They didn’t write anything down. Finally, when I finished my tale, they looked at one another with a look that only they seemed to understand. They went into a diatribe about wasting their time, and ‘prick teasing older men with your little skimpy nightie’.
I let their barrage of insults wash over me, and tried to remain unaffected. I wasn’t even there. I had escaped deep within my own mind.
The following morning, I presented for work not at my usual four thirty am but instead at five thirty. Mum was preparing bacon and egg toasted sandwiches. Without raising her head, she said to me, ‘I know it wasn’t rape.’
‘Really, and how do you know that?’ I asked with all the venom I could muster.
‘Because I spoke to my astrologer this morning and your moon is rising into Venus this week.’ That made me a Lolita, prepared to offer myself up to any passing man regardless of age or description. I never hated her more than at that moment.
One week after ‘the incident’, as I like to call it, I began to bleed. I knew where Mum put the pads, so I looked after myself and went back to work. No fanfare or shouts of adulation, no welcome to the world of womanly sisterhood. Just more shame.
Days, weeks or perhaps even months passed for me in silence. I just had no desire to talk or to be talked to. I cooked in silence, I cleaned in silence and I even took food orders without asking them what they wanted. I stopped putting my hand up in class, and when asked if I knew the answer I just stared back emotionless.
I was twelve years old when I was finally kicked out of home, or—as I referred to it—my parents’ house. Since ‘the incident’ I was on permanent grounding; with the exception of school I was not allowed to leave the house, even for school sport. I was given additional chores that extended beyond the confines of the shop. Now I was responsible for the cleanliness of the family home as well. I made the beds, did the washing, cleaned the dishes and kept the floors clean. I can’t explain what made me decide that day was the day I would find my voice but something inside me snapped.
I was sweeping the floor while my brothers were playing games on our computer with Dad. They were eating croissants with no plate or napkin to contain the flakes of pastry from dirtying the floor that I had just cleaned. The image is still etched in my brain, like I am outside of myself watching the events unfold. Here they were, these three little fat princes, scoffing their collective faces with French pastries, with no care for their sweeping pariah sister. I was incensed! I gave them the broom and told them to clean up their own mess, to which they responded by dusting all the flakes off their laps and on to the floor. Dad immediately took to his feet, his neck turned bright red and his spine seemed straighter that I had ever seen it previously.
‘Don’t speak to your brothers like that,’ he said quietly.
On the inside I immediately recoiled, regretting my verbal outburst, but something inside me decided that this was a Waterloo moment. So, full of false bravado, I stood tall and told him that I wasn’t going to clean the floor again. His eyes opened wider and seemed to bulge out.
‘Get your arse right back here and you clean up the mess now.’
I don’t know why I chose this moment to test out my father’s reaction to a swear word in his presence, but perhaps temporary insanity is a real defence because I had to have been insane to think I could get away with it.
‘This is bullshit,’ I said, immediately dropping the broom and running towards the exit. My father moved towards me, but I was too fast.
As I was running down the stairs I heard him yell, ‘Don’t come back!’
I stayed with my friend Ben, who was twenty-two, for two weeks. I still went to school during the day. I wasn’t having sex with Ben. Funnily enough, he never asked for it. He was the only real gentleman I’d met. He treated me like a fragile, delicate flower. He was beautiful inside and out. Ben had a Chinese mother and a Swedish father. He was six foot two with broad shoulders. We would joke about him being ‘Asian from the neck up’ and everywhere else, pure Viking. He understood what it was like being different. I had often heard people call him half-n-half or Bitsa but mostly they called him Ching Chong.
At the time of moving in with Ben we were merely friends who would spend hours together watching movies and talking. We had never really done anything physical. I had known of him for about six months as a customer in the shop but due to his shyness I hadn’t even known his name. I got to know him better after being locked out of my girlfriend’s house one evening—he was her next-door neighbour. He invited me to come in and wait for my friend to get home. After about an hour we heard the door close next door but played deaf. And so began a beautiful romance.
***