16 May 2000
Our walk-up on Clapham Common Southside was on the fourth storey, with a little balcony overlooking the green. In winter, bare branches left visible the mansions on the north side, but in summer the world beyond stopped at the nearest treetops. To get to our flat, we had to climb eighty-five stairs that zig-zagged tightly between windowless landings. The other three flats were accessed via the back alleyway, so once the street door was closed, we were home. There were no neighbours to tidy the stairs for; nothing to stop us nipping down to pick up the post with no clothes on. We used to joke about getting a fireman’s pole installed to shave seconds off the morning commute, a ritual we still spoke of with the self-conscious, self-important tones of the very young and newly professional. The wallpaper in the stairwell was ancient and peeling, here and there flaking back so that you could see a layer of vivid green paint that Kit said was probably Victorian, contaminated with arsenic. I thought he was joking until I threatened to lick it once and he pulled me back in panic.
There were only two real rooms: our bedroom at the back, and a long, sloping living room-cum-kitchen. The appliances were older than we were, the bedroom door didn’t shut properly, the Vent-Axia fan in the shower was so loud that you couldn’t listen to the radio while someone was in the bathroom. There weren’t enough power points to accommodate all of Kit’s technology and black wires writhed in nests at every socket and underneath the telephone.
The space was tiny – half our stuff was in boxes in Adele’s loft – but it was ours. It was us.
Kit’s eclipse map had pride of place above an old futon that had once belonged to Adele. Once or twice a week, we’d convert it from a sofa into a bed for when Mac would roll out of some sewer of a club south of the river or – more and more frequently – when Ling had locked him out. I got used to finding him passed out in our sitting room, a bucket for vomit at his side. He was already missing a molar, and his face was starting to sink in on itself, presaging how Kit might look at fifty. He was only twenty-two.
Kit had persuaded our local newsagent to order in the West Country newspapers. He needn’t have; the Balcombe verdict made the nationals. He came home from the newsagent with a copy of The Cornishman under one arm and half a dozen tabloids and broadsheets under the other. We read the lot on our balcony with a pot of tea and a pile of toast between us, in a silence that was nervous only on my part. Kit started with the regional papers. The Cornish Times carried an interview with the farmer Rory Polzeath, who was not only financially ruined but also emotionally devastated by what had happened on his land.
I blackened my fingers flicking manically through the headlines, wondering which, if any, might give my lie away. eclipse rapist guilty said the Sun. public schoolboy protests innocence said the Daily Mail, in a report that concentrated on the price of Jamie Balcombe’s family home, the cost of his education and his father’s tenuous connection with the Prince of Wales. There was nothing about my testimony, so although my instinct was to throw the paper across the room in disgust, I handed it to Kit to buy myself a few more minutes.
A female columnist in The Times claimed the rape was an example of all that was wrong with the ‘alternative scene’; it was effectively a warning shot to parents whose children went to music festivals. I felt myself clench all over. The Telegraph took it even further. The headline judge makes example of festival rapist presided over a lament on Jamie’s ruined career.
‘Whose side are they fucking on?’ I said to Kit, forgetting for a moment my own vested interest in the reports. ‘Are we meant to feel sorry for him?’
‘Oh, dear,’ he said, adding the Telegraph to his reading pile.
In the Daily Mirror, I zoomed in on one phrase that made my blood run cold.
There were some tense moments in the trial, including, at one point, a crucial eyewitness who wavered in her testimony.
I didn’t dare read on, not with Kit close enough to see over my shoulder. I stuffed all of the Mirror in between the pages of a discarded sports section I knew neither us would ever read, then pushed both into the recycling bin.
The bobbed journalist, the one I’d pegged as a Guardian writer, actually turned up in The Independent. Georgie Becker’s byline photograph was a good decade out of date but her words were the first to resonate with me.
The most common reaction to rape is freeze:
At last, one jury recognises this
At last, one judge speaks up for victims
‘The sound of his flies being unzipped, it was like hearing the barrel of a gun click into place; you’re a hostage, you just do what you’re told. I couldn’t fight him off, I froze. I just wanted it over with.’ So ran the testimony of the twenty-year-old victim of Jamie Balcombe, the man last week convicted of a prolonged rape during a festival to mark the total solar eclipse in Cornwall in August of last year. Her powerful words shatter the accepted narrative that to resist rape is for the woman to fight back until she is red in tooth and claw. For most rape victims, fear is paralytic.
Rape cases in which the parties are acquainted are notoriously difficult to prosecute. So what went right, here? The Balcombe case is highly unusual in that there was corroborative evidence – in a court of law, a woman’s word alone is not enough – and Mr Balcombe’s victim admitted that she might not have gone to the police had the rape not been interrupted by two passers-by, whose testimonies were crucial to the conviction.
At this point I froze myself, but the incriminating detail was left out. I was overcome first with relief, and then disgust at this relief when Beth’s ordeal had been so much greater than mine. I read the rest through incipient tears.