He knew the answer and so did I. Spanish police, all the shame, the interrogation and the hassle. I had invited him up to my room, hadn’t I? He had only become rough once he was actually inside me. He hadn’t punched me in the face or pinned down my upper arms or worse. He had just pounded into me like a pile driver, kept going while I tried to rain ineffective punches down on his back and he held a garlicky hand over my mouth. I would not be believed. I couldn’t really understand what had happened myself, let alone articulate it to strangers who were primed for every inconsistency in my story, every ambiguity. I knew the struggle to be believed – to tell my story in a clear, unambiguous way – would almost, almost be worse than what had taken place inside my room. And it would make it realer and realer and realer, and I didn’t want that. I just wanted to forget it had happened.

He held up what was in his hand. It was a leaf. A red one, like it should belong to an English autumn or a New England fall, not a summer in Tenerife. A red leaf, who knows from what tree, heart shaped and folded down the middle so it looked like a veiny butterfly. He smiled and held the leaf out to me, by the stalk. I didn’t take it.

‘It looks like what’s on your face.’

He was mumbling. I couldn’t quite hear what he said.

‘What?’

‘It looks like what you have on your face,’ he said and his eyes were pretending to be kind, but it was a trick. He was not kind. He was unkind and cruel. He was just like all those others. He was worse than all the others. And I knew exactly why he had done what he had done to me – recognized it with an uncomfortable familiarity – because he knew I didn’t get many other offers, or any other offers; because he thought I should be grateful to be raped in my hotel room, during a badge-system-advising trip, to Tenerife.

I would not cry or give him the pleasure of seeing my anger. He was nothing to me. He would be nothing, in a day or two. When I would erase him, banish him from my memory, expel any trace of him – tell myself nothing had happened and I was OK. I took the leaf, scrunched it up in my hand and let it fall, in pieces, to the marble floor. Then I turned from him, went to my room to pack my case, put myself on a flight home and asked to change departments.

CHAPTER 19