Maggie Gee - My Animal Life

I was escorted, as usual, by my four French friends. They had been warier, different since the scene with my father. They warned me about one thing: ‘the boys from Bordeaux’. They weren’t like the boys from St Augulin. I could trust the boys from St Aigulin, évidemment — obviously — but not the others who would come to the fair. I hardly listened, or believed they existed.

But the boys from Bordeaux really were at the fair, and you could pick them out by their knowing look, an air of slight loucheness, the cut of their jeans. My village group no longer seemed so cool. I saw a tall boy with tinted glasses, and he saw me, and perhaps he thought he could pick me out by my knowing look, for my father’s insults had taught me one thing, I was sexual, and people were likely to want me. Whatever he saw, this boy liked me. He saw me on the dodgems, with one of my friends, and I saw him looking, and I looked back. I felt proud, and reckless; I expect I was still angry. I was nearly grown up, I was going to prove it. I could look after myself, couldn’t I?

He was slim, with jeans and a flowered shirt. Soon we were on the dodgems together, then walking round the fair, arm in arm. He had full wet lips. I don’t remember his name, but in his dark glasses he looked mature and gorgeous. Somehow I had left my foursome behind. If I had stayed at the fair they would have found me soon enough, but the Bordeaux Beau had other ideas. ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ he said, and his arm was round my shoulders, hot and exciting, his fingers were stroking the back of my neck. Why not? I thought. It was a warm May evening, the sky was still bright with the afterglow, I would soon be eighteen, I could do what I wanted. Surely no harm could come to me? I can see us now, laughing and walking away, looking confident and conspiratorial. Even as we went I was picturing us, thinking, ‘Here I am with a handsome man, people will be noticing, and wondering where we’re going.’ It added to the tingle of pleasure in my stomach. Nothing had happened to me before, except for Frank Lammas, at my father’s school, and a beautiful boy, a Greek Cypriot, Dino, who’d kissed me at a party that New Year’s Eve, to the strains of the Beatles’ ‘Michele’. But these were mere boys. Now I was with a Frenchman.

‘Let me show you the house where I am staying. We could have a coffee, or a drink,’ he said. That sounded attractive, and grownup. The house was small and white, detached, pleasant. There was no one at home. Did he give me a drink? Soon he was showing me upstairs. I wanted to go, there was no coercion. What did I expect to happen up there? I must have thought that we would kiss. Anything further was beyond my comprehension.

But soon we were kissing on the bed, and he was trying to take my clothes off. Without his shirt he looked lean and young, but without his dark glasses his eyes seemed crossed, and his tongue was enormous and slobbering. I was holding my dress down, and trying to explain. I still wasn’t frightened, something to do, perhaps, with that vulnerable lazy eye, and the almost girlish fullness of his lips.

‘Je suis vierge,’ I said. I am a virgin . ‘Montre-moi ton corps,’ he replied, he begged. Show me your body: show me, show me . I heard noises in the house, and grew anxious; I didn’t want to be discovered up there, perhaps by other French people, respectable French people, not from racy Bordeaux but St Aigulin. He was getting more insistent, and impatient. I resisted, and the kisses were too wet, and after a bit, became boring. He was much less attractive than he had been. I said I wanted to go home. He put on his glasses, but not his shirt, and left the room, saying, ‘Wait a moment.’

And then the real terror began, because he did not return alone, but with a short, fat friend, greasy-looking and brutal. He had a thin line of moustache above his mouth, something alien, not youthful. ‘Je suis conscrit militaire,’ he said. I am a soldier, a military conscript . The tall one nodded, weak, upstaged. I wasn’t going home. The conscript wouldn’t let me. This weekend was his leave. He wanted to have fun. He was going to have fun. ‘Or we will kill you.’

A sick shock of fear as the world turned over. My ribs and stomach crushed together with horror. The room was suddenly a hell, a prison. I had been wicked, and now I would be punished. I had always known that one day I would be killed. Now it had come, the black centre of the nightmare.

The high bed was in the middle of the room, back to the wall, electric light to the left of the bed and overhead, horribly clear. To my right was a window I am sure was uncurtained, so the house cannot have been overlooked. Outside was the night sky, now almost dark, and the green countryside, and somewhere the village, distant lights under the bulging black trees on the horizon, and normal life, and the hotel, and my parents , who were waiting in ignorance for me to come back, and the future, the life that I might have had if I had not come to this small lighted prison. All of it impossibly far away, and I had left it behind for ever. I saw my own death; there was no way out. The tall boy went away, leaving the fat one, telling me he would soon be back.

Why was I immobilised by threats of violence? I think my father should answer that question. Our house had been ruled by threats of violence and actual violence, since we were small. He was not very violent, as these things go; he didn’t have to be, the fear was enough. I never thought, as I would now, of fighting those men, of calling their bluff. Perhaps they would have been ashamed to punch me, as they were not ashamed to touch me when I didn’t want them to. How deeply I was part of my difficult family is shown by the thoughts that ran through my brain like electric shocks, agonising, twitching: my parents would be angry. My father would be shamed. There would be a terrible, final scandal. Though I was facing death, I could still feel guilty.

But as I struggle to remember what actually happened that early summer night in St Aigulin, what that hateful, fat little man did to me, I realise one odd thing that makes me happy: I never considered giving in. Partly, of course, because I was a virgin. I simply wouldn’t have known what to do, or which halfway houses it was tactical to offer. (And maybe, I think now, they didn’t know either. They were Catholics, deep in the Catholic countryside, in 1966, when the pill was very new. Maybe having sex was not something they were used to.)

But killing he was keen on, the little conscript, keen on threatening it, at least, this olive-skinned, lard-faced, stubble-headed man so far from the tall pale handsome Frenchman I had thought, in the rosy glow of sunset, I was choosing. This one had no aura of youth or glamour. He did not smile under his creepy moustache, a black greasy millipede crawling on the sweat. He did not, like the first boy, try to woo me. He was fat and brutal and excited. I remember clearly asking him if he had a sister, or a mother. Perhaps he was wearing a crucifix. He would not admit to having either, he would not talk to me, I was just a body.

The title of this book is My Animal Life , and my feelings for animals are interest and respect, but I remember the dread thought: he’s just an animal . For him I had no soul, no special livingness, no consciousness that had to be regarded. And so, in this hot prison, he abolished me — we abolished each other — so he could harm me. I didn’t see sex: all I saw was death. There was nothing alive, just the end of the road. And that longed-for world outside the window. I do not know how long it went on. I know he didn’t rape me, or damage me physically, he just repeated his dead ultimatum. I do remember that I was crying. And I remember I was praying, as well, small stumps of prayer: please God. Please help me .