it, I didn’t even know it was in my vocabulary. The years between his death and now dwindled away to nothing. I sat staring into the fire. “I do miss Dad.”
All the swabs and blood tests I’d had done—I did go to the S.T.D. clinic the next day—came back negative. I went home from the clinic, rang a locksmith, and turned the house into Fort Knox (though no locks will help you if you leave the door open!). I’d become hypervigilant. No more walking home glued to my phone or with my head in the clouds, thinking about what I was going to paint next. These days, if a shadow had peeled off the wall and started to follow me I’d have spotted it at once.
Not that I went out very often. The house was where it had happened, and yet the house was the only place that felt safe. I refused invitations. I didn’t go out at all after dark. Bin bags I just threw out into the yard, where they rapidly became a smorgasbord for rats. Ever since it happened, the mantra running through my head had been: I will not be forced out. I will not be forced out. It took me a while to realize that I’d been forced in.
“You’ve got to get out more,” Jenna said.
I started walking, and then running, and once I’d started I couldn’t stop. I became the Forrest Gump of the local park, running round and round the neatly manicured lawns and flower beds, past the little play area where mothers pushed their children on the swings. I hated it. It wasn’t where I wanted to be. I loved wilderness; I loved the riverbanks and the disused railway lines that in summer became green tunnels; I loved the nearby beaches in Northumberland, where you could walk for miles and not meet a living soul. But I was afraid to go to any of these places. So, livid with myself, I ran round the park with small children and dogs and O.A.P.s and my own shadow rising up to meet me.
I hardly knew myself. My hair was crammed into a beanie, which I pulled down low enough to cover my eyebrows. I wrapped a scarf round my mouth and chin, wore figure-obliterating jackets, baggy tracksuit bottoms, and trainers, grunted a response if anybody spoke to me. More than once a man out walking his dog addressed me as “mate.” “Mate,” not “love.” Well, that suited me.
I don’t want to suggest that it was all grim. It wasn’t. Some mornings I woke up and thought, What’s the fuss about? I wasn’t injured. I had a carpet burn on the small of my back, a cut from the broken wineglass—nothing more serious than that. I wasn’t a young girl whose whole subsequent view of men could be darkened by one encounter. I still had a good life, didn’t I? A lot of things were going right. I’d sold eight paintings in the cathedral exhibition. Eight. I’d have been happy with two. I’d ask myself sometimes, Really, what is wrong? What’s the matter with you? The answer lay in the studio upstairs, in my brushes spread out in a fan across the table, still, after three months, unused. I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t painted, not since I was three years old and first got my chubby fingers around a brush. Now I entered a room that seemed to withdraw from me and stood, hesitating, in the doorway, like an uninvited guest, inhaling the familiar smells of oil paint and turps. Ghost smells.
“Ithink I need to get away,” I said to Jenna one evening as we were having a glass of wine in the students’ bar after work.
“We’re going to New York in May.”
“Yeah, I know, and I’m looking forward to it, but I think I need to get away before then.” Jenna was part of what I needed to get away from. Not that she was ever less than supportive, but I was aware of leaning too heavily. “And I think I need to go on my own.”
I went to Florence. I’d spent a fortnight there when I was a student and had always meant to go back but never had. Then it had been the cheapest B. and B. I could find, hunks of bread and cheese eaten in the street, bottles of rough red passed from mouth to mouth. Now I stayed in a small hotel near Piazza della Signoria and ate in restaurants. Otherwise, it was the same overwhelming experience: exhausting, exciting, daunting, dispiriting, stimulating, inspiring, exhausting, exciting. Every day was crammed full; I scarcely sat down, developed a huge blister on my right heel where the sandal strap rubbed, but, somehow, always managed to limp on to the next gallery, the next room, the next church, the next fresco, until finally I was so saturated I couldn’t take anything in. But the trip did what I’d hoped it would do. The feeling in my right hand was back, the physical need to hold a brush. Though even in Florence I was on alert, never so wholly absorbed that I forgot to look over my shoulder, to notice who else was there. This was the least likely place for him to be, but still I couldn’t relax.
There was one encounter I’d been postponing. On the afternoon of my last day, I went to the Loggia dei Lanzi and wandered from sculpture to sculpture: The Rape of the Sabine women; Menelaus holding the dead body of Patroclus; Achilles, sword raised, about to rape a Trojan girl. D. H. Lawrence saw Florence as the most phallic of cities. I wondered if he’d been standing where I was when the thought occurred to him. I lingered for a long time in front of Achilles and his terrified victim before moving on to Perseus, who, also clutching a sword, held aloft the severed head of Medusa. Her body lay discarded beneath his feet. I remembered how, as a young student, nineteen years old, I’d been enraptured by this. My reactions were a little more complicated now. For one thing, I knew the story, or at least I knew one version of the story. Medusa had been raped by the god Poseidon inside the temple of Athena, and, to punish her (oh yes, her), Athena had transformed her beautiful hair into hissing venomous snakes. The transformed Medusa could petrify—literally, petrify—anyone who looked at her. So, in order to kill her, Perseus had to use his shield as a mirror, watch her reflection, wait for the right moment—and strike. Her face under its coils of writhing snakes was beautiful, even in death. I stood and stared. I suppose I may have wondered why, in this epicenter of European culture, the rape of women should be so celebrated; but no, I don’t think I did. I simply looked. For the first time in months I lost track of my surroundings, totally absorbed.
After I don’t know how long—it could have been ten minutes or half an hour—I became aware of being watched. It was a physical sensation, like a hand on the side of my face. Turning to my right, I saw a tall, broad-shouldered man with a mass of crinkly hair looking curious and amused. The jolt of seeing him there where, only a few minutes before, I’d felt safe from observation nettled me. “Well,” I snapped. “At least she hasn’t turned you to stone.”
“Nor you.”
“I don’t think she did it to women.”
“Oh, I think she did. Fact, isn’t that one of the theories? That she saw her own reflection in the shield and it turned her to stone.”
“You’re saying she killed herself?”
He shrugged. “Possible.”
“Then how typical of a man to take the credit.”
“Whoa!” He threw up his hands and took a step back.
In spite of myself, I smiled.
“Anyway,” he said, “I come prepared.” He held up a pair of mirrored sunglasses.
Oh, for God’s sake. I’m tolerant to a fault, but there are limits. I do think people who wear mirrored sunglasses should be removed from the human gene pool as expeditiously as possible.
He seemed to read my thoughts. “They’re not mine. I found them on a bench.”
It was late afternoon. The crowds were beginning to thin. We wandered out of the Loggia together and lingered, looking over the sunlit piazza. Sharp-edged black shadows danced across the stones, more vital than the limp, jaded tourists to whom they were attached. A bit like the cathedral in Valletta, where the skeletons cavorting across the floor always seem to be having so much more fun than the people peering dutifully down at them. I thought of asking him if he’d been to Valletta, but then didn’t bother.
“Have you got time for a coffee?” he asked.
I hesitated, but only for a moment. A crowded café, a short walk back to the safety of my hotel. Why not? I was fed up with being alone.
Twenty minutes later, sitting at a table by the Arno, I looked at him, really looked at him, for the first time. Built like a brick shithouse, as Dad would have said. Somehow the northern flatness of his vowels added to the impression of bulk. He wasn’t in the least good-looking, and I was sensitive to that: I’d just spent the past six days gazing at images of beautiful men. His nose had been broken, possibly more than once. There was a yellowing bruise around one eye and another on his cheekbone. Somebody had clouted him really hard, and quite recently, too. His hair was not only crinkly but coarse: the sort of hair that more properly belongs between the legs—but let’s not go there. Oh, God, let’s definitely not go there. A bead of tension—sexual tension—was developing between us. Deep waters, already, and the coffee had only just arrived.
I couldn’t stop looking at his bruises.
“She was a big girl.” He saw my expression change. “No, I got into a fight in a taxi queue.”
It was disconcerting to have my reactions read so accurately. I didn’t want this to become too personal, so I started talking about the sculptures we’d just seen: Perseus and Medusa, Achilles and the captive girl, the Sabine women.
“I don’t know anything about art, I’m afraid,” he said. “I just know the stories.”
“Not many people do these days.”
“I read classics.”
“Do you teach?”
“No, I dropped out of college.”
“Why?”
“Dunno—just wasn’t me. I felt like a little black beetle in a tank with all the air being sucked out. I could actually see myself flat on my back in a corner waving my legs in the air. One day I just got up and walked out. I was in the library, and I—just left. Left everything. Notebooks, pens. Even left my sandals.” He was laughing now. “Walked out barefoot.”
I was trying to guess his age. He was very weather-beaten and, I thought, possibly quite a bit younger than he looked, but still this must have happened some years ago. “So what did you do?” I asked, expecting to be told that he’d gone backpacking.
“Joined the Army.”
“Really? Why?”
“Why not?”
He was smiling, but there was a definite edge. You could see why minor disagreements might escalate: he was ready to take anybody on.
“No reason. Just I don’t think I’ve ever met a soldier.” Unless Twerp was one. I stared at my coffee, making patterns on the surface with my spoon. “Then you must have been in Iraq?”
“Afghanistan.”
“Ah. ‘You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.’ ”
He laughed. “Do you know, I couldn’t get enough Conan Doyle when I was a lad? I must’ve read every story five or six times.”
We were safely into trivialities. The jolt was over, the darkness lifted. I sat up straighter, letting my shoulders settle back. Then I caught him looking at me and realized that he’d registered it all.
“But you’re out of the Army now?”
“Yes—two months.”
“Any idea what you’re going to do?”
He puffed out his cheeks. “None whatsoever.”
“Well, what did you do in the Army?”
Stupid question. Fight, of course.
“I interrogated people.”
“Oh.”
“Oh! ” He smiled. “It’s O.K., not waterboarding. Bit more subtle than that.”
He asked me where I was staying. “Hotel Lorenzo,” I said. I had no idea whether such a place existed. There was a pause during which he should have reciprocated but didn’t. I looked at the size of the rucksack he was carrying and wondered if he was sleeping rough. I couldn’t fit the different parts of him together.
And then he started trying to draw me out. I’ve done my fair share of Internet dating and I’m very familiar with men who use every contribution you make to the conversation as a stepping stone to their next monologue, but he was nothing like that. I talked about my painting, the exhibition in the cathedral, what a step forward that had been, and closed my mind to the darkness I’d met when I got home.
“So what’s next?” he said.
“Shadows, I think.”
I hadn’t realized that I’d been thinking along those lines.
“Do you fancy something to eat?” he said. “I’m famished.”
The suggestion took me by surprise, but I hadn’t had anything since breakfast. And what else was I going to do except have dinner in the hotel, alone, sit in the lounge afterward, making polite conversation with elderly couples, and listen to an old man with a shock of Toscanini-white hair play the piano. “Yes, all right.”
I ordered salmon; he chose steak. The waiter who came to prepare the table gave him a much sharper knife than mine, with a thinner blade. “Never a good sign,” he said, picking it up. The light glinted on the serrated edge.
I stood up. “I won’t be a minute.”
I stumbled between the tables into the darkness of the bar, where a waiter pointed me toward a door at the back.
Empty, thank God. I ran cold water over my wrists, splashed my face and the back of my neck, and then, dripping, gazed into the mirror. So that’s it, then, is it? Every time a man picks up a steak knife in a restaurant you’re going to throw a hissy fit? How long are you planning on doing that for? The rest of your life?
She was back, the belligerent, bullying cow who’d walked into my life the same night as Twerp, insisting again, as she’d insisted then, that everything was my fault. No. Not having it. I reached up and tugged my hair out of its constricting band. Freed, it tumbled round my shoulders in thick springy coils, snaking halfway down my back. I ran my fingers through it, shaking my head from side to side as my scalp cooled. Then I looked in the mirror again. I needed to see my face. I needed to see the change. No more polite, reasonable, placatory smiles. Instead: this. Features contorted with rage. I barely recognized myself. And yet I did. I stared at my reflection for a long time, imprinting it on my memory, and then, slowly, let the muscles of my face relax, eased my shoulders, lifted my head. I ran my damp fingers through my hair one last time and went back into the restaurant.
“You O.K.?” he asked.
A bottle of wine and two glasses had appeared on the table.
I picked up the one he’d poured for me. “Fine,” I said. “Absolutely fine.”
And then I looked at him, at this man who in a previous life I might have liked or even loved—and watched him turn to stone. ♦
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