My Animal Life (14 page)

But the boys from Bordeaux really were at the fair, and you could pick them out by their knowing look, an air of slight loucheness, the cut of their jeans. My village group no longer seemed so cool. I saw a tall boy with tinted glasses, and he saw me, and perhaps he thought he could pick
me
out by
my
knowing look, for my father's insults had taught me one thing, I was sexual, and people were likely to want me. Whatever he saw, this boy liked me. He saw me on the dodgems, with one of my friends, and I saw him looking, and I looked back. I felt proud, and reckless; I expect I was still angry. I was nearly grown up, I was going to prove it. I could look after myself, couldn't I?

He was slim, with jeans and a flowered shirt. Soon we were on the dodgems together, then walking round the fair, arm in arm. He had full wet lips. I don't remember his name, but in his dark glasses he looked mature and gorgeous. Somehow I had left my foursome behind. If I had stayed at the fair they would have found me soon enough, but the Bordeaux Beau had other ideas. ‘Let's go for a walk,' he said, and his arm was round my shoulders, hot and exciting, his fingers were stroking the back of my neck. Why not? I thought. It was a warm May evening, the sky was still bright with the afterglow, I would soon be eighteen, I could do what I wanted. Surely no harm could come to me? I can see us now, laughing and walking away, looking confident and conspiratorial. Even as we went I was picturing us, thinking, ‘Here I am with a handsome man, people will be noticing, and wondering where we're going.' It added to the tingle of pleasure in my stomach. Nothing had happened to me before, except for Frank Lammas,
at my father's school, and a beautiful boy, a Greek Cypriot, Dino, who'd kissed me at a party that New Year's Eve, to the strains of the Beatles' ‘Michele'. But these were mere boys. Now I was with a Frenchman.

‘Let me show you the house where I am staying. We could have a coffee, or a drink,' he said. That sounded attractive, and grownup. The house was small and white, detached, pleasant. There was no one at home. Did he give me a drink? Soon he was showing me upstairs. I wanted to go, there was no coercion. What did I expect to happen up there? I must have thought that we would kiss. Anything further was beyond my comprehension.

But soon we were kissing on the bed, and he was trying to take my clothes off. Without his shirt he looked lean and young, but without his dark glasses his eyes seemed crossed, and his tongue was enormous and slobbering. I was holding my dress down, and trying to explain. I still wasn't frightened, something to do, perhaps, with that vulnerable lazy eye, and the almost girlish fullness of his lips.

‘Je suis vierge,' I said.
I am a virgin
. ‘Montre-moi ton corps,' he replied, he begged.
Show me your body: show me, show me
. I heard noises in the house, and grew anxious; I didn't want to be discovered up there, perhaps by other French people, respectable French people, not from racy Bordeaux but St Aigulin. He was getting more insistent, and impatient. I resisted, and the kisses were too wet, and after a bit, became boring. He was much less attractive than he had been. I said I wanted to go home. He put on his glasses, but not his shirt, and left the room, saying, ‘Wait a moment.'

And then the real terror began, because he did not return alone, but with a short, fat friend, greasy-looking
and brutal. He had a thin line of moustache above his mouth, something alien, not youthful. ‘Je suis conscrit militaire,' he said.
I am a soldier, a military conscript
. The tall one nodded, weak, upstaged. I wasn't going home. The conscript wouldn't let me. This weekend was his leave. He wanted to have fun. He was going to have fun. ‘Or we will kill you.'

A sick shock of fear as the world turned over. My ribs and stomach crushed together with horror. The room was suddenly a hell, a prison. I had been wicked, and now I would be punished. I had always known that one day I would be killed. Now it had come, the black centre of the nightmare.

The high bed was in the middle of the room, back to the wall, electric light to the left of the bed and overhead, horribly clear. To my right was a window I am sure was uncurtained, so the house cannot have been overlooked. Outside was the night sky, now almost dark, and the green countryside, and somewhere the village, distant lights under the bulging black trees on the horizon, and normal life, and the hotel, and
my parents
, who were waiting in ignorance for me to come back, and the future, the life that I might have had if I had not come to this small lighted prison. All of it impossibly far away, and I had left it behind for ever. I saw my own death; there was no way out. The tall boy went away, leaving the fat one, telling me he would soon be back.

Why was I immobilised by threats of violence? I think my father should answer that question. Our house had been ruled by threats of violence and actual violence, since we were small. He was not very violent, as these things go; he didn't have to be, the fear was enough. I never thought, as I would now, of fighting
those men, of calling their bluff. Perhaps they would have been ashamed to punch me, as they were not ashamed to touch me when I didn't want them to. How deeply I was part of my difficult family is shown by the thoughts that ran through my brain like electric shocks, agonising, twitching: my parents would be angry. My father would be shamed. There would be a terrible, final scandal. Though I was facing death, I could still feel guilty.

But as I struggle to remember what actually happened that early summer night in St Aigulin, what that hateful, fat little man did to me, I realise one odd thing that makes me happy: I never considered giving in. Partly, of course, because I
was
a virgin. I simply wouldn't have known what to do, or which halfway houses it was tactical to offer. (And maybe, I think now, they didn't know either. They were Catholics, deep in the Catholic countryside, in 1966, when the pill was very new. Maybe having sex was not something they were used to.)

But killing he was keen on, the little conscript, keen on threatening it, at least, this olive-skinned, lard-faced, stubble-headed man so far from the tall pale handsome Frenchman I had thought, in the rosy glow of sunset, I was choosing. This one had no aura of youth or glamour. He did not smile under his creepy moustache, a black greasy millipede crawling on the sweat. He did not, like the first boy, try to woo me. He was fat and brutal and excited. I remember clearly asking him if he had a sister, or a mother. Perhaps he was wearing a crucifix. He would not admit to having either, he would not talk to me, I was just a body.

The title of this book is
My Animal Life
, and my feelings for animals are interest and respect, but I remember
the dread thought:
he's just an animal
. For him I had no soul, no special livingness, no consciousness that had to be regarded. And so, in this hot prison, he abolished me — we abolished each other — so he could harm me. I didn't see sex: all I saw was death. There was nothing alive, just the end of the road. And that longed-for world outside the window. I do not know how long it went on. I know he didn't rape me, or damage me physically, he just repeated his dead ultimatum. I do remember that I was crying. And I remember I was praying, as well, small stumps of prayer:
please God. Please help me
.

And then the world turned. The story breaks, and pivots. The door swings open, and light pours in. My prayer is answered.
My prayer was answered
. It wasn't time; this was not the end. In another universe, perhaps, I died, but in this one, suddenly, I slipped my prison. The room was full of people — men — but they were shouting at the conscript, and he was shrinking, and I saw two faces I recognised, my friends from the village, come to find me. They took me downstairs, they were vocal and worried, they grouped around me, excluding the city boys, they found my jacket and my chain pendant, they made black coffee, which I never drank. I stopped crying as they comforted me. Unbelievably, I had been saved. It wasn't even late; long before midnight.

Someone took me back to the hotel. Blindly, I did as I had promised and popped my head into my parents' bedroom. From my father's point of view, nothing had happened, so long as I did what I was told, so long as I was back before my curfew. Had I had a nice time? Yes, I lied. A lovely time. All my friends had been there.

(And I still don't know what happened that night.
Did the first boy, Lazy Eye with his dark glasses, panic about the rape he thought was in progress and go and find acquaintances from the village, where everybody knew each other? Did the house belong to someone from the village, sons whose parents were away, who came back by chance and stumbled on the story? It doesn't matter. Somehow I was saved.)

But the randomness of it has stayed with me for ever. I did not save
myself
, by initiative or courage, by strength or cunning or sexual know-how. I was saved by chance, or perhaps by prayers. I was helpless in the power of others. And the underside of that is, I needn't have been saved. A universe existed where I was not saved. It was terrifying, full of rape and murder.

I thought I had escaped, but I was only half-right. The school trip ended three days later. I did not say a word to my mother and father, though the story must have circulated in the village. One of my four friends, the boy I least liked, took me out one night and asked me too many questions: ‘Mais qu'est-ce qu'ils t'ont fait, dis-moi, Margaret?'
What did they do to you, tell me, Margaret
? He wanted the details. Naïve though I was, I knew he was excited by the thought of what might have happened to me. I closed up tighter, like a clam.

A week or so after we got back home, my A- and S-level exams began. My mind responded; I sat down and did what I had always done, and did very well. Not long afterwards, the school term ended, and we all stood and cried as we sang the school song for the very last time, ‘To serve is to reign', that hymn of the female downtrodden.

And then there was a blank. I did have a plan, to do my very first job, for the civil service, as a filing clerk in an office in Horsham. The job was very boring, and
very easy, sorting grey-green cardboard files alphabetically. The pay, I think, was £1 or £2 a week (but then my rent, three years later, was only £3). Only two things were wrong: first, my fellow-workers. One was a stout, glossy-haired girl who had been at my father's school, and seemed friendly, and offered to take me under her wing. Her name was Thelma; she had a soft voice and a strong Sussex accent. She talked incessantly. Soon she was pouring pure vitriol, softly, constantly, into my ear. Whenever she could get me out of other people's hearing, she told me bad things about my father. ‘It's going downhill, the school. He's losing his grip, everyone says so. Shall I tell you what we used to say about your father?' I was powerless, fascinated, by Thelma. I did not know how to deal with her, how to stop her talking, or stop myself hearing. I felt I saw evil, once again. And so the second thing went wrong: my mind. The world started to slide under a veil of terror.

Every lunchtime I escaped from the office, and Thelma, and bought myself chips from the fish-and-chip shop. They were huge and greasy and I could not eat them. There was a phone-box in the street outside. One day I rang up my mother in a panic. ‘I hate this job. I can't go back.' She was puzzled, and consoling. I returned to Thelma.

Poor Mum. I phoned her, crying, every day that week. I did not know what was the matter. My father agreed I should give up the job. I think they told themselves it meant I was special;
Margaret wasn't meant for filing
. But giving up beached me in structureless summer, in the empty days before we went away on a camping trip, the last family holiday, tenting with my parents and my cousin Susan. Something definite: the holiday. But before that, a featureless glaze of time, and
beyond, a cliff of anxiety, the beginning of Oxford, at the start of October. The security of school and the prefects' room, of lying on the sunny garden bank with the girls, my friends, my dear friends who had grown up with me, Jill and Gillian, Jacky and Hilary, Patty and Lizzie and all the rest, that big gang of girls who looked out for each other, sprawled on the short yellow grass we loved under the monkey-puzzle tree outside the library window, giggling and teasing and dreaming of the future, was shrinking inexorably into the past. No more navy jumpers with gold at the neck, no more uniform days promising safety. I sat at home, in the new vacant summer, watching things float away from me. And everything turned blank and grey, a thick goo of slime that choked reality.

Worse, it
became
reality. Like other people suffering from depression (I had no idea I was depressed) I felt I at last saw what life was: an alternation of emptiness and terror. When I lay down to sleep, my heart beat madly, and I woke terrified, night after night. Then that fear invaded my days, as well. I tried to tell my mother, but I only cried, because I did not know what to tell her, I did not know what was happening, and couldn't make the connection that now seems obvious, between this terror and my untold story, the thing that had happened in St Aigulin and at once been suppressed when I reported to my parents: ‘I had a lovely time. All my friends were there …' Yes, watching me, afterwards, pale and worried, wondering if the conscript had raped me.

I don't believe in therapies that mean endlessly reliving traumatic events, but I know that I needed to talk to someone. If I had done, perhaps there would have been no breakdown. But physically, the scene had been left far behind, on the other side of a channel ferry, and
nothing could be told without appalling my parents and causing — what? Anger, disapproval. So I kept it inside, and slid into paralysis.

It's forty years ago, more or less exactly, but I do not enjoy recovering this period, still feel it's somehow perilous. It has never happened to me again, but sometimes the terror has brushed against my cheek, often at night, like a bat's wing, passing, a leathery thing whispering of claws in the darkness, hissing that if you fall through the surface, there is nothing underneath, just falling for ever. I won't invite it to come near again.