The Race (17 page)

“That’s really nice of you but I want to go to college,” I said. Diane was the first person I dared to tell about this ambition. I was seventeen then, my brother Derek was almost twenty. I’d been hoping Diane might help me fill in the forms, but when I asked her she shook her head and said she couldn’t possibly.

“I’m useless at forms,” she said. She didn’t want to get involved for some reason, that was obvious. “Can’t you ask one of your teachers?”

“I suppose,” I said. The problem with asking a teacher was that there was always the risk they would start pestering me with questions about my mother. Also I was afraid of looking an idiot. I still wasn’t certain which courses I should apply for. I liked History best but I was afraid I wasn’t clever enough to make a success of it. Derek always insisted that all that stuff about kings and queens was boring, but I was mad for it. I used to take books out of the library – books about Queen Matilda of England and Queen Elizabeth and Anne Boleyn – because I was addicted to the stories they told, stories that reminded me of fairy tales, only with more danger in them, more blood and revolution, more death by fire. I knew all the dates and battles by heart, but when it came to writing anything down I would lose my nerve. When I was asked a question in class my mind went blank.

“Perhaps I’m just stupid or something,” I said to Monica. Monica was round at our house two or three evenings a week by then. Sometimes she’d go to the pub with Derek, but mostly she’d stay behind with me and we’d sit in watching the game shows on the kitchen portable. Monica knew about Mum leaving but we never talked about it. We bitched about the flower shop customers instead, or chat show hosts, or other things we’d seen or liked to make fun of. Having Monica around made life easier generally, because Derek made more of an effort not to be an arsehole. More than that though, I just liked being with her. She was fun and she stuck up for me. No one had ever done that before, or bothered much about what I did, one way or the other.

“Of course you’re not stupid,” Monica said. “Don’t talk like that. You’re so bright it’s scary. Anyway, it’ll do you good to get out of this place, spread your wings a bit.”

“I suppose,” I said again. I still wasn’t sure, about anything. I found it hard to recognise the person she was describing. “Why didn’t you go to college?”

“I wasn’t ready. Not like you.” Monica shrugged. “I’ll get around to it later, probably.”

She helped me fill in the forms, then showed me how to prepare a Personal Statement. I got my father to sign the consent form when Derek was out. When I finally received my offer from South Bank University, Monica insisted on taking me out for a drink to celebrate.

“I haven’t got in yet,” I said. The offer still depended on me passing my ‘A’ Levels.

“I know. But you will.” She hugged me and kissed my hair as she sometimes did. Both of Monica’s parents were dead – they’d been killed in an air crash.

When Monica’s birthday came around, Derek gave her an antique pendant made from silver and Venetian glass that was called Murano.

~*~

In the summer of the year after our mother left, my brother raped me. It was a boiling hot day in August. I was sixteen.

I’d spent most of the day by myself up in Castle Meadow, reading a book called
Memoirs of a Survivor
by Doris Lessing. It had been lent to me by Miss Wisbech, who’d come up to me in the corridor just before the summer holidays started and put the book right into my hands.

“I hope you’ll find time to read this, Christy,” she said. “I think it’s the kind of story you might enjoy.”

I had no idea what I’d done that would make her think that – I wondered if she’d been secretly spying on me in the library. I said thank you and then walked away before she found the chance to add anything else. I expect my behaviour must have seemed rude to her, but I was surprised and a bit embarrassed. I’d never heard of Doris Lessing, and I was afraid the book might be boring, or that I might not even understand what it was about. But when I actually started reading it I found it was okay, quite exciting really, and no more difficult to follow than the John Wyndham stories that had been in the box of books Derek had given me from Charlotte House.
Memoirs of a Survivor
was set in an unnamed city that was probably London, only as in
The Day of the Triffids
everything had descended into chaos. There were gangs of kids in the streets who kept setting fire to things. A lot of the ordinary people were trying to escape from the city into places like Wales.

In spite of the terrible things that were happening, the woman telling the story set down her thoughts in a calm, almost cold way. She was supposed to be taking care of a girl called Emily, but really it seemed to be Emily who was in charge.

Emily had been abandoned by her mother.

I liked the way Doris Lessing just wrote what happened and didn’t much add to it. Most of all I liked the way she had managed to transform London into an imaginary city. It was an idea that had never occurred to me, that you could write about a real place, a place you knew well, and that just by changing or adding small details you could turn it into somewhere quite different. A place where good things happened, or bad things did.

A place of your own that you could escape to whenever you wanted. It made me wonder whether it might be possible to change Hastings into a place where weird things happened, the same as Doris Lessing had done with London only even stranger.

At around four o’clock I left the meadow and began walking home. My books were in my gym bag, and I was carrying my sandals. In summer I often went barefoot, even in town. The pavements were hot. If I stood still for too long in one place I could feel the soles of my feet burning.

When I was halfway down St Mary’s Terrace there was a cloudburst. It happened suddenly and without warning, a clap of thunder so huge and so terrifying that for a moment I thought a bomb must have gone off. Then the sky seemed to split open. Rain poured down, so heavily and so fast it was like a single sheet of water.

I flung my arms above my head and screamed. I waved my sandals in the air, then flung them down like flatfish on the streaming pavement. I felt a massive energy coursing through me, as if my blood had been replaced by lightning, and for one endless, joyous moment it felt as if the world I knew really had ended, and another, more surprising world had taken its place. A world like the one Doris Lessing had written about perhaps, in
Memoirs of a Survivor
.

I ran through the streets, slipping and sliding on the jet black asphalt, my arms flung out to either side to keep me from falling. I remember I couldn’t stop laughing, that my laughter seemed to come from somewhere outside of me, a laughter-demon. The gutters coursed with thick brown water, like angry rivers. People cowered wetly in doorways or hurried indoors.

I burst into the hallway of Laton Road and stood there, dripping. I was expecting to find the house empty – Dad and Derek had a big job on, something in Tonbridge or Tunbridge Wells. Dad had said they wouldn’t be back until six at least, which was part of the reason I’d decided to come home early.

As it turned out, they finished sooner than they’d expected. It’s strange, how many of the things that help decide how your life goes seem to happen by chance.

Derek appeared at the top of the stairs. The happy madness that had been filling me up, that feeling of being energized, disappeared as soon as I saw him, just like that. It was as if I’d been unplugged from the mains or something.

“You look like a drowned rat,” Derek said. He was wearing jeans but his top half was naked. I could tell from the way his hair was spiking out that he’d just had a shower.

“It’s raining,” I said. “You’re home early?”

“Jake was free after all, wasn’t he?” Jake Hom was a half-Chinese kid who Dad sometimes hired to help with the loading. He was skinny, like Derek, but very strong. “Dad’s down the pub. Get that wet shit off – you’ll catch pneumonia.”

I looked down at myself and saw that my T-shirt had become transparent. The flesh of my arms and belly gleamed pinkly through the soaked cloth. My nipples, a darker pink, like the hearts of roses, were clearly visible.

A small pool of water was beginning to gather about my feet.

Derek came slowly down the stairs to where I was standing. He hoisted me up, seizing me with both arms the way he used to do when we were younger, pressing me against his chest then slinging me over one shoulder in a clumsy fireman’s lift.

“You’re soaked to the skin,” he said. “Slippy as a newt, you are.”

“You beast,” I cried, kicking out at him. “Put me down, Del.” I didn’t know yet if I was joking or if I really meant it. I was afraid of Derek. I hated to admit it, even to myself, because admitting I was afraid of anything was a source of shame to me. But I had reason to be scared of Derek, because I knew he was dangerous, or at least that he could be, the kind of person that didn’t give a damn for the feelings of others and so might do anything. He might hurt someone just because he wanted to, or because he wanted to find out what it felt like to harm them.

It was almost as if he was mad. As if he’d been made with something missing, I don’t know.

The worst thing about it was that you never knew when he was going to do something awful. A lot of the time he acted pretty much the same as everyone else.

I knew he knew I was scared, but he never let on. It was a game we played, a game of dare, like when he threw the plastic bags of stinking water at me and I’d pretend it was funny.

“You’re the beast,” he said. “A filthy little swamp otter.”

He rushed me up the stairs and into my room. Both of us were screaming with laughter. He dumped me down on the bed, winding me slightly but not hurting me. I could feel rainwater soaking out of my hair and into the pillows.

Derek grabbed me around the waist and began tugging my shorts off.

“Fuck off, Derek,” I said. I was still giggling like a moron. I kicked out at him, but he caught my ankle, gripping it hard and forcing my leg back down on the bed. His eyes had narrowed into slits and he was breathing hard.

I think I knew then what was going to happen, half-knew anyway, but any idea of fighting it never really had a chance to get started. He was stronger than me, bigger, and besides if I fought him it would mean admitting that I was afraid. The game between us – our pretend-game, our
charade
– would be burst wide open, and Derek’s power over me would then be absolute.

“Have you done it with anyone yet?” Derek said.

I shook my head. “Course not.” I knew he was talking about fucking, though the idea that he should ask me felt all wrong. I twisted my body to try and free myself but his hands had locked themselves even more tightly around my shins.

“Good,” he said. He swung my ankles apart and raised them, making a ‘v’. “Got a boyfriend, some guy you’re into?”

I shook my head again, this time more fiercely. There was a chance Derek knew about Tim – Derek had a way of finding things out, especially those things you least wanted him to know – but there was no way I was going to tell him, not unless he dragged it out of me by force.

“You will soon, though,” he said. “Some randy little nerd who can’t wait to stick his cock in your cunt. I reckon it’s time I showed you what’s what.”

He had my knickers in his hand by now. He dropped them to the carpet with a wet little thump. Then he unzipped his jeans and shrugged them off. He had a particular way of doing that, graceful, like a dancer, that I always admired. He was down to his underpants. His bare legs were long and slightly knock-kneed, just like our mother’s.

His ribs stuck out like the bars of a cage. Derek was always skinny as a yard-dog.

“It’s better if I’m the first,” he said. “It won’t be so painful then, later.”

He was kneeling on the side of the bed. I could see the bulge in his pants, the fat coil of his swelling penis. “Touch it,” he said, and when I did the iron-bar hardness seemed not to be a part of him at all. His features became stiff, strained, as if I’d hurt him in some way. His breath was quick and shallow and I could almost make myself believe I could hear his heart beating, battering up and down like a tack hammer in his narrow chest.

“Keep still,” he said. I was shaking with cold, though the room was still stiflingly warm from the heat of the day. He leaned across me and pulled me under him, and then lay straight as a rod with his chest against mine. His movements felt clumsy, almost nervous. When he went inside me it hurt a bit, though not nearly as much as I’d been expecting. The most horrible thing was not the pain at all, but the wrongness, his noisy breath in my ear, him growing out from between my legs like a root, me wanting to kill him and knowing that I couldn’t, that I’d have to lark around with him afterwards as if nothing had happened.

He humped up and down a couple of times then tugged his penis out of me and rolled away. My stomach hitched with nausea. I curled on my side.

Get out of here, you shit
, I thought.
Just get the fuck out.

“Don’t tell Dad, or I’ll kill you,” he said. Just that.

He buggered off after that, and when I heard the front door slam downstairs I knew he’d gone out and most likely wouldn’t be back for some time. I lay where I was for a while, listening to the sounds of the house and thinking about just shoving some spare clothes in my gym bag and running away. Where would I go, though? I felt disorientated and not quite real. It was as if my mind had become separated from my body somehow. I knew I had to coax it back, hold out my hand to it as if it were a scared animal. I knew I had to pull myself back together or he would have won.

In the end I got myself into the bathroom and under the shower. I turned it on full blast, remembering the rain, the maddening cloudburst, the steaming pavements. The water was hot, hotter than I normally liked it but that was okay. As the feeling began to edge back into my toes and breasts and fingertips I took the soap from the side of the bath and began to wash myself, scrubbing and working up a lather, making sure I soaped each and every part of my body, touched it with my own fingers, even the parts that hurt.