if you stay outside, Ali.’ In my own house! Mike was outside, still on the swing seat, head bowed, with Bill, who had also gently urged me away. Bill hadn’t sat down but was standing awkwardly over him. It wasn’t clear if he was guarding Mike or taking care of him. Callum, I guessed, was still passed out on the living room sofa. Cassie hovered on the decking, wrapped in her cardigan. I saw that her flip-flops had mulch on them, the kind of dirt and leaves you got in the woods just outside the back door. Where had she been? ‘What happened?’ she kept saying.
No one answered her. No one had the words. ‘Mum. What happened?’
‘Where were you?’ I turned on her. ‘Why were you outside?’
‘I . . . I couldn’t sleep. It was noisy. What’s wrong with Karen?’ It wasn’t so long ago that she’d called her Auntie Karen.
Still I couldn’t answer, and I suddenly felt cold all over, as if I was going to be sick. The words went over and over in my head. It was Mike. He raped me. My mind rejected them, because it couldn’t be true. How could it be true? They were friends! We were all friends! But something had happened, I could see that from the marks on her neck, the way she shook and hugged her arms around herself. A mistake, then. She’d made a mistake. My mind would not take it in, the thing that Karen had said. For the first time in many years, I genuinely had no idea what I was supposed to do. Who should I go to? What was going on? It was Jodi who took charge again. She came to the door and put her arm around Cassie, who shrugged it off. ‘Auntie Karen’s not feeling very well, love. She says – well, she’s saying someone hurt her. You should pop up to bed. It won’t be very nice around here.’
‘She’s right.’ My voice sounded raw, as if I’d been talking all night. I swallowed. ‘Please Cass. Will you take Jake and go to your room?’ All I could think was to get them away from this, get the children out of here. Not that Jake was a child; he’d be eighteen soon. How could I even begin to tell Cassie what her father had been accused of? I couldn’t, because it wasn’t true. It would all be sorted out once the police came.
Although, of course, they’d never been much help to me and Mum, the times I’d called them back then.
Cassie’s head turned as if she’d only just noticed Jake, who was crouched down beside Karen in the kitchen, whispering to her. ‘Please Mum. Tell me what happened. Did he hurt you?’ Karen didn’t seem to see him. She was rocking, her hands clutching so hard at her elbows they were almost white.
There were feet on the stairs and I turned and – Oh, God, I’d forgotten Benji. In his Star Wars pyjamas, his rounded child’s tummy poking out, he looked so innocent and sweet. ‘What’s happening, Mum? You were all shouting and you woke me.’
I wanted to move, to explain, to shield him from this even though I didn’t know what it was, I didn’t understand what was happening, but then I heard a noise outside, on the drive. A car on the gravel. The police.
‘Come on, Benj,’ said Cassie, seeming finally to get it. ‘Let’s go upstairs.’
The police were here. All I could think was, my God, we were all so drunk, and Cassie had been up to something, and we looked so guilty. All of us just looked guilty as hell. And I found myself remembering that night back in 1996, the night Martha Rasby died, and feeling that same mixture of fear and shame and terrible, crushing guilt.
They were very kind. I even knew the DC, who’d come to give a talk to the women at the refuge a few months ago. It was hard to say who was more embarrassed, him or me. They were good at handling the situation. I’d expected, I don’t know – some kind of brutish denial that Karen could possibly have been attacked, here with her friends. Instead they took her away, efficient and serious. There was a sexual assault centre in Maidstone, I knew. I remembered writing something about the new centres, never imagining they’d fall within the sphere of my own life. They’d be doing tests and taking swabs and .