Conviction

by Denise Mina

often with uncomfortable stories like this there is a chasm between lip and ear. You might not be able to hear it at all.

The disposable girl should develop a drink problem or take drugs. She should become the victim of someone else, somewhere else. At best she becomes a campaigner against whatever she was a victim of. Nothing can happen to her that doesn’t refer back to the attack. She has been branded. The event owns her. She can only ever exist in reference to it.

But that’s not true because the world is full of us. One in five.

We don’t tell our stories because, if we’ve survived, that can only mean that what happened wasn’t so very bad after all. It never means that we are fucking amazing.

I knew that the further we got from the house the worse whatever he had to tell me was. My heart rate slowed to a treacly bump, a familiar numbness crept over me. The body develops a tolerance to adrenaline. At a certain level all that remains is a paralysing ennui.

Then we held hands as we sat on the rickety train, rolling into a grey November London. It wasn’t romantic. It wasn’t sexual. We held hands like Hansel and Gretel on their first night in the forest. We were both sad and I think we were both grateful that someone else was there, someone kind.

Julia stood up to meet him; she called him darling and thanked him sweetly with a hand squeeze. Then she sat back down on the couch, her cigaretted hand outstretched, the other hand resting on the pack of two hundred as if it were a toy dog. I have never seen anyone more regal. She reminded me of Leon. They must have been a great couple. Beautiful, fun, charismatic, those special creatures it’s hard to envy because, despite their flaws and lies and shallowness, they enhance the world by existing. Julia saw the awe on my face. She recognised it. She pouted and graced me with a small, wry smile, then dropped her eyes and turned away as if to say, yes, here I am. I am a peerless pearl who has fallen from her setting. I have rolled into the dust under a couch and been forgotten. But, if you can see past the dust and the gloom, you will see that I am still a pearl.

Demy paused, so overwhelmed with emotion that he struggled to get the words out, but it was a drunk’s sadness, fleeting and shallow. I felt he had told this story many times before and knew it worked.

There is a nice way to dispel self-delusion, which is a beautiful thing if you can get it, but this isn’t it: ‘You fucking idiot, Fin.’

He reached forward and took the phone and went into another room. He whispered to her. I don’t know what they said. When he came back he had hung up and his eyes were red. ‘What did you say to her?’ ‘Goodbye.’ He looked at me. ‘It’s hard to be alive sometimes. Don’t you find it hard?’ I was worried he meant he didn’t care if we were murdered today. ‘I do, until my life is threatened and then I’d fight the world.’

I saw now that Gretchen thought I was victimising her by telling a truth she didn’t want to hear. It made sense of the way she behaved during the rape case and why she felt OK about trying to shut me up. Even now, even after the other girl and her attempts on my life, Gretchen still felt that I was attacking her. Self-pity makes tyrants, it’s the defining characteristic of brutal regimes, but it was more than that with Gretchen. It was laziness too. Violetta suited her, flattered her, coddled her, and Gretchen would harbour Violetta until it no longer served her to do so.

they took turns kissing my bump better, jabbing it with passionate little kisses, taking turns. It was incredibly painful and I never wanted it to stop. With each kiss I thought of Sabine’s love for Amila, of my mum’s love for my dad, and how close I came to suicide. Trina was right. It is a passing impulse, a signal that change is needed.