Guilty Innocence (11 page)

She clings to Mark, hiding her face against the mat of hair on his chest.

‘You were right,’ she says.

He’s quick; she’ll give him that. Once the hot wetness of her tears soaks into his skin, he grasps her meaning immediately. His arms tighten around her.

‘Somebody’s hurt you,’ he says.

She nods.

Against her cheek, Mark’s chest stops, mid-inhalation. He breathes out, slowly, rhythmically, before answering. ‘You were raped?’

‘No.’ She shakes her head in emphasis. ‘Thank God, not that. But…’

‘Tell me.’ His arms squeeze her body again. Soothingly, reassuringly. He rocks her back and forth as she sobs against his chest. His mouth touches her hair and to Natalie’s amazement, the memory of hot, mocking breath against her ear recedes.

Mark’s silent, allowing her the space she needs, waiting for her to cry out all the tears. Natalie’s surprised at herself. She’s known this man only a few weeks, and yet she’s about to expose the scar on her soul she’s never even let her mother glimpse. Mark’s different, though. Her intuition’s already twigged he’s damaged goods, despite the fact he’s never divulged any details. Odds are he’ll grasp how badly she’s also been hurt. If he’s as fucked up as she is, his understanding is a certainty, not a hope.

‘He pushed me to the ground, you see. From behind.’

‘You didn’t know him?’

‘No. I never saw his face. I remember he smelled…’ She wrinkles her nose. ‘Bad.’

‘You never told anyone?’

‘No.’

‘Not even your mum?’

‘No.’

‘How old were you, Nat?’

‘Eleven.’

‘Christ.’ Anger infuses his voice, along with something she can’t quite identify. It’s as though her words have confirmed something he’s already guessed and she wonders whether she carries with her a whiff of low self-esteem, a scent he’s picked up.

‘Guess it’s not the sort of thing a young girl tells her father, either,’ Mark says. ‘Your parents weren’t divorced then, were they?’

‘No.’

‘So you bottled it all up. What happened, Nat?’

Natalie tenses, her fingers pleating the duvet cover. When she speaks, her voice is thin, fragile, in danger of breaking. ‘He shoved me onto my stomach. Got on top of me, held me down. Can’t really talk about the details.’ She sniffs.

‘You don’t have to.’

‘He hurt me, though. That’s why…’ She snorts snot back up her nose, forcing the tears into retreat. ‘Why I can’t do it that way. Doggy-style, I mean. Face down.’

‘Brings it all back to you.’ His hand glides over her hair.

‘It shouldn’t have happened.’

‘Damn right it shouldn’t.’

‘No, you don’t understand. It was my fault.’

Mark pulls back to catch her eyes briefly, before her shame forces her to clamp her eyelids tight, shutting out his incredulous expression. ‘How the hell were you to blame, Nat?’

‘I should have fought back. Struggled, pushed him off. But I didn’t.’

‘He was stronger than you. Bigger. Nothing you could have done.’ Mark’s words are flat; it’s as though he’s giving a running commentary on a scene he’s witnessing in his head. His empathy is comforting, although Natalie needs him to understand the guilt she’s always carried.

‘I don’t understand why I didn’t even try,’ she says. ‘I just let him do it. I knew I should put up a fight, but I didn’t. He scared me too badly, you see. That’s why I’ve always felt so ashamed.’

‘Because you believe you could have done something to stop it, but you didn’t. So you feel guilty for not acting.’

Jeez, how does he
know
?

‘Yes,’ she replies.

Mark’s arms squeeze around her again. ‘Believe me, I understand exactly how that feels,’ he says. Somehow, although she doesn’t ask how, she’s aware he really does get it, right through every cell in him. Her pain is his pain, her terror his terror.

‘You want to know what my worst fear is?’ she asks.

‘Tell me.’

‘Him finding me again one day.’ She shudders. ‘I know it’s illogical. He never saw my face; there’s zero chance he’d ever recognise me again. But I can’t help it. I think about him, still being here in Bristol, having got worse, more aggressive, in the meantime. Scares the shit out of me.’

‘I get that.’

‘He’s always with me. In my head, I mean. If anyone male comes up behind me in the street, I panic. I’m terrified it’s him.’

Mark kisses her hair again.

‘I should have told someone. But I didn’t.’

‘You were eleven years old. Kids of that age don’t always do what they should.’ His arms slacken their grip as he pulls away. As though his words have triggered a memory for him. ‘Don’t beat yourself up over it, Nat.’

‘Can’t help it.’ Natalie’s unconvinced. She should have done something. Anything.

‘Want to talk some more about it?’

She shakes her head.

‘That’s OK,’ Mark says, and they slip into silence, words no longer necessary. She’s incapable of telling him more anyway. Safe beside him, her mind retreats through the years, until she’s eleven years old again, transported back to the park near her childhood home in Bristol.

She’s taken this route so many times before, down the slope under the trees, prior to walking up the other side towards where she lives. On this day, a Saturday, she’s been to the shops to buy chocolate and is heading back for lunch. Eventually, but not yet. The rows between her parents have been escalating in recent months, and a bar of Dairy Milk provides Natalie with a welcome form of self-medication. She’s been resorting to its sweet comfort more and more, along with sneaking biscuits from the kitchen into her bedroom to soothe herself when the raised voices downstairs grow unbearable. Here, alone with her thoughts in the park, she’s safe, insulated from the nagging worry that her father will leave them. His vice, Natalie’s gleaned from what she’s overheard, is younger women. Aged eleven, she’s already sceptical about the male capacity for fidelity.

A small copse lies ahead on the left of the park, where the trees are thick and it’s dark and secluded. Natalie’s often detoured through it, loving the way the branches swallow her up, shielding her from anyone on the main path. It’s overgrown, and hard to penetrate, but a tiny clearing hides in the middle. A place to which Natalie frequently retreats with her sweet pleasures to shut out the rest of the world, leaning against a tree as she eats. Her bag slung over her shoulder, she’s headed there now, anticipating the satisfying crack of the chocolate snapping under her teeth, the first gratifying release of its sugary delights.

Absorbed in her thoughts, she never hears her attacker approaching from behind.

An arm presses against her windpipe, cutting off her air, pulling her head backwards. She catches a whiff of stale breath as the arm hoists her upwards, so that her toes are the only part of her still in contact with the path. That’s when he says the words.

‘Frigging fat bitch, ain’t you? Been stuffing too many pies into yourself.’ His mocking contempt sears shame through her. She’s incapable of any response, her throat crushed by the force of his arm, although an inarticulate moan escapes her. She’s pushed forward, into the copse, shoved through the brambles and undergrowth, the thorns snagging her jacket, gouging scratches into any exposed flesh they encounter.

They reach the clearing, his arm still tight against her neck. Then she’s forced to the ground, her right cheek slamming down against the earth, the peaty smell of which fills her nostrils. Her bag crashes off her shoulder, scattering its contents. No noise, not anywhere; it’s as though only two people in the world exist, her and him. He’s on top of her now, his weight heavy and oppressive as he pins her down into the dirt, his breath hot against her left ear.

‘You’re going to let me do what I want.’ Total self-assurance in his words.

She nods, her head bobbing up and down as far as her restricted position allows. Surrender is her only option. He’s too big, too heavy, too terrifying, for anything else.

‘I’ll hurt you, bitch. If you scream or do anything stupid.’

He will, too. Something about him, his tone, his strength, his words, are beyond menacing. She’s rendered mute, passive, incapable of any response other than submitting to whatever foul thing he wants. She prays it’s not
that
.

It’s not, thankfully, although what he does do is vile. Painful, invasive. He holds her with his left arm, whilst his right goes exploring. Her body bucks as his hand rakes underneath her, popping the button on her jeans, dragging them over her arse cheeks. Her panties get pulled down along with the jeans, leaving her buttocks exposed to the cold December air. His thighs press hard against hers, his chest against her spine, as he slides his hand around her right hip. Pain stabs through her as his fingers force their way inside, invading her, violating her, but he’s anticipated this, and his left hand has already moved to seal her mouth. Her strangled moans find no way to escape. His fingers continue to twist and probe, stretching her, and a sudden wetness, warm and sticky, seeps onto her thighs. Later on, as she disposes of her stained knickers where her mother will never find them, she discovers it’s blood.

He gets off on her fear, she realises. What excites him is not so much having his fingers inside her but the invasion they represent. Total control over her is the aim of the game. If she gives it to him, maybe he’ll keep his promise and not hurt her even worse.

So Natalie lies there, crushed to the ground as her assailant takes his time, revelling in her pain, her submission, her helplessness. An odour enters her nose, acrid and foul, and shifting her head, she sees the half-dried dog turd a foot or so away. The pain in her cunt meshes with the shit in front of her and Natalie swears to herself she’ll never reveal the horror of today to anyone, not ever.

She’s not sure how much time passes, but eventually he gets bored with the game and pulls out his fingers, wiping them on the grass nearby. His chest peels away from her spine, his thighs shifting to straddle her. Natalie doesn’t move, not a muscle, not an inch. She’s aware of him stretching to pick something up. The crackle of packaging against his fingers reaches her; then she hears cloth rustle as he puts her Dairy Milk in his pocket.

‘I’ll take this,’ he says. ‘You shouldn’t be eating chocolate. Not a porker like you.’ His laugh is mocking as he eases his weight off her. Still she doesn’t dare move or look round. Then the sounds of him striding through the brambles to the main path float back to her.

Natalie’s grateful for the seclusion the copse offers, unaware of how long passes before the ability to peel herself off the ground comes to her. She’s sore, and bleeding, and pain stabs her between the legs as she stands up, shaky and uncertain. She grabs her bag, shoving the scattered contents in hastily, before pushing her way blindly back to the main path.

Her mother shouts at her for being late for lunch, but Natalie barges past her, pleading sickness, desperate for the sanctuary of her bedroom. Later on, when Callie goes out, she raids the biscuit tin, stuffing chocolate chip comfort into her mouth to dull the pain saturating her body and her mind. So what if she doesn’t need the extra calories? Food’s become Natalie’s solace, even if she is, as her assailant puts it, a porker and a frigging fat bitch. Heat floods her face as she recalls his words.

Within a month, her father walks out on her mother for good, his dick lured away by a twenty-year-old aerobics instructor. A week later, Natalie’s beset by the onset of her first menstrual cramps, for which she seeks relief in extra chips and chocolate. Her body thickens and expands even more, her fat layers protection against the male of the species.

Once she moves into her middle teens, however, Natalie’s sex drive rears its head. She’s straight, so she has either to get to grips with fucking men or resign herself to perpetual virginity. Natalie chooses the former. Sex doesn’t come easily to her, though. She can manage being astride a guy or having him on top, but getting fucked from behind – no way. Her first boyfriend tries it and as soon as Natalie’s chest presses into the bed with his body against her, panic rises in her and she bucks upwards and backwards, pushing him off her. Gradually she eases into her routine of taking the initiative in bed, concentrating on pleasing her man, relegating her own pleasure to the side-lines, ensuring she’s too busy with her mouth and fingers for them to contemplate fucking her doggy-style.

Shit. She’s one screwed-up bitch, that’s for sure.

‘You’ve ended up afraid of men. Not just him, but all of us,’ Mark says, his words bringing her back to the present.

‘Yes.’

‘I won’t hurt you, Nat.’ He pulls his head back, tilting up her chin so their eyes engage. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

10

HIS SIDEKICK

The call from Adam Campbell thrusts Mark’s mind back through the years as he tries to sleep later on that night. He’s Joshua Barker again, aged eleven. His first day at secondary school, Exeter Grammar, and he knows nobody, not really. His former classmates have either moved away, gone to different schools or else he never interacted much with them anyway. He spots a couple of them in the queue at the lunch counter, envying the ease with which they seem to be integrating into this unfamiliar social fabric. He finds it hard, anxiety oozing from him whenever he attempts to initiate contact, his awkwardness stemming from his mother’s dislike of him having friends. Starting secondary school initially seems like a way to break through his social deprivation, but now, standing alone in the dining hall, not daring to join any of the tables, he’s not so sure it’ll work. The other boys ebb and flow around him, carrying trays, their apparent self-assurance mocking his own uncertainty. Various smells assault his nostrils: frying chips bubbling in oil, pastry warming in the serving dishes, orange Fanta. His isolation becomes unbearable and he escapes to the sanctuary of the toilets, locking himself in a cubicle, where he wills himself to get a grip on his spiralling emotions. If only Dad were still alive, he thinks.