white noise

We’re sitting in an alley that smells of piss, but we’re one too many sips of shitty white wine in to mind that part. Elle’s cigarette smoke covers it for the most part anyway.

‘Pinky promise me, this stays between us.’

I almost sigh. She’s my best friend, of course I’ll keep her secret, whatever it is, so I stick out my little finger and wrap it around hers. Pinky promises have ruled both our lives before, she knows I will never break one.

‘What is it?’

‘I think something happened.’ For a moment we sit in silence as I wait for her to continue. I wonder if she paused on purpose, to give me another moment or two without the truth breaking my heart. ‘On Friday, when I was in London – I think something happened. I don’t know, that’s the fucking issue, I blacked out at 11 and got home at 1 and that’s 2 hours I…’ She trails off and looks away, flicking ash at her shoe. ‘2 hours I can never know. Maybe there was an alley, or maybe it was just a road, and there was a man and I think I was running at some point - but maybe he was just some harmless man in London and maybe I was trying to catch the train or something. Or maybe…maybe not.’

Her head falls forward, towards her lap and her cigarette butt falls from her listless hand. I rest my hand on her back and stroke it gently. I don’t want her to say it, but I know where this is going, I know the core fear in every girl’s heart. The one that turns your insides to ice when suddenly you’re surrounded by men you do not trust, and maybe you’re drunk, and maybe you’re in heels or a tight dress, or maybe you’re 13 in school uniform because it doesn’t fucking matter; at the end of the day, there is a boy, and there is a girl, and he thinks her body is his. That’s what it always comes down to.

It bonds us, that fear, it bonds every girl I have ever known. It’s the feeling that followed me home the first time men honked at me, when I laughed it off as a compliment but I couldn’t stop my hands shaking. It’s the help me eyes we all recognise from girls being chatted up by guys standing too close, begging for someone to interrupt.  It’s creepy uncles and getting groped on public transport and every guy that’s seen a girl so drunk she couldn’t walk and thought that was the perfect time to stick his tongue in her throat. It’s head pushers and white vans driving too slow and taxi drivers that leer in the rear-view mirror. It’s the gamble with every Tinder date, with every stranger, with every night out. It’s not all men, of course not, but it’s damn near every girl, and isn’t that enough?

‘Why, um, why do you think something might have happened?’

She opens her bag and pulls out a pair of tights, handing them to me wordlessly. I turn them over in my hands until I find the hole, the gaping hole, almost perfectly centred on the crotch seam.

‘They weren’t ripped when I left. And I was wearing a lace thong – and look.’ She pulls her skirt up and leans back.

On the inside of her thighs are little bruises, purple and red, mottling her pale skin.

‘They look like fingertips.’ I say it, but I know she’s thought it. I imagine the hand that fits them, clutched round an Xbox controller or holding a beer or who knows, wrapped around some other girl’s thigh. I look at my own hands, my own fingertips, as if I’m scared that they’ll match, or maybe as if I’m hoping they will.

‘I’m so sorry, love.’

She stands up and takes the tights to a bin, and she doesn’t think I notice her eyes watering.

‘I’m so annoyed, y’know? Like even if something did happen what the fuck can I do about it? Excuse me officer, but a man in central London on Friday night may have assaulted me, why no I couldn’t pick him out of a line up, why do you ask? Plus, when I woke up – I know myself, of course I do, I know my body and it didn’t feel like, um, I didn’t feel that I’d, y’know…’

‘Had something inside of you?’ I finish for her. It’s a clinical way to say it, but ‘had sex’ is too forgiving, and ‘been raped’ will make us both cry.

‘Yeah.’

She sits back down and rests her head on my shoulder. Her fingers rest on my thigh and I almost laugh at the irony. I have felt a man leave his unwanted fingerprints on my skin before, I’ve scratched at where he touched me until I almost drew blood, showered in water so hot it scalded me, scrubbed myself until I was raw and pink, just trying to feel like my body was my own again. It never works, not when the fingerprints are all in your head. Sometimes I can still see their shadows on my skin. I wonder whether it’s easier or harder when there are actual bruises.

‘You could try and file a report anyway.’ Elle just looks at me in response, and her scowl says: 99 men walk free for any 1 that goes to jail, even if we did know who it was. ‘What do we do then? Therapy? Tell your mum?’

‘Oh come on, you know what we do now.’ I wish I didn’t, but I do; I hand her the bottle of wine and slide two cigarettes out of her pack. I try not to smoke anymore, but days like this it’s almost necessary, so we light them in sync. This is what we do now; we drink and we talk and we smoke until it stops hurting, and we put ourselves back together with stitches made of paper and wax, and we keep going. She told me so she didn’t have to bear it alone, and now she doesn’t. This is what best friends are for. There’s no reason to tell anyone else, not really.

I exhale a heavy cloud. I know that this is bad for me, but at least when I’m hurting myself I’m in control of the pain.

‘I do have one other idea. Burning bridges, and all that shit.’ I pick up Elle’s lighter, walk over to the bin and take out the tights. They must be some synthetic blend because they catch alight easily; flames lick my hand within seconds until they’re too hot to hold and I drop them, watching them writhe and flicker on the dark concrete. And then it’s over, and they are ash. It barely feels like closure, let alone justice.

‘Should’ve brought the knickers, could’ve burnt them too.’

‘Are they good knickers though?’

‘…Topshop.’

I laugh. ‘Yeah, we can’t burn Topshop, not when we’re both unemployed. But hey, if you don’t want them now, I’ll totally take them off your hands.’

She laughs a little then, and I almost catch my breath in relief. I knew she wasn’t broken, but this is proof, proof she’s going to be happy again, eventually. She’s still Elle, she just has a little more backstory now. I know she won’t give them to me, I know those knickers will be thrown out sometime soon, and I know she’ll tell herself it’s because they are getting old or worn out, and I know that’ll be a lie. I sit back down beside her and let her head fall into the space between my shoulder and my cheek.

A man walks across the mouth of the alley and I feel us both tense up for a moment. He is gone before I even see his face, but that’s what happens when you’re on high alert. My shoulders ache from how I have been tensing them, carrying some invisible weight. I take another sip of wine.

‘You’re okay, Elle.’ I don’t know what else to say. I want to reassure her, I want to take this pain and wear it for her, I want to wrap her in cotton wool and keep her in my pocket so nothing can ever hurt her again. Instead I stroke her hair as she leans against me and we both ignore the silent tears tracing their way down our respective cheeks. I clutch her hand so tight I wonder if I’ll leave my own set of fingerprints.

‘We should have a girls’ night. Take you out in London again but with nothing but good memories this time.’

‘Yeah, that’s a good idea. Not just yet though. I’m not ready for central just yet.’

I squeeze her tighter. I don’t know what else to do. I am here and I love her and I just hope that’s enough. I wish I could make her skin fit her again, if I could kiss her or love her or pay her and make it feel like her body is her own, I would. If I could shoot the man that raped my best friend in cold blood, I would. If I could take a bullet to make it never have happened, I would.

‘Do you reckon we can just choose to pretend nothing happened?’ I watch as she mulls this over, the cogs in her head whirring as she wonders if ‘nothing happened’ can be a reality and not just an excuse.

‘Maybe.’

‘Maybe they’re your fingerprints from being nervous on the train home. Maybe the tights ripped when you pulled them down to piss. Maybe even if a guy tried, he didn’t manage. Maybe you just fell into something, a weird shaped fence maybe.’

She closes her eyes and I think we wish for the same thing; to live in the maybe, to let it empower us, no matter how unlikely it is, to let ourselves hold onto that strand of hope and use it to pull ourselves up, out of the hole, and to tell the world that this time, we’re okay. Maybe, maybe not; it doesn’t matter, as long as we’re okay.

Somewhere, so deep down inside that it is not a conscious thought, we both know that maybe is not true.

‘Thank you.’ She curls into my arm as she says it.

‘My love, what are best friends for? You have no reason to thank me.’

She smiles again, and I am glad, because I know that she knows she did the right thing telling me.

‘Still. I’m glad I have you. I hope everyone has someone like you.’

For a moment I am proud, proud that I can help her at a time like this, and then all of a sudden I am heartbroken when I consider that not everyone has this kind of friendship.

‘Anytime, love.’

‘I should go, I need to meet Mum.’

‘Yeah, no worries.’

We leave the alley and walk down the road, where she will go left and I will go right. We hug each other goodbye, and we hold each other for a few seconds longer than usual and we both screw up our faces and neither of us are at all okay, but we are both pretending we are.

‘Bye, Elle, I love you.’

‘Love you too, see ya soon.’

I watch her leave, and my heart aches. I take a moment, to let it all settle, and then suddenly the essay due next week and the date I have on Friday and my mother’s questions about my brother’s birthday present all come crashing down.