All in the Mind (8 page)

He was done, his final grunt followed by a snarl as he put his face right against hers and pretended to spit. He slid out of her, wiped himself with his shirt tail, did up his trousers, stood over her, made to hit her but pulled back, then laughed and left the room. She lay
there
, tears now flowing, then heard the door to the flat close quietly as her daughter came running towards her.

She was referred to Professor Sturrock by one of the GPs helping with his research programme on asylum seekers and refugees. She was plagued by nightmares in which the rapist and his accomplice reappeared, and she and Lirim had not had sex since the attack.

For all the talk of rape during the Kosovo war, Arta had never given any real thought to the consequences of it before. Rape was something best dealt with by being content that one never had to deal with it.

Once, in a cafe in Priština, her mother had pointed out a young woman with a son who was known to have been fathered by a Serb soldier who had raped her inside a mosque. Arta had been interested enough to watch the interaction between mother and son, and had a sensation somewhere close to pleasure on seeing how the boy so clearly enjoyed his mother’s touch and company. The young woman looked little more than a teenager yet was clearly comfortable with the mechanics of motherhood, the juggling of the various objects her son was playing with, the challenge of keeping him from her hot drink even when he grabbed for her, the skilful use of a smile or small talk to defuse any embarrassment if he ran into a waitress. Yet, the young girl had surely hoped to raise a family through the love of a husband, not a soldier’s hatred for her and her race. Would she ever now be able to find a man willing to love not just her, but her mixed-race son created by the sperm of a grunting brute cheered on by his friends and fellow conquerors? It looked to Arta as though the girl was able to separate love for her son from hatred for his father. But could a woman really love a child half made by hate and evil in the same way as she would a son fathered in love?

That was as far as she ever got in her reflections on rape. She had a new life now. England was her home, and Priština a place she visited once a year, each time feeling less of a desire to go back to settle, as she used to imagine she would.

Once she was a rape victim herself, she thought of little else but the consequences of it. She was tormented by questions. Had Besa
suffered
lasting damage as a result of what happened, or would she be able to forget, provided the reminders were taken away? What was her husband really feeling beneath the attempts to sympathise and support her? Did he feel at fault in not having been there to protect her? Was there a part of him that felt she should have been able to fight off her attacker, cry for help, take greater risks than she had to alert neighbours and passers-by on the walkway outside their front door? Would he ever be able to make love to her again without thinking that someone else had been there and hurt the only woman he had ever truly loved? Would she? And finally, the question that took her to Professor Sturrock’s brown leather armchair on the sixth floor of the Le Gassick wing at the Prince Regent Hospital: would she ever be able to sleep again, without the rapist intruding night after night into her dreams?

As she sat on the bus, desperately trying to recollect details from the dreams of the last week, she calculated that the rapist had entered her subconscious on every night but one. He had raped her twice, once on Sunday, in a muddy field in pouring rain, with Arta feeling she was sinking into the ground, and she wanted the sun to come out and bake the mud into a coffin shape and take her to her death; and the second time on Tuesday, when he raped her in the hallway, watched by his accomplice, Besa and Lirim. Yet she was just as scared by his presence in the dreams where he didn’t rape her, where he just looked and smirked and insulted her.

Professor Sturrock had told her his task was to help her to accept what had happened, to help her to believe her life could be good again, persuade her that, with time, the memory and the pain could fade. But no matter how many times he told her there was no shame attached to what had happened, she felt it.

They talked about the kind of dreams she’d had before the rape. She struggled to recall any in detail. In so far as she had a recurring dream, it was of their journey to England, where they were carrying all their possessions in canvas bags, climbing a long, stony hill, reaching the summit only to find that it wasn’t the summit at all but a short plateau before the hill stretched upwards again, ahead of them a single
file
of humanity fleeing fear and persecution, their certain knowledge of the reality of both sufficient to keep their feet shuffling forward. Alban was thirsty but she had no milk or water to give him.

‘Did you ever reach England?’ Professor Sturrock asked.

‘Not in the dreams,’ she said. ‘Only in real life.’

‘So life can be better than our dreams,’ he suggested.

Arta knew that her homework this week was not as good as either of them would want it to be. She preferred to type it up and email it to him, but today was still scribbling in her large handwriting as the bus ground its way into the centre of town. She was always nervous on the bus, especially the first part of the journey from the Elephant, worried that some of her friends might see her. They knew what had happened to her, and had been as supportive as they could be, but there was a limit to what friends could do. In any event, she didn’t like to talk to them about it, especially now that a little time had passed, and she didn’t want anyone but Lirim and her GP to know that she had weekly sessions with a psychiatrist. Should she bump into anyone she knew, they would ask her where she was going, just to be polite, and she would feel she had to say something truthful. She thought that ‘into town’ would be OK, but then they might ask ‘what to do?’ and she’d feel obliged to say she was going for a medical appointment, taking the conversation down routes she didn’t want to go.

Last week, Professor Sturrock had said to her that it was possible the nightmares were recurring because, even though women knew that rape existed as a phenomenon, particularly where she came from, there was no part of her basic belief system that could incorporate such a terrible thing even in theory, let alone in practice as a victim. So the rapist’s constant appearance in her dreams was a reminder not just of how awful and traumatic the attack had been, but also that she was a good, decent person with good, decent values. The basic vision she had of herself was as a devoted wife and mother. The rapist must not be allowed to take that from her. He credited her too with being a great survivor, who had come through dreadful experiences in making her way to Britain, and she had to draw on those qualities
as
a survivor in how she responded to what had happened to her. But he had also said that so long as she allowed her life to be dominated by bad memories, the chances of a good life slimmed down. He had said it kindly, but it felt harsh at the time.

He had asked her to plot any changes in the rapist’s appearance and behaviour in her dreams. The bus had slowed to a halt and was waiting for traffic lights to turn from red to green. Arta closed her eyes, and tried hard to think. When he raped her in Sunday’s dream, he had a knife and he was wearing the balaclava. When he raped her on Tuesday, he was wearing the balaclava, but he had no knife. She thought it possible that he hadn’t grunted so much either. It also helped that she could see her daughter and husband who, though immobile and seemingly unable to help, had love in their eyes, almost as if they saw only her, not what was happening to her. She opened her eyes and wrote it all down, until the bus braked and she dropped her notebook.

The taxi had arrived early for Matthew and Celia Noble. It was one of their regular drivers, Alan, who turned up, which meant they couldn’t really talk to each other much about what lay ahead. They just gave him a postcode, which he tapped into his satnav console.

‘It’s got the Prince Regent Hospital coming up,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Celia. ‘We’re going to a shop just round the corner.’ She slid her hand over to touch Matthew, who was staring out of the window, wondering if he would ever have sex with Angela again.

He looked back on the two affairs as unfortunate accidents really. He had reached a point in his professional life where he was established, knew what he was doing, did it reasonably well and had more or less given up thinking he would ever be anything more than a good, solid, middle-aged, jobbing barrister who could make a tidy living without ever becoming the star QC he had once thought he might be. Their two children had left home, one to university, one to ‘travelling’, and though he missed them, a little, he didn’t get much sense that they missed him or Celia, so he felt freed from many of the emotional stresses they once put upon him.

He had quite fancied Madeleine, the first of his two adventures, but no more than he did plenty of other women who flitted in and out of his radar. She was nothing special in the physical stakes: a few years younger than his wife, a bit slimmer, but her face was nowhere near as striking, nor her mind as sharp. She didn’t even make him laugh very much.

There was nothing that he could remotely term magical in the sexual encounters they enjoyed. ‘Enjoyed’ was as high as he would put it. He was only a few weeks into the affair when he wanted out of it. He wondered if he hadn’t deliberately gone for someone not too attractive, so that he wouldn’t be drawn in too deeply, and would be able to end it without too much pain on either side of the ledger. The problem was that, even before he got to that stage, Celia found out, in circumstances that were cruelly unlucky.

Celia worked three days a week as the assistant catering manager at the offices of a rival law firm. Though she had a second-class degree in fine art, she had been a full-time wife and mother for most of their marriage and it was only when the first of their children left home that she asked Matthew to help her find something to do to get her out of the house a bit more. She had no relevant experience in catering other than running a small household, but Matthew was a close friend of the head of the divorce specialists, Durrants, who agreed to take her on. Once she got the hang of it, she loved it.

Her discovery of the affair with Madeleine resulted from the simple fact that the combined volume of a flushing toilet, a running tap and a ringing mobile phone is louder than the turning of the key in a front door, the closing of said door, and the movement of feet on carpet. Celia had left for work at 8.10, forgoing a goodbye kiss because Matthew was in the downstairs loo, reading
The Times
. Overall, he had preferred the newspaper when it was a broadsheet, he was thinking, even though a tabloid was a lot easier to read when sitting on the toilet. ‘Goodbye, darling, see you tonight,’ she had shouted, and as he heard the front door close, he took his mobile phone from his trouser pocket, and sent Madeleine a short text message. ‘
Safe to call xxx
.’

Madeleine tended to respond to texts with an immediate call, one of the signs that had suggested to Matthew that she might be becoming more intense about their affair than he had ever intended. With that thought very much in mind, and with it an accompanying sense of disappointment, and slight dread at the day ahead, he flushed the toilet, then walked the four steps to the sink to wash his hands. It was now 8.11. As the toilet gurgled away, and as he washed his hands under the cold tap, his phone rang.

Unbeknown to Matthew, at the moment he was pressing the answer button on his phone to silence the final ring, Celia was turning her key in the front-door lock, having come back for a letter she had forgotten to post. Worse, she was passing the door as he uttered the words, ‘Listen, Maddie, here’s a plan. I have a case first thing, but it won’t even see out the morning, so what do you say we meet for an early lunch, at the little Italian we went to last Tuesday, one course, quick as you like, then back to the flat, and I promise you, by the time we’re finished, you will be in no doubt how much I love you.’ Then she opened it.

Matthew was so shocked he dropped his phone. When he picked it up, he told Madeleine that he was cancelling lunch. ‘Something’s come up,’ he said. Half an hour later, he ended the affair by text. ‘
Celia heard us talking. I’ve promised her it’s over. Sorry
.’

He felt that, if he could last the first twenty-four hours without being thrown out, he would be able to make it through. He could live with being ejected from the marital bed for a while, and with the kids away, he had plenty of spare rooms to choose from, but he positively did not want to be kicked out of the house. Matthew was not far off the truth when he said to Celia that there was nothing much to the affair, that it was classic midlife crisis stuff, he had been flattered into it, now wished it had never happened, and how it made him want to be with Celia for the rest of his life, which all being well could be another three decades or so.

The second affair lasted longer than the first, its intensity was stronger, the sex more joyous and there was even a brief moment when he really believed that he would happily end his marriage for
a
future with Angela. She was the junior brief for the defence in a case where Matthew was prosecuting two young Turks charged with beating up a minicab driver. The second he set eyes on her, across the corridor as he walked towards the courtroom, he was possessed by a desire to know her. She was tall, with long brown hair and green eyes and a smile that mixed mischief with warmth. The case lasted four days and throughout he couldn’t have cared less how he was viewed by the judge or the jury. He was performing for her alone. He was not known for being sociable at the Bar, but he engineered several meetings between the prosecution and defence teams so that he could get closer to her. By the time the case ended, with a guilty verdict, which had given him more pleasure than any verdict he had ever secured, because she
must
have been impressed by the way he secured it, he felt he had met her often enough to ask her out for lunch. The moment she said yes, he knew they were going to have a totally inappropriate, highly unprofessional relationship.