Broken (7 page)

I begin my search with James William Cutler. Battery, burglary, grand larceny, sexual assault - a real animal. Just looking at his photos makes my stomach turn over. His facebook page hasn’t been set to private, so I have several pages of information about his life, where he works, where he went to school, who his friends are, what kind of things he likes, the posts he’s commented on and the events or parties he’s gone to. He doesn’t look like a gangbanger, he looks like a weasel.

The internet is an incredibly powerful data mining tool, and within less than ten minutes, I have his home address, his rap sheet, his mobile phone number, almost everything down to his last known whereabouts.

We live in an age where everything about
us
is accessible. We volunteer that information for free, because we are led to believe it makes us happier, our lives, by turn, less complicated. Privacy doesn’t exist in the same way now as it did even ten years ago. After Alice was murdered, I went through the process of erasing her from the internet in the wake of a glut of newspaper articles and media coverage about the story.

They were digging up and using private and personal information that they had absolutely no consent by any of us that knew her to publish. It took me a long time to finally remove every trace of her I could, and if Martin hadn’t have been there to help me, there would have been no way I could have done it at all. A week after that I did the same for myself.

Traces and echoes of a person that no longer exist, both in my memory and by extension the collective memory around us they call the internet. Alice, myself, everyone else who ever had an online personality and is now no longer with us.

I killed my facebook account because I couldn’t control all of it. I still can’t control who wants to remember Alice, but I can control my own access to that information.

I don’t want to forget about Alice completely. I couldn't, even if I did. She forms as much a part of me as any physical element of my body. It’s like she’s another sense, always there and activated by trigger responses i’m not consciously in control of. I don’t want my memories erased, but I don’t want to share them with anyone either who can use them against me.

James William Cutler takes less time than I expect to find. I recognize him instantly from the photos he has on his facebook account, the others I found with a simple google search for his name. My heart leaps to my throat when he passes the car I’m sat in, close enough for me to reach out and touch him. This could be the man who raped and killed my wife. This could be the man that destroyed my life.

The gun is in my lap, already loaded, squashed between my thighs and hidden by a newspaper I pretend to read. I don’t have a plan other than to watch, to see him, to see how I would feel seeing him, to work out what to do. I know immediately that I’m out of my depth. I bury that feeling and concentrate on the other one. The darkness consuming me. The rage I feel, the fear Alice felt.

Cutler is alone. He strides confidently past the car, crosses the road and heads towards his apartment block. He doesn’t see me or if he does, he doesn’t make it apparent. He has no reason to believe his life’s in danger. Less than half a minute later he has disappeared inside, and I’ve lost him to the inner workings of the building.

I’ve been parked here for only an hour and a half. Sixty four days and the police have done nothing, I’ve spent a couple of weeks collecting names and less than two hours to find one of them. Maybe the police have already checked him out, but maybe the police didn’t ask the right questions either. That crosses my mind. Cutler may turn out to be innocent of my wife’s murder, but he’s not innocent of sexual assault. He has that on his sheet in block capital letters. Someone’s pain is his responsibility. He’s violated someone’s intimacy and they’ll never get that back.

I touch the gun just to make sure it’s there, and the cold steel of the barrel responds accordingly.

If he doesn’t come out again, I’m going in. If he doesn’t come out again, he may never do so.

1
7 November 2015. Fifty one days after.

It’s my first day back at work, and I feel even more nervous than I did on the very first day I started here. Alex has allowed me to begin slowly, just so I can adjust myself to the change. So I can ease myself back in to normality.

Knowing Alex, I half expect him to announce my return by standing on a chair in the middle of the office floor and encouraging me to do the same. Thankfully, he doesn’t. Thankfully, despite the time I’ve been away, despite the vagueness over the reasons for doing so, not much seems to have changed. I get enthusiastic welcomes back from the team, but after that, it’s as if I never left. It reminds me of the group therapy session, and the difference between the fear of telling my story, and having that story then told. People move on quickly. People seem to adapt to change much more than we ever expect. I wonder if I have too, about what happened to me. I wonder if now, almost two months after it happened, when I think of what he did to me, I underestimate the pain he caused me, or under appreciate exactly the trauma he caused me to go through.

We have a date for the case. Dad has dedicated himself to this cause completely, almost to the point of consumption, and has managed to apply pressure in exactly the right way to the right part of the system for the right amount of time in order to have the case rushed through as a priority.

January the 26th. That’s just over two months from now, which according to him, is the best result we could have expected. It’s not the best result I could have expected, but I don’t think that matters to him.

I’m back at my old desk, the bright eyed temp girl they’ve had in to replace me moved to the work space in the corner of the office used exclusively for hot desking. We do the hand-over together, and already I feel like I’m out of my depth. She’s newly graduated, ambitious, clever, I feel a spike of concern for my position, and wonder if she secretly resents me for coming back.

I spend a couple of hours clearing out my emails, my heart chilling when I read the regular email reminders for the Friday night social get togethers. Fox and Hounds, Upended Spoon, the Twisted Sister. Bowling, roller discos, rape.

In the end I blanket delete them all. I delete every single email from that day and every single email I’ve ever received about going out after work on Friday, but not before I’ve read an email chain between Fraser and I about that night that nearly makes me cry.

Fraser: Can’t wait to get wasted!

Me: Me too. Is it time to go home yet, I’m bored!

Fraser: Any plans for the weekend?

Me: I’m going to be sat on my sofa, chilling the fuck out!

Fraser and I used to flirt with each other when I first started. We even went on a couple of dates. After that fizzled out we became close friends. I’ve kind of pushed him away a little over the last couple of months because of what happened. Dating seems like a million miles away from where I am now. I don’t know whether it’s something I’ll ever feel like doing again. It’s normal, that’s what they say at least. Resounding effects: Loss of libido, depression, feelings of guilt, lack of self worth, disassociation. Fucked up life.

Jesus, I used think about sex all the time before it happened, and now, now when I think about it, which admittedly is hardly ever, I can’t not think about
him.
I feel so lonely sometimes. Looking around the office, being with people, I get reminded of that. It’s paradoxical, but here, with other people, I can’t help but get a real sense of my own solitude, as though I couldn’t see it before without something to put it into context. I haven’t had someone to connect to intimately for a couple of years, and now, because of what has happened to me, I can’t help but think it might not happen at all.

I don’t know why I’m thinking about this so much. I guess it’s because things are moving on so quickly around me and I’m struggling to keep up. I don’t want to get left behind, the broken doll left on the shelf because she doesn’t work properly. I don’t want to be in this situation forever, on my own forever.

Yeah I’m here at work, and there are people around me, and I have friends and family, which is more than can be said for a lot of people, and I have the group therapy sessions in which I can connect at some level with people who can empathize because they’ve experienced the same thing, but even with all that said, it’s not the same thing. The problem is letting someone else get close to me, in order to be able to give me exactly what I need to stop me feeling that way. And that takes courage and trust, neither of which I feel like I truly have.

2
4 November 2015. Fifty eight days after.

Ethan is not at the session today. There is an empty chair where he usually sits, and a hole in the group more noticeable than a hole in the roof would be with rain coming through it. We wait for ten minutes to begin the class, all a little unsure if we should proceed at all. Katy calls his mobile, but he doesn’t respond.

“Maybe he’s gone on holiday”, Patricia says, “Didn’t he mention something about family back west?”

“He could be doing something for his birthday, you know as a kind of belated birthday present”, Paul adds.

We spend the first half an hour discussing his possible whereabouts, before moving on from that and beginning the session. It never really gets going. It seems like Ethan is the glue that gels everyone else together. Without him, they all seem a bit lost, Katy included.

I tell them about the court date, because it’s bugging me, and I want to know whether anyone else has already gone through what I’m going to have to do in the new year. Patricia is the only girl who took her attacker to court and spoke up in her defense against him.

“Seeing him there was the hardest thing”, she says. “The lawyers try and trip you up, you know, mess around with what you’re saying about where you were and shit like that, how much you’d been drinking and what went on before consent wise, but that was a piece of cake compared to being stood there in the same room, his eyes on you like they must have been when he was doing it. My trial went on for three weeks because he was a sick sonofabtich and there was a lot of stuff he was accused of doing. It got easier every day, but it still wasn’t no walk in the park, that’s for sure.”

Patricia was raped on her way back from a night out like me. Dragged into the bushes at the edge of the park and forced into the ground with a knife across her throat. She still has the scar. The guy that was responsible? Someone who had tried it on with her at the club she’d spent the evening at, and she’d turned down. It was as simple as that. If she wasn’t going to agree to giving it to him, he was going to take it himself.

“I didn’t want to, but I had to go. They sent him down for what we said about him. Plenty of the other girls didn’t take to the stand, but there wasn’t any DNA evidence on me, so I had to talk and tell my side of the story. I was glad I did too. That was the first time apart from to my sister and Mom. I came here after that case went to trial. He denied it of course, until he was red in the face. Said I’d agreed to it, that we left the club together, that it was my idea we fucked in the park-.” She excuses herself for swearing and it makes the group smile. “-They’ll say anything to get away, be prepared for that. I heard so many excuses I couldn’t have made them up myself.”

Her attacker got six years for what he did. He was convicted of two counts of rape, the nine other charges reduced to either sexual assault or thrown out completely. On appeal, his sentence was reduced to three years, and after serving only a year and a half of his sentence, he was let out for good behaviour. He still lives in the area, you can look him up on the sexual offenders register for Pittsburgh.

“Sometimes I wonder if our system is enough, you know? We talk about how we feel and what we’re going to do to rebuild our lives and shit like that, but we never seem to talk about how we’re gonna get justice for what happened. You think a year is justice enough for what he did to me and all those other girls? Hell, no. Whereas here I am, over two years later, and I’m still just as fucked up as I was the day after it happened. I can’t get a relationship, I lost my job and I can’t get another one, I’m on medication, I can’t sleep, I have bad dreams, I still can’t go out at night on my own, and on top of all of that, I’ve got to think about what I’ll do if I ever bump into that sonofabitch in the street.”

“You’ve got us”, Katy reminds her, and takes her hand to give it a squeeze. Patricia smiles timidly.

“Yeah”, she says. “You lot have been my rocks this last few months.”

Later, when the session is over, she comes over and apologizes to me. “I didn’t want to make you feel bad, I realized after saying it I might have given you the chills.”

I tell her it’s ok, that I’d prefer her to be honest.

“Just make sure you got people around you to support you”, she says, giving my hand a squeeze now in the same way Katy had done to her earlier. “We all gotta stick together.”

I walk to the intersection thinking about Ethan. I hope he’s ok, wherever he is. The more I think about him, the less I find I have to think about myself. The clock is ticking. Christmas will come and go in a heartbeat, and then it’ll be upon me. January 26. Doomsday. The day I face my attacker.

2
December 2015. Sixty six days after.

Christmas is coming. Snowmen and tacky lights and fucking platitudes. Although we haven’t got snow yet, it’s forecast to hit before the end of the year. I can sense the approach of it at work. The winding down before the clock begins again. It’s a time of contradictions, where despite awful weather, severe lack of sunlight, and pressure to conform, people seem happier, more cheerful, more human. People dress up, take themselves less seriously, are more inclined to help others. It’s literally the season of goodwill.

I feel like shit today. Christmas exists everywhere except my own apartment. My own head. I miss my old life. The one before all of this began. My clock started again sixty six days ago, and it feels like I’ll never be able to pass a day without thinking about him.