I met him on the plane on the way to Ecuador, and I'd just been robbed and was feeling completely alone and vulnerable. I had a hotel booked for two nights, which gave me 24 hours to find somewhere to stay in a city that was completely alien to me. He took pity on me, gave me his fax number and told me to get in touch. I did, the next morning, and he offered me a place to stay in his house, with him and an English lad (HE was Australian).
I was wary, but he invited me to spend the day with them and view the house first, which seemed like a fairly genuine thing to do, and we had a good day together, and I had nowhere else to go so I said yes - it was only until I found my feet enough to find somewhere myself. Most of the time things worked out okay, although he tried it on the first night I was there, even to the point of sneaking to my room and climbing in bed with me, but I managed to get rid of him. I told the other guy, and he said if he tried anything like that again I should just scream and he'd come and "rescue" me, but the other times were when he was out or away...
A few days later he bullied me into sleeping with him, made me feel so pathetic and small, when he knew I didn't want to, and I felt awful for cheating on my then-fiance. I cried the whole time, but he didn't care.
After that things improved in a bizarre way, because he couldn't handle it, and wouldn't talk to me for the rest of the week. Mich went away to the coast so there were just the two of us in the house, and on the Friday, I decided to leave on Monday, as soon as Michael got back. But he started talking to me again, and things seemed to go back to normal, back to friends who got on well.
He went out for a drink and when he came home he came up to my room to ask me to go downstairs and talk to him - it was nothing unusual, so I did. I could see he was upset about something.
The first thing that made me uneasy was when I went into the kitchen to get a drink of water, and I came back down the stairs to find him snorting coke in the corner near the fire. I can't explain why, but it made me feel edgy.
When I sat down, he came and sat a little closer to me than before, and although at first things seemed the same as before, something had changed. We carried on talking for a while, but his conversation began to change, almost imperceptibly at first, and my uneasiness grew and grew. I told myself I was being irrational, but I did not feel at all comfortable, and I began to wish I were somewhere else.
He began to run his fingers through my hair, and to talk about sex in a way that disgusted me. I can't explain it even now, but I felt completely degraded by the way he spoke. He asked me intrusive questions that I could not answer, and he began to get rougher and rougher as he carried on touching my hair, tangling it and pulling it, and I tried to pull away a few times but I couldn't, and I was really frightened by this time.
He took my glasses away so that I felt even more vulnerable and insecure - I really don't see well without them - , and carried on talking in that sordid way, and I felt trapped, unable to speak a word because I felt that I would somehow be accepting the way he was talking to me, in some way being an accessory to it, a part of it; and that would have made me feel even more degraded than ever.
I finally managed to move, to pull right away from him, and that seemed to free my tongue from the suspended animation it appeared to be under; I had already made it as clear as possible that I was not interested, but I stood away from him and said that I was going up to my own room, alone, to sleep.
When I said that something in him just seemed to snap, not in any dramatic display of temper - I think that would have been much less frightening than the cold, empty way he changed, the disinterested way he changed which I found infinitely more terrifying. He just moved towards me and picked me up as though I were a feather, swung me up in his arms, and said "We're going upstairs...". And I knew.
It was the most awful night of my life; I know that's an obvious thing to say, but words just don't seem to come near it. Sometimes I still can't face the emotions of it all, and so I remember it but in this blurred way, where I can see it all happening but I don't feel anything. There's just a void where the emotions ought to be because they're just too...too harrowing really. Then at other times I remember it all perfectly, in too much detail, and I feel completely trapped in it when I remember it that way.
There is a part of me that can never move on from there, that is caught forever in that room, in that night, like a fly in a spider's web. That is why I know how it feels to have no hope, because one day I realised that I had no hope of ever escaping from it, of leaving it behind. It cannot be undone. Part of me, however small, is still there, because as Borges said "what has happened once in time is repeated ceaselessly in eternity".
Part of me is still in his arms, being carried up those interminable flights of stairs, lookingly longingly up to my room, the warm, bright, cosy place where I could be alone and safe, but being carried into that other place, the dark, lonely, intimidating room that was such a different world to the one just one more flight of stairs and an eternity away. Part of me is caught, forever being pushed onto the bed, having my clothes torn off me, and part od me is stuck forever trying to run out of the door, but never, ever making it, knowing that I WILL never, ever make it, always being dragged back and being forced down onto that huge, black bed, so huge that it seemed that no matter how far you tried to go you could never get to the end of it, never get off...
Part of me is still begging, all the way up those five flights of stairs, all the time, begging, pleading, crying, fighting, please don't do this, please let me go, please don't, please stop, please, oh god please stop, oh god please...still wriggling away just to be dragged back and have it start all over again, time after time, desperately fighting and trying to get away just to be pulled back, and no sound except my voice still begging, no words from him, nothing, just that constant dragging back and starting again, tears streaming down my face, feeling so tired, so very tired, and so cold and sick, aching inside, aching in my soul...
Still at the point where he got tired of my trying to get away from him, the point where he put that enormous hand on my throat, pressing down, squeezing, just enough to keep me still, pinned there unable to move, knowing it would never end, was never going to end, that we'd be there forever, repeated ceaselessly through eternity, never ending, and feeling so very cold, so alone, oh god when will this end, oh god how can you let him do this to me, this can't be happening, oh god what did I do wrong, when will this end....not even feeling afraid of that hand gripping so tightly, because it was too late to be afraid, too late, the worst was already happening, still happening, and that hand could at least bring an end to it all, a relief from all the horror, the pain, the emptiness...
part of me is still there, hoping it will, knowing I'm only seconds away from never having to feel again, never having to feel anything ever again, half hoping...no, nothing to fear from that, an end to this hell, god let this end, please stop, please, please stop...end the horror, the darkness, the vastness of this place, the cold, cold emptiness, in the room, in the house, in me....the sickness, the total isolation, desolation, despair, the ice in my heart, the splinter from the Snow Queen's mirror making all the world seem ugly and miserable...still begging and pleading... It never ends.
All this never ends, and never will. I... I
don't know what to do with it all sometimes; it hurts too much. I want so
much to forget, to not feel any more. But I can't forget, and I have to go
on feeling. I have to go on feeling.
Last updated 11th October 1998