Sophie Hannah - Hurting Distance

Waterhouse doesn’t believe me. He probably thinks I’m too composed. I hate the way everybody expects you to emote in public. ‘Why tell such a lie?’ He says it in the way he might to a suspect.

‘I wasn’t sure I wanted to report the rape at first.’ I keep using it, the word I’ve avoided for three years. It gets easier with each repetition. ‘I wanted to scare him—Robert Haworth. I thought a visit from the police, with my name mentioned, would terrify the life out of him.’

Waterhouse stares at me in silence. He is waiting for me to crumble. ‘So why the change of plan?’ he asks eventually.

‘I realised all my other ideas were stupid. Taking the law into my own hands . . .’

‘The thirtieth of March 2003 was a long time ago. Why wait until yesterday?’

‘Three years is nothing. Ask anyone who’s been raped. I was in shock for a long time. I was in no fit state to make decisions.’ I answer each question quickly, like a robot, and accept my own congratulations for having had the sense not to put myself through this ordeal three years ago.

Reluctantly, Waterhouse pulls a chair out from under the table and sits down opposite me. ‘You were more convincing yesterday than you are now,’ he says. ‘Has Mr Haworth given you the brush-off, is that it? Is this your way of punishing him?’

‘No. I—’

‘Are you aware that falsely accusing someone of rape is a serious criminal offence?’ He keeps his eyes on his sheet of paper. It is covered in writing, the smallest handwriting I’ve ever seen. I can’t read any of it.

I am about to answer him, but I stop myself. Why should I let him fire question after question at me? He’s got into a rhythm now, like someone throwing a tennis ball at a wall. I’m entitled to more respect and sensitivity. I am lying about one detail only. If I removed you from my rape story and put in a man whose name I don’t know, a man whose face I still see clearly in body-jolting, sweat-soaked nightmares, it would be a hundred percent true. Which means I deserve better treatment than this.

‘Yes, I’m aware,’ I tell him. ‘And you should be aware that I’m going to make a complaint about you if you don’t stop looking at me and talking to me like I’m shit on your shoe. I’m doing my best to be straight with you. I’ve apologised for lying yesterday and I’ve explained why I did it. I’m here to report a more serious crime than falsely accusing someone of rape, since we all know there’s a pecking order, and I think you should start concentrating on that instead of whatever prejudices you’ve got against me.’

He looks up. I can’t tell if he’s angry, daunted, startled.

‘Why don’t I make life easier for both of us?’ I say. ‘I can prove I’m telling the truth. There’s an organisation called Speak Out and Survive—they’ve got a website: speakoutandsurvive—all one word—dot org dot uk. On the page called “Survivors’ Stories”, there’s a letter I wrote, dated May the eighteenth 2003. The stories are numbered. Mine’s number seventy-two. I signed it only with my initials: N.J.’

Waterhouse is writing all this down. When he’s finished, he says, ‘Wait here,’ and leaves the room, letting the door bang shut. I am alone in the small blue cage.

In the silence, my head fills with your words. DC Waterhouse is nothing to me. He’s a stranger. I remember what you said about strangers, on the day we met, after you’d taken my side in an argument between me and a man named Bruce Doherty—another stranger, an idiot. ‘You don’t know him and he doesn’t know you,’ you said. ‘Therefore he can’t hurt you. It’s the people we’re closest to who can hurt us the most.’ You looked disturbed, as if you were trying to shut something out of your mind, something unwelcome. I didn’t know you well enough then to ask if you’d been badly hurt, and by whom. ‘Believe me, I know,’ you said. ‘The people you love are within hurting distance, close range. Strangers aren’t.’

Thinking of my own experience, I said vehemently, ‘You’re telling me a stranger can’t hurt me?’

‘If the pain isn’t personal, it isn’t as bad. It’s not about you, or the other person, or the relationship between the two of you. It’s more like a natural disaster, an earthquake or a flood. If I was drowning in a flood, I’d call it bad luck, but it wouldn’t be a betrayal. Chance and circumstance have no free will. They can’t betray you.’

Now, for the first time, I see what you mean. DC Waterhouse is behaving in the way he is because he has to, because it’s his job to doubt everything I tell him. It’s not about me. He doesn’t know me at all.

I wonder what you would say about strangers who are kind, who smile at me in the street and say, ‘Sorry, love,’ when they bump into me by accident. To anyone who’s experienced deliberate brutality, the slightest kind word comes as a shock forever after. I’m so pathetically grateful even for the small, meaningless kindnesses that cost people nothing; grovellingly thankful that someone thought me worth a smile or a ‘sorry’. I think it’s the shock of the contrast; I’m amazed that offhand generosity and offhand evil can exist in the same world and barely be aware of one another.

If the police find you safe and well, they will tell you what I’ve accused you of, all the sordid details. Will you believe me if I say I made it up? Will you understand that I only blackened your name in desperation, because I was so worried about you?

I wonder, not for the first time, if I ought to change all the specifics of the attack, so that the story I tell DC Waterhouse, if he ever lets me, is completely different from what really happened. I decide I can’t. I can only be confident if I have a bedrock of fact to support me. I haven’t slept properly for days. All my joints ache and my brain feels as if it’s been grated. I haven’t got the energy to invent rapes that never happened.

And no made-up story could be worse than my real one. If I can only persuade DC Waterhouse that I’m telling the truth, looking for you will leap straight to the top of his to-do list.

After about ten minutes the door opens. He edges back into the room, carrying several sheets of paper. Eyeing me warily, he asks, ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

I am encouraged by this, but pretend to be annoyed. ‘I see. So now that I’ve proved myself, I get offered refreshments. Is there a sliding scale? Tea for rape, sparkling water for sexual assault, tap water for a mugging?’

His expression hardens. ‘I’ve read what you wrote. What you say you wrote.’

‘You don’t believe me?’ He’s more stubborn than I thought. I prepare to go into battle. I like a good fight, especially when I know I can win. ‘How would I know it was there if I hadn’t written it? You think women who haven’t been raped cruise rape websites for fun, and then when they find a story that happens to have their initials at the bottom—’

‘“My attacker was someone I had never seen before and have not seen since,”’ Waterhouse reads aloud from one of the pages in his hand. He’s printed out my letter. I baulk, uncomfortable with the idea that it’s in the room with us.

I speak quickly, before he can read me any more of my own words. ‘I didn’t know who he was at the time. I found out later. I saw him again. Like I told you, I bumped into him at Rawndesley East Services on Thursday the twenty-fourth of March last year.’

Waterhouse is shaking his head, flicking through his papers. ‘You didn’t say that,’ he contradicts me flatly. ‘You said you first met Mr Haworth on that date, but not where you met him.’

‘Well, that’s where I met him. At the service station. But it wasn’t the first time. The first time was when he raped me.’