He Said/She Said(99)

Failure suspended me in the moment. In the background was the ever-present bass and a chattering crowd. The Ferris wheel creaked in rotation. Close by, birds sang their second dawn chorus, gently shushed by the leaves. Over all this my blood roared in my ears. This time, I felt no relief; only a crushing sense of failure for the girl I had let down. If I’d had a tail, it would have been tucked between my legs as I picked my way back through the tents to Laura.

I used the abandoned dodgem as a marker and eventually found Laura with her back to me, frowning into her mobile phone. The girl was still crouched in her doorway, the same pale leg extended now to display a battered silver trainer, the dip of an ankle and curve of a calf that had been hooked around my thigh days before.

My first thought was that it was a terrible coincidence but scientists know there is no such thing. Using the evidence in front of me, I came up with the only plausible hypothesis. Beth had been following me – us – and someone had either followed her, or seen her on her own, and . . . it was too horrific. That dark flame flared again, burning through the surface of my guilt. I had a suicidal urge to hold her; it passed. For a few selfless seconds, my instinct was for Beth’s comfort rather than my own survival. It might not have triumphed, but it was there for a while. I cling to that knowledge.

In front of me, Laura swore at her phone, then took a few paces forward.

I did the same, dislodging a pile of tent poles someone had dumped on the ground, and Beth whipped around to see what the noise was. Our eyes met in mutual, awful comprehension. Her face was smeared with mucus, although her eyes were dry. She came here because of me, I thought. Laura would have been furious enough at my infidelity, but that it had led to this: any chance I’d had of being able to tell her vanished, a pinprick of light dwindling to blackness. I dropped to my knees and whispered, ‘Oh, Beth.’ She stared through me. ‘Oh, you poor girl. What’s he done to you?’

‘Like you care.’ Her voice cracked on the word.

‘Of course I care, it’s just . . .’ I nodded at Laura’s back.

She had finally found a signal on her phone, and her voice, high on the breeze, the wind in her favour, made it clear that things had escalated while I was away. ‘She’s traumatised, she’s not really talking properly. I’d say she needs an ambulance. Can it be a WPC? Can it be a female paramedic?’

The decency that had flared in me died just as quickly. It was clear that two irreconcilable things must happen. We had to do whatever we could to help Beth. And we had to do it without revealing what I’d done.

‘Beth, I’m so sorry,’ I whispered, and only then realised I was not expressing sympathy for what she’d been through but apologising for what I was about to do. ‘When the police get here you can’t tell them about the other night.’ You don’t live with a woman like Laura without absorbing this kind of stuff: how the system is weighted against rape victims; the tricks clever men use. Beth carried on with her dark green stare. I couldn’t even tell if she understood me. ‘You know what I mean. They’ll come to the wrong conclusions about you.’ I was taking a risk, digging myself in even deeper. There was more now to be discovered; I knew that Laura would have been more disgusted at my cynicism than the act itself. ‘I’m trying to help you,’ I said to Beth. Only a tiny involuntary curl of her lip showed that she’d understood me at all. ‘I wish there was something I could do.’

Twenty feet away, Laura was describing the attacker to the emergency services. I sprinted round and caught her as she was winding up the conversation. Upon seeing that I was alone, Laura narrowed her eyes at my failure. I offered no excuses; I barely trusted myself to speak.

‘I’m going to sit with her till they come, see if I can get her to talk,’ she said. The following seconds were thick with a concentrate version of the terror that has spread itself thinly across every subsequent day. I couldn’t tell her not to without giving myself away, so I watched her disappear between the caravans and kneel down beside Beth. I pictured Laura’s face when the news hit. I’d never seen her in shock or in grief but I could easily rearrange her features into scooped-out eyes and a howling, hollow mouth and knew I could not bear it. The solution came to me, gloriously simple. If Laura finds out what I’ve done, I’ll just kill myself, I thought. I can no more live with Laura’s reaction than I can live without her. She’ll want me gone anyway. It was as though I’d conjured a piece of glass to break in case of emergency, and it brought a kind of peace. Crucially, though, I didn’t consider a method. If contemplating logistics is a step towards action, then I can’t have had the courage of my convictions. Even as I mooted suicide, self-preservation had other ideas.

Behind me, the women whispered. It was my job to look out for the police. I stood next to the broken carousel horse, with its flaking gold leaf and chipped eyeballs, with my feet apart and my arms folded in a nightclub bouncer position, braced for Laura’s furious shriek.

The police were, thankfully, on us in what seemed like minutes, buzzing towards us in their black-and-yellow stripes. Laura took over at once. ‘They could’ve sent two women,’ she said under her breath, brushing past me. I knew then that whatever Beth had told her I was not part of it. I felt relief, then an emetic guilt at this relief, then bitter regret, a pattern that has repeated itself constantly in my mind ever since. Beth’s continuing silence, essential as it is for both of us, is a guillotine over my neck. Although she holds the rope, she cannot let it go without it burning her own hands.