‘Is it too weird hearing about me, you know, doing adult things?’ I ask her when she doesn’t lift her eyes from the ground and the rippling in her jaw doesn’t stop or ease off at all. I don’t say ‘sex’ because that would probably traumatise her more than she already looks.
She shakes her head, attempts to smile but it dies before it has a chance to get a foothold on her lips. ‘No,’ she says quietly, still staring at the scrabbly ground beneath our feet. ‘Not at all. I’m glad you told me.’ She lifts her head and, despite her upset, she gazes adoringly at me. She used to do that all the time. She would look at me with such adulation I was sometimes embarrassed. She was quite clear and open and blatant about how much she loved me and Con, which was all the more surprising given what she’d hidden about herself all these years. ‘I’m sorry it happened.’
‘I’m glad I told you, actually, because now that I’ve said it out loud, it doesn’t seem to be as big a deal as I thought it was,’ I say.
Mum’s brow crinkles quite dramatically. ‘In what way?’ she asks as though she suddenly doesn’t understand the language I’m speaking.
‘I mean, it’s felt like something huge sometimes, but talking about it, I can see now that it’s just a case of getting our wires crossed.’
She nods thoughtfully at that, as though the language she didn’t understand is slowly filtering through to the area of her brain where she can translate it. ‘Did he apologise?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It was a total misunderstanding, so did he apologise for doing that to you?’
‘Doing what to me?’
Mum inhales deeply, the agony ripples across her jaw and face again and she breathes out deeply through her barely parted lips. ‘For . . .’ She stops speaking for a moment. ‘For having sex with you without your consent?’
What? Is that what she heard? ‘He didn’t do that,’ I explain. ‘I was totally up for it. Sorry if that’s TMI.’
‘OK, but did you agree to him taking off the condom?’ she asks.
‘No,’ I say.
‘Had you discussed in the past that he could decide to do that at any point in the future when you had sex?’
‘We’d discussed stopping condoms,’ I reply.
‘But had you agreed to it and said that he could do that whenever he chose?’
Without warning, it feels like my head is burning, like it’s just spontaneously combusted and blue-orange flames are leaping high into the air. What is she saying? What is she saying? I shake my blazing head.
‘Did he give you the chance to say no when he did take it off? Did he ask if it was OK? Did he give you the chance to say no? Or did he keep going without checking with you if you were all right with him unilaterally taking such a huge step?’ she asks gently, quietly, devastatingly. Because her words are devastating me. They are taking a sledgehammer to my very being and slamming away chunks of my certainty about the world, about my boyfriend, about my recollection of my life to date. ‘Or did he force you to have unprotected sex and then pretend it was what you wanted afterwards?’ My mother looks like she’s going to cry again. ‘Did he become the victim in that scenario when you mentioned it wasn’t what you wanted or would have agreed to?’
He’d kept hold of my wrists, he’d kept kissing my mouth, he’d kept me pinned and silenced while he did what he did. I feel sick. My head is on fire and there is an ocean of nausea filling up my stomach.
I manage to nod my head as it continues to cremate itself. Yes, he became the victim, the wounded one. I was scared of getting pregnant because he’d forced me to have a type of sex I didn’t want and the whole conversation became about whether I loved him enough.
‘And if it was truly a misunderstanding, a case of getting your wires crossed and him getting caught up in the moment, was he horrified with himself when you told him how you felt? Did he apologise afterwards and promise never to do it again without your explicit say-so?’
I can’t tell her. I can’t tell her that after we agreed to not talk about the baby stuff and my commitment to him, after all of that, he kissed me. Then he climbed on top of me and he entered me and had sex with me again without a condom. I can’t confess that I didn’t want to have sex without contraception again, not that night, not ever, but after the trouble it’d just caused, the argument it’d led to, I couldn’t say no. I just lay there and let him do it.
And I can’t tell her that after that night, he wouldn’t wear condoms even though I never agreed to sex without them. He just didn’t put them on. He would pretend I hadn’t spoken if I asked him to wear one. Even when I made a point of putting one on him as part of foreplay, he would always take it off before penetration. If I tried to move away when he did that, he would kiss me to stop me talking, stroke and caress me while I was under him – all gentle and loving, but all essentially pinning me in place, refusing to let me go until I let him do it to me. The worry about getting pregnant was too much after a while and I had to try to make an appointment to go and get the Pill.
But wasn’t it my fault? I had a voice, I could stand up to unreasonable people at work, stand up to police officers, could argue with people who were rude to me in shops, so why could I never use it with Logan? Even though I had the biggest voice in the world, I couldn’t say anything to the man I loved about him doing something in my body I didn’t want him to.
I slowly rub away the tear that has crawled out of my eye.
‘After the first time we had sex, Marcus . . .’ Mum says his name like she is on unsteady territory, that the mere mention of those six letters in that order would open up the ground and make her tumble down into the bowels of hell. ‘Marcus . . . he drove me home. He was meant to be tutoring me in history after school at school, but he managed to get me to convince him to take me to his house. It was about ten times after that we had sex. And it wasn’t awful, it hurt a little, but I was so confused. I didn’t understand why I was so confused until your aunt Faye told me he wasn’t allowed to do that with me. That it was against the law and it was statutory rape. That all came so much later though. After that first time, he drove me home and dropped me off at the end of the road. I was still really confused because while it hadn’t been terrible, it hadn’t felt good. I’d gone along with it because it was what he wanted.
‘Just as I was walking away, he called me back. And I knew it would all have been worth it then because he was going to tell me he loved me. And more than anything, more than breathing sometimes, I wanted him to love me. And instead of saying he loved me, he told me to go to the doctor for the Pill so I wouldn’t get knocked up.’ Mum reaches up and wipes away a tear that’s sitting in the well of her eye. ‘It’s only now I can see it all clearly. He was in control of everything. It didn’t start when he started to hit me. It started with seemingly little, insignificant things like that – he had decided when we were going to have sex, then he decided that the burden of contraception would be mine because he wouldn’t wear condoms any longer.
‘And I did it. Without question. I started to hide things from my parents, I started to sneak around to meet him, I went to the doctor and got the Pill. And in those days, that wasn’t easy. There was a woman who’d made a big deal about under-sixteens getting the Pill without their parents’ consent and took it to court. Even though she lost her case, the doctors had to ask you a lot of questions to find out if you were competent enough to be having sex and therefore to take the Pill. I was mortified sitting there, lying to the doctor about my boyfriend, saying he was the same age as me. He got me lying for him right from the start.’