No one offered an answer. Katherine shifted from foot to foot. Kim started flicking her nails.
I sat down. “You may as well make yourselves comfortable. This may take a while.”
They sat one by one.
“This is a serious question. Why do knives and guns scare you so much?” Flick, flick, flick. Tonya’s faint wheeze.
After a long thirty seconds, Therese said, “We’re afraid of getting hurt.” “Let me tell you something about the times you’ve been hurt, all of you, every single one: it didn’t kill you.”
“But getting hurt… it hurts.” Pauletta.
“Certainly. So does having routine blood tests. Or dental work. Having children, spraining your ankle, menstrual cramps. A hundred and one things you’ve all been through before and survived.”
“But a knife. Being cut.”
“None of you has been cut while chopping vegetables?”
“Do you really not understand?” Therese said. “It’s the malice. It’s the fear. It’s the idea of some masked man with a knife threatening to torture you, and you being so scared that you do anything he says. Anything. You humiliate yourself just so he won’t… damage you.”
“So he won’t cut your nipples off and rape you with the knife!” Jennifer said.
There was a gelid silence and they all looked away.
The bogeyman with a knife. Afraid of the bogeyman, because they didn’t know that 76 percent of women who are raped and/or physically assaulted are attacked by a current or former husband, cohabiting partner, or date; that for women ages fifteen to forty-four, domestic violence was the leading cause of injury. They have met the bogeyman and they are married to him, at least according to the Journal of the American Medical Association.
I had encountered ignorance before in my brief stint as a community liaison officer. They didn’t understand, they didn’t know. They hadn’t been twelve when their mother had visited a London domestic violence center in her ambassador’s clothes, chatted politely to the executive director, and been given a green-covered, amateurishly designed book titled The Women Against Rape Study. Their mother hadn’t given that mysterious-looking book to her assistant. They hadn’t taken the book from the assistant’s desk the next day and leafed through it, trying to understand who their mother was and what it was that other people thought interested her.
I had gradually become fascinated by that book, with its columns and tables of statistics, its quotes from women who had been attacked by husbands and brothers and boyfriends, by bosses and transport workers and babysitter’s fathers.
I had read that green-bound book over and over, in between novels like The Lord of the Rings and Narnia and Dune, and had gradually come to believe it was my job to be the wise and powerful one, the wizard, the warrior, the seer; my job to lead my people and protect them from harm. I was the one with the noble brow and the secret book of runes, I was the one who knew. And so I became that person. I taught myself. I read that book, and others. I watched people. I studied their faces, their hands, their words. I learnt karate, and later wing chun, and boxing, and aikido, and tai chi. Killed a man who pointed a gun at me when I was eighteen. Joined the police force. And gradually forgot that I had ever had to learn, that I hadn’t been born this way, that nobody is.
I stood and pulled my shirt off.
“The fuck… ?” Suze said.
I pointed to a silvery line about three inches long on my left side, just above my hip.
“This thin scar here, that was a knife. At the time it felt as though someone had drawn a pen along my ribs. I barely noticed. Adrenaline does that.” I walked slowly around the circle of women. Look. See. Know. This is what it’s like to have your skin opened like the thin skin of a peach and watch the juice run out. “It bled a fair amount, but I didn’t even need to go to the emergency room, I just bound it up.”
“It didn’t hurt at all?” Tonya looked as though she wanted to put her fingers on it, in it. Doubting Tonya.
“It hurt the next day, a kind of deep ache, a bit like the worst time I sliced my finger when cutting up carrots.”
I showed them that scar on the tip of my left index finger. There was a scar on my thumb, too, but I couldn’t remember what that was from.
“Cutting carrots?” Katherine said, with a look that said, Are you fooling with me?
“I took naproxen and that helped.”
“Like for period pains.”
“Yes. Pain is pain, whether it’s ‘natural’ or not.”
They chewed on that.
“Were you afraid?” Jennifer said.
“No. It happened too fast. It often does.”
“Was he trying to kill you?”
“No.”
“What did he want?”
“He, they, wanted to escape. I was in their way. It wasn’t personal.”
“Not personal!”
“No, I don’t think so. He wasn’t expecting me there in the first place. He didn’t care whether I hurt or not, whether I died or not, he only cared about himself.”
I couldn’t tell what they were thinking.
“This”—I bent my left arm and put my fist on my shoulder to show the pink furrow running along the line between triceps and biceps, then turned so they could see the entry wound by my left shoulder blade—“this was a rifle bullet, fired from a scoped weapon. I couldn’t tell you if that was personal or not. It was for money. He was an expert, who was lying prone and ready in the snow. Snow. I was a dark target against a white background. As you see, it missed all my vital organs. I was hit here on the shoulder and the bullet traveled just under my skin, down my arm, and out near the elbow. I lost blood but was able to drive myself back to safety eventually. I’m told that the scar can be repaired nicely. This—”
“Wait. How did that feel?”
“At the time, it felt as though someone had punched me in the back.” And then I had been worrying about not getting shot again, about hypothermia, and bleeding too much, and, overwhelmingly, worrying for Julia.
Therese said something.
“I’m sorry?”
“After that? After the punch in the back?”
“It hurt. But pain is just a message. Just a note to let you know that something is wrong. You can ignore the message.”
“You can’t ignore a hole in your back.”
“You can. You can ignore anything if your life depends upon it. Pain is just a message. Of course, I did take some morphine.”
“Morphine.”
“Yes. And later I went to hospital.”
“Did the police catch him, the guy?”
“They found him.”
“Did he go to jail?”
“No. He didn’t make it that far.”
Most of them didn’t get it, but Sandra was looking at me, face very still, eyes like a photograph of an eclipse: pupil a black hole, iris blazing, almost writhing, like a corona. I didn’t understand her message. “That one,” she said, pointing to my neck, “that looks personal.”
“An addict. An adolescent with a straight razor. I couldn’t tell at first if it was a boy or a girl. It turned out to be a boy.” I had seen his naked, skinny little chest when I had taken his sweater. I could have killed him. I nearly did. “As I say, an addict, or schizophrenic.” Funny, that had never occurred to me before.
“Were you scared?”
“I thought I was going to die, but I’m not sure I was scared.”
“What did you do?”
“He had the blade against my jugular. He’d probably seen how from television. For a little while, I gave up. I just started telling a story.” I had spent months trying not to think about that night, how I had known, really known, I would die, how sordid I found the situation, the understanding that this was it, right there, in the dark, in a park full of homeless people in a city where I knew nobody while wearing the clothes of a man I had just beaten half to death, and that there was nothing, nothing to be done.