Stay calm, stay calm, stay calm, must stay calm, stay calm for Chloe, Paul told himself.
He couldn’t afford an emotion overload right now. He had to keep his composure. The girl falling apart before his eyes needed him to.
“Chloe, it’s okay, it’s all going to be okay.” Paul said, edging closer to her.
“I’m sorry.” Chloe whimpered. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s alright, it’s alright.” Paul soothed, reaching out and stoking Chloe’s hair. “I’m gonna make everything okay again.”
“I don’t deserve it.” Chloe said quietly.
“Why?” Paul asked before he could stop himself.
“It was my fault.” Chloe said, the tears starting again.
“No, shh, don’t say things like that.” Paul said, desperately wanting to hug Chloe, but thinking that it might not be the best idea.
“I’m a slut.” Chloe said.
Paul frowned. He didn’t know what to say, and he didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what was going on! How had this happened?!
“No you’re not.” He said.
Chloe didn’t say anything, just kept crying.
Paul felt like crying for her. What was so wrong with the world that it allowed something like this to happen to someone like Chloe? Paul could feel the cauldron of emotions in response to his newfound knowledge bubbling inside him about to overflow, but he knew that the most important thing at the moment was to sort Chloe out. Paul didn’t exactly know how he was going to do that, but he couldn’t leave her crying on the kitchen floor.
“Don’t cry,” Paul said helplessly. “It’s gonna be alright.”
He felt like such an idiot telling her things would be alright over and over again. It was such a stupid thing to say – how the hell would things be alright?! He had absolutely no idea how Chloe was feeling and he couldn’t see how anything he said would do a thing except make it worse, but he had to try. He’d always said that something was better than nothing, and now was the time to put that into practise.
Paul slowly and cautiously moved closer to Chloe and gently helped her to her feet, being careful not to initiate too much physical contact. All Paul knew about rape he’d learnt off TV programmes like ‘The Vice’ and ‘The Bill’ and a book called ‘The Temp’ that one of his girl friends had made him read once, where rape was an unexpected storyline introduction towards the end of a fairly plotless novel, so he knew very little indeed, but one thing he did know was that women who’d been raped were usually very wary of men in general, and Paul intended to be very aware of his actions towards Chloe, and how they might look to her. What she really needed right now was a girl friend to look after her, but Paul didn’t know any of Chloe’s friends. The only person he knew that she knew was Ben, and… Oh God: Ben. Now that was a whole other issue that would need dealing with shortly after Paul had dealt with the more pressing ones.
Holding Chloe up by her arms, Paul looked into her eyes. They were totally empty: dead, in fact. She was like a living zombie – her face was so pale that Paul half expected to be able to see through her skin – and she was just standing there, barely existing. Well that was Paul’s first decision made for him then – Chloe needed a really good sleep. Sleep cured everything, apparently. Except therein lay Paul’s first problem: he didn’t know all the details, but he presumed that when Mark had raped Chloe, he’d done so in his bedroom, as Chloe had vaguely indicated that she’d been at Mark’s house when it had happened, and if Paul just took Chloe into the bedroom now he might run the risk of misleading her into thinking the same might happen again. So how did he get round that problem?
“Right, okay, Chloe? I think if you can maybe get some sleep, you might start to feel a bit better, so, erm, what I’m going to do is take you through your bedroom, okay?” Paul said hesitantly, hoping that he was taking the right approach by talking Chloe through his thoughts and actions.
Chloe didn’t respond, but Paul took that as a go-ahead and proceeded to half-propel, half-lead Chloe out of the kitchen, though the sitting room and into her room. Leaving her by the door, he plumped up the pillows and pulled the covers back.
“Er…” Paul gestured to the bed and looked at Chloe. “I’ll leave you to it.” He said awkwardly, walking past Chloe towards the door.
“No.” Chloe said weakly, putting a cold hand on Paul’s arm. “Don’t leave me.”
Paul was slightly taken aback, but nodded and watched as Chloe fragilely climbed into the bed, lay down and pulled the covers up to the top of her arms.
“Are you sure you want me to stay?” Paul asked, surprised that Chloe wanted him to stay.
Chloe nodded. “Please? I don’t want to be on my own.”
Paul smiled sadly and sat on the chair in the corner of the room. Ohhh, he didn’t know what to do. They really should prepare you for things like this in school. But then, they didn’t even let the boys sit in on the periods talk, so there was relatively little hope for a ‘What To Do When You Find Out That Your Friend Has Been Raped By Your Other Friend, With Whom She Was Having An Affair’. No. So, things Paul didn’t know: what to do next, how Chloe was feeling, whether he was really the right person to be dealing with this, who he could tell. He’d dealt with the first three – to which the answer was a rather inconclusive ???!!! – and now it was time to tackle the question of if and when he told people what had happened. Not in a go to the papers way, but more in an I NEED ADVICE!!! way. He wanted to tell Ben because he wanted him to look after Chloe, to come over and love her back to normal, and also stop beating himself up about what he’d done to make Chloe leave. Paul wasn’t sure it would be very safe from Mark’s point of view to tell Ben what he’d done to his girlfriend, but then why did Paul give a damn about Mark? He was surprised he’d himself managed to contain his personal feelings about Mark and not rip his head off, but he was still shocked that Mark could do something like that to someone he professed to care about. Give it time, though; the murderous thoughts would come.
Paul shook his head. Oh, how had this got so serious? Only a week ago Paul had been playing devil in the middle, trying to keep Mark and Chloe apart, and Ben and Chloe together, and although that had been serious to a degree, it had still been light-hearted in a film plot way. But now… Well, now things had changed beyond repair. And for once, none of this was Paul’s fault, but that was hardly a fact to be revelling in at the moment, because at the moment he needed to be somehow finding all the answers to the questions he was furiously asking himself.
As Chloe dropped off into a restless sleep, Paul suddenly had an idea. Quietly getting up from the chair he set off in search of a computer. Chloe was a student, so hopefully she’d have one, hopefully it would be hooked up to the internet, and hopefully the internet would hold all the answers Paul was looking for. If he couldn’t get advice abut this from real people, he’d have to get it from an anonymous machine. Pretty much the only time Paul had ever used the internet before was to look for porn with Ben for a laugh, but using it for serious purposes couldn’t be that much different. Instead of typing ‘free porn’ in the search box you typed ‘rape’, or words to that effect. Simple. Now all he needed was a computer.
Paul walked around the whole flat without finding anything remotely computer-esque, and just as he’d given up he noticed a flat-ish carry case stored under a table in the corner.
“Ahh-ha.” He muttered, getting on his knees and pulling out the case.
He unzipped it and pulled out a shiny sliver laptop. He put it on the table, opened it and looked at it.
He did not have a clue how to work it.
Okay, come on, common sense/intelligence, you must have some – find it and use it, Paul mentally coached himself.
He pressed the power switch and nothing happened.
Paul stared at the little machine in an attempt to jump-start it with the power of his mind.
Nothing happened.
Oh! Okay, power cable! Paul thought to himself. Come on Paul, are you thick, or what?!
Rummaging in the carry case again, Paul pulled out a couple of cables – one of which had an obvious plug on the end, thank God – a mouse and a flat square thing with a slit in it. Well he didn’t know what that was – he just hoped he wouldn’t need it. He matched the small end of what had to be the power cable to a socket-y thing on the other side of the laptop, plugged the other end into a wall socket, switched the plug on, and the laptop whirred into life. Paul hastily attached the mouse to a relevant-looking port on the opposite side of it and pulled a chair up to the table as he waited for everything to do whatever it did when you turn it on.
He really must learn how to use computers properly.
In no time the fully loaded desktop of Chloe’s laptop was staring expectantly at Paul. He stared expectantly back.
Unsurprisingly, nothing happened.
Recognising the Internet Explorer icon amongst the files called ‘Evil Coursework’, and various programmes such as Kazaa and Audacity, Paul moved the mouse and clicked on it. A window opened, followed by a box asking him whether he wanted to ‘Connect’ or ‘Work Offline’. Paul obediently clicked ‘Connect’ and almost immediately was informed by the computer that ‘There was no dial tone. Check that the modem or phone line is connected to the computer’. Paul looked at it, perplexed. What the hell was a modem?! Well he knew what a phone line was, so he’d go with that and hope it was causing the problem, not the mysterious modem thing. Locating the phone point in the wall next to the doorframe, Paul began to contemplate how to hook up the laptop to the telephone line. He had another rummage around in the almost empty carry case and came out with what appeared to the non-computer literate eye to be a totally useless double-ended phone line. Nevertheless, Paul managed to fit both ends between the phone point and the laptop, and as he pressed ‘Connect’ again with his fingers crossed, the internet began to dial up.
“Oh shh.” Paul said, looking worriedly to Chloe’s open bedroom door as the laptop proceeded to scream to the internet, a harsh grating sound surfacing by way of reply.
Finally, after much loud conversation, a page claiming to be the WHSmith.net homepage appeared before Paul’s eyes. He scrolled down the page until he found the search box and clicked from ‘UK’ to ‘Worldwide’ before typing ‘Rape’ into the blank white box. The page went momentarily blank as the blue bar at the bottom of the window raced towards the end. Slowly pictures advertising various products and websites started to appear, and then the results of Paul’s search turned up.
‘Showing 10 of 3946385’ the page claimed proudly.
“Blimey.” Paul said under his breath.
Was that even a number?!
That was a hell of a lot of websites.
As he scrolled down the page, none of the hyperlinked headings particularly caught his eye – ‘Men Can Stop Rape – Home’, ‘We Are AWARE’ and ‘Welcome To The CAVNET HOME Page’ didn’t strike Paul as being much use to him. A link promising ‘More results on Yahoo!’ did attract his attention however, as that was the search thingy him and Ben had used that time, so Paul followed the link to a page that looked a lot more organised than its predecessor. With electric blue titles such as ‘Rape Crisis Center’, ‘Rape Crisis Federation Wales & England – What Do We Do’ and ‘Rape Fact Sheet – NCIPC’ looking altogether more promising, Paul started at the top by clicking on ‘Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN)’ and was immediately taken to a brown and white website, which – despite its plain appearance – looked as though it might hold all the information Paul needed. He clicked on the first link on the left navigation bar – What should I do? – and he’d hit the jackpot. There were more links down the side of the new page answering almost every question he had – Common Reactions to Sexual Assault, What You Can Do, Making A Police Report, Medical Care, Myths + Facts, Recovering: feelings + decisions, Friends + Family: how to help, Understanding Sexual Assault Victims - it was all there. Paul didn’t know where to start, but he decided that ‘Understanding Sexual Assault Victims’ was the way to go and clicked on that link. A page full of neatly separated and categorised facts presented itself to him and Paul knew that this was where he was going to find all his answers. The first thing he read was the definitions of the different kinds of rape. He hadn’t even known there was more than one kind, and it was pretty horrible reading with the use of words such as sadistic and torture, but Paul quickly found out that when someone is raped by someone they know, it’s acquaintance rape. Reading on, Paul learned about what classed something as sexual assault, the immediate impact on the victim, and possible reactions by the victim in the hours and days following the rape. Each person is different, it assured him, but “usually survivors will experience a fairly dramatic shift in feelings and behaviour soon after the rape.” Well that certainly applied to Chloe after her previous swing from tearful to angry earlier.
As Paul reached a list entitled ‘Other Fears Experienced By Victim’ he was forced to contemplate factors involved in this that he hadn’t thought about before. Point number one on the list of fears was ‘Possible Pregnancy’, which was something that hadn’t even crossed Paul’s mind. He wondered if it had crossed Chloe’s. He tried to work out the probability of Chloe being pregnant: if she was on the Pill – which hopefully she would be, because her and Ben had been together for a long time – then everything would be fine, and if Mark hadn’t been a total bastard and had used a condom, similarly, everything would be fine, but if neither of those were options then… How long was it since it had happened? When had Chloe gone missing? Paul thought. It was at least four days, and that was too late for any kind of emergency contraception, so at the moment it looked like the odds of Chloe being pregnant by Mark were one in three. It was something that Paul would have to ask her about, like it or not, because it wasn’t the type of thing that went away if you didn’t think about it.
The second thing on the fear list was worse than pregnancy: ‘Venereal Disease including AIDS’. Paul’s initial thought was, ‘Oh, that’s okay, coz Mark won’t have anything’, but immediately after that he realised that if this rape had come this much out of the blue to Paul then he really didn’t know Mark at all. He hadn’t had a clue that Mark was capable of something like that, he didn’t know if he’d done it before, and he didn’t know if he’d do it again. This sort of thing could have been happening for years. Jesus, in the band they were constantly surrounded by admiring girls, dressed up to “tempt” them. Paul wondered if Mark had been tempted. And of course he would get away with it, because he was Mark – sensible, caring, kind, friendly, safe. And he was also clever enough to know that if he made it look as un-like rape as possible, no-one would ever tell.
Dammit, how could he not have known the type of person Mark really was?!
So, depending on how many times Mark had done this before, and how “safe” he was, the chance of Chloe catching something unpleasant from him was… probably 50/50. That was not a good figure. Paul added ‘Convince Chloe to go and get checked out’ to his mental to-do list.
‘Serious Injury’ was the next point.
Yeah, Paul thought menacingly, I’ll do Mark some serious injury.
He thought he’d been quite good so far – not rushing off and sticking Mark’s head through a brick wall – but the only reason for that was that he was very very confused. It would be easier if he didn’t know Chloe’s attacker, but the fact that it was Mark, one of the people Paul spent most of his time working with, meant that he had emotional ties with both of the people involved, as did Chloe. And it must be even more confusing for her, because she’d been in a sort of relationship with Mark. Ohhh God…
Paul read on. ‘Fear of reporting crime’ was next, followed by an explanation that “victims are often afraid of unsympathetic police questioning or/and an agonising trial’. Well that was another thing, wasn’t it? Did he/she/they report what had happened to the police? Again, because it was someone very close to both Paul and Chloe, it was a difficult question. Mind you, Paul didn’t feel particularly close to Mark at the moment, considering that the Mark Paul thought he was friends with wasn’t Mark at all. But did he want him to go to prison? Ohhh, he didn’t know all the facts, he couldn’t make that kind of decision. What happened next was up to Chloe and no-one else. Lucky her.
The last point on the list was ‘Fear about retaliation’. Would Mark do it again? Well, at the moment he was ill, so…
No he wasn’t.
He wasn’t ill! Paul felt like kicking himself as Mark’s recent no-show slowly fitted into the rest of the puzzle.
Idiot idiot idiot Paul, he cursed himself.
Mark was keeping a low profile, wasn’t he? Rightly so, but didn’t that make him look a bit suspicious? Having got away with it so many times before – because by now, Paul was convinced that this wasn’t a one-off for Mark – he obviously wasn’t expecting Chloe to tell anyone what had happened, so surely the best thing for him to do would be to act normally. But then again, that would be logical, and Mark was clearly a deranged psycho who needed locking up.
By the time Paul had finished trawling through the masses of information on the internet – most of it just repeated in a slightly different way – he felt knowledgeable enough to write an entire thesis on the subject of rape. He knew now that Chloe didn’t see herself as the victim and was probably feeling like the rape was her fault, doubting if it was even rape in fact, but instead believing that she deserved or asked for it. Paul understood that Chloe had kept it to herself because she felt ashamed, like no-one would believe her and also because she wanted to try and block it out, to pretend that it had never happened. He anticipated that some of the many reactions to what had happened, in the following days and weeks, would be a fear of being alone, acute stress, sleep disturbances/nightmares, pre-occupation with memories of the assault, flashbacks, concentration problems, fear of men, and relationship difficulties. And, most useful of all, Paul now knew how to help by listening and being available, believing and not judging, creating an environment where Chloe felt safe, recognising that recovery would take a long time, respecting the decisions Chloe made, being sensitive, and dealing with his own feelings elsewhere.
Paul felt better now – not so helpless, he felt like he could really be there for Chloe and give her what she needed. The practical side of things was that she needed a medical check-up and to preserve any evidence of the rape – a process not aided by scrubbing herself raw with bleach, but it was too late to worry about that now – but the most important thing Chloe needed was a friend to look after her. That was what Paul was, and one thing was for sure – he was not going to let Mark ruin Chloe’s life: he was going to help her get through this, even if he had to do it entirely on his own.