Four months before Catherine
Sam is a better man than I deserve.
I say that a lot and it’s true.
For it’s Sam who has urged me to make this journey to your house as the light starts to drift from the sky; it’s Sam who made me see the one thing I’ve always refused to accept.
‘You were drunk, Catherine. That doesn’t make you responsible for what happened.
You woke up and found Jack having sex with you.
Most people would call that rape.’
This word ‘rape’ falls all the way through me.
Rape. An act of violence.
A crime. When I told Liv about the night with Jack, I knew full well that it wasn’t what I’d wanted; I could picture my nineteen-year-old self lying motionless on your bed, awash with tears my tormentor kissed away.
Yet Jack was so clever.
Quick to manipulate my panic and confusion, my half-formed memories and hung-over brain.
He convinced me that not only was I complicit in the betrayal of you, I was the initiator.
How I have hated myself for that.
‘I didn’t say no,’ I told Sam, for this was my greatest shame.
‘And you didn’t say yes.
Call it non-consensual if you want, it boils down to the same thing.’
‘I was so ashamed. That’s why I didn’t tell anyone.
I felt I deserved it because I’d got so drunk I didn’t know what I was doing.
If I hadn’t been so drunk, I would never have allowed it to happen.’
‘Getting drunk isn’t a crime.
What he did is. He’s a sick bastard.
He preyed on you when you were asleep.
When you were drunk and defenceless.’
‘When I last saw Lucian, the night Ling died, I told him about me and Jack. I told him we’d slept together.’
‘You really believed that? That it was sex and not rape?’
‘That’s what Jack told me the next day.
He said I’d started it, that I’d been all over him.
And I was so sick and ashamed I chose to believe him.
It didn’t fit with my memories of it, though; the thing I remembered most clearly was just wanting it to be over.’
‘Oh Catherine.’
Sam took hold of my hands, the two of us standing there in our newly painted sitting room, surrounded by the history of you.
In Sam’s face now, comprehension.
At last I am understood.
‘Go and find him, Catherine. Go and tell him the truth, just like you’ve told me.’
‘Why are you doing this, Sam? You hate him, don’t you?’
‘I hate what happened to you. It wasn’t your fault and you’ve spent your whole life regretting it.
You’ve made yourself ill with it.
I think you’ll feel better once he knows the truth.’
I am buoyed up by the anger Sam hands me, and afterwards I will not be able to recall a moment of my journey to your house, not a road or a tree or a passing car, so preoccupied am I with my justice.
Jack took my life from me and now I’m taking it back.
I’m turning the hands of the clock myself: once, twice, fifteen times.
We will be that girl and boy again, only this time we’ll get it right.