She sleeps with a woman and it’s a homecoming but also not, because in the actual act she can’t feel anything, she can’t let go. It happens on Halloween in a bar toilet on her hands and knees. Praying to a warped goddess.
Later, Mei will think back to that time and wonder whether she took something that did not belong to her. She had entered the soft sacred folds of this woman without a yes or a no. Only sweaty palms pressing, hand to hand through hot bodies, the eyes of men following the beginnings of their pornographic fantasies. In the bar toilet it is just the two of them. She is hairless and Scandinavian and Mei has no idea what she is doing so she copies the videos she has watched alone in bed. She doesn’t come.
There is a poison and it spreads inside of her. She thinks it is her fault. She cries after having sex and feels nothing during. Not until the end, when great waves of sadness rise up in her body and crash out of her. Waves so big she has to get up and go to the bathroom and wait for the tears to stop falling down her cheeks, still round with youth. Most nights, sitting naked on the toilet seat, the tears will stop and she will splash her face with cold water and carry on. Other times they do not stop.
Back in bed, the other person rolls over and begins to snore and Mei lies on her side, facing away, tears rolling down and wetting the pillow, body shaking, nose running. Sometimes she has to snort up her snot because she cries so much, and a part of her hopes the other person will hear her, turn over and ask if she’s okay. But they never do because they don’t care; they don’t find sex sad—it is a fun thing that ends with an orgasm. Mei can’t understand this simplicity, but she guesses some people just aren’t like her. She learns to break open into the night-time silence, to hide in the darkness, so others won’t be inconvenienced. Rooms where night buses rattle past. Rooms that smell of damp clothes. That have no hairdryers. Or soap or clean towels. Rooms that house her for the night because she has something to offer. But in the morning, there is only that smell. Damp clothes and toast with no butter and wet hair in December air and mumbled goodbyes and the long journey home.
There is a word that follows Mei, that she has to whisper, or spell out, or replace with facile, weak words like assault and harassment . The word seeps into her bones as she watches a play about a young girl from Tennessee who is groomed by her uncle. The actress playing the teenage girl is in her thirties, with long blonde plaits falling down either side of her chest. She wears daisy dukes and flounders around on stage, the way insecure actors always do when playing children. The play is bad, but something dawns and breaks Mei open as she sits shaking in her stalls seat.
The word follows her home, through Waterloo station, past her dad and stepmum sitting in the living room, up the stairs and into the shower, where for the first time since the night of the assault (she still can’t use the word) she understands. She accepts for the first time that she is one of them. One of those girls you hear about on the news, one of those sullied, victimised, down-the-back-of-an-alley type girls. Black bodycon dress, legs akimbo, bleary eyed and slurring.
There are some places in the world that smell like rape. A short man in a tight tracksuit with anger in his body is one of them. Cheap petrol stations with plastic chairs and thoughtless cigarettes are another. Cream-covered hotels with smooth banisters. The smell is everywhere and once you notice it you cannot escape it, until you wonder if the rape smell is all you.