Love & Virtue, page 21
‘But if he was already vulnerable’—my voice sounded high-pitched and weak—‘surely having someone like Eve accuse him of rape . . .’
‘Yes, but don’t you see that it’s just too complicated? It’s never going to make sense. For every Eve factor, there will be others we don’t know about. I’m not saying you’re wrong—’
I scoffed audibly, because, of course, that was precisely what he was doing.
‘I’m not!’ he continued, more forcefully. ‘I’m just saying that you shouldn’t single out Eve as your villain.’
I felt physically exhausted by the number of times Balth had cut me off. His point of view rose up before me as a solid, impenetrable thing, and I resented him for the self-assurance on which it was constructed. To stand so firm and not be budged—what, then, was the point of conversation?
‘So you don’t see any world in which what happened between us, and Eve pursuing it, is relevant?’
He sighed and looked at me through new eyes, neither amused nor intrigued. His face was dull and grave.
‘Look, Michaela. I don’t know what else to tell you. A great guy died way too young. There’s no narrative to it.’
EMILY, CLAUDIA, AND Portia didn’t read the student newspaper. So when I woke on Monday morning to an article linked in our group chat, I knew it must directly concern them.
It wasn’t until Balthazar texted me that I felt compelled to open the link.
Hey just checking in. Hope you’re
okay. Here if you need.
I’m fine! (I think???) Is something up?
Have you read Eve’s article?!
I opened the article on my phone, lying in bed. For a moment, another text from Balth obscured the screen.
I’m so sorry. I didn’t think she had it in her.
The first paragraph set the tone.
An unsolved murder, decades old. An eighteen-year-old girl, last seen leaving home to visit a St Thomas’ boy, found dead on the St Thomas’ oval. Her body beaten and bruised, discarded with a pile of stones.
Then there were more recent stories, told in an exacting, clinical style. No more deaths, but plenty of female bodies—mistreated and ill-used.
A girl sees her naked arse on someone else’s phone screen. A photo of her, head obscured, bottom pale and spread before the camera. She is on all fours before a man, behind the jacaranda tree in the St Thomas’ College quadrangle. They have been interrupted. And the photo evidence of that interruption will follow her, relentlessly, until she finds somewhere else to live.
A girl is caught in a ring of bodies. ‘Eagle Rock’ is playing, and pants and underpants have dropped together. She is alone—a circle of twenty boys or more flapping and jumping and taunting. They do not stop when they see her cry. They stop when the song ends.
A girl wakes up in a strange boy’s bed, her face against the wall. As she wakes, searing pain creeps into her consciousness. She walks slowly, with her legs bent awkwardly apart, to the hospital emergency room, where, after several hours, a nurse finally removes her tampon.
And just when Eve’s reporting started to numb the reader—a shopping list of degradations, enacted on a single, faceless victim—Eve switched to the first person.
‘This author’s story,’ she wrote, ‘is not so very different.’
There were parts I recognised with stomach-curdling clarity. The scratch of the academic gown; the metallic smell of the bin; the stomach-acid f lavour of regret. Parts of it—the boy’s aggression; how sore she felt the next day—were new. These details were not necessarily false. Rather, Eve’s lucid, exacting prose rendered them more vivid than my memory ever could.
Reading the first-person paragraphs, I pictured Eve, not myself, enduring the ordeal. Her style was so bold and casually philosophical—her voice so perfectly encapsulating her confidence—it was not possible for the words to conjure another body, another face than hers.
While I was throwing up, he flung an academic gown at me. It hung open. It didn’t cover me; it underlined my shame. He did nothing to help me secure it in place. Instead, he shouted at me.
In the following weeks, my sexual assault became the subject of campus jokes. People would raise their hands when I walked past and say the boy’s name, expecting me to give them a high five. Like it was an achievement. A privilege.
All this time, his words resounded. Stupid bitch, he kept on saying. Stupid bitch. How did I end up weak and intoxicated in a stranger’s bed? Why didn’t I say no? Why didn’t I fight him off? What a stupid bitch I was.
This author makes no claims to objectivity. If objectivity requires me to look upon those men and argue that they were drunk too, that young people don’t know what they’re doing, that everybody makes mistakes, that these mistakes are made everywhere and not just in residential colleges, then, quite frankly, fuck objectivity. You heard me. Fuck it. I’m not interested in journalistic commitments that require me to pretend I see the world through non-judgemental, depersonalised eyes.
I write from personal experience. I write from his bed. I write from underneath his thrusting weight. And when I write from that perspective, I also see with my own eyes, with my own moral perceptions.
So if you’re going to write in the comments section that these events are unrelated, that the institution is not the problem, that institutions don’t have their own morality, then please, go ahead. Free speech etc.
But this stupid bitch won’t believe you.
When I finished the article, I read the parts about Eve again, and I felt for her again. Then I went to the bathroom and threw up. When I was finished, I put my fingers down my throat and dry-retched. I sat on the tiles, my hands cupping the cold porcelain, and marvelled at how much more affecting it was to read a story told about someone else than to piece together my own fractured memories and try to construct a picture of myself.
The group chat with Emily, Claudia, and Portia was relentless. The notifications nagged me all morning. They were getting coffee to discuss the article. From the tone of their texts, I could tell that the discussion would take place in the hushed tones reserved for scandal. They would dissect each story, indulging in the gorier details, and defending parts that didn’t ring true—conducting a post-mortem to preserve their perspectives, their experience of what Fairfax was really like, as the truest of all possible narratives.
I said I wasn’t feeling well, and locked myself in my room. I didn’t reply to Balthazar. Instead, I lay in bed, wide awake, listening for any sound of Eve next door, f linching at the slightest movement.
The fears I’d harboured since I read Eve’s journal—fears Balth had tried to dispel—returned with those precise details, fashioned into the first-person, but still, cruelly, true. I had never told her about the vomit, or the bin, or the gown. My suspicion—that Eve had spoken to Nick before he died—hardened to conviction, with none of the satisfaction of being proved correct. Rather, I felt sick and cold to see my worst fears so confirmed. I pulled my blankets tighter around me.
Although Eve’s article did not name Nick, it dragged his person, his actions, dangerously close to the spotlight. With Nick gone, who was there to refute Eve’s claims? Fuck objectivity, she had said. Objectivity, in this case, was long since dead.
I looked up the editorial board of the student newspaper. The only member I recognised was Luke, his face stern and self-important in the black-and-white photo on the website. I contemplated contacting one of the female editors and telling her that Eve was lying. As I played out this conversation in my mind, it faded quickly to absurdity.
‘So what she’s saying is true?’
‘Yes, but it happened to me, not to her.’
‘Oh. I’m so sorry.’
‘It’s okay.’
‘And you’re happy for us to report that?’
‘I don’t want to report it or anything. I just want you to know it didn’t happen to Eve.’
‘But it did happen?’
Swapping me for Eve didn’t change the nature of the story, the dark-hearted thrust of it, especially because I was incapable of replacing any of her details with my own. I didn’t remember Nick calling me a ‘stupid bitch’. Indeed, I had never known him to display any kind of cruelty. Hadn’t he sat and smoked and worried that his friends had no inner life? Who was that person—that Nick I knew—if not a man with a conscience? But I could hardly overlay Eve’s story with my own anecdotal perceptions, accumulated over other, unrelated interactions, all of which would . . . what? Defend the man who had allegedly assaulted me? Even knowing that I could not correct her, I stared at the ceiling until my eyes drew shapes on it, and entertained the possibility.
THE DAYS WERE lengthening. When Paul called and asked what I was doing for dinner, I could have wept with relief. I thought that to see him would be, for a few hours at least, to live a different life—to go to a place where Eve’s words were not the constant undercurrent of my thoughts.
We had finished eating dinner at the little table on his balcony. Sitting with one leg crossed over the other, I leaned my shoulder against the railing, and sipped a beer. It was a dark ale Paul had in the fridge. I didn’t really like the taste.
There was a lull in our conversation, and I strained to hear the ocean.
‘That article about Fairfax in the student paper was doing the rounds today.’
I took a large gulp. ‘I didn’t know you read the student paper.’
‘I normally don’t. But I normally don’t have a vested interest in what’s going on at Fairfax.’
I wanted to talk about anything, anything at all, except the contents of that article, and how they might or might not reflect my interests. I surprised myself with how breezily I replied. ‘I know the girl who wrote it. I think you teach her, actually.’
‘Eve Herbert Shaw? Shaved head with white stubble?’ The pause between each question was forced—as if it were possible to know her without noticing what she looked like.
‘Yes. She’s allowed to take your class, seeing as she’s not sleeping with you.’
He kicked my leg gently under the table.
‘And her hair was pink last time I saw her, but that sounds about right.’
‘Are you sure you’re friends?’
‘We had a fight,’ I said. ‘We’re not really speaking to each other at the moment.’
‘Oh yeah? What about?’ Paul stood, and we went into the kitchen to wash the dishes.
I didn’t look at him as I scraped my plate over the bin. I hadn’t spoken to Paul about Nick for weeks. What happened between us—my hazy memory of it and Eve’s visceral retelling; the mystery, that still suffocated me, of how she came to know; what Nick might have told her—I needed to keep these apart from Paul. So I said, ‘About you, actually.’
I heard the plate crash into the sink. Perhaps it was louder in my head, because when I turned, Paul was rinsing it with a steady hand. ‘She knows about us?’
‘I didn’t tell her, of course. It just sort of came out, after we bumped into my friend at the beach that day.’
‘Right.’ He put down the sponge and stood motionless, looking at the soapy water.
‘I’m sorry.’
He wiped his hands on a tea towel, and I took it from him. He didn’t look at me. ‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘It’s not your fault. It is what it is.’
What is it? I wanted to ask. But I said nothing. Instead, I dried the plates as he handed them to me.
‘So this story she told in her article: pretty brave thing to do. I imagine it’s caused quite a stir?’ His voice was strained, teetering towards the upward inf lexion. I said nothing, and he tried, again, to push the conversation along. ‘People must be annoyed with her.’
‘Yes. We are a bit.’
‘We?’ He looked at me, smiling. He’d caught the scent of a debate. ‘I thought you didn’t like Fairfax that much?’
‘Well that’s the thing. I thought I didn’t. I mean, I always knew the culture was pretty appalling, but I guess I didn’t sustain anything like her moral outrage.’
‘It’s where you live. You can’t be outraged the whole time.’
‘I could move out, I suppose.’
‘Where to?’
I’d finished with the plates and watched as he wiped down the bench. His question contained no tremor of invitation—his apartment strictly the setting not the subject of our conversation. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I guess I don’t have anywhere else to go.’
Later that night, when Paul’s head moved down past my stomach, I took it in both hands and pulled him back up. I didn’t explicitly say no, but he was pliant. He didn’t ask why. I didn’t really know why, except for an instinct that I didn’t deserve that kind of pleasure. Lying there, helpless and writhing, while he buried his face in me and licked me with calculating strokes, seemed shameful and selfish. Like stealing. That it might give him pleasure to give me pleasure wasn’t an idea I entertained.
On a whim, I told him to choke me. He put a hand to my throat but didn’t apply real pressure. I closed my eyes and did not ask again.
I lay awake for hours, trying to put a name to this incredible smallness; this feeling of being broken and fragile, and so totally in Paul’s hands. When I eventually fell asleep, my dreams met me with whole conferences of age-appropriate, bookish women who might suit him better. They all had sumptuous hair and stylish substitute-for-a-personality spectacles. Their faces looked like Eve’s.
17
PORTIA THOUGHT WE all needed a break. ‘Especially Emily,’ she said. Claudia and I agreed. I agreed emphatically when I realised that Portia’s parents owned a beach house.
In the car on the way to Palm Beach, they spoke about Eve in tones that would have brought tears of frustration—hot and smarting—to her eyes. For weeks, the conversation had centred on the personal drama, as if she had made no political point. Claudia had decided, on the day the article was published, that Eve had something against Fairfax: that she had not had a good time. This was intuited not from the ‘time’ so graphically described in the article, but from the fact that she wrote it at all. Claudia sensed in Eve’s article something deliberate—vindictive, even. It didn’t read like an experience relived but one reshaped for a purpose. What this purpose was—who had pissed her off—was Claudia’s favourite topic of speculation. To her credit, I couldn’t fault her instinct for inauthenticity.
‘She must have a problem with someone.’ Claudia addressed the whole car.
As usual, I said nothing. My silence had become characteristic in these conversations. It was misinterpreted as loyalty, at least by Emily, who would usually press Claudia, with widened eyes, to drop it. This was difficult to execute today, with Claudia in the front seat, feet up on the dashboard, and Emily next to me in the back.
They assumed, incorrectly, that I had spoken to Eve since the article.
I had no intention of exposing her publicly. I couldn’t reveal her story as mine without revealing that it was also Nick’s. I thought about Emily’s stilted politeness the morning after the ball, when she found out I’d slept with Nick: not allowing herself the indulgence of feeling hurt, but not yet over it either. My stomach ached, thinking of the pain she had felt then and the grief she had since endured. I knew—with gut-deep dread—that this pain would only breed and mutate if she saw the scene, as I now did, through the lens of Eve’s disgust.
So whatever I might say to Eve could only be personal. There would be no threat, no intent on my part; no commitment to corrections. How dare you? might be a start. How could you? But when I imagined these kinds of conversations, I couldn’t see past the opening line. All the qualities that first drew me to Eve were now keeping me from her. Her intelligence; her confidence; her eloquence: these were obstacles. Whatever I felt—however hurt—she would have rebuttals at the ready, justifications I couldn’t surmount. If I saw her, I supposed, I would be compelled to speak. In the meantime, I assumed she was avoiding me, and I waited, paralysed, for circumstance to force a move.
In the front seat, Claudia continued, ‘What happened to her was obviously awful and whatever, but the article was just so much.’
Portia nodded. ‘The stupid bitch thing was a lot.’
I enjoyed their understatement.
‘I did find that bit hard to believe. Like, the whole encounter was horrible’—Claudia spoke quickly, as she always did when working up to a but—‘and they were obviously too drunk, but the yelling just seemed so cruel. He sounded like a real bully.’
‘I think those boys can be cruel.’ Emily spoke softly.
Claudia turned the radio down and asked her to repeat herself.
‘I just don’t think it’s inconceivable that a St Thomas’ boy might be cruel.’
Emily’s words, unsure though they were, choked me. It was nauseating, hearing her discuss the boy in Eve’s story—what he was capable of—as if he were not a boy she’d loved, but a faceless type she knew of.
I turned my face to the window. We were driving through the Harbour Tunnel. With dirty walls on all sides, I couldn’t pretend to look at the view. I leaned my head against the glass and closed my eyes.
Claudia didn’t turn to look at us, but spoke out, to the windscreen. ‘I’m not saying it’s inconceivable at all. I just reckon their behaviour is even more insidious than what Eve was getting at, because it’s harder to call out.’
I texted Balth in an attempt to opt out of the conversation.
We’re talking about Eve’s article
Who’s we?
Claudia, Portia, Emily
Must be nice to have something to talk about
Ha!
They’re thanking her no doubt
Oh absolutely. Just grateful they’ve been liberated
Aren’t we all
I could feel Emily looking at me. I put my phone away, holding it screen-down on my lap so I’d feel it vibrate if Balth texted again.
