Imagine my surprise to find myself, a year later, one of the central characters in Coetzee’s novel. He even used my full name, Lucy Lurie. It was as though he were daring me to sue him, knowing I didn’t have the means or the resolution to do so. Lucy means “light” in Greek. Scholars have made much of his use of nominative determinism in the book. Lucy is the moral centre of the novel—an unwavering source of light and goodness. She is an unflawed character, apart from some amusing mannerisms.

She has a way of walking with her toes turned out like a duck—a legacy of her early training as a dancer. She blinks her eyes and screws up her nose when she gets tired or when her contact lenses irritate her. When she is talking to someone who makes her uneasy, she twists a strand of hair around her forefinger until it hangs lankly by the side of her face. When she believes herself to be unobserved, she sucks on her baby finger until it becomes wrinkled and bloodless.

These are my mannerisms. Only one who has observed me closely would notice them. I want to shrink when I think of Coetzee observing my hank of over-fingered hair. Mortification slaps me on both cheeks when I realise he must have walked past my office and seen me sucking my finger.

The man who pretended not to recognise me when I ran into him in the general office had been watching me all that time, cataloguing my habits.

The critics ate it up. It was so perfectly Coetzee-ish (yes, that is now a word) to humanise an otherwise angelic character by giving her a laundry list of bathetic qualities.

* * *

I don’t see many people from the English Department these days, but my friend Moira comes around sometimes. She asks whether I’m flattered to realise how carefully Coetzee had been watching me.

I tell her I’m not. Not at all.

But that’s a lie.

Something within me blooms under the warm, acknowledging gaze of a clever older man. I feel worthy. Validated. I feel like I exist. Like I matter.

And I despise myself for feeling like that.

CHAPTER 2

I have a therapist. Of course, I do. Every middle-class white woman who gets raped has a therapist. It’s only if you are poor and black that you don’t need a therapist after being raped. You pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and get on with it. Your feelings aren’t as tender as those of a middle-class white woman. Your scars don’t run as deep. Your trauma isn’t as real. You’re a coper. A survivor. Your skin is thicker. You shrug these things off faster.