‘Fitzy didn’t do anything, not really. He was just there.’
‘For fuck’s sake, Emma, I saw the photos. I know what they did to you.’
And then I know that there is no way that I can stop all of this. I can’t stop this now.
I bend over with the crippling pain of it, aware of nothing but the sobs hacking up through my chest and a blistering heat building behind my eyeballs, and I’m rocking back and forward. A bottomless grief. Black hole. Black space. Falling, falling, falling.
Slowly I come back into my body, into the room, and I can smell vanilla and coconut from my candles, and soap and apple shampoo (I don’t use apple shampoo?) and then I remember that Conor is here with me, that he is still by my side, his hand rubbing my lower back, his head bent over mine, his lips against the back of my head, whispering
you’re OK, you’re OK, you’re OK
into my hair.
‘I’m sorry.’ I sit up straight, turned away from him so that he won’t see my ruined face. He keeps stroking the back of my hair, and I am four years old, and my daddy is holding me close, and telling me
I’m his little princess, I’m his little girl
, and that he’ll love me forever.
‘You’re OK,’ Conor says again, pulling me closer to him. ‘I’m here. I’ll take care of you.’ I relax into him, burrowing my face in his chest, the worn wool of his school jumper against my skin. I listen to the beat of his heart, steady and slow, as he murmurs
shhh, shhh
against my head. He is so good to me. He has always been so good to me, and he never got anything from me in return. (
We thought we could trust you to be a good girl, Emma. We thought we had raised you better than this
.) I see my father’s face and I am broken from the way he is looking at me, and I cannot think about it, I cannot bear to think about it. I wriggle my right hand behind Conor, nestling it in the small of his back, the other hand dropping to his knee, making small circles with my fingertips, working my way up to his inner thigh. His body stiffens, and he pulls away from me.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I’d better go,’ he says, staring straight ahead.
I rest my head on his shoulder, swallowing a sob. ‘Don’t cry, Emmie,’ he says, and he wraps his arm around me again. I can feel him relax into it, and I move so that my lips inch closer and closer to his neck. He gives an involuntary moan. I can do this. I know I can do this. I butterfly-kiss my way towards his mouth, ready to give him what he has been waiting for all these years. My fingers move higher on his thigh. He reaches down to grab my wrist, pushing me away, and stands up, turning away to adjust himself.
‘Conor –’ I reach out for him – ‘there’s no need to be nervous.’ I undo the button of his school trousers. I know that if he’s inside me, he can make me forget, he can make me clean. He’s so good, he can make me better. He grabs both my hands to stop me.
‘No need to be shy.’ I tilt my head at his hard-on. ‘It’s pretty obvious you want this too.’ He blushes. ‘What?’ I say. ‘Are you worried about someone walking in? I can lock the door.’
He crouches down to meet me at eye level. ‘Emma. You don’t have to do this.’
‘I know,’ I say. ‘But I want to. Don’t you want to be with me?’
Of course he wants to be with me. He
has
to.
He lays his hands on my shoulders, pushing me away from him gently.
‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ I spit the words out.
‘I just . . .’ He looks at the ground before reluctantly making eye contact again. ‘I don’t want you to feel like you have to do this.’
‘I don’t feel like I “have” to do this, Conor. I want to do this. I thought this was what you wanted too.’
‘I just want . . . I just want—’
‘I just want, I just want,’ I mock him, but he doesn’t react.
‘I just want to help you. I want to protect you, Emma.’
And he brushes a piece of my hair away from my face. I’ve never seen this look from him before. It’s pity. He feels sorry for me. (I can’t bear it.)
‘Just go,’ I say.
‘Emma—’
‘Just leave me alone for fuck’s sake, will you?’
And he does.
And I watch him leave.
This year
Thursday
I am awake. And then I remember.
I am awake and I instantly wish that I was not.
(Life ruiner.)
(I have ruined their lives.)
Guilt paints itself on to my skin. I am tarred in it and feathered.
The morning is creeping under the curtains like it is hunting for me. Even the light seems different now. It is greyer, shaping itself into shadows that want to smother me.
I am thirsty. A chalky residue coats my tongue. I look around the room, at the mirror, and the desk, and the windows. I can see points and the hard edges, the bits I might cut myself open on.
There is an old-fashioned radio alarm clock on my bedside locker, a cheap plastic square my mother bought to replace my iPhone. I’m not supposed to use my iPhone. I am not supposed to keep my laptop in my room any more either.
*
8.51 a.m.
I have slept for ten hours and fifty minutes.
That is a long time. (It was not long enough.)
I wrap the oversized dressing gown around myself. I sit on the desk chair, swivelling around once, twice, three times. I used to twirl my father’s globe like this as a child, my eyes closed, putting my hand out to stop it. I insisted that wherever my finger landed told of my future husband, my future home, my future life. I was so sure then. I was sure it was that easy.
The chair comes to a standstill. I concentrate on the edges of the mirror first, at the tacky residue left behind from the torn-off Polaroids, postcards, tickets for gigs. I work my way slowly towards the centre until I see that girl. Her face is slightly rounder now, her eyes like pieces of broken blue glass glued on to a papier-mâché moon.
I pick up a hairbrush from the vanity table, my eyes watering as I try to wrench out some of the knots (
when was the last time you brushed your hair, Emma?
) and for a second I think I can see chunks of vomit in my hair, that I’m covered in it,
so gross, like, Sean puked all over her, did you see that photo?
I jerk forward, searching.
But there’s nothing there.
*
8.57 a.m.
This is a normal time for breakfast.
I stand at the top of the stairs, looking down. If I fell . . . (Broken neck? Brain trauma?) People fall down the stairs all the time.
One. Two. Three.
I count each one until at last my feet touch the round mat at the bottom. It is new. I sit on the bottom step, curling my toes against the emerald-green fabric. My mother never did get the vomit stains out of the old one. This one is not as nice. It is cheaper, I think.
‘Ah, here, it’s as simple as this, Ned,’ from the kitchen, I hear a man’s voice saying in an inner-city Dublin growl. ‘I’m not a judgemental man, I’m not. But if this girl was in bed with the lad anyway, what was she expecting?’
‘I don’t think she was expecting to get raped, Davey,’ a nasal voice retorts. Posh. Dublin 4. ‘Although yours does seem to be a popular opinion. You agree with him, do you, Eileen?’
‘I do indeed,’ an older woman says. She breaks into a raspy smoker’s cough before continuing. ‘I see these girls walking around town here on a Saturday night, half naked, I tell you—’
‘They are—’ Davey chimes in, but she talks over him.
‘Skirts up to their backsides, and tops cut down to their belly buttons, and they’re all drinking too much and falling over in the streets, they’re practically asking to be attacked, and then when it happens, they start bawling crying over it. As your other man said, what do they expect?’
‘Hmm,’ the presenter says. ‘OK, it’s time for the 9 a.m. news, but stay tuned to us here at Ireland FM because after the bulletin we’re going to keep discussing the Ballinatoom Case.’
I get to my feet as the shrill jingle for
The Ned O’Dwyer Show
plays out. Ned O’Dwyer, self-proclaimed defender of the innocent. ‘It’s so important that we talk about this,’ he tells his listeners. ‘We need to have a national conversation about this.’
I wish another girl had been the one to start the national conversation.
I am a regular feature on
Ned O’Dwyer
. They cannot use my name so they call me the Ballinatoom Girl. They cannot use their names either, for legal reasons, but everyone knows who they are. Their lives are ruined because of this. I have ruined them.
The Ballinatoom Girl. Her story told and retold until it’s not her story any more.
She alleges. She claims. She says.
I don’t have anything to say, but they want to hear it anyway. Journalists from Jezebel, from xoJane, from the
Guardian
, from the
New York Times
. Everyone wants me to tell my story.
I don’t have a story.
It’s because of
The Ned O’Dwyer Show
that the ‘Ballinatoom Case’ became national news in the first place, then international, thousands of people tweeting about me. #IBelieveBallinatoomGirl
I am supposed to take comfort in that, I think.
A source ‘close to the family’ rang in to the show to tip the producers off. (Who? my father kept asking. Who is giving them all this information? And we close ranks. We talk less to the neighbours. We watch everyone for signs of betrayal.) The source asked to remain anonymous. ‘It’s a small town, everyone knows everyone,’ they said. ‘And no one wants to upset anyone else.’
People phone in to say that I deserved it. They say that I was asking for it.
At first I was hurt when I heard what they said about me. I cried a lot, in the beginning.
I probably shouldn’t listen. But no one will tell me anything. It feels like I am always trying to finish a jigsaw puzzle with a few pieces missing.
In the kitchen my mother is bent over on the counter, stretched out towards the old radio, fiddling with its busted antenna. A clipped female voice says, ‘Good morning. Here are your news stories. One year on in the Ballinatoom Case, and it’s . . .’
I cough and she slams her hand down on the radio to turn it off. She pretends she wasn’t listening to it. I pretend I didn’t hear.
‘I didn’t hear you come down.’
My mother’s face is flushed, her eyes folding inside creases of puffy skin. She looks pale, faded, her features indistinct. Behind her I can see the calendar propped up against the cupboard, a picture of a French bulldog in a flowerpot. The anniversary is coming closer and closer. I want to mark it, put a big black X on the date. But I never know which day to choose. ‘The alleged attack happened in the early hours of Sunday morning’, the papers said, even though when I think about it, when I force myself to imagine what happened (what might have happened – I can’t remember, I can’t remember, I can’t remember) I always think of it as Saturday night. When you can’t remember something (and I can’t remember, I have told them all so many times that I can’t remember) it is as if it never happened at all.
But it did happen. I know that now.
‘You’re late for school.’ My mother tightens her dressing gown around her, the white stripes yellowing, a splotchy tea stain on the lapel.
‘I’m not going in.’
‘But you promised me last night that you would go in today, Emma. Your exams are only a month away.’
‘Maybe tomorrow.’
This is a game we play. I pretend that I might return to school. She pretends to believe me. We both pretend that I might sit the Leaving Cert in June. We’re good at pretending now.
I take a seat at the dining table, willing my hand to stop shaking as I tip some Alpen into a bowl, pouring the milk in after. It folds out in thick lumps, plopping on to the cereal. I stare at it. I should get up. I should throw away the cereal. I should wash the bowl out. I go through all the actions in my head, watching my body move as if it’s easy.
‘The milk . . .’ I break off, my voice drying up. I swallow some water. ‘. . . it’s gone off.’
‘Shit,’ my mother says. She picks up the carton, sniffs it, pulls a face. ‘Don’t tell your father about this.’ She throws the mess into the sink, opens the cupboards with a clatter, hands me a new bowl and a pot of natural yogurt. ‘You’ll have to make do with that until I get a chance to do a shop.’
I begin again. It is a process, and each step must be taken carefully. Alpen in bowl. Yogurt. Stir. I am focused on the present moment. Mindfulness, the therapist calls it.
If I do this right, if I get every part of this right, maybe today will be OK.
‘Where’s Dad?’
My mother turns away from me. She rinses out some dishes and puts them in the dishwasher.
‘Where’s Dad?’ I repeat, forcing myself to take a spoonful of cereal. It tastes like glue and cardboard, but I swallow it.
Have to keep your energy up
, the doctor tells me. And starvation seems a long, slow route to death.
‘He had to go to work early,’ she says. She opens the cupboard door and stands on her tiptoes to reach the top shelf. ‘Some problems at the office.’
‘Oh.’
I stare out the patio door. Helen O’Shea is herding Ollie and Elliot into the car. They are both wearing raincoats over their school uniforms, jumping into puddles and screaming with laughter so loudly I can hear them through the glass.
I want to eat them. I want to make myself fat on their innocence.
It’s not your fault, the therapist tells me, but she is wrong.
‘Did Dad leave my phone for me?’
‘I thought we discussed this.’
‘I deleted my Snapchat. I changed my number.’ My voice rises. ‘What more do you want?’
I didn’t want to change my number. I was afraid that one of the lads might change their mind, that they might want to apologize, that they would decide to plead guilty and then maybe I wouldn’t have to go through with all of this, people would know I wasn’t an attention-seeking whore, that this wasn’t my fault.
(Kevin Brennan tweeted:
OK girls, just get drunk and slutty, and then shout rape the next day.
It had been favourited 136 times.)