The Good Girl (36 page)

He pushed Wolf against the wall. Music burst out through the speakers; Wolf must have hit the switch for the music system.

‘What service do you want? Police, fire or ambulance?’

Ailsa realized she had dialled 999.

A voice interrupted her thoughts as to what emergency service this situation called for. ‘Stop it!’ ordered a voice from the doorway. ‘Stop right now.’

The worst has happened and I haven’t died. That is how I felt in the days after the video went viral. I realized that shame is a chronic condition not a terminal illness. It was Jay’s betrayal that hurt the most. That was all jagged edges. As I lay in bed and watched images flash by of a life gone past I saw myself as the survivor of a catastrophic event. I swear I could even remember being born and the exact sensation of my knee being stitched after I fell off my first bicycle.

Apparently this happens to people who survive extreme situations like drowning or heart attacks. People think it’s a spiritual experience but it’s got nothing to do with God. It’s your brain playing tricks. According to Dad, you can actually trigger a near-death experience in the lab by stimulating the place where the temporal and the parietal lobes meet.

I thought about a lot of things that week. I remembered a game that Luke and I played all the time when we were small back in our house in London. We would push my bed into the middle of the bedroom and pretend it was a desert island where we had been washed up after our ship had sunk. The floor was the ocean and we’d lean over the edge of the bed to identify sea
creatures in the mysterious shapes and marks on the carpet below.

I reminded Luke of this when he came in to see me after school on the first day, pointing out the coffee-stain sharks circling at the bottom of the bed. I could see from the way he shrank back that after a lifetime of trying I had finally managed to freak him out. I giggled, but Luke didn’t smile or do that thing where he punched me in the shoulder and called me Romeo because I used to look like a boy. When he left I cried because he couldn’t see beyond the video to the person I used to be. It was as if my shame was a stain that had spread over the whole family. Even Ben, who knew nothing, wasn’t immune. People no longer invited him over to play, and he told me that the mums in the playground stopped talking if he went too close.

I must have spent almost a week holed up in my room. It felt safe there. Downstairs everything was noise. The doorbell and phone rang all the time. Later I learned that this was because Stuart Tovey had posted my home phone number on a copy of the video circulating on a slut-shaming site. The house was full of people whose voices I didn’t recognize. After a couple of days I realized this was because all Mum’s calls were on speakerphone so Dad could listen in. That was how I knew that Mum had removed my computer from my room following a warning from Mrs Arnold that I might be a suicide risk because of the hate messages. I resolved not to kill myself just to spite Mrs Arnold. The deputy head
pastoral had finally justified her existence. It was also how I learned that the video had spread as far as Vietnam. Dad kept comparing it to a virus, but no virus I had studied could spread that quickly.

I learned a lot of things that week and one of them was that the reason most families fall apart after traumatic events is that people can only deal with their own grief. They can’t deal with anyone else’s. As long as I was on my own I was fine. What I couldn’t handle were other people’s reactions. Even when they didn’t say anything you could see it in their eyes: Mum and Dad’s pain, Luke’s reproach, Ben’s bewildered kindness, Aunt Rachel’s tears.

Although it turned out these were as much for herself because Ben told me during one of his visits where he chatted and I listened that Mr Harvey had unexpectedly broken up with her. He asked if I wanted to play Cluedo and looked downcast when I said no because it required too much analysis. So I suggested he get down my old game of Operation from the shelf. We played the best of three. During the last match he lay flat on my bed, chewing his lip, and successfully removed the final rib.

‘What exactly have you done wrong, Romy?’

I stroked his hair and he closed his eyes in pleasure, like Lucifer. He clung on to the rib in his hot little fist. Poor Ben. Until the Miseries started last year his life had been completely carefree.

‘I trusted someone I shouldn’t have trusted.’

‘I don’t believe what people are saying about you.’

‘What are they saying, Grub?’

He was silent for a while.

‘Bad stuff.’

‘How so?’ I was curious.

‘That you’re a ho.’

‘What’s a ho?’

‘I don’t know. But I can tell it’s bad from the way they say it.’ He threw his arms around my neck and clung on to me like a monkey.

‘It’s all right, Ben,’ I said, my voice muffled by the force of his hug. He started crying and didn’t stop until I offered to play another game of Operation.

Marnie stayed away. I’m still hurt by that. Initially I assumed she hated me because of what had happened with Marley, but when Becca came to visit she let slip that Marnie’s mum didn’t want her associating with someone like me. Apparently I was a bad influence. The gulf between how other people saw me and how I saw myself made me feel dizzy with anxiety because it was too big to bridge.

Becca brought me a present. It was a poster of a self-portrait by an artist called Frida Kahlo. It showed the artist’s body lacerated with hundreds of self-inflicted tiny knife cuts after her husband had betrayed her by shagging another woman.
Why didn’t she leave him?
I wondered. If someone treated you like that they weren’t worth the pain. It was a strange choice of gift but I appreciated the gesture.

Becca was full of righteous anger on my behalf. She spoke about female exploitation and how the Internet was the last safe haven for women-haters like Jay.
Jay doesn’t hate women
, I wanted to explain. But she wouldn’t have believed me. Besides, she had already moved on to the hypocrisy of Stella Fay calling me a slut when she was the one who had had sex with seven boys in the year above. The hypocrisy lay in referring to girls as sluts and boys as players, I wanted to say. Because this was where there was no equality. I was beginning to realize that my opinion counted for nothing because everyone had already scripted their own version of events.

This was really brought home when I turned on the radio one day and tuned into a heated debate about teenage girls and oral sex. Apparently there was a blow-job epidemic in Britain. There were accounts of schools where teachers took turns to patrol toilets during breaks, parties where girls competed to see who could blow the most boys. The female presenter made it sound deadlier than Ebola. They interviewed a doctor who explained the link between oral sex and cancer.

As I listened I realized that the programme had been inspired by what had happened to me. At least I think it was me, because although they couldn’t be specific they kept mentioning an oral-sex sexting scandal at a British secondary school.
Too much alliteration
, I told myself to quell my rising sense of panic at the sheer scale of it all. I had caused all of this. It was terrifying, as if I suddenly possessed superhuman powers.

I started getting up really early so that I could have a shower before anyone else in the house was awake. After that I went back to sleep for a while until Mum came up with breakfast on a tray. She cooked food that I used to eat when I was a child. Things like fish fingers with a bread roll or baked beans on toast. At first I thought it was to make me feel secure. Then I realized it was to reassure her that I was still her little girl. I got it. She sat on the end of the bed and watched in silence as I forced myself to eat a quarter-slice of toast. Jam, no butter. I appreciated her restraint but her eyes were full of unanswered questions and I couldn’t wait for her to leave. We were separated by our dread.

I avoided food partly so that I could restrict trips to the toilet in case I bumped into someone, but mostly because I knew from Marnie, who described herself as a high-functioning anorexic, that not eating was the simplest way of re-establishing some control amidst the chaos. Most of the day I lay on my side under my duvet with the curtains closed, drifting in and out of sleep. I didn’t get dressed. I didn’t read.

I spent a lot of time considering what Jay had done to me. I wondered if he now understood that causing me pain was no cure for his own. This was a good lesson to learn early in life. It occurred to me that my future relationships might be damaged by what had happened. I would get the wrong kind of attention from the wrong kind of boys, and the nice ones would avoid me. Maybe I would turn into a voyeur? Ironically Jay and I had more
in common than ever before: now we were both dysfunctional. My gift to him turned out to be the agent of my own destruction.

I wondered if he thought before pressing send or if it was an impulsive action that he immediately regretted. Who did he send the clip to first? Was it to a group of people or a single friend? I guessed it was Stuart Tovey because Jay knew he would do something twisted with it. According to Becca, Jay’s irresistibility factor among some of the girls at school had tipped off the scale. How did he seem? I had asked her. Like a deer caught in the headlights, she replied thoughtfully. He didn’t seem to be exploiting his new-found popularity. And he walked away from the boys who wanted to high-five him.

I made lists in my head of all the people at school who would definitely have watched the video. I realized that for the rest of my life, every time I met someone new, I would wonder if they knew about it. I decided that I could no longer be a doctor because there would always be a risk that a patient would find out. I told Mum this so that she didn’t have to worry about delivering the bad news to me.

Perhaps I could do research. I could work in a lab where my face was covered with a mask. I would investigate where traumatic memories were stored in the brain in the hope that I would find a way to eradicate my own.

Dad didn’t come up for days. I thought maybe he saw the scandal as Mum’s territory, like one of those rites of
passage such as the start of my period or the chat about birth control. When he finally knocked on the door yesterday and came in carrying a plate of pasta, I realized that I had read him all wrong. Blinking away tears, he tried to find the words to tell me that he knew I had found the phone in his office with the messages between him and the other woman. To begin with I thought that he was about to tell me off, then I realized that he was looking for forgiveness. He opened and shut his mouth as he presented his evidence but he couldn’t bring himself to say the words I had appropriated from her so I filled in the gaps and he started crying again.

‘I’m so sorry, Romy.’

‘It’s Mum you betrayed. Not me.’

‘Did you make the video to get back at me? For revenge?’

He stood by the window, tears streaming down his cheeks. Somehow his self-pity made it easier to deal with him. For a moment I thought about lying. But I took pity.

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Apart from the ending, I’d planned it before I read the messages. It had nothing to do with you.’

‘Why did you do it, Romy? Why would you risk everything for this?’

‘You did. You lost your job. We had to move house. You almost lost Mum. And your pre-frontal cortex is fully formed.’

I turned on my side and faced the wall. There was a whole chapter in his book that could answer his
questions. Our conversation was over. Shortly after that Aunt Rachel unexpectedly turned up at the house.
This must be bad
, I thought to myself as I heard Rachel explain to Mum that she was here to support her through this crisis.

Ben told me later that Rachel had offered to go to school to help Mr Harvey with his research and cried when he had turned her down. I understood that was more about being close to him than helping me. I didn’t mind. After all, I wanted nothing more than to feel Marley Fairport’s arms around me again, telling me that everything would be just fine. He was the only person who could have made things right for me. I could never tell anyone that.

This morning Rachel came into my room without knocking. She sat cross-legged on the floor with her head cocked at an empathetic angle and explained that she wanted to talk. Off the record, she emphasized. Just between her and me. She promised that she understood better than anyone else what had happened. She sounded sincere but I couldn’t help wondering if she was doing research for something she was writing. I was certain, however, that even with her powers of imagination she couldn’t possibly understand what it had done to me to know that my first big sexual experience had been seen by most people I had ever met and millions more that I hadn’t.

I pretended to be asleep. She didn’t give up. She said that she knew I had taken to my bed in order to rebuild
myself. She used terminology that sounded as if it had been taken from the Lego website. She started banging on about Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian and music videos simulating oral sex and how they might make you think you could become famous by making a sex tape. I couldn’t work out if she was stupid or trying to provoke me into some kind of reaction. I’ve got more brain cells in my bum than Kim Kardashian has in her head.

‘Give me some credit,’ I said, my back still facing her. ‘Actually give most teenage girls credit. This was never intended for worldwide release.’ Her history of failed relationships might have heightened her empathy but it diminished the credibility of her advice. It was like that moment when I heard Mum and Dad had discovered that their marriage guidance counsellor was twice divorced.