Without Consent (12 page)

‘Why are you so afraid of getting married, Aunty H?' she asked as they passed through handbags. Neither had much use for leather; shocking prices.

‘Dunno. I suppose because I did it once, hated it and found out I'd married a thief. He didn't even know the meaning of truth. An utterly lovable thief.'

‘Must've been his body.'

‘We've got an hour,' Helen said in a voice grim with resolution.

‘Monsoon? Principles?'

There it was, fifty-five minutes later in neither of these premises, but hanging in the window of an establishment neither had considered. Not a dress, not a trouser suit: a jacket made in heaven.

‘If, at a trial where any person is for the time being charged with a rape offence to which he pleads not guilty, then, except with the leave of the judge, no evidence and no question in cross-examination shall be adduced or asked at the trial, by or on behalf of any defendant, about any sexual experience of a complainant with a person other than that defendant.'

S
helley Pelmore understood shops better than the back of her hand. She had haunted shops ever since she was allowed out on her own. West End shops were the stuff of dreams when she was a kid, especially the ones where music boomed and nobody cared who you were and you had to shout to ask the price of anything. Not that she had even whispered in those distant days, or dared to ask particulars of what she could never afford. On one single occasion, she had been stopped by the store detective, leaving with a vest tucked up the sleeve of her jacket. A vest, of all things! Nothing gorgeous, just an ugly piece of thermal underwear, chosen on a November afternoon, simply to find out if thieving was as easy as someone had
said it was. Her informant had lied about the ease, but it had been a bitter wintry day, and Shelley's wise reaction on arrest by a woman who resembled her mother was to burst into tears, say she was sorry, but oh, she was so cold and it was colder still at home. A pretty child; thin, pinched, distressed, she had been forgiven with a brisk pat on the arm, accompanied by a kindly warning. Even now, she could still feel the shock of that hand on her sleeve.

She had felt genuine distress, a mixture of shame and horror over her own incompetence, but by the time she was halfway home, she could see she had been wise in learning her lesson with a vest. Anything more covetable would not have been forgiven as easily. Shelley never did it again. It diminished her love of big shops for a few days, but the light and warmth, the colours and the merchandise, were too strong a lure. It was preordained that she would work in a shop of large proportions and escalators, another childish passion, and only a question of time, she told herself, before she would own a shop of her own. Progress was slow, pay was lousy; she was not much further forward but it had ceased to matter.

The problem was that shops had lost their allure; she was waiting for it to come back. It was quite a while now since anything gave her a buzz, unless it was skin.

‘Can I help you, madam? Just browsing?'

Suit yourself, you old cow.

Shelley had moved from hapless trainee in a department store to experienced sales assistant, almost to floor manager, until she'd had that fight with another girl which put her out of the running, although, mercifully, not out of a job. She had learnt from her mother, knowledge retained
like a talisman, that to be out of a job was the greatest disgrace on the planet, so she stayed for a while, although she knew she was not going to progress any further. Instead she took a sideways move into a far classier, up-market South Molton Street designer boutique, which felt like a kind of promotion. Escalators wearied her by then.

A friend of hers, who was leaving to have an unwanted baby, had recommended Shelley on a temporary basis. By the time she wanted the job back, Shelley was well dug in amongst the expensive clothes, indispensable to the manageress and not to be ousted by a mere plea of loyalty. End of friendship; so what? Shelley had other friends, other distractions; she flitted among the silk chemises and linen jackets, dressed in the shop's stock which suited her model figure, shining with suppressed sexuality; a brooding presence which gave the display an added cachet. She despised the fat customers all the more, because she knew their secret ambition was to look as sultry and tempestuous as she did inside these clothes.

She had told Ryan some of this. Something about the frustration of selling to fat cows with no looks and much more exciting lives. And about being best friends with the manageress; the kind of friendship which led her into clubs and pubs as a willing ally, trailing along with a couple more girls, all exceedingly slender, with the unspoken misunderstood purpose of giving the older wiser woman some kind of support as she cruised the bars, looking for something special with a bank balance to match. Shelley never did know when she was being used. As friendships went, the one with the manageress could be blown away in a puff of smoke, but Shelley had never known that, either.

‘What you been up to? Two days off and thinner than ever, well, I don't know. What's the matter, Petal?'

‘Period pain,' Shelley drawled. ‘Won't happen again.' Knowing she was being watched. Let down this brittle creature more than once and the coveted job and the fun which went alongside might be at risk, and worst of all, the man of her dreams and nightmares would not know where to find her.

D
erek was right: Shelley was tired to her bones and might well have been better resting at home. She was too nervous and edgy to be at her best. When the phone rang at the back of the shop she jumped, and when she steamed the creases out of a blouse her fingers were nerveless and clumsy.

Perhaps, if she told the manageress what she had endured so recently, there might be sympathy; or disbelief. Besides, she was unsure of her ability to tell the story in the way she had told it when they took the statement; any repetition would confuse. She panicked when she thought of having to repeat it, live through it all again. The only person she wanted to talk to was him. She painted her face, teased her hair and waited.

Late afternoon; the two brown hands appeared in front of her on the display cabinet which housed the underwear: pure silk, made only for those with sufficient time or domestic help to keep them beautiful. The display was a fine froth of cream and lace: colour of the month,
café au lait.
His hands on the glass were enormous and alien by contrast.

‘I'll have two of those, miss. Please.'

‘The briefs, sir? Which size?' Her voice trembled; her fingers fluttered among the lace.

‘Your size.'

‘Any. You choose.'

‘Your colour.'

She wrapped them with an attempt at the air of indifferent insolence she had perfected with the fat ladies, her heart beating like a gong and a sheen of sweat breaking out on her face, pausing in her fussing with the tissue paper to swipe her hair back from her forehead.

‘How would sir like to pay?'

He handed over the card without a word; she put it briefly to her lips before passing it through the machine, stood watching the slip emerge for signature as if that piece of paper held the secret of the universe. ‘I must see you,' she mouthed at him as he bent to sign. The bag rustled as she handed it to him, noticing with a kind of anguish how the varnish on her nails was chipped and untended. They had taken scrapings from under her nails, a sample of saliva from her tongue and swabs from her vagina; she wanted him to know all that. She wanted him to know how well she had done and how bravely she had endured. She ached to touch the burnished crown of his head, finger the smooth and repellent ridges of his skull, but she desisted.

‘What a lovely day,' he said loudly. ‘Far too good for working.'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘No choice about it.'

‘Ah well. Perhaps you'll be able to take a walk in a nice shady park later on. If not today, tomorrow? Something to look forward to … so wonderful to have these places.'

‘Perhaps,' she said.

Watching his retreating back, she felt the sweaty mix of revulsion and excitement which made her stammer. The breath of the manageress was on her neck. Long manicured fingers, without chipped nails, straightened the back of Shelley's collar, patted it back into shape, feeling beneath it the dampness of her skin, sidling round to check the price of the sale.

‘Three times in a month that mean old baldy's been in here. The mistress must need some pleasing, or is he a conquest of yours, sweetie?'

Shelley suddenly had a vision of the rape suite in that faraway police station as a place of safety.

M
aybe the life of a well-off Irish Catholic lady would be better if she had worked. A little job in a shop, perhaps. Brigid Connor watched the afternoon light turn dark and felt down her spine the threat of a storm. Late summer brought these alarms; she was less afraid of the thunder than the lightning. Oh dear Lord, if a storm were to burst over her head, she would run and hide in a cupboard, and if the devil himself had come to the door, she would fling her arms round his neck. Such nice eyes that doctor had, so kind. It was he who had stumbled upon the truth, only by letting her talk without saying anything. All she had wanted was for him to find something wrong with her, something which would make sex impossible, but there was nothing to be found. Maybe it was he who had sent the cutting from the newspaper. Maybe it was one of the girls. Brigid eyed the drinks trolley. It was Aemon's favourite affectation, as if they ever threw cocktail parties.
She knew she would succumb, despicable though it was to be sipping anything other than tea at four in the afternoon, with a storm coming on as well. If her husband found her laid out and comatose, she would blame the lightning which brought with it that everlasting fear of the wrath of God. Punishment; the apartment destroyed in a bolt from heaven which would consign them to hell and then do the worst thing of all, bounce them back, the same as they were before.

Taking a tincture was a new habit she had learnt from the parish sisters, who were not, she had come to realize, quite as obtuse and fatly comfortable as they seemed. Perhaps one of them had sent the newspaper cutting.

There was a ritual which had come to precede the tincture habit, like many of her rituals, which she vaguely recognized as a sign of something not quite right, although with the clarity of vision afforded by the first drink she could say there was nothing unusual about her own neuroses. It was beginning to occur to her that her careful rationing of drink might not be such a brilliant idea. Aemon had a thing about women and drink; hated it. Should he find her under the influence, it would either make her untouchable or, if it did not, she could sleep through the whole process. For the moment, she could not bring herself as far as putting that theory into action. Pride of a kind forbade it and, besides, she did not have a lifetime's experience of practice. Life might have been different if she had learnt, long before, to enjoy the taste of alcohol.

It did such dreadful things to the skin, so she'd heard. Made a female flushed and wrinkled before her time, her
mother said. Made a man inherit the belly more suitable to a pregnant woman, so she had noticed of Aemon. Ah, drink is a terrible thing, sister. She thought all this as she ran the bath, thinking at the same time that only a woman with nothing to do bathes twice a day, but so the ritual demanded. It was a variation of the idea that a bath was therapeutic, relaxing, good for the soul and the body, cleansing enough to eradicate past and future sin. Sins such as taking the pill, denying Aemon his ambition for a son, offending God on both counts, and then telling the doctor all about it. Brigid simply liked this bathroom as a fantastic resort; it was big, beautiful, blousy and soft at the edges.

So was I, once, she thought, sadly, looking at her depleted figure in the comforting, obfuscating steam of the bathroom mirror. Tits, of course, famous for her tits, straining at a T-shirt and well able to pass the pencil test first tried at school. A girl had good tits if she could move around easily with a pencil held beneath each. She sank into bubbles, arose in front of the mirror, the top half of her festooned with foam, which she wiped off, using her hands, to save the towel.

‘You're a highly attractive, healthy woman, yet, Mrs Connor; hardly a wrinkle. You could mother children if you wanted. You can do whatever you want, but from what you tell me about your lifestyle, maybe that could be improved … if you're worried about your own appeal, don't. That's not the problem, is it?'

So said that fine-eyed doctor, and she supposed that her appeal, as he put it, defined her existence. Being handsome, or not, was what dictated life and got one married
out of a poor life into a rich one with a bathroom like this. She held the newspaper cutting over the steam and wondered again who had sent it. Whoever it was might have been kind, or, equally, malicious.

The print blurred in steam as Mrs Brigid Connor read, yet again, about the woman who claimed her husband had raped her, buggered her, generally messed her about. Asian names, therefore not applicable to herself, even if the result of the case had been hopeful, which it wasn't. All very well, they said, this business of marital rape, but it was difficult to prove. Almost impossible. Brigid had set a little store by this piece of paper, watched herself squash it in one fist and pull the lav chain with the other hand. She was a kind of hostage in here, dreaming of ways out. Using the law was unthinkable: she'd never dare and Aemon would always win. In the heat of the water, she cleaned her fingernails with a toothpick and removed some imaginary dirt from between her toes. There might have been a faint hope that Aemon preferred his wife less aggressively clean in the same way that he would like her to be dressed in something other than an apron – her standard uniform when she was cooking. She was a woman kept, in a certain style, maybe, but still kept, in a towelling robe which took the damp off her skin and smelt, vaguely, of rose petals, with the underlying musk of moisturizer. Perhaps all these ablutions made her smell of a tarts' parlour; she didn't care.