Rocket would lie at the side of the river and watch me swimming in the water, sheltered from the sun by a willow tree that hung over the riverbank. We were hidden from the rest of the world. We never ran into anyone else and this became our special place. I would be frozen when I got out of the water, my skin cold and wet, but he would still throw me down on the grass and make love to me, not caring about his own clothes or the fact that I was numb to his touch.
Those days by the river I felt invincible, as though no one could ever shatter the woman I was becoming. I was stronger for him, or at least I thought I was. I had been so preoccupied with being free that I hadn’t noticed my isolation from everyone else. The only world I knew was Rocket. My friends had given up on me. Laughing my absence off at the fact that I was in love and that life never gets better than this honeymoon period. They were right about one thing. Life never did get any better, it only got worse. I was totally complicit in my own demise and I wasn’t even aware of it until it was far too late.
It wasn’t for a full year that I began to really notice what was happening. Rocket had asked me to move in with him and I’d said yes. He and JD shared a house but JD worked a lot and was never home. My parents helped me move my things, and then we said our goodbyes. I assumed I would see them a week or so later, but I didn’t see them again for two months, and the time after that it had almost been half a year since we’d met up. In fact, I didn’t really see anyone from before I’d met Rocket – this man that I was so blindly in love with that I accepted everything he did or said without question.
JD started dating a bottle blonde and moved in with her; she was pretty but she talked so much. It was hard to imagine him being with a girl like her. Maybe her constant noise took the pressure of talking away from him. Sometimes I caught him looking at me across the room when we were all together. He didn’t make me feel nervous or bad though. I couldn’t put my finger on it at the time, but I realise now he was checking that I was OK, looking for outward signs of stress or distress. He knew where this was going; he had been here before. But still he didn’t warn me.
Rocket would sit next to me wherever we went, his arm always around me, or if he couldn’t do that then his hand would be on my knee or my shoulder. I thought this was affection, but I now know that it was possession. I belonged to him, he had plucked me straight from my parents’ arms and put his hooks in me. He had never mistreated me, but I had never stepped out of line, I had never done anything unexpected or out of the ordinary. Until then I had never done anything that he saw as questionable. He had moulded me into the girlfriend he wanted – adoring, loyal and fiercely in love.
He got a promotion at work and so he told me I could stop working if I wanted to, but I didn’t want to, I enjoyed my job. It wasn’t the most glamorous of jobs admittedly, but I liked the hours. I started at 5 a.m., worked for eight hours a day and still had half the day to enjoy myself. I think, looking back, this was part of the problem. Those few hours between when I finished work and Rocket came home from his shifts at the hospital. He didn’t know what I had been doing and that bothered him.
His friend owned the camera shop SNAPPO’S and Rocket got me a job there so we could meet for lunch every day as it was near the hospital. I left my waitressing job and started working in the camera shop. I had talked to him before about how much I had always wanted to be a photographer and so he bought me a camera. It wasn’t an expensive one, it was an old Russian camera that I had mentioned; it produced imperfect images and that was the kind of art I wanted to create, maybe because I had always felt imperfect myself. I thought Rocket was supporting my love of photography by finding me a job more suited to my interests. Although I missed having my free afternoons, it was good to be doing something different. The manager paid my wages in cash to Rocket, but at least I got my films developed for free as a perk of the job.
In a little over a year my life had been transformed. I had no family around me anymore and it seemed as though my friends were all moving in a different direction to me – it wasn’t until much later that I realised they just didn’t like him, they didn’t trust him. I wish someone had told me, had made me look at what I was getting into, but no one said anything. There was nothing to say, I suppose; for all intents and purposes, he was lovely. I couldn’t fault him – there was nothing to fault. He was generous and kind and he was always good to me. Until he wasn’t.
The toilets were empty when Selina walked in; she hurried into the stall and closed the door. They had a ten-minute break before the next lesson and she had a terrible stomach cramp. She held her breath as the exterior door opened and more people piled into the bathroom. The faint aroma of cigarettes, Impulse and hairspray in the air told her it was Pippa, Liza and Naomi. They ran the taps and she listened to them speak, imagining them reapplying the black lines to the corners of their eyes, curling their eyelashes and applying a rosy lip gloss. This was their bathroom ritual, it was how they managed to look preened at all hours of the day.
‘So, did he take you ALL the way home then?’ Naomi said, her raspy voice instantly recognisable.
‘A lady never tells!’ Pippa said.
‘Right, so what happened then?’ Liza’s deep and sultry tones were also easy to spot as she jibed Pippa.
‘Bitch,’ Pippa said and they all burst out laughing.
‘So, what did his dick look like?’ Naomi said quietly. The laughter continued.
‘Naomi!’ Pippa called out, indignant.
‘No! I mean is he like, circumcised? I heard all Americans do that shit. Is it weird? What’s it look like? Are you seeing him again?’
‘We’re hooking up at the weekend.’
Selina guessed they were talking about her new neighbour, Connor. His arrival at the school had caused quite a stir. Most of the kids in school all knew each other from primary or even nursery school – they were all from similar neighbourhoods, so when someone new came in all eyes were on them. Add to that the fact that Connor had an American accent and he was one of those typically chiselled sporty boys, there was no chance these girls weren’t going to get their hooks into him. She looked at her watch; it was almost time for class and she didn’t want to be late. She flushed the toilet and took a deep breath before exiting the cubicle to face the girls.
‘Have a good listen, Dildo?’ Pippa said.
‘You’re such a fucking freak,’ Naomi muttered.
Selina walked up to the sink and washed her hands. She could feel them all staring at her.
‘You should let me straighten your hair, you know, it would look so much better than that ratty mess,’ Liza said.
Selina pushed past them and out into the hall, finally exhaling properly. Since she had started at the secondary school, those three girls in particular had made her life hell. Having a surname like Dilley didn’t help, completely lending itself to the term Dildo, which had been her unofficial name since she had been twelve years old. It didn’t bother her as much as they probably hoped it did. She had much bigger things on her mind than those idiots.
Connor stood by the rugby pitch watching the rest of the class. He had been dreading his first sports lesson and for it to come just a couple of days after an argument with his father made him even more nervous. He liked to play sports, but he was worried about the changing rooms afterwards, aware that
