I Came to Find a Girl (12 page)

I shrugged. “No idea.”

“Are you bothered?” Kelly asked.

“No.”

“What is it then?”

“It’s – something happened, a few weeks back, that artist, he...”

“He what?”

“I don’t know, it’s just...” I said what I could, tried to make sense of it. “I think he drugged me, but really I don’t know what else – I can’t remember.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell us.” Kelly hugged me, they both did, and went on to say loads of great supportive stuff about what a wanker Flood is and things we could do. “You’ve got to report it,” Kelly said.

“But I don’t know what happened.”

“Yeah, but even so, what if he keeps doing it, drugging other women, I mean. What if they don’t get away next time?” Kelly and Tam looked at me like I was their kid for that moment. They knew best and I had to agree.

“Will you come with me if I report it?”

“Yeah, course,” Kelly said. “We’ll go tomorrow.”

“Oh, I’ve got a crit first thing,” Tamzin said.

“That’s okay, as long as someone can go.” I looked at Kelly.

I felt like getting drunk then, really drunk. Nottingham was my place, why should I go home? I’d head to Rock City as planned, as a matter of principle.

Rock City, a Nottingham institution, is a vast cave of a place. Its interior walls are painted black and there’s a beer-sticky carpet. We usually stood at the far end by the bar, overlooking the dance-floor. It was too much effort to talk – too loud.

I knocked back my first can of Stella and went to the bar for another and, as I’d already had a few in Ruby’s, I was tipsy. Doug, one of those club-friends that you only see out, came over. He wasn’t bad-looking with dark hair and thick eyebrows but he didn’t do it for me.

“I heard about Bert,” he shouted above the music.

“What’s that?” I wasn’t aware they knew each other.

“Mandy told me – about Bert’s girlfriend.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, which was sort of true. “Was that the girl he was with in Ruby’s?”

“Yeah – Céline – she’s over from Paris. They're engaged.”

Too much information – did Doug enjoy telling me that?
 

“Bert’s been a prat,” Doug added. I shrugged. It was such an effort to talk, the music going right through me, and more to the point I’d noticed Luke, the third year sculptor. I hadn’t bothered talking to him since the night at the club when I’d returned home and cut up my Blondie T-shirt. But now he was standing close by, staring over like he wanted to talk.

“Hello,” he said, and I went over as Luke knew I would. We talked for a while though it was more like the odd shout in one another’s ear in an attempt to be heard. He was going on about what it is to be an artist and whether acknowledgement is important, which was all very well but he was being pretty flirtatious – and didn’t he have a girlfriend? Wasn’t that her standing alone behind him?

“Isn’t that your girlfriend?” I asked. He looked sheepish.
Fuck it
. I wasn’t in the mood for this. I turned on my heel, left him to it, and went back to Kelly. “I don’t believe it – that’s his girlfriend.”

“Bert’s been watching you,” she said.

“What – he’s here too?”

I needed to get away, be alone for a moment. I headed to the toilets at the far end of the club. There were about fifteen cubicles in a long line and yet there was always a queue. I waited on the right-hand side, close to the washbasins. All the girls checked themselves in the mirrors at some point. I was next to a particularly smeared patch of glass. I squinted at my reflection, thinking I looked haunted, and then aimed towards a vacated toilet cubicle as its door swung ajar.

The lock was broken. I sat down, leaning forward, one hand on the door to hold it shut as I relieved myself. The walls were metal and covered in graffiti: ‘Anita Smith takes it up the arse’, ‘The Libertines’, and then another simply said ‘I need love’. Me too, I thought.
I want someone, someone of my own, but not Doug, he bores me. Why am I always on the outside of an already established relationship?

I ran my tongue around my lips. Then, shakily, stood up, leaned my back against the door to hold it shut while I rearranged my dress. I felt dizzy. The floor was wet. My feet gave way. I slid down the door to the floor catching my bare back on the door’s useless metal lock.
Shit, that hurt
.

Back outside, I returned to the bar area at the other end of the club.

“Here, I got you another beer.” Kelly put her arm round me. “I love this song – let’s dance.” So, we all hit the dance-floor for a few tracks, beer cans in hand.

I went back to the bar, bought another round, danced some more, and then went back to the bar, and bought yet another beer... Bert was still there, watching me.
Where’s his fiancée?
And there was Luke’s ‘girlfriend’ standing alone, looking at the dance-floor. She talked to some of Luke’s friends before dancing alone for a few miserable minutes, then eventually made her way back to Luke who hardly turned in her direction. He stood back and spoke from a distance barely looking at her. She must have told him she was leaving. She must have asked him to leave with her but he let her go, remaining where he was, looking back at me.

What is going on? I can’t take this, not tonight. I’ve had enough
. I checked my watch; it was getting on for one thirty – late enough. “I’ve got to go,” I said to Tamzin.

“Yeah, I’ve had enough,” she agreed. “Where’s Kelly?”

We looked around, spotted her in the corner talking to a guy she really liked.

Tamzin had a word. “Kelly’s staying, but Spence is coming.”

I couldn’t walk straight but I managed to follow Tamzin and Spencer out.

“I’m Hank Marvin.” Spencer nodded towards the pink neon fish flashing in the window of the takeaway across the street. We crossed over and joined other club leftovers in the queue of the brightly lit chip shop.
 

“Foxy ladies.” A bloke in a checked shirt handed out flyers for another club night, but we were more interested in smothering our cones of chips with salt, vinegar and ketchup.

“Shit, look at that rain, it’s pissing it down,” Tamzin said, as she stabbed at a fat, ketchup-coated chip.
 

The rain was heavy and none of us had coats or umbrellas. “Let’s shelter down there.” Spencer pointed towards the underpass and Tamzin and Spencer made a run for it, rushing ahead down the fifteen or so concrete steps out of the rain.

I followed, and as I paused at the top of the steps to stab at another chip, I glanced up and panicked. On the subway’s left-hand side, was Gecko Girl and someone holding a large black umbrella above her bright splash of hair
– Flood
.
 

Fuck.
I lost my footing, stumbled and fell down the subway steps, scattering scarlet chips across the concrete.

Fifteen

Flood’s DVD continues with an exterior shot of a city street with wet concrete steps that lead down to a fluorescent lit underpass.

It’s the subway where I fell. The realisation sickens me. I don’t want to know.

A figure in white with a platinum blonde crop (Gecko Girl) stands over someone lying on the ground.
It’s unclear but it must be me.

“Are you okay?” Gecko Girl asks, as she stoops to check on me. I look up but my face is unrecognisable. It has been pixelated.

Can you film anyone you like as long as you pixelate them? Is that what he’s done?

Gecko Girl takes my arm, while Spencer takes hold of my other side. They try to hoist me up but I struggle – obviously out of it. I look pathetic and that makes me now feel even worse.

“Give us a hand, Jack,” Gecko Girl says.

“It’s okay, she’s up,” Spencer says.

Film cuts to a close up of the chips splayed across the path – some fat and anaemic, while others are bright red.

Gecko Girl folds her arms. “Hurry up, I’m so cold.”

“
Don’t go with him
.” It’s my voice, and I sound desperate, crazy even, while my face remains pixelated.

“Silly drunk tart,” Flood says.

“There’s no need for that, mate.” Spencer puts his arm round me. “You telling me you never had one too many?”

Cut to interior, the basic hotel room: tartan bedspread, bed almost filling the room and Flood’s washed-out face in close-up.

“We’ve met before – the girl in the subway and me, and I have to admit I liked the look of her all over again – rain having made long, dark tendrils of hair stick to her pale face. I wanted to help her, hold her, and film her – but thought better of it.

“The young idiot she had with her, he was straight in there, arm round her waist. ‘She’s all right,’ he kept saying, ‘she’s just had one too many.’ I told him to take her home before she falls flat on her face again.

“She was off her head, didn’t know what she was doing, staggering all over the place as the kid with the shaved head tried to hold on to her. She was having none of it, told him to ‘get off’, broke away, up the steps, treading on the red chips as she ran off in the rain – all very sad.”

Sixteen

The redness hit me as I entered the room. On a vast white background, a concentrated mass of rich crimson pigment had dripped down the canvas like a Nitsch ‘Action’ painting. I had read about Hermann Nitsch, and how he orchestrates naked pagan-like ceremonies involving the ritualistic slaughter of animals. It looked like a heart had been ripped out and used like a child’s potato print.

Through a door came a succession of naked women covered in red liquid – blood or paint? Perhaps they would roll on a canvas like an Yves Klein happening or was it something else? Confused, I turned around and there was Flood, naked apart from a towel round his waist, laughing.

I sat bolt upright.
It’s not real. He’s not here. I’m all right.

I had expected shades of asylum: pale pea green on the lower part of the walls with dishwater grey above, but then I figured police stations should be drab, somewhere you wouldn’t rush back to. To think I had been walking past that ugly pile for a good two years and had never taken much notice.

Kelly must have sensed my apprehension as she linked arms and pulled me forward through the heavy stone doorway to a wooden counter.

“We’ve something to report,” she said.

The duty officer had a face like a pit bull. I couldn’t tell him anything.

“Is there a female officer we can see?”

Pit-bull leant towards the window. “We have the Sanctuary,” he stated, passing a leaflet through the hatch. “Is that what you need?”

Kelly nodded.

“Take a seat; someone will be with you shortly.”

The leaflet described a rape suite for sexual assaults. “‘Rape Suite’ – it sounds like they’re renting out luxury space to rapists,” I said. “This isn’t going to work. I’ll be wasting police time – they charge people for that.”

“Sit.” Kelly pointed at some grey chairs, and I sat, staring up at the array of posters fixed to the wall behind protective plastic: ‘Drugs are no way to live!’ – with a photo of a dead body on a mortuary slab; ‘All of her friends said she was the life of the party. But she can’t remember.’ And then there were posters about terrorism and how we must be vigilant, and knife crime – saying you’re more likely to be a victim if you carry a knife.

“Is that all they can do – commission posters?” I said. “I can’t do this.”

Kelly stopped texting and looked at me. “You’re here now,” she said, “so you may as well talk to someone. You might prevent it happening to someone else.”

Between us we knew of four other friends who’d been victims of sexual assaults and that didn’t include me. One of Kelly’s friends from home was fifteen when it happened to her. It was her brother’s mate. Another friend got attacked on a date and he made out she led him on, and then I had a friend whose boyfriend had hammered her against a wall in the death-throes of their relationship and another who’d had a date go seriously wrong. So, if every woman knows at least two friends who have been raped that would suggest possibly epidemic proportions – judging by the fact none of our friends had reported the attacks, it could well be a silent epidemic. And, so far, I’d been part of that.

“Just get it logged,” Kelly said. “Even if there isn’t enough evidence at least they’ll have it on record in case someone else one day reports him. It could even help your mate Jenny in some way, you never know.”

Oh my God, she’s made the same possible link I made
. I felt sick and I wanted to go, get out, and run all the way up the hill home to my room and lock the door.

“Mia Jackson?” A chunky blonde woman with a nasal voice looked at us. “Would you like to come through?”

We were led down several corridors to a door labelled ‘The Sanctuary’. The room, painted in a warm shade of sand with primrose yellow cushioned chairs and a vase of plastic lilies, was as comfortable as a police station gets.

“I’m DC Jan Wilson. Call me Jan. I’ll be your point of contact – anything you need to ask or any problems you have, just give me a call. She punctuated her words with a kindly smile. “OK, first things first, when did the offence take place?”

The date was indelibly etched on my mind – a future unhappy anniversary. “It was Friday 27
th
May. I always work on Fridays.”

She consulted her desk calendar. “That’s three weeks ago – to be honest, the quicker these things are reported the better. The evidence will be limited.”

I knew that. There was little Jan could tell me. I’d looked it all up on rape crisis websites. I knew I should have gone straight to the police after fleeing the hotel. I shouldn’t have washed and I should have given blood and urine, saliva and pubic hair samples. Swabs should have been taken from my mouth, vagina and rectum. I should have been examined and probably photographed within forty-eight hours. And even then the likelihood of gaining a conviction would still have been below ten per cent, and more like five.

“You understand it’s too late to examine you physically. We need to think about other possible evidence. Do you still have the clothes you were wearing that night?”

That morning I’d retrieved the carefully wound plastic package I’d hidden at the back of my wardrobe. I held it up for Jan to see. “They’re cut up, I’m afraid – I couldn’t help it.”