It took a while for me to face up to the changes my body was going through. As one part of me healed, the superficial bruises and sore parts of my legs, thighs and wrists steadily fading, another side of me was going through a change. A change that had been going on for weeks, in spite of my attempts to ignore it. To carry on. To battle through.
Sometime late in the season snow had settled on my small corner of Essex, causing my parents to moan even more than usual. Grumpy references to how much nicer it was in the Caribbean started to become frequent, and there was a distinctly more ratty tone to the way they spoke to each other. I did my best to keep away, avoiding joining in with their conversations, the rough ball of anger within me always in danger of spilling out whenever I spoke.
One day – the fourth of our early spring snowfall – I journeyed down from my bedroom, my usual place of sanctuary, for a breath of fresh air outside in the garden. The fine, dusty coating on the patio crunched under the soles of my trainers and as I looked up, the afternoon light starting to dwindle, I got a snowflake in my eye. I tried to rub it out and my arm brushed against my left breast, causing me to wince. It was tender. So was the other. Two days later, after some nights of feeling hot and cold, I woke up to a sensation of low-level nausea which increased in intensity the moment I tried to walk normally to the bathroom.
I was going through an evolution, one that was competing with the emotional warfare I was already saddled with. One I couldn’t ignore any longer.
I went to my local GP one day when both my parents were out. My dad wanted to pick up an old dressing table he was sure he could sell on and Mum intended to drift around a nearby branch of Laura Ashley, looking at throws and floral frocks she couldn’t afford. I made an appointment over the phone with the receptionist then walked the short distance to the practice surgery, an awkward, ugly-looking building that had probably looked very modern in the 1960s. The conversation with the doctor didn’t take long, although one of his questions did cause me to wobble a little, the tears that were never far away threatening to arrive in front of him: ‘What’s your support network like? Are you here with your parents?’
I told him I wasn’t. And that was that. He gave me some leaflets, some advice on my next steps, on antenatal groups and some stuff about scans. Then I left and walked back to the house, nervous, scared, but with a growing resolve within me, a steadily strengthening refusal to be beaten, one I would carry with me and, years later, still hold to me like a trophy I had crafted all by myself. It was still there. My ability to cope. To deal with the situation. To survive.
Three weeks after the snow had gone, I woke up one morning to find my mother standing over me. ‘Ah, you’re awake,’ she said and sat on my bed. I noticed she’d drawn the curtains and had that expression on her face that said very plainly she was about to start a discussion she would rather not face.
‘I was wondering … well … your dad and I were wondering what the plan was?’
I pulled myself up from my bed, feeling a ripple of nausea run through me, and reached for the bottle of water I kept near the alarm clock I hadn’t bothered setting for the past month.
‘What plan?’ I said, confused.
‘Your plan. What, er … what happens now? Now the Oxford dream is dead and you apparently won’t even take part in a conversation about why you left in such a hurry.’
‘I’ve told you why.’
‘Yes, I know, your little crush. Are you sure you didn’t embarrass yourself in some way? You can tell me, dear.’
I looked away towards the open window, unable to look her in the eye – if I did, I wouldn’t be able to keep the tears at bay.
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
She sighed and I think I saw the flicker of an eye-roll. ‘Why must you be so proud? This superior silence you’ve always kept. Do you think your father and I are stupid? We know there’s more to all this than you’ve told us.’
I took a deep breath and then said, ‘I don’t think you really want to hear the truth.’
She didn’t say anything, just stared at the wardrobe, waiting for me to elaborate. Finally I said the words I’d been practising in my head. ‘I’m pregnant,’ I said.
I heard a quick intake of breath and she put her hand to her mouth. ‘Oh God,’ she whimpered. She sat there, rocking slightly, her head dipped so I couldn’t see her face clearly. ‘I suspected this. I just hoped it wasn’t true.’
‘You suspected it?’ I said, gulping down some more water.
‘A mother knows,’ she said, now rubbing the tops of her knees. She always did this when she was upset about something. ‘And your sudden wardrobe change hasn’t gone unnoticed. These big chunky jumpers and baggy t-shirts. I’ve heard you being sick, too. Stomach flu doesn’t last this long, you know. When were you going to tell us?’
‘I’m telling you now,’ I said, then added, ‘I’ve only known myself for a few weeks. Well, longer than that, if I’m honest, but I didn’t really want to believe it.’
Some deep breaths. My mother swayed slightly. ‘Of course you must be expecting my next question.’
I nodded. ‘Yes. The father is George Treadway.’
That made her stop with her knee rubbing. She turned around, a look of shock on her face. ‘My God, you don’t mean … that rough-looking boy you went to school with?’
Now it was my turn to roll my eyes. ‘He isn’t “rough”. He’s perfectly nice.’
‘I thought you’d been made pregnant at Oxford?’ she said, sounding almost disappointed.
‘Well, I’m sorry your first grandchild won’t be the illegitimate son of an earl or something,’ I snapped. ‘Is that what you would have preferred?’
She stood up and walked away from me, towards the door. ‘Your father’s out. When he’s home we’ll tell him this together. God, I knew it was something like this. I knew there was some reason you’d turned up suddenly here out of the blue. This is all such a mess.’
‘Are you worried you won’t be able to go on any more cruises?’
Instead of walking out of the door, she slammed it shut and turned back to me. It was strange to see her lose her temper. She usually just bottled things up and went silent, but in this case she apparently wanted to have it out with me.
‘You’re in no position to use that high and mighty tone with me, sitting there with some random youth’s child inside you!’ She hissed this, then threw a look towards the window, as if the neighbours might have overheard. We stared at each other for a few seconds, then I finally said it, the thing I’d been terrified of saying out loud, more than the pregnancy, more than about George Treadway, more than anything in my whole life.
‘Mum,’ I said, and I started crying. ‘I was attacked.’
The colour drained from her face and she looked at me with an expression I would never forget. ‘Oh dear lord,’ she whispered. ‘That boy raped you. That Treadway boy … he … he forced himself on you?’ She came over to the bed now and picked up my hand. ‘We need to go to the police. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me this sooner.’
‘Mum, I—’
‘Jesus Christ, I knew there was something strange about him. I knew it. I’m not going to let him get away with it. I won’t.’
She started muttering away to herself about the kind of vengeance she’d wreak on George Treadway, clearly more concerned about being victorious in the pursuit of punishment than the wellbeing of her daughter. ‘Mum,’ I said quietly. ‘Please, Mum, stop. It wasn’t him.’
She looked at me, clearly baffled. ‘What do you mean, it wasn’t him? You just said he was the father.’
I shook my head. ‘Mum, George and I had … we had sex. Consensual sex. At Christmas when you and Dad left me here. He’s harmless.’
‘Then who …?’
I stared at my hands for almost a full minute, then started to speak. I told her everything. I described the whole evening to her. How we’d started playing a drinking game, how I’d been a bit tipsy and gone a bit overboard. How I’d followed the three boys back to my room and it had got out of control. They had taken advantage of me and attacked me. Once I’d finished I finally lifted my gaze from my fingernails and looked her in the face. I couldn’t quite see it at first, since she was turned towards the wardrobe, not looking at me. Then she finally leant in my direction.
‘You say one of them’s the son of Clive Kelman?’ She spoke evenly with barely any emotion, quite differently to when she’d been fantasising about George’s incarceration.
‘Yes. His name is Ernest Kelman.’
She didn’t say anything for a bit, then asked another question. ‘Do you get drunk like that regularly?’
A steady sense of dread started to creep down my shoulders. ‘No … but, what’s that—’
‘And do you regularly have sex with … with multiple participants of an evening?’
Her strange and archaic turn of phrase would have made me laugh under different circumstances, but the full horror of what she was saying was sinking in. ‘I’ve never had sex with more than one “participant”. As if that really matters.’
‘Of course it matters,’ she said scathingly. ‘The thought of my little girl off cavorting, playing sex games and having drunken orgies, not to mention dropping her knickers for any random lout that comes knocking.’
I cried into the top of my duvet and she let me. She didn’t offer a hand to comfort me. She didn’t even look at me. ‘Please, Mum, I’m telling the truth.’
I saw that she, too, was crying, but silently, without sobs, the tears just running down. Slowly, she shook her head. ‘You stupid, stupid girl. Do you know what they’ll say? If we take this to the police and accuse an MP’s son and his mates of improper behaviour? Do you know how it makes you look?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said firmly. ‘It was rape. It was assault. Doesn’t that bother you?’
She stood up now. ‘If every woman who did something regrettable after getting drunk cried rape … God, the thought of you taking those three men back to your room. I thought I’d raised you to respect yourself.’
‘Christ, you’ll have to give me a rundown sometime as to how you did that, because I can’t really remember you raising me at all! And so what if I had taken them back to my room to have sex with them. With all of them. Me and all those boys, in a bed together, fucking the night away!’ She flinched visibly at the word ‘fucking’, but I didn’t stop. ‘If we were all happy about it, there would be nothing wrong at all. But I wasn’t happy with it. They carried on and I didn’t want them to. And that’s never acceptable.’
She stood up and again started walking away, only this time I doubted she’d be back. ‘I don’t know where you’ve got these ideas from, Holly, or who’s put all this stuff into your head, but the world doesn’t work that way. Actions have consequences.’
I felt hatred towards her in that moment. Pure, full-blooded hatred. ‘Are you saying I asked for it? That I deserved it?’
She looked back at me as if I were some strange, vaguely disgusting animal who had wandered uninvited into her clinically clean house. ‘Get dressed,’ she said coldly. ‘We need to tell your father about the baby. Just the baby. Nothing more.’ With that, she left the room.
‘Wait,’ I say, wiping my nose on my hand. ‘We haven’t discussed the other option. I could have an abortion.’
I really did think then that she was going to faint, but she held on tight to the door to steady herself. Her biting words came seconds later.
‘I really don’t think we need to add that to your list of sins.’ Then she left.
Ten minutes later, on my way back from the bathroom after giving in to my morning sickness, I heard her crying properly, too, in her bedroom. I didn’t feel pity towards her, just a strained sense of numbness, like my emotions had been overworked to the point of losing feeling.
The conversation with Dad was one of the most awkward of my life, but on the whole he handled it a bit better than Mum did. He just stayed silent through most of the explanation, then afterwards simply said: ‘It’s a shame we sold your old cot and pushchair when we realised we couldn’t have any more. We’ll have to see about getting some new stuff for you.’ My love for him increased a little when he said that, but I wasn’t in a position to show it. We weren’t really a hugging family, so I just sat there on the sofa while Mum tried not to cry, eventually walking away to clatter about in the kitchen, making an early lunch that nobody wanted.
The thing I really found hard to deal with as I made my way back to my bedroom, ready to sink myself into the Ruth Rendell novel I was in the middle of, was the thought of the endless years stretching ahead of me. Would this be it now? Me, them and a baby who would grow up shaped by the same cold, colourless existence? I got back into bed and opened my book. No, I thought to myself. I wouldn’t let it be so. I didn’t know how I was going to do it, but I was convinced I wouldn’t let this situation beat me. I wasn’t going to be ‘the victim’, ‘the teenage mum’, ‘the Oxford drop-out’ for the rest of my life. I didn’t know at that point exactly what course of action I’d choose, but the small seed of determination sown within me became like a life-raft to cling to in the years to come. It was a reminder that I could decide what defined me, not other people, my parents, my circumstances. It gave me hope that there was more than this.