A Bad Thing That Happened Last April

TW: Rape.

This is a list of facts, about something that happened to me last April.

1. I met some friends from college in South London for a night out. I had been messaging one of the boys prior to this.
2. I showed off my party trick, downing a mug of neat vodka, more than once. Though formerly enough to make me drunk-but-happy, I hadn’t factored in the effect of 6 weeks at home not drinking. It completely wiped me out. My memory from this point on is fragmentary.
3. The mugs of vodka had predictable effects. I nearly passed out, lolling, on the train. Somehow, I made it to Slug in London.
4. I lost my friends at some point, and was thrown out by a bouncer (this is inferred from (5))
5. I was at a bus stop, vomiting, for 2 hours. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, and was covered in my own sick.
6. A stranger took my phone, and somehow called the group I had entered with, telling them I was at this bus stop.
7. They came and found me. The girl I was meant to be returning home with was also drunk and didn’t want me coming back with her.
8. One of the boys in the group offered to take me back to his. (Again inferred).
9. He called an Uber. He put his hand over my mouth to stop me vomiting.
10. Somehow, I made it into his house. (inferred).
11. He had sex with me in his house. I remember lying on the kitchen floor.
12. My trousers were ripped the next morning.
13. He put his penis in my mouth. I remember lolling on a sofa, and his telling me to suck it.
14. I somehow was moved up to his brothers’ bed (inferred).
15. I woke up in the morning at 6 by him, his brother and mum, his brother needing to go to school. I was naked, and there was blood and vomit on the sheets.
16. I was mortified and took the sheets downstairs to be washed. I sat at the breakfast bar, covered in sick, making small talk. At the time, I didn’t really know what to think of the night before, and couldn’t remember, completely what had happened.
17. I called an Uber and went to my friends. Her mum opened the door, I showered and changed. I took the train back home.
18. I came home and cried and cried and cried.
19. I sent the boys mums flowers to apologise for ruining the sheets.
20. I denied knowing anything about what had happened when the boy messaged me, claiming a complete black-out. I’ve laughed at jokes and told anecdotes about the time I was sick on his brothers’ bed. I remained friends with him over the next term and slept with him consensually on two further occasions. I’ve apologised in person to his mum.

There is the list of facts. Make of it what you will.

It took me a long time to organise and understand that list. It’s been a year of thinking, and of struggling to comprehend what happened — to order into the neat dichotomy of right and wrong.

Part of this is due to the gaps in this list. I don’t know what happened between 10 and 11. I don’t know how responsive I seemed, or how eager I appeared. I don’t know how drunk the boy was. But I do know that I was covered in sick, and had been unable to speak, but he was at the very least sober enough to call an Uber. I do know (13), that I was lolling, and he was instructing.

I don’t know how 11 happened. One of the things I struggle with is that his family were at the very least in the house the next morning. I don’t understand how we managed to have sex, but I very clearly remember lying next to the kitchen island. Again, make of that what you will.

19 and 20 are odd. I think they were attempted acts of control, ways to restructure the event that had happened to fit it into some alternative narrative. 19 reduced this to a drunken mishap, the focus on my being too drunk, rather than what happened to me.

20 I think is an attempt to reorient the story. If I could choose when to have sex with him, it didn’t matter that he had chosen to have sex with me. The third time I simply felt revulsion and a sense of superiority that I could feel such disgust.

I’ve not used the word rape in this recantation. Part of this is because the word itself is such a loaded term. Rape has certain paradigmatic, awful images — the violent stranger in the street, the systematic gangs, the abusive boyfriend. Partially because of the gaps, the inferences, the ambiguity that I hope I have addressed with a proper amount of attention, this doesn’t fit easily into the common core we take the word to have.

I now call this rape. But I understand this does not fit with everyone’s denotation of what the word means. What I hope can be agreed is that this is something wrong. If anyone is reading this, and has experienced something similar, but does not feel like rape ‘fits’ what happened, I want them to know that this is something wrong, something that should not happen, and something I am so sorry did. One of the barriers to my accessing the support I needed was a reluctance to use ‘rape’, and all the loaded connotations it possessed.

I hope in writing this, that people who have experienced something similar, but do not yet know how to label it or conceptualise what occurred, can recognise that, at the very least, something wrong has happened. You may not think of it as rape now, you may have lingering suspicions, you may see the word as something insurmountable or too alien to affix to what you, yourself have been through. I write this to say that ‘something wrong’ is enough to seek out help, to find someone to talk to about it. Don’t let a word, and fear and discomfort from engaging with it, prevent you from finding help.