Chapter 2 - The Morning After

(Laura)

The ceiling is the first thing I see. It’s high and white, with a plaster rose in the middle and a crack running out from it like a road on a map, and I lie there and stare at it because it isn’t my ceiling and it isn’t the ceiling in the holiday flat, and my brain refuses to tell me whose it is.

My head is pounding. My tongue is glued to the roof of my mouth and swallowing hurts. When I try to sit up the room tips sideways, so I lie still and wait for it to settle. The sheets are dark grey and expensive, and they smell of a man’s aftershave with something sour underneath.

I’m naked.

I lift the sheet to check, as if I might be wrong, and I’m not. Giulia’s emerald dress is on the floor beside the bed with one strap torn clean off. My bra is hanging over the arm of a chair. I can’t see my underwear anywhere. I push myself upright and my thighs ache, a deep, wrong ache, and there are bruises on the insides of both my arms, four small purple marks on each, lined up in a row like fingertips. Lower down there’s a soreness I don’t want to understand and a stickiness on my skin I can’t make myself look at.

The word arrives before I’m ready for it.

Rape.

I try to shove it away. I try to think of anything else, of the plaster rose, of the crack in the ceiling, of the fact I’m a physio student and I know how bodies work and there could be some other explanation. There isn’t. My brain goes round and round the same track and comes out at the same place every time. Rape. Raped. Someone raped me. I was raped. The word keeps coming, over and over, getting louder, and I can’t get past it to whatever thought is supposed to come next.

My breathing goes wrong. It starts as a gasp and turns into another one, then another, quick and shallow and high up in my chest, and no matter how hard I suck at the air none of it seems to reach my lungs. My fingers start to tingle. My lips go numb. Some calm, useless part of my brain, the part that sat through three years of lectures, says you’re hyperventilating, slow your breathing down, and I can’t. I can’t. I don’t know how. My hands curl in on themselves, the fingers cramping into claws, and I stare at them and make a noise I’ve never made before, a thin, high wail I clap both hands over to smother.

Because what if he’s here.

I slide off the bed onto the floorboards and wedge myself into the gap between the bed and the wall with my knees pulled up and my hands over my mouth, and I cry. Not quietly. Great ugly heaving sobs that shake my whole body and leave snot running into my palms, and I can’t stop them any more than I can stop breathing. I rock. I don’t decide to rock, but I’m doing it, forward and back against the wall, my bare shoulder bumping the plaster. Raped. I’ve been raped. I don’t remember it. I don’t remember any of it, and it happened anyway, to my body, while I wasn’t there.

I don’t know how long I stay down there. Long enough for my legs to go to sleep. Long enough to hear the apartment around me through the noise I’m making: a fridge humming somewhere, a scooter in the street below, a church bell. No footsteps. No voice. No one coming to see what the crying is about.

When the sobs run out of air at last, I’m left with hiccups and a raw throat and the word still sitting there in my head, waiting.

I have to get out. That’s the only other thought I can find, so I grab it with both hands. Get out.

Getting dressed takes forever. My fingers are still stiff and shaking, and I can’t do up the clasp on my bra, so I give up and drag it on crooked. I step into the dress and hold the broken strap against my shoulder. I don’t look for my underwear. I can’t bear the idea of finding it.

I creep to the bedroom door and press my ear against it, my pulse going so hard I can hear it in my own head. Silence. I open it a crack. There’s a hallway with a marble floor and a lounge room beyond it, with tall shuttered windows and white light leaking through the slats. Nobody. An espresso cup in the kitchen sink with a brown ring dried in the bottom. A pair of gold cufflinks on the bench beside a stack of envelopes, and the top envelope is addressed to Sig. P. Vianello.

Piero. His hand on my elbow. His voice in my ear, telling me I needed air.

I make it to the kitchen sink before I throw up. There isn’t much, mostly champagne and bile, and I hang onto the edge of his marble bench with my eyes streaming while my stomach heaves on and on. Then I turn on his tap and rinse my mouth and drink, and drink, and nearly bring that up too.

My shoes are by the front door, lined up side by side, neat as anything. That’s what sets me off again. Somebody put them there. Somebody lined them up, tidy, like this was a normal night and I was a normal guest. I stand there with tears pouring down my face and stare at my own shoes and can’t move.

My little beaded clutch isn’t on the hall table.

It isn’t by the door, or on the kitchen bench, or anywhere I can see.

My phone was in it. My wallet, with my bank card and the euros I changed at the airport. My passport, which I tucked into it last night because Giulia said Italian police sometimes ask tourists for ID.

“No,” I say out loud, and my voice cracks right down the middle. “No, no, no, no.”

I yank open the drawer of the hall table. I tear the cushions off his couch and fling them on the floor, crawl around looking under it, pat down the pockets of a jacket hanging on a hook, run into the bedroom and rip the sheets off the bed, sobbing, saying where is it, where is it, where is it over and over like it’s a prayer. It isn’t anywhere. Nothing is anywhere. My breathing starts to climb again, quick and ragged, my fingers starting to buzz, and I sink down onto the end of his bed and press both fists against my eyes.

No phone. No money. No passport. I don’t know where I am. I can’t speak the language. And I’ve been raped.

I don’t know how long I sit there before another thought pushes through, small and stubborn, and I hang onto it the way I’ve never hung onto anything.

Giulia.

I know the address of the holiday flat. Giulia will be there. Giulia has spent every summer of her life in this city, and she knows everyone, and she’ll know what to do. All I have to do is get to her.

I wipe my face with the heel of my hand, which does nothing, and pick up my shoes. I open Piero Vianello’s front door, and it clicks shut behind me with a soft, expensive sound, and I start down the stairs crying so hard I can barely see them, clutching the brass rail I remember from last night because my legs don’t feel like mine.