It was as though whatever was trying to implant in me was resisting being cast out.

Then there was a long, tense time during which I waited for my period to start. I knew it should start within three weeks of taking the pills—if I weren’t pregnant. If anything, it should come a little earlier than normal. Mine made me wait the full three weeks. Just as I was about to phone the doctor, it started. I was safe.

If it hadn’t started, I would have had an abortion. That was clear in my mind. I never for one second considered keeping any foetus that might have resulted.

Fiction-Lucy not only fell pregnant, she kept the baby.

In John Coetzee’s book, her pregnancy was a blessing that made up for the rape. So convincingly did he describe her gravid state that many of my friends and family thought I must be pregnant, too. Total strangers agreed. When no baby came, they believed I must have had an abortion. They didn’t approve. My almost-forgotten social media accounts were flooded with people condemning me for being a baby killer.

They flung Bible verses at me. They bombarded my timelines with blood-soaked photos of abortions. I glimpsed pathetic little bodies in sterile buckets as I flicked through the images, deleting them one by one.

Then they moved on to what I deserved for having aborted my child. Images of women being gang-raped with my face Photoshopped over theirs became a daily sight—crime-scene photos of women having been brutally and bloodily murdered, now wearing my face.

Right about the time that John Coetzee was being nominated for his first major literary award, a man started taking photographs of me going about my daily life and posting them online, just to prove that he was watching me and knew where I lived. I went to the police. Thanks to their sensitivity training, they assigned a woman officer to take my statement. She gave me a lecture about how wrong it was to have aborted my baby.

I told her I hadn’t aborted any baby. She wanted to know why I wasn’t pregnant in that case. I said not all sexual encounters ended in pregnancy. She was sceptical. These were vigorous young men who had taken me, she said. Not the weak, pallid creatures I was accustomed to coupling with. This would definitely have caused pregnancy. I told her I had taken the morning-after pill, and she said that was just as bad as abortion.

* * *

Do I blame John Coetzee for creating a fictional child for me? One that I had to take the blame for aborting?

No, of course not. I am a doctoral candidate in English literature. Well, I was. I am now a deferred doctoral candidate. The external examiner wanted changes made that I have not got around to implementing.