Plan/synopsis/something for play #3

A girl and an older man. He is married (of course—but isn’t everyone?). A law professor. She goes and sees him after she does the rape kit. Or. It doesn’t happen that fast? There’s a bit of drifting around and thinking first? But it’s definitely the next day.

Freshers’ Week. The fucking bacchanals.

Smooth down your skirt, you fucking slag.

Always such a fucking slag. And now this.

We’ll call you “She” for now, as in He said, she said.

She’s the first person in her family to go to university but ofc we will learn this in a subtle way and not just be told it. She feels older than the others. More jaded. She is not a virgin and is shocked that some of them are. She’s brought some bud in an old silver tin that maybe belonged to her father. He might have kept washers in it? Her hair is dyed red and she has a patchwork handbag and high-rise jeans. It’s normal to dress up as your favorite characters from fiction, right? But she wasn’t going to dress up for the Freshers’ Ball—like, why would she? And she can’t really be bothered anyway after so much spliff, but that girl across the hall comes out in a short skirt and she knows she can go shorter with that turquoise sequinned dress but does she dare?

And then she’s at the sticky bar buying cider because it tastes like apple juice and the barman is young and cute in a pale blue shirt only he doesn’t have a face and she looks around and no one has a face and—

That really is it.

The next morning in her tiny room, with stains on the sheets.

Three roaches in the frosted peach ashtray.

How when she stands up she knows she’s had sex. It hurts when she pees. There’s blood in the toilet. The brief thrill of still being a character in a story. And then she thinks. She can’t remember consenting, and so she can’t have done. She realizes that future-her wants options and so.

She goes to the police station and fills in a form and pees in a thingy and they take some swabs. Then she goes to the greasy spoon café near Westgate and eats fried eggs and mushrooms, which have been undercooked and look pale and watery on the plate, like things not quite dead. Her legs feel heavy and numb. She walks back up to the university and goes to the student union where.

The volunteer is a girl with a buzzcut.

The girl says there’s someone more qualified to help. A law professor.

And that’s when she meets the professor for the first time. He’s wearing a white linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up and his forearms are strong and darkly hairy. She goes to his office in the law building and sits on the gray institutional chair and he closes the door.

“So you remember barely anything?” the professor says after she tells him her story.

She shrugs. “I guess it was a date-rape drug?”

“Rohypnol. Ketamine. GHB. Sure. And you’d been taking drugs before that? And drinking?”

She nods.

He puts down his notebook and sighs.

“I’m going to go off the record now for a moment if that’s OK.”

“Yeah.”

“I recently had a rectal examination.” He holds up his hands. “Sorry, too much information, I know. It was a bowel-cancer screening. I was given the all-clear. They gave me sedation before the procedure. Do you know what that means? It’s basically a date-rape drug but given in the proper context, to make sure you have no memory of something that would have been traumatic had you experienced it consciously.” He rolls his pen in his fingers. “It turned something unbearable into quite a pleasant experience, if I’m honest. There was a study recently that said that people would much rather have a traumatic experience lasting for one hour that drugs caused them to forget completely, than be conscious for five minutes of terrible pain. Do you understand what I am beginning to say here?”

“I was lucky to have been drugged? But—”

“Do you feel traumatized?”

“No. But I know that something terrible happened to me.”

“As it would have done if you had been to the dentist, or for cataract surgery, as my wife’s sister recently did. They essentially sliced out some of her eyeball while she was awake. In that case there was not even any sedation—the patient must be fully conscious to move the eyes for the surgeon. But there was no pain. Her eyeball was sliced with a scalpel, but she felt no pain, because it had been anesthesized. Should she be upset? Should this experience ruin her life? Of course not. She was grateful for the procedure. She’d been on a waiting list for some time.”

“OK, but that’s hardly…” She shrugs. “It’s hardly.”

The professor leaning forward… His muscular forearms, etc.

“What’s your goal in life?”

“Um…”

“Short term and long term.”

“Short term I think I might sue the university. I need to get a job too, because my loan doesn’t cover everything, but maybe not if I get a good settlement. Long term I want to be an actor.”

“You’re doing…?”

“Theatre studies.”

The professor sighs and leans back again. He puffs his lips like they are little bellows.

“You won’t be able to sue the university, I’m afraid.”

“Then the guy. I could find him. There must have been witnesses.”

All the people with no faces and no eyes. Can you still see if you have no eyes? If you do not have a face?

“No,” says the professor. “You need to move on. I’ve seen this before in these ‘he-said-she-said’ cases. It destroys everyone. And in this case you don’t even have a ‘he,’ so it will no doubt only destroy you. Something happened to you but it didn’t hurt and you don’t remember, so move on. That’s my advice.”

“It hurts now.”

“On a scale of one to ten?”

She thinks about it. “Maybe three?”

“Move on.” He pauses for a second. Puts down his pen and picks it up again. “Since you’re here. Um. You say you need a job?”

So she becomes his housekeeper, just like that. It’s a live-in position, so she gets to leave her shoebox-room in the strange concrete fairy-tale tower that looks more like a prison block. She gets a charming attic conversion in a large house convenient for the A2 and with good light in the afternoons. Instead of going deeper into debt, she actually saves. She pairs the family’s socks. She folds the wife’s microfiber underwear with holes in the sides from where the wife yanks it up and down because she’s always in such a fucking hurry. She cooks the basic foods they prefer. Lamb chops with new potatoes. Shepherd’s pie. Wild salmon fillets with basmati rice.

She doesn’t meet the son for a while. Well, she glimpses him briefly and then he’s off to university in Durham. She pairs his socks too. She irons his shirts. His white ones. His striped ones. She’ll meet him properly a lot later of course.

She has sex with the professor in the mornings, when his wife is in London.

He phones his wife’s secretary to check she’s actually there, which he does in a number of unconvincing ways, and only then does he pull down his organic white Y-fronts.

It was probably she who started it—let’s not make this the kind of story about a maiden who is used by many merry men. She is no Fanny Hill. All those evenings staring at his arms, and the wife insisting she eats with them, treating her like a daughter almost. A daughter who cleans. A daughter who fucks. Maybe not so much a daughter then. But they took such an interest. Such an interest.

The wife who both does know and doesn’t know, giving her career advice and later helping her invest money when she suddenly earns a lot of it. Talks her into buying property and putting it in a trust run by the family.

And the professor, whose full name she never puts into her phone.

His bright blue eyes.

His sculpted eyebrows.

His thigh muscles on the rowing machine.

So pathetic too that she falls in love with him. It would have been such a good arrangement otherwise. They pay her well and she saves even more. She gets a first. She gets a first and a scholarship for the MA. She travels in the summer. She gets a distinction for the MA and one night she goes to a talk and the talk is from an actors’ agent and the tutor invites her for dinner with them and she pitches her one-woman show and suddenly her show is in Edinburgh and then London and then on TV.

All those FaceTimes from hotel rooms. The sexting.

The messages of love before her planes take off.

But the professor won’t leave his wife. He doesn’t even know how to get his cock in the frame. She sees up his nose a lot. Her love should fade but instead she just loves him more because he seems so awkward and fragile in this new world of shiny screens and buttons that are too small.

All the hundreds of little theatres. Then the big ones. All that pizazz. And then she ends up teaching at the same university she’d gone to, all those years before. Back in Canterbury—in the terraced house that had been one of her better investments. And the rise of #MeToo makes her wonder about that dark weird night from Freshers’ Week and what really happened to her, and she asks the professor if he can remember what she told him and he says it will only hurt if she rakes it up and so she doesn’t.

But so many years on she suddenly remembers one new detail. The girl with the buzzcut standing at the bar when she bought the cider, just before. Staring at her and the boy she was with. The boy with no face, and his friend with no head.

The buzzcut girl, Luciana, who became the professor’s star student.

The one she went to for help at the student union the next morning.

The buzzcut girl’s own version of scholarships and glory and travel and tenure somewhere.

So much glory everywhere. Some kind of montage?

And the buzzcut girl with her hair grown long coming to the wedding and saying how nice it was that these two finally married, after dancing together so much at the Freshers’ Ball all those years ago.

Can do a lot with the early scene when the professor fucks her in his sunlit en suite, and then his son comes home from Durham unexpectedly and she makes lunch for them both and serves it in the summer house.

“I’m Richard,” the son says. “Nice to meet you at last, Evelyn.”