Zero




Despite the Germanic origin of his family name, Maurice Anthony Wentzel was as English as could be. Rugger, beer and seducing horsy debutantes were his preferred amusements, and he exuded the compelling bouquet of self-assured public school gentry.
His breeding, education, financial background and social station were impeccable. His friends would have called him supremely confident, if a bit loud. The rest of the world would unanimously have thought him arrogant and stuck-up, the epitome of an upper-class prick. He was enjoying life at university; the parties were wild and the girls attractive and generally very willing. None of this mattered to him at the moment, as he stared wide-eyed at the ceiling, waiting for death. He strained futilely against his bonds and the gaffer tape gag.
He could still see the horrifying sight of the gloved hand holding up his blood-gushing genitals for him to examine. The blood had caked across his face where they had smeared his ruptured scrotum, and he could still smell the nauseating odour of his own raw flesh; still taste his own blood. The pain was excruciating. It would no doubt get much worse before it was all over.
Apart from the soft rumble of traffic along the Tottenham Court Road, and the faint reverberation of the windows as a tube rattled along the Central Line far below, the only sound he could hear over his own sobbing, snotty nasal breathing was the steady drip-drip of his blood into the bucket they had placed under the table beneath his mutilated groin.
In the morning when Roger had told him that the girl had been raped, he didn't make the connection at first. It took a little time, through the hangover and splitting headache for Maurice to comprehend that he was being fingered as the culprit. There had been talk of arrest and charges, frantic thoughts of scandal, of Daddy, and of prison. A miasma of panic and despair had enveloped him.
What a relief when he got the text message inviting him to her flat to 'talk it over'! Surely she'd understand that a bloke can't just stop in mid-flight simply because someone changes her silly damned mind...
He remembered knocking on her door. After that, events had taken on a totally surreal hue.
Hours later when he regained consciousness the pain seemed to have abated. Alone in the dark he thought he must have been hallucinating, he was sure he had an erection, though he knew it couldn't be possible.







What I remember most acutely is the smell. The darkness and the smell. The darkness, the smell and the pain.
We were in a strange place. I had fallen asleep during the later part of a long, tiring journey and had no way of knowing where we were. We arrived at night and I was asleep.
When I awoke it was pitch dark in the house where I lay. I couldn't breathe because I awoke with a big strong hand over my mouth. A giant heavy monster lay on me, squashing the air out of me. When I struggled and stole a breath it was filled with an incredibly sharp reek of rottenness. A sour, prickly rottenness. A stench like the taste of vomit.
The monster whose firm, rough hand held my mouth breathed its stench hard in my ear. Its voice was deep and gruff. It gurgled and hissed, scraped like stones. It spoke slowly, in a deadly whisper: 'Fa o ka kua, ke tla go bolaya!' 'Scream, and I'll kill you!'
Then I became aware that my body was strange. My legs were bent up and wide. Held so they couldn't move. It hurt where something pressed me. In that part of me.
Then the monster was clawing at me. At that part of me. Poking me. I nearly screamed, but the growl of the monster reminded me. It would kill me! Then it belched. The rotten smell made me retch, and the hand on my mouth gripped tighter so that I thought my face would break off. Then I heard the monster clear its throat, like something heavy dragged through gravel, right next to my ear. It spat, and the hand that had been poking me now smeared slimy spit on me. Into that part of me.
It was completely dark. The pain came so sudden and so huge that as it got bigger I thought I would burst with pain. Something like a burning stick went into me. Into that part of me. The pain wouldn't stop. It went on and on. The monster's hand still held my mouth and I couldn't scream.
I couldn't scream, though even if it would have killed me, I tried.
Then I remember nothing.

There was a hullabaloo in the morning. There was blood everywhere, and I was hot and feverish and delirious while Mama and some other women yelled and panicked. Mama kept asking me, 'who was it? Who was it?'
She kept shaking me as if to pull me from the delirium. ''Who was it? Oh my child, who was it?'
But the monster had no name. Only a smell. And a hard hand like a claw. And a burning stick that tore me apart, so that I bled all over the blankets, and the children who had been sleeping on the floor near me were all wide-eyed and shocked, and spattered with blood on their clothes and on their faces.
Then I must have passed out again, for I remember nothing until I woke in the hospital. That was my first rape. I was just four years old.

I swallowed hard and looked up from the neat script. Kelly had paused in her writing, and was looking out to sea, her pen poised above the page, her left forefinger worrying the scar on her neck. Her eyes were wet, and as I watched, a tear dribbled over the eyelid and ran down her cheek. Although I was reading a different part of her story to that which she was writing - she was using another exercise book so that she could continue writing while I read yesterday's copy - by some means, our melancholy moods were in concert.
Somehow, reading the detail of the rape made me more sad than mad. The anger I experienced last night seemed so futile and inappropriate now. Here was the victim - right in front of me. Here was the very same little girl who had suffered this thing. There was no place for my self-righteous rage here, just room for compassion. That was her first rape. That meant there was another? My God!
She noticed me watching her, and quickly wiped away the tear but didn't look away. I held her eye for a long moment. I was overwhelmed with emotion.
'I love you, Kelebonye.'
She looked down. She was rigid, and seemed to have stopped breathing. There was a long moment where neither of us moved. Then she looked up, took a deep breath and met my gaze.
'...Too!' She was crying now. I crawled over the books on the beach towel and took her in my arms. Her little body shook with sobs. After a long, close moment, she suddenly got up.
'Going for a walk. If you're not here when I get back I'll find you at the apartment. Ok? See you!' I watched her head off along the beach. For a moment I forgot my overwrought emotions and just drank in her wondrous beauty. She walked with such natural grace, the swing of her hips - the flawless figure - I was overwhelmed. What a doll! What a perfect little woman! God, I was lucky to have found her!
But oh! It was so bittersweet.
I caught sight of the blue exercise book again and lost my train of thought. I straightened out the beach towel, lit a cigarette and steadied myself as I opened the journal.



My physical wounds healed quickly enough. The pain dissipated swiftly, turned to itchiness and then disappeared completely until even the memory of the pain was spent. The torn flesh knitted itself back together, the stitches came out, and that was that - although, of course, I have some scar tissue that other women don't have. But the fright didn't dissolve at all. The days in the hospital were strange and alien. My world till then, in the village and on the farm in the labourers' shacks, had been delimited by the familiar, soft margins of earth and thatch, sand and grass, goat and hen. The hospital ward, that aseptic, rectangular, painted and tiled environment - Cartesian space - was foreign to me, and merged with the dreamlike delirium into which I had retreated to fashion an otherworldly cavern that my forlorn, terrified little spirit inhabited like a wraith. Into these surreal surroundings, like figures on some kind of slowly revolving merry-go-round, came Mama, and nurses, and a doctor, and others whom I later supposed were social workers and police. Each face appeared in turn as if emerging from a mist and then dissolved again, to be replaced by another. All wore solemn frowns and treated me with exaggerated care. Much attention was focused upon my injured vagina, which all felt they needed to examine again and again. Hushed conversations in grave tones accompanied the raising up of my nightie and the peering, prodding and palpating that I endured. None looked me in the eye, as if I was somehow too soiled to be part the normal, regular world. Even after I left the hospital and went back to stay with Mama, no one really looked me in the eye. I felt somehow to blame for being dirty, evil, bad, naughty. The thing that had happened to me had happened to my vagina, and that is a bad thing. A bad girl is a girl whose vagina becomes a thing of public knowledge, and my vagina had been seen and touched by all those people, and had been spoken about openly, and that was unclean. That was shameful, bad...