Until the rapes, your life had been different. With each raw pelvic thrust those nights, your old self fled in terror. You can hardly remember what it felt like to see the world as a good place. Those nights, something was taken from you and you can never get it back. There are days when you find it hard to get up in the morning. Other days, you are fuelled by coffee and rage. It feels like the old version of you died and left in its place a person who has been hollowed out. But then you feel a serpent of seething, writhing hatred coil and fill the hollow parts. Impotent rage corrodes you from within. It becomes fire.

Soon you discover that rage, all dressed up with places to go, burns like the sun.

You take a chocolate biscuit from a small plate and eat it, then carefully wipe your hands with an alcohol swab and put on a pair of surgical gloves. When you have access to the town’s medical records, and you have contracted syphilis, it’s pretty simple to identify the source. Jack fucking Barratt. Every time you see him around town, bile rises in your throat at the thought of him using you like a ragdoll, infecting you, then tossing you aside like garbage.

You start with that old oaf down the pub. When you read in the newspapers that women are harassed then ‘saved’, you are startled by the pattern. You’d seen it. You’d been it. Till that moment, you thought it was just the barbecue. But no! They came back for you. Your dreams suddenly make sense. All those faces you see floating above you as your body is jerked up and down with their lust and your horror.

And that day in the pub, when from your quiet corner you see Jack Barratt come in and make a beeline for the old guy, you just knew. But you watch Ralph Murphy kick him out before you can hear anything.

You think slipping a drug into his beer will be hard, but it isn’t. You think you might feel guilty, but you don’t. In fact, you feel … lighter, knowing that never again can he sidle up to a woman minding her own business and spit and snort and try to crack on to her, as if the only thing that mattered was what he wanted, and she doesn’t matter at all. It is so disgusting. And if the old bastard didn’t play that part, the Jack Barratts of this world would never seem like a safer alternative.

And so, you think, it doesn’t feel like murder at all. It feels like … saving women.

So does offering a helping hand on a cliff top.

Now, you just have to find the others …

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS