Dirty Weekend: A Gripping Crime Fiction Novel

by Helen Zahavi

She must have had enough, they would have said. At least she had the decency to do the decent thing.

For Bella couldn’t bend. As he found out, as she found out, Bella could only break.

When they’re in your mouth. When they’re bigger than you, and stronger than you, and they know it, and you know it, and the ground lurches beneath your feet, it really lurches beneath your feet, and if you had a God you’d ask him why he’d forsaken you. Bella knows it. Bella’s always know it. Bella knows that she’s never really had any rights. Rights are fiction. Rights don’t exist. You can’t touch them. You can’t taste them. You can’t see them. You can’t smell them. They’re not there. They don’t exist.

You only have what you can defend, and if you can’t defend it you don’t have it. Bella can’t defend herself, so she can’t belong to herself. Bella belongs to no one and to everyone. She is everyman’s. She is the original collective. To each according to his needs. Let them all drink from her well.

about the therapy they’ve had, how they’ve talked it through, how they’ve come to terms with what they did. And running through it all, bubbling away beneath the surface, you hear the self-justifying snivel of the unrepentant rapist. They think, by doing time, they’ve done their penance to society. Except they didn’t victimise society. Not all of it. Not the bit that matters. They didn’t do their damage to society. They haven’t made society too scared to walk the streets. It’s not society they’ve scarred. If you hear them say they’re sorry, don’t believe it. They’re never sorry, and it wouldn’t make a difference if they were. But if they say it, if they ever dare to say it, don’t believe it. They’re lying scum for whom castration is the kindest cut of all.

When certain people talk to you, you shouldn’t say anything encouraging back. You really shouldn’t say anything at all. Stan was one of those people. Stan often spoke to women. He spoke to women at bus stops and in waiting-rooms and in lifts. He especially liked speaking to women in lifts, if there were just the two of them. He’d press the stop button and the lift would stick between floors. He’d had some of his best conversations in lifts. Women liked talking to Stan. He knew that for a fact, because they always told him so. When he let the doors slide back, he always asked whether they’d enjoyed the conversation, and they always said they had. Stan didn’t think he’d ever met a women who hadn’t enjoyed talking to him.

What she wants is open windows on summer nights. Lone walks along the shore. No fear of the motorway breakdown. No terror of the dark. No horror of the gang. No comments in the street. No furtive touchings on the Tube. No more stroking their egos for fear of the fist in the face, the broken nose, the blood and snot running into her mouth. Bella was born free and is everywhere in chains. Usurpers have stolen her inheritance, and she must reclaim it.

He fears her ridicule. She fears his rage. She might laugh at him. He might kill her.

You shouldn’t step from a main road into a side road, and from the side road into a black hole that leads nowhere. It’s not illegal, but it’s not advisable. Bella wouldn’t have done it. The old Bella, who became the shed skin of the new Bella, wouldn’t have done it. The blithe rashness of the act was something she just wouldn’t have done. But you can’t expect young men, with voices like those voices, to feel like a Bella. You can’t expect them to tread softly, like a Bella. You can’t expect them to hesitate, when every building, every patch of grass, every dim-lit street, every station, every subway, every blind alley belongs to them, and they can enter if they wish. You can’t expect them to feel like a Bella, who felt like a trespasser in her own home.

Sometimes you think certain thoughts, but you don’t say them. They’re such dirty thoughts that you can’t believe you can even think them. You think no one else could possibly think those thoughts, so you keep them to yourself. You keep your dirty thoughts piled up inside your head in a little heap of thoughtful dung.

He was a very small man. The smaller the man, the bigger the ego. She’s often noticed that. Everyone’s noticed that. It takes no talent to notice that. She doesn’t dislike small men. Not particularly. Not especially. Not unless they think they’ll have her.

If you see a woman walking, if she’s stepping quietly home, if you see her flowing past you on the pavement. If you’d like to break her brittle bones, and you want to hear the hopeless pleading, and you want to feel the pink flesh bruising, and you want to taste the taut skin bleeding. If, in fact, you see her and you want her. Think on. Don’t touch her. Just let her pass you by. Don’t place your palm across her mouth and drag her to the ground. For unknowingly, unthinkingly, unwittingly you might have laid your heavy hand on Bella. And she’s woken up this morning with the knowledge that she’s finally had enough.