Joe Victim: A Thriller

“Carry on,” she says.

“So my auntie came outside and called me down. I went down there expecting her to tell me that suddenly the garden needed doing or a lightbulb needed changing, or that I wasn’t painting the roof as well as she wanted, and when I got inside she reminded me why I was there,” I say, and I can still remember it, can still remember the dress she was wearing, and she was wearing lots of makeup too. I can almost feel the sunburn and smell the aloe vera she would rub into my skin later that same day. She told me to sit down on the couch and I did and she handed me a drink of lemonade that she had made that tasted how I imagined cat piss would taste if you carbonated it and threw in a slice of lemon. Then she sat down next to me. She put a hand on my leg, then told me not to flinch when I flinched. Then she told me she had another job for me, and that if I said no, I’d be going to jail. She put one hand in my lap and one hand on the back of my neck and told me to kiss her. I didn’t know what to do. She pushed her face into mine and I’d never kissed a girl before, and it tasted like cigarette smoke and was wet like coffee, and I still remember that my thought was to try and bite her nose off, but before I could think how, she was straddling me. I tried falling back further into the couch, I put my hands on her shoulders and pushed her away. She said if I pushed her away again she would tell my parents what I had done and that I had raped her.”

I tell the psychiatrist this and I can feel my face going red, as if the sunburn and shame from then is finding a way back into my life.

“And in the bedroom,” the psychiatrist says, “your auntie was in control?”

“I don’t . . . I don’t really want to talk about it,” I say.

“Joe—”

“Please. Can’t we just drop it?”

“What happened afterward? When you were finished in the bedroom?” she asks.

“She sent me back outside to work on the roof.”

“Just like that? She didn’t try talking to you first?”

“A little, I guess. Mostly about my uncle. She said that I reminded her of him in many ways. I didn’t know what ways she meant and didn’t know if she meant sexually. Things had been . . . you know, pretty quick. Then she made me go back outside.”

“How did you feel?”

“Well it was hot out there and I burned some more.”

“I mean how did you feel about what your aunt had done to you?”

“I’m . . . I’m not sure.”

“Angry? Hurt?”

“I guess.”

“Excited?”

“No,” I say, but maybe just a little. Not that excited though. There’s a reason my uncle died—looking at my auntie every day couldn’t have helped his health. If my auntie had been hotter—well, that might have been quite conflicting. As it was I felt strange about the whole thing. “It happened again a few days later. Then it just kept on happening, and every time when I got home all I could smell was the cigarette smoke.”

“And this lasted two years?”

“Almost, yeah.”

“Did you try to stop it?”

“I didn’t know how,” I say.

“But you tried something, right?”

I nod. “I killed her cat,” I say.

She doesn’t look alarmed at my response. “You said earlier you hadn’t killed any animals.”

“I pretty much forgot about it,” I say, and it’s true. In this case, anyway. “There’s a lot I had forgotten about that time until you wanted to talk about it.”

“And the cat?”

I shake my head. “The cat didn’t want to talk about it.”

She doesn’t laugh. “You killed the cat, Joe. Tell me why.”

“I thought if I killed her cat it would give her something else to focus on and she wouldn’t want to keep having sex with me,” I say, “only the opposite turned out to be true. She needed me more at that point.”

“How did you kill it?”

“I drowned it in the bath,” I say, “and then I used a hair dryer to dry it out so my auntie never knew what happened. She just thought it died naturally.”

“At what point during the sexual abuse was this?” she asks.

“What the hell? I didn’t fuck the cat,” I tell her. “I just drowned it. I had to do something.”

“That’s not what I mean, Joe. I mean the abuse between you and your auntie.”

“I wasn’t abusing her,” I say. “Why are you thinking the worst? How am I going to have a fair trial if everybody keeps—”