Authors: Nikki McWatters
Tags: #Fiction, #Psychological, #Retail, #Suspense, #Thrillers
What now?
The photographer stopped snapping and looked over to Mum.
‘Abbie,’ she called. ‘We need to talk.’
***
1.
Libby O’Neil
Dear William,
I am writing this on the day you were born and I will seal it and you can read it when you turn eighteen. I don’t think you’ll be able to understand it all until then and I don’t want to burden you with heavy stuff until you are ready to deal with it.
I was a messed up teenage girl when I fell pregnant with you, that much you have probably already heard. Hell, I was all over the internet for a while. That stuff never goes away.
But I wasn’t always a messed up wild child. Once upon a time I was normal and just wanted what normal girls wanted. A knight in shining armour and a pretty palace to play in. Nice things and beautiful children and happily ever after. It was the dream that we were spoon-fed from the first little pink frilly dress. I’m glad you were a boy. Really, really glad. It’s a man’s world, William and while I tried, you just can’t beat them at their own game. Despite all the leaps and bounds of feminism that I learned about in Modern History this year, not much has changed at all really.
Take your grandparents for example. Your grandfather, my father, Thomas O’Neil. He’s an educated man, he’s got two PhD’s for Chrissakes. He has learnt all there is about gender studies and stuff. He teaches alongside some brilliant women who have really important jobs at the university. He married my mum, your grandmother, Casey Kitchener who then became Casey O’Neil. See – right there – she gave away her name and took her husband’s. That’s an old fashioned thing to do with ownership. Dates back to the time when men owned women.
First bit of advice to you William, from your old mother. Don’t make a girl give up her identity when she hooks up with you. In fact don’t even bother with the marriage thing. It doesn’t work. It’s based on the principal of monogamy and being faithful and in my opinion, you boys are crap at that.
I’d like to believe there are decent guys out there but you know what, the only one I have ever met in my whole entire life (which at this point is only a little more than sixteen years), the only one, is Chester McNaughton, your daddy. He seems like the true gentleman. And you know what? I was too stupid to realise that until it was too late. He has every reason to hate my guts but he doesn’t or if he does, he’s too nice to show it. If you grow up to be like him that would be super. Just don’t wear your hair the way he does when he’s eighteen (look at the photos….bad look).
If you are with a woman and you want to be with another woman, have the decency to tell her and move on before you start grazing in another paddock. It’s called GOOD MANNERS!
See, all my life, when I was little, I would hear my parents fighting. Always about the same thing.
That girl
. They never fought about money or the bills or the housework. Just about what my father did to
that girl
. It sounded so frickin serious, I just assumed he’d killed her. So I grew up with the belief that my father was a murderer. That fucked me up a lot. Sorry to swear but if you’re eighteen, you’ll understand that I needed to use that word right there.
Then when I was older and started getting the birds and bees talks, my mother explained to me what exactly my father had done to that girl. He hadn’t killed her, he’d slept with her and that seemed somehow worse to my mother. So I figured this whole sex thing was pretty powerful and huge and scary.
At school I could see all the sex power plays between people. It seemed like between boys and girls and men and women it worked pretty much like money does in the world of economics. Girls sometimes didn’t want to put out or do stuff but they
did
because they didn’t want to lose their boyfriends. That happened a lot. Girls would then know that sex was the way to catch and keep a guy and you learned to string him along, give a little, hold back, play cat and mouse. It was like a choreographed dance. I played it a bit. Just dabbled. I wanted to keep that power for myself for as long as possible because I started noticing that the guys who were getting the most sex were the most confident dudes on campus and the girls who were putting out the most were insecure and always terrified of being replaced. And that’s what it is to so many guys. Power.
The whole feminist thing only
looked
like it worked because in reality, deep down, guys still treated chicks like cars. They traded them in. Preferred shiny new models to old wrecks. And even when they were driving in their ride, they were checking out other wheels on the road. Of course, sometimes they even liked to collect them and drive in a different one every day. Have a chick for every day of the week.
About a year before you were born or maybe more like eighteen months, there was this teacher. Mr Luft. He was a complete creep. He always brushed against the girls and we could see his semi-stiffy all the time when we were rehearsing dance number and stuff. He went most for the girls who didn’t seem like they were the slutty types. Girls like Portia and Abigail, were the blonde bimbos of the school. Everyone knew they were up for it. No, Luft went after the ones who were hanging back. The shyer ones. The less obvious ones and he’d play them. Offer them leading roles, massage their egos and their shoulders, pushing his erection into their backs. He started paying me attention in year nine and it felt awful and yet at the same time I was kind of flattered. That sounds sick but it’s true. I started getting messed up thinking about my Dad and how he hit on a student.
I started realising that when you’re a teenage girl, if you aren’t hideously deformed, men, not just boys, but grown men will start wanting you. You become like this forbidden obsession and I made the mistake of thinking that I could use this power, grab it and take the one thing that could have been my weakness and make it my strength. But, William, I didn’t know what I was doing. I really didn’t know what I was doing.
All that stuff about being a woman trapped in a girl’s body that Abigail used to go on with? That might have been true for her. But I was the opposite. I was a girl trapped in a woman’s body. I wasn’t ready to use that power and I was playing with fire.
I decided to use it to take revenge on the musician’s wife, the woman who had stolen my mother’s power away from her without a second thought. It all came to me when I put two and two together and found out that the author of the book I was studying, was the woman my Dad had screwed and it just happened that she was married to a very famous musician. And one thing that we all knew rock musicians liked ….was groupies. So, I decided to wear that hat and bait him and trap him like an animal. Like I felt men had always treated women. As objects. Conquests. Things to use and then discard.
I had a lot of anger.
I organised back stage passes with a roadie the day before and then I basically used my friend Abigail. I tried to seduce him but he was not interested in me. To be really honest, he wasn’t much interested in Abbie either. She was like a cyclone just sweeping him up in her boobs and hair and her very experienced fingers. He had no chance. I dropped a couple of different pills in his drinks to try to make him hornier and wilder, hoping he’d get me involved too. I wanted to get evidence to throw at his wife. To break her heart like she broke my mum’s. But eventually he just passed out and we kept…well…I did stuff for the camera and of course the rest is history. I changed my mind about the film footage because it wouldn’t really show that he was cheating on her because the guy was unconscious so I changed my mind and decided to say he raped me. Because that’s the worst thing a girl can say about a guy. I forced myself on your Dad because I couldn’t claim rape if I was still a virgin.
I was still thinking about it all when I found out I was pregnant with you and I had wondered if that might happen but was completely freaked out when it did. Then I went nuts and went to see Chris and tried to get money out of him but it wasn’t feeling like a big enough deal so I went to the cops and claimed rape. I knew they’d make a big deal out of it because I was only fifteen. And it went mad. All over the world. I didn’t realise how big it would get.
When the film came out, the stuff on the phone, because Abbie stupidly left it lying around or deliberately gave it to someone to bust me on purpose, I got charged with sexual assault. She put it on YouTube and Facebook too. Although she denied it, I know it was her. Who else could it have been unless it was the reporter that found the phone? Maybe?
Was I guilty? Was that a fair call? Yes. It was. I knew one hundred percent that what I was doing was wrong. Not just from a legal point of view but because it was morally wrong. I was deliberately hurting a man I didn’t even know by using sex and sexual things and humiliation. I was angry, not at him, but at men. At my father, at Mr Luft, at ….just at men and the fact that I didn’t feel I would ever be taken seriously as an actor or a singer because I was a woman. I would always have to look pretty and stay skinny and be available sexually. And that made me angry.
I read a lot about rape. Research. Mostly it’s all about guys who are rapists and they don’t really do it for sexual kicks. It’s about power and I know that because I felt that. I wasn’t turned on by what happened in that hotel room that night. I didn’t feel sexy. I felt powerful. I’ve been seeing a counsellor about all this stuff but it isn’t helping at all.
Today you were born and I wanted to love you. But there’s something in me that is too afraid to love, William. Don’t blame yourself for that. You are perfect. You have all your fingers and toes and are pretty cute for a baby but after my folks and the jerks in my life, I just am too afraid to love in case I get hurt. That sounds lame, I know, but it’s just a fact.
Your Dad’s girlfriend came to see me today. She’s nice. Lola. I’m happy they hooked up. They suit each other. But she told me that Luft had hurt her too. Abused her. Actually raped her. And she can’t make that right because I screwed everything up when I tried to get him busted but got scared that nobody would believe me and that he would get revenge so I denied it. Now no-one will believe her and that’s my fault.
And so I’ve written a letter to the police and the principal, telling them everything. All about Luft. How he’s got a bent, uncut penis and a mole about two inches below his navel. How he forced me to pleasure him. Lola and anyone else who comes forward will be able to tell the same story. I hope that will help Lola get some justice and closure. It’s the least I can do. Those two letters are sitting, folded up near the flowers I got from the McNaughtons. Also next to the over-boiled hospital slop they call dinner.
I wish I could have given you a loving, happy little family like I always dreamed of having but I can’t. The only experience I have of mothering is from my own mother and she abandoned me yesterday, the day before you were born. I cried so hard that night, I think that’s what caused you to come early. She never hugged me after I was about ten and only ever used me as member of her anti-Dad club. I was a pawn that she used and manipulated as she saw fit.
I wasn’t her daughter. I was her belonging. Her real birth name was Elizabeth. She changed it to Casey to sound funky and more masculine for her job as a publisher. So she gave me her name so that I could be a little mini-her. When I insisted on Libby, she ignored that and always called me Elizabeth even when I asked her not too.
On that last day, which seems like a lifetime ago, but it was only yesterday, she called me Libby. She said good-by and didn’t look back. I’d disappointed her so much she just wanted to wipe me out of her life.
How could I be a good mother to you, William? You will do much better with Chester, your Dad. He has nice parents who brought me flowers and smiled and asked how I was even though I know they are horrified of what happened between me and their son.
They are good people and I know you will be safe and loved.
I wish I had turned out differently. I would have liked to see how you turned out.
But I’m not going to prison and I’m not giving my mother the satisfaction of being able to forget me. She’ll be turning around and coming back on the next plane. Of that I’m almost certain. I want to be a thorn in her side and my father’s for the rest of their lives and so when I put down this pen, Will, I am going to take the lift to the top floor and crawl up to the roof.
I always wanted to be someone special. Famous. Loved. Cherished and adored. I wanted to be spectacular. A super-hero!
Tonight I’m going to see if I can fly.
I suspect that I can’t. That I’m just a bunch of boring flesh and blood.
So good-bye son and know from the bottom of my heart that if I was capable of loving anything or anyone, it would probably have been you. But that would probably only be because I’d see you as a flawed version of me. And that just wouldn’t do.
I’m singing as I write this. ‘
He had it coming. He had it coming. He only had himself to blame. If you’d have been there. If you’d have seen it. I betcha you would have done the same.’
I was a star that burned too bright, too fast, William. A supernova that got swallowed up by a black hole.
Have a good life and don’t fuck it up the way I did!
All the love I’m capable of,
Your mother,
Libby O’Neil. X
THE END
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