Some Never Awaken: A Memoir of Abuse, Sexual Healing and Freedom

1.

If you’re one of the lucky ones, you might remember before it’s too late.

And I was lucky.

Lucky following the dot-com crash to still have a job when so many of my colleagues had been fired. Lucky to be going to Barbados on an all-inclusive holiday with my best friends. And luckier still to have escaped the curse of my less than virginal single past with a rich, respectable boyfriend like Gus. But as I speeded away from Paris in the comfort of the Eurostar, that day I realised I felt lucky to be leaving without him. That day, with every agonising screech of steel against steel, I felt the sweet sense of release. My body relaxed, my shoulders dropped and the breath usually held so tight…came out of my chest, which, barely perceived, had constricted, millimetre by millimetre, over the course of our relationship. That day, I felt lucky because I remembered how freedom tasted.

So I felt lucky, but also confused. Because the arrival of my boyfriend Gus had heralded such a change in my life, that until that moment I had thought I was free already. An adult. I kept myself preoccupied with adult considerations and adult responsibilities. I had an apartment, a job and, even more surprisingly, I still had friends—even if Gus hated the majority. Had you got drunk and stupid in his presence? Worn a top which showed your cleavage? You were scum. As the list of potential faux pas grew, he had persuaded me to whittle down my group of friends to an eligible few. Birds of a feather, he’d said.

***

We met in a bar. Luckily. Since I rarely socialised anywhere else. This bar nestled in underground caves buried in the old catacombs which laced the city of lights, one of those which opened illegally until seven a.m. by tacit agreement of the neighbours and well-lined pockets of the commissaire, who was often to be found there at his darkened table. By the fourth gin and tonic of the evening I felt comfortably numb. By the eighth, I was close to desired oblivion. But it was in those moments between insanity and unconsciousness that my brain chose to retrieve the memories I tried so hard to suppress.

In front of me, friends passed around a stick pretzel from mouth to mouth at their table of ten, lips close to touching, which, after all, was the whole point of the game. A bite taken by each of them to see who would win the prize of engaging teeth, tongues and alcoholic saliva. As if by that stage of the evening any of us needed excuses to lend structure to our lascivious intentions.

‘Your turn, Louisa,’ said my new friend, grinning with anticipation. Paul? Was it? I’d only known them a few hours. A new night, a new group of friends. The pretzel stick was a centimetre long and the kiss was imminent. And as I looked at him, he leaned forward, gripping it between yellow nicotine-flecked teeth. His pores were magnified, and I saw a smudge of ketchup below his lips from his earlier portion of chips and flakes of salt trapped in his dirty moustache. I smelt his breath, remembered in dark clarity that night I’d tried so hard to forget and felt sick. Sick of sexuality, sick of male drunkenness. Sickness had become my context. Its acid eroded the fabric of my life, and in those brief seconds of lucidity I realised that I couldn’t really remember what life was like free from it. I wasn’t free.

‘Sorry, I’m going to be sick,’ I said, bursting into tears, and got up, pushing the chair back with a crack so it fell over as I stumbled, crying, towards the Turkish toilet in the back room. A collective ‘Awww’ rose from the table behind me and there was no time to close the door, but the view from the main bar was on an acute angle so no one saw my shame. No one, that is, but one singularly muscular and wholly upright man, dressed in a black T-shirt stretched thin over his massive bulk. What was he doing in this dive…sober?

There was no toilet paper, so I wiped sick from the corners of my mouth with my hand. He got up with some cheap white napkins that sat in moulded plastic holders on every table and silently passed them to me.

‘How are you?’ he asked.

‘Peachy.’ I dabbed the tears from my eyes. The tissue came back black from running mascara.

‘I’m Gus,’ he said, recoiling at the sight. ‘We met last week. We argued about social politics for an hour. You blamed Mitterrand for ostracising les blacks in the outskirts of Paris.’

‘Who cares?’ I said, not caring.

‘You’re clearly intelligent,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘Well read. Educated. But constantly drunk. Why?’

‘Fuck you.’

‘After we talked,’ he continued as if I hadn’t spoken and checked his watch, ‘at about this time, you burst into tears and ran to be sick. And tonight you’re doing the same thing. Tu veux qu’on s’en parle?’

Mindlessly, I blurted out my philosophy in curt sentences.

‘I don’t want to talk about it. Life is lived forwards. If you believe Kierkegaard.’

Gus barked out a laugh which he quickly turned into a cough. Annoyed, I glanced up and saw both interest and mockery challenging me in his black eyes. They twinkled fire and ice. I’ve never seen eyes like that since.

‘Why don’t I take you for a coffee instead?’ he said, nodding to someone behind the bar. ‘You don’t need any more to drink.’

I felt my neck bristle. Cheeky sod. And I turned to leave.

‘What I do is none of your business.’

Gus grabbed my arm and flashed a lopsided dimple.

‘C’mon,’ he wheedled. ‘You can bang on a bit more about how the riots are because the poor immigrant community has been systemically oppressed by the decentralised building in Seine-Saint-Denis.’

Caught off guard, I suddenly giggled. That did sound like something I would say, although how I’d formed a coherent sentence when hammered must have been a fluke. A lucky fluke. But an offer of a coffee and conversation was something novel. A man who didn’t want to get me into bed? Maybe it would turn out well. Maybe.

***

‘Cherie, don’t wear that, it makes you look like a hooker!’ had been Gus’s opening words when I’d opened the door to him earlier that week.

I’d spent three hours getting ready for our date. ‘I’m only being honest,’ he said, noticing my flash of anger. ‘Don’t you want to know if you look like a hooker?’ My experience with hookers was minimal. If the question had been ‘Did I want to look like Julia Roberts?’ Sure. I also needed the money. But two years on Gus had turned out to be no Richard Gere.

He never liked what I wore, even though I spent hours trying to make sure my clothes would make him proud. No black boots and leggings, they were the sign of a whore. No student gear, the mark of a tramp. That cut out the majority of my wardrobe, which had been mainly fashioned after my long-standing dream to look like Debbie Harry. A dream that had proved unrealistic.

‘Money well spent,’ Gus said once I was dressed to his satisfaction. Slender heels high enough to be elegant, understated enough to be what Gus deemed ‘suitable’, but which still murdered my feet on the cobblestone streets of Paris. Fitted clothes in rich fabrics he liked me to wear, only to later rip them off. I spent money I didn’t have, on clothes I didn’t want, to look like the woman Gus wanted me to be.

‘I love you,’ he said. ‘Always remember that. I just want my friends to love you like I do, and it’s a harsh world out there.’

My own world consisted of a twelve-metres-squared apartment in the attic of a four-storey house, on a street which smelt like a mixture of stale piss and lemon-scented finger bowls. It was an eclectic mix of beggars at the feet of high-class socialites, students with yellow fingers philosophising over home-rolled cigarettes at the café on the corner, men selling roasted chestnuts over pierced-metal barrels and wealthy businessmen lusting over chic models in the exclusive hangout at the top of the road. Gus presided over one of those bars where the dregs of the businessmen and I ended up at four a.m. Because despite the hours spent straightening my wild, mousy brown hair, I wasn’t anything close to a chic model.

But I adored dabbling in all of it, and during inattentive moments even smirked as the puddles of urine pooling in the gutter ruined Gus’s favourite Louboutins when I left the decrepit clubs in the early hours of the morning. Most of my evenings were spent lounging at my local bar, wearing the clothes Gus didn’t like, laughing with the friends he hated, and chatting with the part-time musicians, the craggy film producers and the visiting backpackers I guiltily feared would make him jealous.

In the beginning, Gus took me out once a week. It was to the pizza-cum-kebab stall round the corner, Mr. Goodfast. But it was neither good nor fast.

‘Why do we always go here?’ I whined on the third time after we’d been waiting half an hour for a slice of moist pizza.

Gus laughed. ‘Petite cochonne!’ he’d said, pinching my arm in a way he found affectionate. Little pig. I wasn’t even sure it was an endearment. ‘I can’t take you out somewhere where people can see us. One day I’m going to present you to the world. The queen by my side. But you know it yourself. Tu piccoles trop. No one respects a drunk woman, least of all my friends. You have a terrible reputation to repair. Anyway, let’s go back to your apartment. I’m horny for you.’

At first I humbly acknowledged this grating truth. After three months I told him to go screw himself. I was no one’s improvement project. But he’d reasoned with me, negotiated, cajoled. For twenty-four hours he stayed by my side until he ground me down through lack of sleep and I agreed to give him another chance. And another. And another. After all, I also wanted to repair the broken pieces left of me. So eventually I decided that the legitimacy of having a respectable boyfriend after years of one-night stands outweighed my indignation at being kept a secret. And any time it bothered me, well I just drank more.

***

A year passed, and with every date, I started getting ready earlier and earlier. If I’d had a lot to drink the night before, then I spent even more time getting ready, hoping that with the minutest of preparations I might fend off the conflict that dogged our evenings out. Yet there was always something to criticise.

‘Not criticise, cochonne,’ Gus said every time. ‘Improve. I’m ten years older than you, don’t forget. And you’ve got a lot to learn.’

The stainless steel implements in seafood restaurants that I couldn’t master. The molluscs he said sophisticated people ate but which made me gag. The inappropriate sexual puns I made in front of people I shouldn’t. The blow job which lasted a jaw cramping two hours and which resulted…in nothing. His past steroid use had fuelled a sculpted torso, but this also meant the orgasmic proof of his manhood was hard to come by. I dredged up inventive titillations from my repertoire to preserve his pride but often fell short of the goal.

‘It’s not one of your fortes, darling,’ he’d say afterwards, ‘despite your amount of practice.’

And then he’d frown. My methods only confirmed a past we both preferred to forget and which was incompatible with what he wanted from a girlfriend. But no matter how much I tried to conform to his ideals, no matter how much I tried to dress the part, there was no way I could erase it. Caught in a downwards spiral, that didn’t stop me from endlessly trying.

The mirror showed a girl whose curls tumbled to pink-nippled breasts, whose baby blues hid too many secrets and whose tight-lipped smile curled into seductive mayhem after a couple of glasses. My changeling nihilism seduced as effortlessly as red roses, but night after night the bloom disappeared until all that remained was a thorny mess. That same girl in front of me in the mirror had gone out last night and got achingly drunk. I hoped Gus didn’t get to hear of it—whatever it was, whatever I didn’t remember—because his ferocious temper was kindled best when he knew I’d consumed alcohol and been around men, without him.

But even after the screaming fights, he never left. He wrestled me to the ground, and then he stayed the night until I agreed to make it up over sex.

‘I’ll never let the sun go down on your anger,’ Gus said. In the early days, that would illicit my smile: he was a poet. But too often he followed it up with ‘Remember what state you were in when we got together.’ Until I hung my head in shame whilst he smiled.

‘Don’t worry. There’s still a long way to go, cochonne. But you’ve grown so much, and I’m proud of what I’ve done. Proud of what you’ve become. We’ll beat them yet. But no one really understands why I’ve done it. They think I’m an imbecile.’ Then he would caress my cheek whilst I flinched, feeling like Eliza Doolittle to his Henry Higgins. ‘Of course, they didn’t see your future full of…possibilities.’

***

I’d never felt less full of future possibilities when Charlotte had phoned one rain-sodden afternoon long distance from the UK. I was lying on my bed still fully dressed in the previous night’s clothes and groaning from the habitual weight of guilt as I strove to remember what had happened. When the phone rang, I’d been cataloguing the damage. Handbag. Okay. Keys. Okay. Shoes. Shoes? What the fuck happened to my shoes? Oh God. Fragments of broken memories nestled in the yawning black holes of nothingness sitting heavily on my conscience. Repentance, I needed repentance. So when Charlotte said we needed to help Linda, I only said, ‘Tell me how.’

‘A one-week holiday abroad,’ she said. ‘A last-ditch attempt to get Linda away from that fuckface Tom before she goes bankrupt.’

I didn’t hesitate in saying yes. Because not even the prospect of Gus’s rage could stop me going to the aid of my friend. I had an altruistic desire to rush to Linda’s side, because saving each other was what we did best. But under those layers of well-intentioned compassion, I knew my willingness to fly against Gus’s wishes were driven by a truth which rang hidden, deep inside of me, as much as a wish to help a friend. I had to escape the life I was living if I were to survive. Besides which, it was also November. The idea of escaping the shit autumnal weather—more or less a constant grey drizzle—was just too tempting.

‘The money might be a problem though,’ said I, wondering how I could stretch my overdraft to cover a holiday without my bank manager, or Gus, noticing. Holidays weren’t by any stretch of the imagination a necessity, even if this one was a mercy mission, a ‘friend-tervention’.

Suddenly, a familiar surge of nausea came over me.

‘I’ll sort it out hon. Gotta go.' I dropped the phone on the floor and ran to the bathroom to kneel down next to the toilet, passively accepting the waves of sickness, tasting the bitterness of bile. Six gut-peeling convulsions later, I sat up, gasping for breath. I felt better physically, and also mentally—as if I had paid for my crimes the night before. Gargling with mouthwash and splashing myself with cold water, I rummaged in my makeup bag to cover up the damage that six pints and countless tequila shots had done. As I disguised red blotches with my foundation, words from the previous date with Gus rang in my ears.

‘I haven’t told my family yet. I can’t do it before I’m sure about you. About us. But soon. I think you’re nearly ready.’

He’d dangled the carrot for months, yet I understood why he hadn’t. Because it was a constant struggle. He wanted me to be someone else. And so did I. The well-mannered wife. The respectable woman. The immaculate virgin. But despite my best efforts, I hadn’t yet achieved what seemed impossible.

The tight control I exercised over my thoughts, my appearance and my words ran so deep that I couldn’t bear the pain. But I was getting there. Weeks could now pass without incident, but then I would snap. One orange juice turned into ten vodkas. It was times like that I remembered why Gus was important. What it was I was escaping. The sex. The drinking. The land where there were no rules. Until I woke up with a throbbing head the next morning, terrified of what had happened and what I had done.

Proof indeed that I needed him. And his rules. Finally, he’d offhandedly asked me to marry him. But I hadn’t said yes—instead I teetered precariously on the brink of becoming the very woman I’d always wanted to be. His fair lady.

‘Wouldn’t you be happier to leave all of this behind? Your friends? Be my wife?’

A part of my heart glowed in his approval.

The legitimate life I thought I would never have was offered on a platter, albeit rather less graciously than in the movies. But it was the only proposal a woman like me was likely to get. He was risking his reputation to be with me. He’d asked me to marry him. I loved him. And he loved me.

***

It was four o’clock when I heard the tinkle of cutlery and glasses being laid on the tables in the restaurant downstairs, sending my adrenaline level a little higher. Even without my first drink I started to feel a needling of nerves in my belly.

Yanking the shower curtain around