We walk her in Western Park every day that spring, peaceful in her blankets as a carved marble angel, through glades of trees roaring into leaf. Apart from being physically on top of me, walks are the only way she’ll sleep. The fight starts every day when we get about half-way. Believe all women – from a legal point of view, it’s just not a workable proposition . . . Define ‘sexual assault’ . . . Grey areas . . . Multitude of sins . . . How to stand it up in a court of law though . . .
John with his calm voice on, his hands spread wide as if to say, come on, I’m a reasonable guy. Me with my face red, my mouth twisting in contempt. Knowing I probably look ugly, but not caring.
“But women have their own power. Sex is power,” he says to me, frowning. “Remember House of Cards?”
“Kevin Spacey is not a good person to be citing here in any context, John. And being sexually attractive has nothing to do with being assaulted. I’m not talking here about normal sex!”
“Beautiful women are powerful, though. Why do you think men want to be successful, if not to attract the highest class of mate?”
A picture that keeps going around in my head: lying with my eyes tight shut in Eric’s bed, poisoned with a hangover down to the roots of myself. The yellow duvet with no cover, tiny little duck feathers floating out of it. Eric swiping me down in the lift that always smelt of chalk, the city already going about its day many floors below us. Me in my dirty clothes from the night before. There were nights he’d text when I was already in bed, in the middle of eating, or watching a film. And I’d find myself in a taxi, walking through the public lobby, my high heels ringing out on the tiles, shivering a bit under the fluorescent lights. Some nights he didn’t even want me there – he’d rather have watched M*A*S*H and gone to bed. And the mornings then, feeling him waking up next to me. Pretending to be asleep for the rest of it.
John pushes the stroller ahead of me, past hundred-year-old oaks, the daffodils in a bright ring. The birds bomb and dive overhead, maddened by whatever pulse inside them says it’s time to find a mate. Then 500 yards later, we’re into it again.
“I’m talking about the burden of proof, and reasonable doubt, and all that stuff. You know what I’m talking about.”
“I just wish, for once, you would stop trying to rationalise this. As though the courts represent some kind of pure standard of truth, or justice, instead of being just a reflection of what people – men, I mean – can get away with. Why do you think so few women even take rape charges to court in the first place?”
“Because police have to be sure they have a case, first.” He sets his shoulders, gets behind the buggy for the final push up to the ridge.
“Yeah, and that threshold is at their discretion!” I can feel myself getting wound up again. The baby has her eyes open, watching transfixed, as the shadows track across her face from the trees overhead. “And even if they do decide to take it, do you know the percentage of convictions?”
He turns and looks at me. “No, what is it?”
Fuck, of course he wants to know. And I have no numbers, only a flow of magma from my brain to my stomach. “Very small, John! It’s a very small percentage.” I want to slap his face, then, all pink from pushing the stroller. To kill him. Reach over and rip off his head. Or maybe just get up in the night, run away with the child. I have a friend who lives on Great Barrier Island. I could go back to Ireland.
He’s still talking when I tune back in. “There’s a level of proof required, it can’t just be women accusing men of rape.”
“It’s a burden of proof, John, not a level. That’s fucked too – you know it is. In a legal system meant to protect us. And it’s not just rape! There’s more things that can be done to you than rape! And there’s all the things that can happen to you after being raped, too.” My voice echoes through the trees. A woman walking a labradoodle the colour of a caramel slice looks back behind her. “All I’m saying is—” I look at John, standing there waiting, gulp a breath.
All I’m saying is. My ears are ringing. I feel like I’m on a debating team, losing under bright lights. All the women before me, singing along the blood in my veins.
Men can’t protect the women they love in Dracula. After all the technicolour obscenities that came with Lucy becoming a vampire, Mina goes up to bed in the asylum and Dracula gets her anyway.
John’s still turned back towards me, arms on the handle of the stroller in front of him, long body in jeans, a navy jumper, his beat-up Nike trainers. All the different shades of blue that I’m used to. His hair is in a ducktail, it needs a cut. Neither of us has slept a night in months.
“It just needs more definition, in the context of a legal—”
“John! Are you even fucking listening to me?” Looking up at the sky, the tops of the trees so high, I feel dizzy.
“Stop shouting,” he says. “Come on.” Turns his shoulder back to pushing the stroller.
I walk on through the good-smelling mud of the path, fitting my shoes into where his feet have packed it down flat. It’s so embarrassing. Every single time. We walk the rest of the way home in silence, me ten paces behind.
Later that night, in front of Game of Thrones, I dig my spoon into the bowl of ice cream he brings in. On the television, the dragon is reducing a whole city to ash and memories. We watched the first episode the week I went over to France to live with him. Lying in his bed in the blue-shuttered room, the laptop on his long legs. Economical storytelling, he said. And now it’s four years later, zombie winter has come to Westeros. The last season is patchy, overwritten since they went away from the books.
*
That summer in France, there were thunderstorms in the afternoons some days, being close to the Pyrenees. He picked me up once, in the garden, and carried me up to the bed. I remember lying there afterwards on the tangled sheets, feeling like fucking Anais Nin.
Our second date, I bought him white flowers and a box of cherries. He was home in New Zealand for the summer, visiting his mother. He had lovely manners. I was surprised by how fast he moved when he wanted to. Ten years of professional rugby. I stood half-dressed on the other side of the bed, half scared, half exhilarated, the height of him, his hairy chest. “Come over here. Come and get me.”
Afterwards, both of us laughing with relief, the lovely swollenness of my bottom lip.
*
“I’m not just some asshole you’re arguing with,” he’s saying. “I’m your husband.” He has one eye on the telly, the baby in a tiger-in-the-tree hold along his arm next to me. Ice cream melting in the bowl on his chest.
“My fiancé.”
“Yeah, whatever. I love you. I want to talk about all this with you, rationally. I know it matters.”
“I know you know.”
He sighs, looks sad, then, handing me over the sleeping baby.
She nuzzles into the space between my shoulder and my breast; I pat her nappy reflexively, checking it.
I look at his face, the slightly downturned eyes that our daughter inherited. He said to me yesterday, “Looking into a baby’s eyes, you’d forgive them anything.” Eve was gazing up at him, tracking his shifting expressions. “She connects me to all of humanity, everyone.” He’s frowning again, now, gaunt in the cheeks from lack of sleep. In ten minutes he’ll get up and make the dinner. He does all the cooking, suffers through the midwives asking him if he’s helping Mum around the house enough. He’s started timing me with the stopwatch on his phone while I run around the park, since I said I wanted to lose the weight from the baby; he’s edited every word I wrote for that story about the sleazy photographers. “I’m sorry love, I’m just tired. I love you,” I say, reaching over Eve, asleep in my lap, kissing the top of his head.
“We’re all tired,” he says.
“It’s hard to explain. I know rationally it’s not your fault, but . . . you’re there. It’s like it’s all in my body.”
“Well, tell your body I’m not the enemy. I’m not the bad guy.”
He puts his bowl on the ground, beside the couch – it makes a hollow ringing sound.
You’re not the fucking good guy either, I want to say. None of ye are good guys. None of ye get it.
Taken with kind permission from the newly published memoir Stakes by Noelle McCarthy (Penguin, $40), the follow-up to her prize-winning debut Grand. Much is made of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in this dark contemplation of sex, desire, men and women, and motherhood. ReadingRoom is devoting all week to Stakes. Tomorrow: a review with personal revelations by Joanna Cho.
