Significance (51 page)

Automatically, she scrambles to right herself, to get back on her feet and continue on down the lane to the destination she has been so focused on. But she is a twist of awkward, boneless weight, stars sparkling before her eyes as if to prove that those cartoons in her childhood were not merely imaginative in their visual tropes and clichés.

She scrambles inelegantly, the brick wall offers no purchase and she feels heavy and weak.

For a second or two she has forgotten the man, forgotten how this happened. Or perhaps she assumed, (as much as a thought process as complicated as assuming: assessing, analyzing, guessing, assimilating knowledge of past, present, future and strategising can be said to happen in such circumstances) that he, like a machine, a steam engine, a rolling rock, a falling boulder, a charging bear, a stampeding horse has continued on his way barely noticing the small obstacle now sprawling in his wake.

Failing to right herself, she half
-
twists around, pushes herself forward so she's on her hands and knees, like a dog. She is self
-
consciously aware of this humiliating pose, of how stupid she must look. Then she draws one leg up, so her foot is now flat on the ground, and her pose is like that of a runner on the block and her head is beginning to clear.

She sees a disembodied foot out of the corner of her eye. A foot in a white trainer with a trim consisting of several narrow stripes in navy.
A leg too, unsurprisingly. Dark denim trousers, the dye thick and rich, midnight blue, brand new, unwashed as yet.

She begins to push, to heave herself upright and when she is halfway there (when she no longer needs help) a hand is wrapped around her upper arm, another around her elbow and she is carried upward a little faster and more violently than she might have expected. She sways giddily, lurches forward towards him.

‘Oop la!' he says in a sing songy way.

Such kindness.

‘Oh!' she says. ‘Oh.' The poet with only one vowel sound in her vocabulary to mark this moment.

He is still holding her arm with both hands.

‘Oh,' she says again and registers the signals of pain coming from various parts of her body; her ankle, her hip, both shoulders, her head.

‘Oh.'

He is bending towards her, leaning in, adopting an attitude of concern.

She senses something wet and warm on her forehead, a trickle, a tickle of movement across the skin above her eye. She reaches up with her free hand to touch the place. Her hand which is trembling now and thus clumsy, jerks tentatively at the place where she feels the wet seep. The pads of her fingers touch something warm and sticky. She tastes iron on her tongue. Or perhaps she smells it, smells blood and fear and shock.

Her hand fidgets away from her head, and she holds it in front of her face so that she might see the blood
-
dipped fingertips.

He is standing too close.

He lets go of her elbow, takes hold of her upraised wrist and lowers it from her sight.

‘Non, non, non, non,'
he instructs her in a breathy whisper.

She looks at him now. His face looming over hers, too near, almost out of focus. A long face, the light striking one side of it, deep eye sockets. His breath hot and moist on her face, mint toothpaste that almost smells cold. Also perfume smells, a sharp grapefruity cologne. Flecks of dry skin in his eyebrows.

‘Non, non, non,'
he shakes his head, clucks his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

Slowly he lets go of her wrist (though his other hand still encircles her upper arm, the grip, firm, unrelenting) and brings his hand up to her head.

‘Non, non, non, non.'
He draws his fingers over her face, brushing her hair away, first from the wound, then in a more general way, lifting a single stray hair and replacing it.
All the time staring intently as if he is inspecting her. As if he were a doctor, or more disturbingly, a hairdresser or perhaps a sculptor making her anew, improving her to his standards. Then he began stroking her hair, smoothing it in place, leaning in closer, closer.

She did not like the repetitive pressure of his fingers on her head, the side of her face. She suddenly realised it was not comfort, it was nothing to do with her injury, with tending the wound, it was just what he wanted to do.

She was recovering by degrees, absorbing more fully what had happened, what was happening, what might happen.

And all the time he was stroking, stroking her hair.

His
‘non, non, non'
had mutated into rhythmic murmuring, ‘hmm, mm, mm.'

Enough, she thought and jerked her head away from the relentless stroking. ‘I'm…' she managed to say, but the movement of her head had been too sudden, too fierce, and she lurched unsteadily, giddy, her head swimming in a galaxy of stars again.

‘Sit,' he said in English, his voice becoming more assertive suddenly, as he forced her down, pulling on one arm, pushing down on her shoulder until she was in a squatting position with her back against the wall.

‘No, I don't want to sit. I need…'

‘Anglais?'
he had squatted as he forced her down, so that he was now resting on his haunches. Both of his hands remained in place, the one gripping her arm, the other pushing her shoulder back and down.

‘Just let me…' She began the frantic scrambling with her legs again. Useless with him holding her in place, his greater height and strength all giving him the advantage.

‘Non!'
he said sternly and in one quick movement he had pushed her down sideways, so that she was lying on the path against the wall. His knee and lower leg were pressed across her thighs, his left arm was pinning her right arm down and with the same hand he held her other wrist. She struggled in earnest now, grunting a low guttural, ‘No.'

With his free hand he pointed at her face, a warning. His nails, she saw, were bitten and ragged, the skin around the fleshy pads raw and blood
-
spotted.

‘Non!'
he growled.

She was almost completely mute. When does the screaming begin? When?

First comes appeasement.

‘Sorry,' she said, then blinked slowly, swallowed. Mouth dry, heart thumping. ‘Sorry.'

This seems to please him, he begins to brush stray hairs from her face again.

She looks at him, then looks away, looks at him again

His eyes move over her face, from her mouth to her eyes, to her neck to her forehead.

She tries to tune him out. To tune herself out.
To remove herself mentally from this place. But there is no place she can send herself to. No past, no future. Only this.

He strokes her hair, her hair, her hair. The same place obsessively, so that it almost hurts.

Stop it, a voice locked inside her head says, stop it, stop it!

‘Please,' she says in a whisper.

He strokes her face, then brings his hand down so that it is lightly resting on her throat, the thumb under her jaw, the heel of his hand on her Adam's apple, his fingers curling towards the back of her neck. She has a very little neck, like … who was it? Was it Anne Boleyn or Lady Jane Gray who mentioned this fact helpfully to her executioner? Marilyn knows this because of the man she was seeing before she began dating Scott; he had playfully measured her neck with his hands and mentioned the murdered queen, then, ever the braggart, had quoted a poem he had written on the subject.

This was different. She felt the threat of this stranger's hand, even though his touch was gentle. To scream now would cause the hand to tighten.

She thought of the baby.

If she died now, then so would the baby.

Tears sprang to her eyes. Her mouth distorted, she whimpered, not meaning to.

The hand around her throat, the fingers and thumb moving slightly were either attempting something like a caress, or they were testing her neck, measuring the job in hand (literally) or else it was she herself who was being tested in order to discover the measure of her willingness to submit.

The tears spilled from her eyes, burned as if they were caustic, were made of some unknown chemical compound that might act as a primitive animal defence against attack, a bee sting, a snake bite, the hot stink of a skunk, the black, veil
-
like release of squid ink in water.

He was making those ‘mm, mm, mm' sounds again, breathing deeply as if immensely satisfied by this pleasurable moment.

It was ridiculous to find herself lying down on a public path with this man holding her down, pinning her arms and legs as he casually played his fingers over her neck, while she did not scream or fight, but merely succumbed to his power.

She blinked and tried to focus beyond him; the street lamp seen through tear
-
blurred vision gave off long rays of light like a pale yellow star. Above it the mesh of leaves and branches revealed glimpses of an indigo sky and a waning moon.

What did he want?

If she knew she could provide it, pretend it.

Sex? Was that it?

Power?

Love?

She could only acquiesce. Should she make those same mewling ‘mm, mm' noises he was making, so that he would think they were in accord; that she chose to lie here on this filthy ground, that this was something she wanted?

She saw now that he must have barrelled into her deliberately, knocking her sideways into the wall with tremendous force, and understood that her confusion in the first minutes after (because it seemed as if what had happened was accidental and he was helping her) had stopped her from fighting, running, screaming.

But then she had been shocked, shaken, probably concussed and unable to think straight.

He took his hand from her throat at last.

Good, she had been wise to just allow it, to neither struggle nor pretend desire.

But now he was unbuttoning her dress. Or trying to rather, as one
-
handed, the row of tiny seed buttons was almost impossible to undo. He was painstaking however.

When he had managed to unbutton three, he stopped and smiled at her. A stupid dreamy lunatic grin.

Marilyn attempted a responding smile, but her mouth (she could feel the various small muscles and tendons quiver and twitch with the effort) only drew itself down at the corners in a hideous grimace.

He loosened his grip on her wrist and relaxed the pressure on her other arm, then as if he were adjusting a shop mannequin he jerked both her arms above her head and somehow gathered both her wrists in one hand and held them there. He shifted position so that one knee was holding her wrists in place while his other knee was on her thighs. His groin was thus aimed at her face The back of her left hand was pressed hard into the stone path. Marilyn could feel several small sharp objects, stones or pieces of broken glass, digging painfully into her skin, but he wasn't really hurting her. Not since the initial body blow anyway.

She was doing the right thing then. No noise, no taut bucking or desperate wriggling to escape, no pretence of any pleasure.

He probably hated women. Hated them and also feared them, except as now when he had all the power.

He was not hurting her now.

He was smiling. She had pleased him. Perhaps he had noticed the tears and they had made him smile.

No, he was not hurting her.

His knee and lower leg were pressed, bony and hard across her thighs, the weight of his body was concentrated there and also into her crushed, crossed wrists above her head.

He tried another button. This one a few inches down from her breastbone. The stupid row of stupid little buttons – details she had loved about this dress – thirty or more tiny pearl
-
coloured buttons that nestled tight in their minute button holes. When dressing or undressing she only ever undid the top four before she lifted the loose
-
fitting dress easily on or off her head.

He fiddled and tugged at this stubborn button, pressing down hard with his fingers at one point in order to free it.

She could say, ‘let me', but what French she had once possessed had flown and scattered, as if her mind had expunged all superfluous knowledge in order to concentrate on only this – this pitiless moment in hell.

No, he wasn't hurting her. He had pinioned her. Her hands and legs were trapped. She would be bruised, badly bruised, but she would heal.

Except he was hurting her by making her an accomplice to her own rape. This was the sort of hurt which would lodge itself inside her marrow. Tears, broken bones, puncture wounds might heal, but this silence, this giving in, giving it up, giving it away would hurt forever.

This button, every button, would take a lifetime to undo. He was onto the fifth or sixth now.
The sun would rise before he was done. Her fingers were growing numb and cold, the circulation cut off by his weight. Her legs too, jammed flat out with his kneeling weight across her thighs so that it was impossible to do anything other than wiggle her ankles.