"Shit," I muttered to myself. "The bastards ..."
I waited until my head had stopped throbbing, then I took another calming breath and reached up and rang the doorbell.
Lucy's mum had a history of drink and drug problems. It was mostly all in the past now — apart from the odd little slip now and then — but when she opened the door and looked at me, I was pretty sure that she'd gone back to her bad old ways. She looked terrible. Her skin was dull and greyish, her eyes were bloodshot and slightly unfocused, and it looked as if she hadn't washed or combed her hair for a week.
"Hello, Mrs Walker," I said to her. "It's me ... Tom."
She squinted at me.
"Tom Harvey," I explained. "Lucy's friend ...?"
"Oh, right ... yeah. Of course, Tom ... sorry. I only just woke up. I was just... ahh ..." She rubbed her eyes. "How are you, Tom?" She suddenly noticed the wound on my head. "Oh, God ... of course ... your head ... you were in hospital. I'm so sorry, I forgot..."
"It's all right," I said. "Don't worry about it."
"No? Well, I mean ... I just ..." She blinked heavily. "So when did you get home, Tom?"
"Today. This morning , . ."
"Right, right..."
"I was just wondering — "
"Did you want to see Lucy?"
"Well, only if —"
"Come in, come in ... I'll go and see if she's awake. She was sleeping ... she gets really tired."
As I followed Mrs Walker into the hallway and shut the door behind me, I didn't feel very comfortable at all. My head was full of questions: maybe Lucy's mum wasn't in the right frame of mind to decide if I should come in or not? maybe I should have waited outside? maybe I shouldn't have come up here in the first place? But it was too late to turn back now. I'd already followed Mrs Walker into the front room.
"Just wait there a minute," she told me. "I'll go and see if she's awake."
I watched her go into her bedroom (wondering why she was going into her bedroom and not Lucy's), and then I looked over at Ben, who was sitting on the settee watching TV. Although the bruises on his face were fading, and the cuts were starting to heal, it was pretty obvious he'd taken a really bad beating. He was sitting kind of hunched up, which I guessed was on account of his broken ribs, and his left wrist was heavily bandaged.
"Hey, Ben," I said to him. "How're you doing?"
He stared at me. "How d'you think?"
I looked around. The flat was a mess. Empty pizza boxes on the floor, bottles, cans, dirty plates. There were piles of clothes on the dining table, piles of old newspapers on an ironing board. The curtains were closed. The light was dim.
I turned back to Ben. "Do you want to talk about it?"
"No."
"OK, fair enough ... but if you change your mind —"
"I said no, all right?"
"OK."
Mrs Walker came out of her bedroom then. She smiled at me — a fairly vague kind of smile — and said, "Don't be too long, Tom, all right? She's not used to seeing people yet... she gets really tired."
I looked at her.
She smiled again, indicating the open bedroom door with a slightly wobbly jerk of her head, and I guessed that meant that I was supposed to go in. I glanced back at Ben, saw that he was immersed in the TV, and I went on into the bedroom.
The curtains were closed, and the only light came from the pale orange glow of an electric heater standing on the floor. There was something about the room that made it feel like a sick person's room. The stuffy air, perhaps ... the low light, the lack of energy. I didn't know. It just felt like a room without any life.
Lucy was sitting on the bed with her knees scrunched up against her chest. She was wearing a baggy old jumper, loose-fitting jogging pants, and big woolly socks. And as I stood there in the doorway, doing my best to smile at her, I could see straight away that she wasn't the same Lucy any more. Her face was very pale, her skin very dull, and there was something about her that seemed to have shrunk. It was as if her entire self — her body, her mind, her heart was trying desperately to retreat from the world. And even in the muted light, I could see the depth of pain in her eyes, the faded bruises on her face, and more than anything else I could see that she'd been through the worst thing imaginable. It was in her, it had become part of her.
She'd been violated.
She smiled weakly at me. "Hey, Tom ... do you mind shutting the door?"
I closed the door.
"Sorry, about the mess," she said, looking around the room. She indicated a chair by the bed. "You can sit down ..."
I went over to the chair.
"Sorry," she said again, realizing that the chair was piled up with clothes and books. "Let me —"
"It's all right," I told her, clearing the clothes and books off the chair.
"Sorry," she said once more. She smiled anxiously. "I don't know why I keep saying sorry all the time ..."
"Sorry?" I grinned.
She smiled weakly back at me.
I sat down in the chair and looked at her. I'd always loved the way she looked — her messy blonde hair, her pretty blue eyes, her slightly crooked mouth ... I'd always liked that crookedness. It had always made me smile. And another thing that I'd always liked about being with Lucy was that we could look at each other without feeling uncomfortable ... we could just be together, and look at each other, and neither of us felt self-conscious about it. But now ... I realized that Lucy kept touching her hair, pretending to fiddle with her fringe, and I guessed that what she was really doing was trying to cover up the ugly yellow bruising around her right eye. I wanted to tell her that she didn't have to cover it up for my sake, but I wasn't sure if it was an appropriate thing to say. I mean, if she wanted to cover it up, if it made her feel better, who was I to tell her any different?
The truth is, I simply didn't know what to say to her.
What do you say to a girl who's been raped?
What can you say?
"It's all right," Lucy said quietly. "I mean ... you know ..."
"Yeah," I muttered.
"How's your head?" she asked.
I instinctively reached up and touched the wound.
"Yeah, it's OK ... it doesn't even hurt any more." I looked at her, wanting to ask her how she was ... but I didn't know how. Instead, and kind of stupidly, I said to her, "This isn't your room, is it? I mean, this used to be your mum's room ..."
"Yeah," she said, absently looking round. "Well, it's still my mum's room really. I just... well, I just couldn't sleep in my own room any more." She lowered her eyes. "That's where it happened, you know ... that's where ... in my room ..."
"Oh, right..
"I can't go back in there ... not yet, anyway. It makes me feel... you know ..." She shrugged. "So I've been staying in here."
"It must have been terrible," I said, without thinking. "I mean, what happened... "
"Yeah" she muttered. "Yeah, it was terrible ..."
"Sorry," I said quickly. "I didn't mean to —"
"No, no ..." Lucy said. "It's all right ... honestly. It happened ... there's no point trying to pretend that it didn't, is there?" She looked at me. "It happened, Tom."
"I know ... and I'm so sorry. I'm sorry it happened, Luce."
"Me too," she said sadly.
"Can you ...? I mean, do you want to ...?"
"What? Talk about it?"
"Yeah."
"What for? What's the point? I mean, talking about it isn't going to change anything, is it?"
"No, I suppose not..."
She looked at me, her eyes wet with tears now. "I can't, Tom. I can't do it. I know I should, but I can't."