Asking For It

They are all innocent until proven guilty. But not me. I am a liar until I am proven honest.

We teach our girls how not to get raped with a sense of doom, a sense that we are fighting a losing battle. When I was writing this novel, friend after friend came to me telling me of something that had happened to them. A hand up their skirt, a boy who wouldn’t take no for an answer, a night where they were too drunk to give consent but they think it was taken from them anyway. We shared these stories with one another and it was as if we were discussing some essential part of being a woman, like period cramps or contraceptives. Every woman or girl who told me these stories had one thing in common: shame. ‘I was drunk . . . I brought him back to my house . . . I fell asleep at that party . . . I froze and I didn’t tell him to stop . . .’ My fault. My fault. My fault. When I asked these women if they had reported what had happened to the police, only one out of twenty women said yes. The others looked at me and said, ‘No. How could I have proved it? Who would have believed me?’ And I didn’t have any answer for that.

My body is not my own any more. They have stamped their names all over it.

I am not falling apart. I am being ripped at the seams, my insides torn out until I am hollow.

When did we all become fluent in this language that none of us wanted to learn?

Is it possible to want everything to change and nothing to change, all at the same time?

I like it better when my room is pitch black, when the dark is so thick it swallows me up and I feel as if I could drown in it.

What's wrong with what I'm wearing?" "I don't know, Em." Bryan takes a gulp from his water bottle. "It's a bit slutty, isn't it?" I stare pointedly at the FHM poster Blu-Tacked on the wall opposite the bed, of some topless model, one finger in her mouth, the other hand reaching into her knickers. "That's different.