Page 81 of Pictures of Him

‘Hold on, this isn’t making sense. You thought you were having sex with Lucian but it was Jack?’

‘My memory of that night is so patchy, Liv. There’s so much I can’t remember. But I do remember the sex. I know it happened. I know it’s true. I wish more than anything that it wasn’t. I remember him doing things I didn’t want to do. It was strange, almost as if he wanted me to think he was Lucian. I should have stopped him but I didn’t. I knew it was Jack and I just lay there and let him do what he wanted to do. I’ve been so ashamed, Liv, so disgusted with myself. I’ve hated myself, if only you knew how much.’

I’m crying now, but from relief. To tell this secret of mine, finally; to admit that my life has been scarred by shame.

Liv shifts her coffee cup aside as if it’s too much of adistraction. She reaches across the table to take hold of my hand.

‘Tell me everything you can remember about that night. I think you’ve spent so many years blaming yourself for what happened, you might have lost sight of the truth.’

Now

Today Greg spares no punches. Today he delivers me right into the heart of my dread, to the exact moment when my life shattered. He describes the events of that night in the same calm, clinical voice he has used all along. He takes me through it moment by moment, from the first tortured kiss to the last. But I have no need of his words. This moment of betrayal, I have lived and relived it so many times. The memory is crystal clear.

You are in bed with me, on top of me, kissing me, crushing me, holding me so tight I can barely breathe. This kiss, this suffocating kiss, means I cannot see you or speak or ask you to wait. Please. I am still asleep. You are screwing me, that’s the word, I get it now, literally a screw that turns and turns deep in my flesh. I don’t like it. I reach up with my hands to stroke your back. To soothe, to slow, perhaps to stop you, and now your breathing changes gear and you are sighing, sighing, right into my mouth and I don’t like it. You are panting, huh, huh, huh, huh, a sound I’ve never heard before. Smell, touch, taste, sound. This doesn’t feel right.

‘Need to fuck you.’

A word you never use.

‘Turn over,’ you say, and I don’t want to and also your voice doesn’t sound like you.

‘Don’t want to.’

My own voice, when it comes, sounds thick and blurry, drunk, still half asleep.

You pull your mouth away, you lean above me on your hands. In the darkness I can see your face, and now I know fully the thing that subconsciously I have always known. It’s not you, but Jack, on top of me, inside me, all over me, and this is what I wake to. I am crying as he pushes and grunts, quiet tears that streak all the way down my cheeks. He bends his elbows, his face close enough to mine so that he can kiss my tears, he can lick them with his tongue.

‘You want it,’ he says, pressing deeper, so deep it hurts. ‘You love it when he does this to you.’

Those words will stay, they’ll never go.

I don’t say no. No, it isn’t what I want. I don’t push him away. And that will never go either.

Jack is talking again. With his thumb and forefinger he pinches my nipples, first one, then the other.

‘Do you like it when he does that?’ he asks.

He thrusts his tongue into my mouth, an invasive one-sided kiss.

He slides both hands beneath my buttocks, lifting me further into him. Deeper and deeper he goes. He moans. He wants me to do the same, but I am silent, waiting for my ending.

‘Tell me what you like,’ he says. ‘Tell me what he does to you. I’ll do it too. I’ll do whatever he does.’

A strange thing happens. The girl I was floats from mybody like a soul and hovers somewhere above me, watching, waiting as my body is mauled and pounded and obliterated by your friend. There’s no feeling now, no pain, just the absolute quiet of my watchful, disconnected self. This girl, the one on the ceiling, remembers the end, remembers the juddering and the sighing and the slamming into the body that lies on your bed. That horrible final yell. The silence that follows.

I am not crying in this therapy session, though my hands are gripping the arms of my chair so tightly that my knuckles have turned white. Greg has left his chair and is crouched down beside me, telling me to breathe.

‘Breathe, Catherine, you must breathe.’

There’s a sharp pain going right through my chest, like a javelin’s been hurled into it, but I don’t tell Greg this because I cannot speak. Instead I take the breaths, deep ones in, then out, in, out, longer each time, and I listen to his soft, calm voice leading me away from your bedroom of old and back into the warm white light of our cottage.

This is how Greg closes every session, returning me to my safe place, to Sam, to Joe and Daisy. Every day he gets a little closer to bringing me home.

Four months before: Lucian

I’m in my studio, working on an oil portrait of Catherine. I was tempted to mess around with the colours – I tried a pale violet for her skin, a deep rust for her hair – but in the end I’ve gone for a more literal representation. Black-brown hair, creamy skin, those sorrowful eyes, her wonderful mouth. I am completely absorbed. I have this feeling I had once before, that I’m bringing her back to life. I felt it a long time ago when I painted my father for the first time, working from an old photograph. It was as if the painting was smiling at me, the way he used to, the smile a half-laugh, as if he was permanently ready for amusement. How did a man who loved to laugh end up taking his own life? How did a girl who loved me so much end up sleeping with my best friend, my brother?

So completely focused am I on this painting that I don’t hear the studio door open and I am astonished to find Liv walking towards me.

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