It was hot, and the nights were still. Kate slept with the windows open to let in the cooler air, but even the still air stirred the fabric of the curtains and woke her to the conviction that there was somebody standing over her. A weight on her chest pinned her to the bed and obscured her vision. Though she blinked and opened her mouth, no sound came out, and the figure above her pressed down harder and harder until, unexpectedly and without warning, it released her and she rolled over and turned on the light.
“It’s like that painting,” Kate said to her friend Claire, one night when they were alone together in the pub. Other than her mother, this was the first time Kate had seen anybody—or even properly spoken to anybody—since it had happened. Max had texted her a few times, but she’d sent him only short replies back. She did not phone, and neither did Max challenge her distancing. When Kate had arranged to meet up with Claire, she’d half entertained the thought that this might be the moment to tell her what had happened. Claire did not know Lewis, after all. But now that they were in the pub, Kate kept thinking about how long it was since they’d last spoken, and she found it impossible to articulate anything other than dreams. “It’s like that painting, The Nightmare, with the little devil thing on the chest of the sleeping woman.”
“My little brother used to sleepwalk,” said Claire. “Once he pissed in King James’s Castle.”
Claire had three near indistinguishable younger brothers, all of whom played rugby for Claire and Kate’s old school. Somehow, this anecdote did not surprise Kate.
“Pissed in what?”
“It was this Lego castle he built. Battlements and a moat and everything, with a drawbridge he used to close at night. He was really upset when he realized what he’d done.”
“Yeah, it’s not really the same,” said Kate, level.
“No. Yours sound fucked, man.”
Kate had to agree. But the dreams went on, and at night she existed in a state of immobilized terror, while in the day she was restless, exhausted. The deadline for her to put in her film school application came and went, and she did nothing: she had left the camera she’d meant to borrow from Max in its box in his bedroom. Instead, she drank, and disposed of the empty bottles in the dumpster at the end of their road so that she wouldn’t be tempted to count how many there were. Printed on the dumpster’s side was RIPPON, a word that stopped Kate’s heart every time she saw it. She threw each bottle into the dumpster with increasing force so that it shattered on whatever debris was contained there, and walked on, guilty and anxious.
Kate learned very quickly that there was no subtle way of explaining that she had been raped. There was no oblique way of putting it, and because there was no halfway point between having been raped and having not, there were no means of testing the water, of hinting at her condition to measure the response of any potential confidante. There were only the raped and the un-raped.
And so instead she said nothing, hoping that if she chose not to voice whatever it was that lodged itself in her chest, somewhere between her lungs and her heart, it would diminish; that its toxicity might find its own means of excreting itself from her body, in her sweat, her blood, her spit, and her shit; that by simply breathing and being, she might gradually cleanse herself without the horror of ever having to give it a recognizable shape and, unarticulated, perhaps it might recede.
In the middle of September Kate moved to London. She had started sending longer replies to Max’s messages, and they had arranged to have a takeaway on the night she arrived. There would be a whole week of them living alone together before Nicole moved in, and the flurry of communication in anticipation of their next meeting made Kate feel, at some moments, as if nothing had changed: she would arrive in London in a few days, they would eat Chinese food at the kitchen table of their new flat, they would drink cheap wine. But when she thought about the last time she had seen Max, the excitement congealed. On the designated day, Kate packed clothes and kitchen utensils into a rucksack, to the outside of which she strapped her bulkiest belongings—leather trainers, two pans, and a colander—and Claire, who had given her and her enormous suitcase a lift to the station, helped her onto the train.
“You look so fucking intrepid,” Claire told her.
“Come and visit me,” said Kate as the doors closed.
When the train lurched away from the platform, she felt bare, but as soon as she arrived in the high-ceiling two-floored flat she knew that nothing she already owned belonged there, and she was glad that she had only brought two bags with her; Claire would have said that the place resembled an asylum, with its white walls and cream carpets—and they were cream, rather than the ugly beige of Alison’s ex–council house—and its windows that opened only halfway so as to prevent its inhabitants from taking the quickest (the easy) way out.
Max had left a key for her under the rug, and he’d forgotten to shut the balcony doors, presenting a challenge to opportunistic thieves. But rapists didn’t break in via rooftops, Kate thought, as she searched the house for intruders with one of her kitchen knives held tightly in her right hand; rapists had front-door keys and security codes, so she needn’t have worried. Once she’d scouted the flat twice, she took a shit, nervously, watching the handle of the door in case her intruder chose this moment to humiliate her. She still had the knife, balanced on the side of the bathtub, and as she pulled up her knickers, she felt the urge to turn it blade up and to push it inside herself, if only to remember—really remember, without the sudden panic but with full cogency—what it had been like.
Instead, she unpacked her kitchen things, went out to the shops and bought bread for breakfast, and drank two-thirds of a bottle of wine while she waited for Max to come home, trying to make the television work before giving up and sitting in silence on the floor of the living room, watching the sky darken through the balcony windows and wondering whether anybody was looking in. By the time it was fully dark he still had not arrived, and neither had he replied to her messages. She ate toast to quell her hunger. Several times she half thought she heard a key turn in the lock, and although it was always nothing, she held her breath, waiting for him to enter, to apologize for his lateness, to sense some fundamental change in her: to come to her side, to let her rest her head in his lap, and to talk to her about his day until she was at ease, until she could trust him enough to tell him what had been done to her. But she waited, and he did not return. By midnight, he was still not back, and because she had not yet made her bed, she fell asleep on the sofa.