CORA AND AMELIA LOUISE: SHORT FICTION BY PAULA PUDDEPHATT
It’s June 1991, and seventeen-year-old Cora Mason sits in the tidy, white-walled office with Dr. Mary Johnstone, the surgery’s one and only female GP, and Ann Mason, Cora’s mother.
It might as well be just the doctor and Ann Mason present. So far, neither woman has heard a word Cora has been saying.
It was Cora who was brutally raped last night, by a complete stranger. Cora who endured invasive medical tests, and police interrogations, throughout the night. The police strongly implied that Cora herself was to blame, because she’d been drunk.
Cora can’t fight this any more, but her mum’s partner is waiting outside in the car. She might as well accept that she and her mother are going to be leaving with a prescription for the morning after pill. Cora just won’t take it.
If a baby should have been conceived, as a result of the nightmare Cora has lived through - and she feels, in her heart, that this is indeed going to be the case…
It’s too early for tests, apparently.
Cora wants the baby. She is sure, for some reason, that it will be a girl. She likes the name Amelia. She will call the baby Amelia Louise, with Louise to honour the kind receptionist at the police station, who didn’t judge or blame Cora.
But Cora’s mother and George are one step ahead of her, as per usual. The chemist is right next to the surgery, so Ann practically drags her daughter there, and they wait. Come away with the prescription.
And, when they get into the car, George hands his girlfriend a bottle of water, which she passes to Cora.
"Surely we can get home first? I don’t think I want…“
The degree of force used? Cora can’t precisely recall. But Ann always has been a determined woman.
Cora returns to work that afternoon. She has to borrow George’s Walkman, as the attacker stole her own.
On the bus, she listens to a familiar compilation tape of her favourite songs. "Foolish Beat” by Debbie Gibson, and Sonia’s cover of “End of the World”, hurt as never before. Make Cora’s eyes sting.
She aches for Amelia Louise.
The choice should have been Cora’s. In the same way as she did not consent to sex with her attacker - equally, she feels violated by her mother and George.
Years later, Cora has remained celibate. She identifies as grey asexual, but doesn’t know what her sexuality might have been. Her brother is married with two daughters. Her sister is divorced, and has a son.
Ann has her share of grandchildren, and isn’t remotely concerned that her, now estranged, eldest never had kids. Probably never will.
George married someone else, after breaking up with Cora’s mum, and had two daughters with his wife. Even managed to call one of them Amelia.
Cora has never recovered from the rape, or from what she still feels to be the death of her baby.
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