Ironically, Rachel had been quite looking forward to staying with Sonia Next Door while Dad and Wendy were on their week’s honeymoon in Dorset. Sonia had white-blonde hair and wore lots of lipstick and tight jumpers like Barbara Windsor and had a naughty sort of laugh. Once she had answered the door to Terry in a black satin nightie and some fluffy pink slippers. Dad had gone bright red and looked away but Sonia had giggled behind her hand and said, ‘Whoops! No peeping, Tel,’ and then winked at Rachel like she didn’t care one bit.
Whenever Sonia had babysat for Rachel in the past, she had brought round PopTarts and they’d watched Coronation Street together. But now they were in Sonia’s house, the other side of the adjoining wall, and it was no longer just the two of them. There was Frank, too, Sonia’s new boyfriend, who had a mean face and a sour smell about him that adult Rachel would learn to associate with men who’d drunk too much. And on the night of the wedding, while Dad and Wendy were miles away in their hotel, Rachel had woken up in Sonia’s small white-painted spare room to find Frank sitting on the end of her bed, his cigarette smell seeming to settle on her like a film of dust, catching in the back of her throat, as he leaned over in the darkness. ‘Ssshh,’ he whispered, sliding a hand under the covers onto her thigh as she shrank back against the pillow, bewildered and scared. ‘Ssshhh.’
Almost thirty years later, the memory was still enough to make her shudder, and she forced the images violently from her head as the dread and nausea re-awoke. No. Don’t think about it. Put that lid back down, lock it away. That was how she’d always dealt with the horror – by burying the memories so deeply they could rarely be accessed. ‘It could have been worse,’ she had told a counsellor once, mumbling out the story for the first time. She had suffered postnatal depression after Scarlet was born, and had come to a clinic once a week to talk to a kind, calm woman about her feelings. There was something about that quiet, lavender-painted room, the measured gaze of the counsellor, that invited confidences. ‘I mean, I feel something of a fraud, even mentioning it to you now. He didn’t rape me. He didn’t stick his tongue down my throat – or anything in any other place, for that matter. He just came into my bedroom and put his hand under the covers on my leg. That was it. No real harm done. It’s just . . .’ She bowed her head. ‘Somehow the shock of it was enough to make me feel really bad. Dirty. Like it was my fault.’
The counsellor was older, threads of grey through her thick brown hair, and she spoke in a slow, gentle voice. ‘It’s confusing for children when adults behave in unexpected ways,’ she had said. ‘And the feelings it provoked have probably come up again at this time because you’ve got two little girls yourself now, and—’
That was it. That was the thing. ‘And if anyone dared do that to my girls, I would want to kill them,’ Rachel had burst out automatically, fists clenching in her lap.
The counsellor had nodded, understanding in her eyes. ‘But it wasn’t your fault,’ she had said, leaning forward and speaking with uncharacteristic firmness. ‘It was not your fault, Rachel, okay?’
As it was, the incident itself had been over in a matter of moments, thank goodness. She had refused to ‘sssshh’ as Frank had instructed, screaming instead at the top of her voice for Sonia, who came running in, boobs jiggling in her nightie, sending Frank packing. It could have been worse, Rachel had repeated to herself whenever her mind strayed back to the episode; like that made it any better. But at the time, it had been as if a fissure had cracked right through her childhood, as if a protective layer around her had been ripped away, exposing her to the horrible truth: that adults could be random and dangerous and frightening. Afterwards, there could be no turning back, no un-remembering, no mending and replacing of that protective layer; it was destroyed for good.
Rachel had sobbed and sobbed, face in her hands, refusing to look at Sonia, crying again and again that she wanted her dad. She cried all night and all the next day too, even though Frank was long off the scene by then, until Sonia, out of desperation – and guilt, in hindsight – managed to track down the newlyweds and persuade them to come home. No, she didn’t explain why Rachel was so upset. And Rachel didn’t, either. She kept it chained up inside herself from then on, refusing to say what had happened, turning her brutalized feelings on Wendy and blaming her completely for the whole sorry story.
Of course, Wendy, for her part, never quite forgave Rachel for it either. She didn’t say as much to her face, but Rachel overheard her on the phone to a friend, moaning about how they’d cut the honeymoon short because of ‘little Madam kicking up a fuss. While Becky was as good as gold at Mum’s!’ For Rachel, sitting on the stairs earwigging, the words had felt like hot knives stabbing into her. Even now she could remember how she’d leaned against the wall, feeling a drumbeat of injustice pounding in her blood.
A fuss, indeed. A fuss. The man’s hard, probing fingers on her soft thigh, the terrifying weight of him on the bed, the way that Rachel was convinced she could smell cigarette smoke in her hair for weeks afterwards . . . that was not what she would term a fuss at all. But then, how could she try to defend herself, when she dared not get Sonia into trouble? They probably wouldn’t believe her anyway. Somehow it would end up being her fault, her overreacting. (Maybe it was her fault, she had thought miserably.)
After that, the damage was done. Rachel was a good girl and she tried to like Wendy, tried to jolly along for the sake of her dad; but the incident had spoiled everything, leaving a stain across the surface, so that she always felt grubby and ashamed whenever she thought about her dad’s wedding. And no amount of cream cakes or buns from the bakery could ever change that.
‘Good morning! And how are we doing today?’ Rachel was jolted from her memories by the arrival of the doctor – a new one this time – a freckled woman with an Australian accent and brisk manner, with what looked like a posse of medical students in tow.
Rachel felt greasy-haired and haggard, bruised and tender, but she forced herself to struggle upright. I’m a survivor, she reminded herself. ‘I’m fine,’ she croaked.