The Third Person

What happened was – after a while – Jack and his girlfriend went off to bed and left the girl with his friends, who were yawning and stretching and talking about heading off to bed. Despite herself, the girl was annoyed. She’d had a lot more to drink in the meantime and wasn’t necessarily thinking straight, but she felt rejected, frustrated and angry. She felt used. Hurt, even. The kind of resentful feeling that’s more directed at yourself than anyone else – you’re an idiot – but when you’re drunk you attach it to others in the same way you grab their shoulder to stop yourself falling over.

All in all, the evening felt like a bad day at work: nothing much accomplished, but she didn’t want to leave, head home and go to bed, because that felt like defeat. Here everyone was, though: a few of them asleep already; others collecting their coats. It was depressing.

So when this quiet boy – who she’d barely even spoken to all evening – wandered over and told her uncertainly that he had some wine upstairs in his room, and would she like to come up if she wasn’t ready to go home yet?, she thought about it for all of a second, and then said yes, of course, I’d love to. She thought, did you read my mind? He was big and cumbersome: average-looking. She didn’t fancy him in the slightest, but from his virtual silence he was obviously an outsider in the group, and at that moment she hated Jack’s group for using her and smirking and generally being bastards.

She said, Let’s go.

At that point in the story, there was always a break: a fracture. The way Amy always told it, the girl and the boy sat and drank wine in his room, and talked, and then at one point the boy told her that she was going to have sex with him. The girl laughed and said no, I’m not , and the boy said actually: yes, you are. The girl hadn’t even been thinking along those lines up until that point. According to Amy she experienced something dropping away inside herself. She reframed everything that had happened. Mentally, she unpicked the seams of their conversation, pulled away the cloth and for the first time saw his intent for what it was.

She was scared – but not properly. It was too soon to be properly scared and, after all, this wasn’t going to happen.

No, she said more definitely, standing up. I’m really, really not .

The boy looked back at her. Yes, he told her again. You really are.

Then he stood up and took hold of her arm. She tried to shake off his hand, but she couldn’t even move him. He was half as big as her again, and for the first time she started to appreciate what that fact meant.

Properly scared now: You’re hurting me.

It’ll be nice, he said. You’ll see.

Afterwards, a sympathetic policewoman would tell this girl that the decision as to whether or not to press charges was entirely hers, but that she needed to be aware of certain things. The first was that both she and this boy had been drunk, and she’d gone back to his flat voluntarily in the early hours of the morning with the intention of getting more drunk. She didn’t know this boy, but she’d already had consensual sex with one of his friends earlier on that evening, and she hadn’t known him either.

We’d need to question the first boy, she said. What was his name?

She said it like that – the first boy – as though the two encounters were similar.

Jack, the girl said. I don’t know his surname.

Instead, she gave the address; the policewoman made a note of it.

We’d need to question Jack. We’d also need to take samples from him to match against the semen we’ve taken from you.

Without much in the way of emotion, the policewoman told the girl that there was very little chance of Jack’s girlfriend not finding out. She said they’d have to interview everybody who’d been at the party, including the girlfriend. In fact, if they took the boy to court, his lawyer would probably explain to everyone present how the girl had had sex with an attached stranger only two hours earlier. He’d go into detail.

If you press charges, she is going to find out.

The policewoman had a wedding ring on, but she was sympathetic anyway.

It won’t help matters that you didn’t fight back, she said a minute or two later. I’m not judging you because of that, but other people will. They’ll take it as evidence that you didn’t want to fight back.

The girl started crying again.

I did want to fight back. She wanted to hit herself. I was just scared.

The policewoman remained implacable.

I’m not judging you.

‘And it bothers me that the girl didn’t fight back,’ Amy told me once. She wasn’t looking at me: she was just staring into the distance between her toes, moving them slightly beneath the duvet. We always had these conversations in the middle of the night, with an emergency lamp flicked on to wipe away the nightmares.

She said, ‘I think she should have done, maybe.’

‘I don’t think she should.’

‘You don’t?’

‘No.’

What an impossible question. I just said what I thought might help.