Sophie Hannah: Hurting Distance

Sorry, a survivor. Though that word makes me feel uneasy. At no point did anybody try to kill me. It makes sense to talk about survivors in the context of a plane crash or a nuclear explosion: situations in which it might be expected that everyone involved would die. But in most cases rape is not a life-threatening event, so the sense of rare achievement that the word ‘survivor’ conveys seems patronising—a sort of false consolation.

When I first logged on to your site, I hoped that something I read there would make me feel better, but the opposite has happened. Why do so many of your correspondents use the same cloying vocabulary: thriving, telling and healing, smiling through tears, rising from the ashes, etc.? It reminds me of the lyrics of a bad heavy-metal album. Nobody says that they do not ever expect to get over what happened to them.

This will sound terrible, but I am actually jealous of many of the people whose stories are posted on your site: the ones with insensitive, demanding boyfriends, the ones who drank too much on first dates. At least they can make sense of their ordeals. My attacker was someone I had never seen before and have not seen since, someone who kidnapped me in broad daylight and knew every detail about me: my name, my job, where I lived. I don’t know how he knew. I don’t know why he chose me, where he took me or who all the other people were. I will not go into any more detail than that. Perhaps if I did, you’d understand why I feel so strongly about what I’m going to say next.

On the ‘What Is Rape?’ page of your site, you list a number of definitions, the last of which is ‘any sexually intimidating behaviour’. You go on to say, ‘No physical contact needs to have taken place—sometimes an inappropriate look or comment is enough to make a woman feel violated. ’ When I read that, I wanted to hit whoever wrote it.

I know you’ll disapprove of this letter and me and everything I’ve said, but I’m sending it anyway. I think it’s important to point out that not all rape victims have the same mindset, vocabulary and attitudes.

Part I

2006

1

Monday, April 3

I COULD EXPLAIN, if you were here to listen. I am breaking my promise to you, the only one you ever asked me to make. I’m sure you remember. There was nothing casual about your voice when you said, ‘I want you to promise me something.’

‘What?’ I asked, propping myself up on one elbow, burning my skin on the yellow nylon sheet in my eagerness to be upright, attentive. I was desperate to please you. You ask for so little, and I’m always looking for small, subtle ways to give you more. ‘Anything!’ I said, laughing, deliberately extravagant. A promise is the same as a vow, and I wanted there to be vows between us, binding us.

My exuberance made you smile, but not for long. You’re so grave when we’re in bed together. You think it’s a tragedy that you’ll soon have to leave, and that is how you always look: like a man preparing for calamity. I usually cry after you’ve gone (no, I’ve never told you, because I’m damned if I’m going to encourage your mournful streak), but while we’re together in our room I’m as high as if I were on strong, mind-altering drugs. It seems impossible that we will ever be apart, that the moment will end. And in some ways it doesn’t. When I go home, when I’m making pasta in my kitchen or chiselling Roman numerals in my workshop, I’m not there really. I’m still in room eleven at the Traveltel, with its hard, synthetic, rust-coloured carpet that feels like the bristles of a toothbrush under your feet and its pushed-together twin beds with mattresses that aren’t mattresses at all but thick, orange foam mats, the sort that used to cover the floor of the gymnasium at my secondary school.

Our room. I knew for sure that I loved you, that it wasn’t just infatuation or physical attraction, when I heard you say to the receptionist, ‘No, it has to be room eleven, same as last time. We need the same room every time.’ Need, not want. Everything is urgent for you; nothing is casual. You never sprawl on the faded, bobbly sofa, or take your shoes off and put your feet up. You sit upright, fully clothed, until we’re about to get into bed.

Later, when we were alone, you said, ‘I’m worried it’s going to be sordid, meeting in a shitty motel. At least if we stick to one room, it’ll feel more homely.’ Then you spent the next fifteen minutes apologising because you couldn’t afford to take me somewhere grander. Even then (how long had we known each other? Three weeks?) I knew better than to offer to share the cost.

I remember nearly everything you’ve said to me over the past year. Maybe if I could bring to mind the right phrase, the crucial line, it would lead me straight to you. I do not really believe this, but I keep going through it all in my mind, just in case.

‘Well?’ I prodded your shoulder with my finger. ‘Here I am, a naked woman offering to promise you anything, and you’re ignoring me?’

‘This isn’t a joke, Naomi.’

‘I know. I’m sorry.’

You like to do everything slowly, even speaking. It makes you angry if you’re rushed. I don’t think I’ve ever made you laugh, or even seen you laugh properly, though you often talk about laughing—in the pub with Sean and Tony. ‘I laughed till I cried,’ you say. ‘I laughed till the tears were pouring down my face.’

You turned to me and asked, ‘Do you know where I live?’

I blushed. Damn, I’d been rumbled. You’d spotted that I was obsessed with you, collecting any fact or detail I could get my hands on. All week I had been chanting your address in my head, sometimes even saying it or singing it aloud while I was working.

‘You saw me writing it down last time, didn’t you? On that form for the receptionist. I noticed you looking.’

‘Three Chapel Lane, Spilling. Sorry. Would you rather I didn’t know?’

‘In a way,’ you said. ‘Because this has to be completely safe. I’ve told you that.’ You sat up then too, and put on your glasses. ‘I don’t want it to end. I want it to last for a long time, for as long as I last. It has to be a hundred percent safe, completely separate from the rest of my life.’

I understood at once, and nodded. ‘But . . . now the Traveltel receptionist knows your address too,’ I said. ‘What if they send a bill or something?’

‘Why would they? I always pay when I leave.’

Does it make it easier, having an administrative ritual to complete before you go, a small ceremony that takes place on the boundary of our life and your other life? I wish I had an equivalent task to perform before leaving. I always stay the night (though I allow you to think it’s only sometimes, not every time) and march briskly out of the Traveltel the next morning, barely stopping to smile at the receptionist. It feels too informal, somehow, too quick and easy.

‘There’s no paperwork to send,’ you said. ‘Anyway, Juliet doesn’t even open her own post, let alone mine.’ I noticed a slight vibration in your lower jaw, a tightening around your mouth. It always happens when you mention Juliet. I am collecting details about her, too, though I wish I weren’t. Many of them involve a ‘let alone’: she doesn’t know how to turn on a computer, let alone use the Internet. She never answers the phone, let alone rings anyone herself.

She sounds like a freak, I have wanted to say so often, and stopped myself. I shouldn’t allow my envy of her to make me cruel.

You kissed me lightly before saying, ‘You mustn’t ever come to the house, or ring me there. If Juliet saw you, if she found out in that way, it’d break her.’ I love the way you use words. Your speech is more poetic, grander than mine. Everything I say is heavy with mundane detail. You were staring past me, and I turned, half expecting, from your expression, to see a misty grey-and-purple mountain range wreathed in white cloud instead of a beige plastic kettle labelled ‘Rawndesley East Services Traveltel’, one that regularly contributes little granules of limescale to our hot drinks.