Suddenly, amongst the music and voices echoing around the house, I heard footsteps running up the stairs. I begged God to guide whoever it was into the bedroom and end my hell.
Dougie was oblivious to the person outside the door. Then the footsteps stopped as quickly as they’d started. My scream came out as a muffled moan as his hand drove my head ever deeper into the mattress. I begged for the bedroom door to open but my guardian angel paused, and walked away.
I let out my last cry and then, to my eternal shame, I gave up my struggle. Everything fell quiet and all I heard was his shallow breath and the sound of his belt buckle shaking before he climaxed.
Even when he finished, he continued to lie on me, his whole wretched body suffocating me. But I was no longer in pain. I’d been swallowed by numbness. My senses shut down until his weight lifted off me.
Then he pulled his trousers up and left without saying another word.
I lay there for I don’t know how long, immobilised and still partially undressed, trying to make sense of what had happened. It didn’t make sense, but I needed it to.
I realised Dougie had punished me for taking Simon away from him. Somehow I’d been responsible for my husband having a mind of his own and making his own choices. I’d become the one Dougie blamed for everything that went wrong in his life, and he’d needed to force me to understand how helpless he felt by making me feel the same as him.
A voice shouted my name from the garden and it brought me back to reality. I stood up, took clean underwear from the chest of drawers and headed for the en-suite bathroom. I wiped myself and saw blood on the toilet paper. I flushed it away and then fell to my knees. I was sick in the toilet until there was nothing left to bring up. I was empty in every sense of the word.
I raised my head and glanced at myself in the mirror. I’d never noticed how unforgiving it was until then. I wiped my eyes and mouth and forced myself not to cry. I held my hands together so tightly to stop my arms from shaking that I thought my fingers might break.
Then, after a time, slowly and awkwardly, I re-joined the party. I looked around nervously, but Dougie must have left. I was relieved when I couldn’t find Simon either. I had no idea how to tell him what had just happened.
So I carried on, as best I could, like nothing was out of the ordinary. I smiled, I laughed and I topped up people’s glasses. But the life and soul of the party was dying inside.
You have just been raped. You have just been raped. You have just been raped. A voice inside me kept repeating the words like it desperately wanted me to understand what had just happened. But I couldn’t process it, not now, not yet.
When the numbers finally dwindled in the early hours of the morning, and Simon, I presumed, was asleep in one of the kids’ empty bedrooms, I remained wide awake. I washed dishes, scooped rubbish into black bin bags and cleaned the house until everything was spotless.
Except for me.
Northampton, today
7.40 p.m.
The world beyond her front doorstep could have exploded into a tumbling mass of fire and brimstone but it still wouldn’t have been enough to break the eye contact between them.
He knew that for twenty-five years he had got things very, very wrong. And that was by no means the end of it.
CHAPTER TWENTY
CATHERINE
Northampton, twenty-eight years earlier
18 March
I pretended I was asleep when I heard Simon get up and leave the bedroom, then quietly close the front door.
I knew he’d been having difficulties sleeping and guessed he’d probably gone to put in a few more hours in the office in the garage. He’d done that a lot lately, and secretly I was glad. What Dougie had done to me wasn’t my fault, but it didn’t stop me feeling like I was the most disgusting human being on the planet.
I’d never been more in control of my emotions than I’d been during these past few days after his attack. I was afraid that if I stopped running even for a minute, I’d grind to a halt and fall to the floor in a thousand shattered pieces. If I kept moving, I wouldn’t have time to think. I occupied every waking moment of my day with multiple trips to the supermarket to buy groceries we didn’t need, playing pirate games with children who’d rather have been with their friends, digging the garden until there was no soil left unturned.
But being in bed alone – or with Simon – scared me. It gave me time to think. I considered telling him everything, but in the end I decided I’d have been the only one it would help. Trusting those closest to him was such a huge part of his make-up that I knew the truth about his best pal would destroy him. I’d have been in even smaller pieces seeing him so unhappy.
He might also urge me to report the attack, but I’d been drunk, so who’s to say I hadn’t willingly consented then had an attack of conscience? There were no witnesses and I’d taken so many baths to wash him out of me, there was no physical evidence anything had ever happened. It was absolutely my word against his.
Even if there’d been enough proof for the police to charge him, a court case would have meant everyone knowing about that night. I’d have been forced to relive it to a room full of strangers judging me, and his barrister ripping me to shreds. I wasn’t strong enough to be humiliated like that.
But most important to me was my marriage. I was terrified that Simon would never look at me in the same way again: that he’d think of me as damaged goods. If he’d have grasped even a small measure of how dirty I felt, I couldn’t have borne seeing my pain reflected in him. When all things were considered, our family had too much to lose.
Instead I bottled up my tears, and when no one was around, I’d slip inside the garage, shut the door and uncork that bottle until they spilled across the floor. And when it was empty, I’d pull myself together and go back to pretending I wasn’t on the brink of a breakdown.
22 March
The thought of ever seeing Dougie’s face again petrified me and, in a small village, our paths were bound to cross eventually.
When I was outside, I stopped at each street corner and looked around in fear of coming face to face with him. And home alone, I’d lock the doors and keep the curtains closed. Anyone in their right mind wouldn’t have dared to return to the house of a woman he’d raped. But someone who could so degrade and violate another person – and someone who was supposed to be their friend – wasn’t in their right mind anyway.
I never brought his name up again, but strangely, neither did Simon. He just disappeared from our conversations. Simon didn’t go to the pub with him again. He never asked why Dougie hadn’t been round for dinner, and never invited him over to watch a football match on TV. It was like he’d suddenly ceased to exist to Simon, too. The kids were the only ones who seemed to miss him.
‘Is Uncle D coming for tea tonight?’ Robbie asked us over breakfast.