Dan has a neolithic face

Dan has a neolithic face.

I don’t know how else to describe it. He has a flat, clean face, with dark brows sprawling across a bulging ridge. He has a long, straight nose, and his mouth is a flat line. He is tall and broad, an unmodulated chunk of a body, the type of person who always looks close to unleashing some kind of sporting aggression.

But today he looks cheerful enough. He is smiling, lines creasing at the corners of his eyes and starting to creep across his cheekbones. I think his hair has receded since the last time I saw him too. He is smiling because he does not know I am watching him.

Dan’s neolithic face is smiling down at a small blonde woman. She has long shining hair, an unlined powdered face, tapering tanned limbs. I remember a display I saw in a museum, illustrating how neanderthals bred themselves into extinction through their compulsive attraction to tiny human women. Two wax mannequins, different in scale, different in colour, different in sex, in living evidence, thousands of years later. They do not look like they belong together. They do not even look like the same species.

But they are together. She is wearing an engagement ring. She looks content.

She doesn’t know any better.

I met Dan the previous year. My housemate, Ruth, had cajoled me:

“Come on, come out. You never go out.”

I don’t want to go. But I know why she is desperate. She wants me to join her for drinks with Dan because she has fallen in love with his housemate, Todd. She is hoping Todd will tag along. She is hoping I will keep Dan distracted to give her a clear line of sight to her quarry.

“Come on. We can talk about publishing.”

I’m being used. But I’m not unsympathetic. I want her to be happy, especially after what she went through with her ex, and his right hook.

She clinches the deal: “I’ll buy your drinks.”

We get on the tube. We go to a bar in a deprived part of north London, but the people who live here think it’s cool. The bar is decorated with faded pink chintzy furniture that looks like it came from a house clearance: much loved by someone’s dead grandmother, but no longer cherished, except by people looking to do up bars for cheap in a way they think is quirky and ironic, in a part of London they still believe will be fashionable one day. There’s an empty birdcage in the corner. Empty, and closed, an ornament.

Dan is there, but no Todd. Ruth’s plan is foiled, but she keeps up her cheer. We must go on with the evening. Dan and Ruth chat, mostly ignoring me. He is large, and boyish, and badly dressed, and not what I was expecting from her description of a young, driven, publishing mogul. He is charming though, and generous, and capable of making me laugh.

When Ruth excuses herself to the ladies, he tries to kiss me. I’m surprised, because we met moments ago, but too surprised to say anything about it. I fix my eyes on the floor. He takes the hint and returns to his side of grandma’s sofa.

Ruth returns from the loo. She doesn’t notice the distance, or the tension, or the silence. She’s absorbed in her new plan: that we all go on to another venue for more drinking. She’s heard Todd will be there, she thinks she can salvage the evening. Bound up in her hope for a happy outcome, I agree.

We walk to the venue. Ruth and Dan walk ahead of me, chatting, laughing, happy. I trail behind, pulling my coat around me and folding my arms across my chest. It’s not a warm night. We go into a noisy, vertical drinking place, all plate glass and Jagermeister-based cocktails. There’s a DJ trying to make dancing happen, but this is a weeknight, in London, and no one’s going for that.

No sign of Todd here either. Ruth goes scouting round the corners of the dankly-lit space for him. Dan offers to buy me a drink. What else am I going to do while I wait?

In the queue for the bar he stands behind me and slides his hand up my skirt. He slides it up and under so no one else in the bar notices. But I notice. I step away from him and rearrange the knickers that have been pushed aside by his blunt fingers.

Ruth reappears. I tell her I want to go home. The evening’s a write off. Todd isn’t even here. “We’re not going home, we’re going to Dan’s for champagne.”

We are not going to Dan’s for champagne: we are going to Dan’s because he lives with Todd.

I tell her I want to go to our home, not theirs.

“Why? You’re getting on well enough with Dan.”

There’s a wink in her voice. She’s imagining a cosy foursome, sitting around the table having coffee and croissants in the morning, two couples, all friends.

I tell her I don’t want to go to his house, because he is a stranger.

“He is not a stranger! He’s my best friend. I’ve known him for years! It’ll be fine. Come on. There’ll be champagne.”

She holds the taxi door open. I hesitate.

“Don’t cockblock me.”

There was no champagne at Dan’s house.

There was, however, a Todd. Ruth disappears upstairs to his bedroom. Dan and I sit on the sofa making stilted conversation. Neither of us wants to be there, doing that. He wants to be doing something else with me; I want to be alone. Voices overhead are muffled, then louder, then crying. They are having a fight. I think about what’s actually happened: Ruth has turned up to Todd’s house, drunk, in the middle of the night, and let herself into his bedroom. Of course they are fighting, I’d be pissed off too. There’s a silence. I expect to hear Ruth’s footsteps on the stairs, so I pick up my coat and my handbag. There is a series of thuds, but they are not footsteps. They are rhythmic thuds, still coming from the bedroom above us. Whatever disagreement they had has been resolved.

I do not want to be sitting this close to this man listening to that. I tell him I want to go to bed, and he looks hopeful. I clarify that I meant I want to be alone.

“You’re going to sleep on this thing?”

He thumps the sofa. The cushions are unevenly stuffed. I feel a spring corkscrewing into my thigh.

“Sleep in my room.”

I feel myself make a quizzical expression.

“Not with me. I’ll sleep here.”

I tell him it’s fine. The sofa is fine.

“You’re being ridiculous. You’re not going to be comfortable. It’ll be fine.”

So I close his bedroom door and curl up in his sheets, grateful for this small chivalrous gesture. Maybe I have been too quick to judge Dan. I close my eyes and listen to my breathing.

I hear the door open. Light forces its way through the door, slicing across the bed. His weight behind me. Something is inside me. Something small and rigid.

I turn to look at him over my shoulder. I look him in the eye and I say very clearly

“I am not going to have sex with you.”

There’s a different feeling now. Something larger, a sharper pain, a dry stretching pain.

I don’t look at him this time when I speak. I say loudly, to the wall:

“I already told you I’m not going to have sex with you.”

He rolls onto his side, feigning sleep. I get out of the bed, pick up my clothes, and leave the room.

I get dressed in the bathroom. I had been calm. Calm, because I was trying to deescalate, to control a…situation. Now I am suddenly, violently angry. I want to destroy something. I grab the shower curtain and pull. It comes down, bringing the rod with it. That’s satisfying. I start on the products. Everything that can be emptied is emptied, everything that can be spilled is spilled, everything that can be broken is broken. In one sweep I clear a shelf, knocking candles, books, plants onto the talc-snowed floor. I toss the loo roll around playfully, watching it unfurl and spool itself around the room.

I’m not angry any more.

But I really should be going before anyone sees what I’ve done.

I slip down the stairs to the front door and turn the handle. It does not open. It’s locked by a dead bolt, and there’s no key. There’s a rack of coats beside the door. I search every pocket for the house keys. Not one of the keys I try will turn the lock. Defeated, I go back upstairs to the living room, and I sit on the sofa where Dan and I had listened to Ruth persuade Todd to consummate their relationship an hour before.

I sit with my elbows on my knees, my hands propping up my face, and think about the situation. I am locked in. I am locked in a stranger’s house. I have rejected him and trashed his bathroom and now I am locked in with him.

I stop thinking about it. I stare into the space ahead of me. There is a mantlepiece, and on it, a single object: a small terracotta plant pot. It is empty. There is no plant. The pot itself is on display. It is not even an attractive pot. It looks discarded, an afterthought.

But there’s a glint of something metal in the pot. I go over and pick it up. I hold it in my palm and let it sparkle in the street light fighting through the too-thin curtains. It is a key. It looks like a key for a bolt. The bolt on a door.

I use it and find myself outside, in the dark. Cool night air all around me. I am free. I am safe.

Only I’m not. I’m on the street, in an unfamiliar, unlovely part of London, after midnight. Am I better or worse off than I was inside?

A night bus passes, destination TCR. I get on. I alight at the McDonald’s on Oxford Street, the only place I know there that’s open at 3am. Fluorescent light gleams off white formica surfaces everywhere. It’s so fucking bright after the dark of the bar, the dingy flat, the night streets. And busy. Full of people who don’t have anywhere better to be.

I try to think about what may or may not just have happened. There’s a group of boys at the next table, young teenagers, tracksuit bottoms and black puffer jackets and loud voices. They’re eating. I’m nursing a coffee. They’re having fun. I’m waiting out the hours until the tube runs again and I can safely travel home. They’re living in a world where they can do anything, be anything, in the security of their little gang. I’m living in a world where men seem to just do what they want, regardless of what anybody else might want, and I am alone. The thing I’ve been taught to fear my whole life has happened. Or nearly happened. Or not happened.

I need to talk to someone. I need perspective. I switch on my phone. 11 missed calls from Ruth.

“Where did you go? You’re not here.”

“I’m not sure whether to go home. Don’t wanna go home without you.”

“Getting taxi now. Pls ring.”

“Home now, ur not here??!”

If only she’d been this worried about me last night. But she forced me into that house, and forced herself into Todd’s bed. She told me it would be fine, and she didn’t give me a second thought.

I go home to her anyway. It’s a better option than McDonald’s.

She brews coffee. She knows I was in Dan’s room and she wants the gossip.

I tell her, directly, what happened. How I feel. What I’m worried about.

She looks sepulchral. She raises her mug to her face with both hands, for comfort, and sips thoughtfully. She looks out the window, then turns, and looks into my eyes.

She says:

“That doesn’t sound like him.

It sounds like he misunderstood.”

And then, with a laugh:

“It sounds like you’re overreacting.

I’m sure it will all be fine.”

Ruth invites Dan to join us for a drink that evening. She thinks it’ll be good to clear the air. Hesitantly, I agree with her: perhaps if we could be friendly with each other, it would be like it hadn’t happened. That it had just been one of those awkward misunderstandings. No hard feelings. But of course he didn’t show up. He was never going to show up.

I move out of Ruth’s place soon after that. I move in with Savannah. I tell her the story. I cry. She puts her arms around me. This is the response I had wanted.

A few weeks later she creates a profile for me on a dating app. Because it’s:

“Time to move on.”

I meet Timothy. He’s nice enough, but it’s not going anywhere, because I don’t want to be alone with him. He decides I’m not really into him. It cools and then it disappears. He doesn’t want to come to Ruth’s party with me, so I go alone.

Dan is at the party. He is there because Ruth invited him, because he is still her best friend, because she still thinks he’s a good guy, because he’s still someone she wants around.

I am there alone, and he is there with his fiancé.

She is small, and pretty, and delicate. Beside him, she looks vulnerable. But she seems untroubled. She doesn’t look a person who knows she’s marrying a man who likes to see what he can get away with.

Should I tell her?

She probably does know. She lives in the same world as me. They all like to see what they can get away with.

I leave it, because I’m already tired of not being believed.

Outside the party, I realise I don’t know where I am. I suspect I am near the Regent’s Canal. I think I can follow it south until I can orientate myself. I walk along it alone. I receive a message from Ruth, who’s noticed I’ve left. She never notices how or where I am until she realises I’m missing. She doesn’t understand why I’ve left the party, why we haven’t been so close recently, but we’ve been friends for a long time and she hopes nothing will ever change that. I start to cry. I look up from my phone and I see the gas towers and I know I am in Hackney. I recognise it because Timothy lives around here. If I walk through the market and along Bethnal Green, I can get back to Savannah’s, to my home. The market will be open. There will be flowers and coffee and people and colour. I’ve found my way. It will be fine.

But rounding the corner, coming out of the shop, carrying a pint of milk, is Timothy.

He sees I’ve got a tear-stained face.

He wants to know what’s wrong, so he invites me into his flat.

I tell him. He listens quietly, tense on the edge of his sofa. I can see a muscle tightening between his cheek and his jaw.

When he thinks I have finished, he speaks.

“I can’t believe you put yourself into that situation.”

I feel my chest collapse, the air has exited in a rush, winded, punched.

“How could you have allowed that to happen? I mean, nearly happen.

This is why it never went anywhere, isn’t it, between you and me?”

He’s angry. I am alone with this man in his home and he is angry with me.

“It seems a bit of a coincidence, doesn’t it, that you just happen to be skulking around my flat crying?”

It is a coincidence.

But he doesn’t believe that.

What does he believe?

He believes I have been waiting in the street, a fabricated story about a man who tried to rape my up my sleeve, a sodden tissue in my pocket, waiting to bump into him, so I can have his attention.

I am still tired of not being believed.

He gives me a box of chocolates on my way out. Compensation. They’re dark chocolates. I don’t like dark chocolates, but he doesn’t know that, because he didn’t really get a chance to know me. I thank him anyway. It’s a nice box. I put it on a shelf. When Ruth and Todd’s wedding invite arrives, I display it propped up beside the box, but I do not go to the wedding. I don’t like the quality of her guest lists.

They divorce a few years later. Ruth tells me Todd raped her. I wonder about her judgment, about her insistence that all these men are “such nice guys”, and that everything will be just “fine”. But I don’t tell her that. I don’t need to. She’s making excuses for him even as she tells the story.

It was a tense situation. The marriage was dissolving. They were angry with each other.

A boundary got crossed.

She’s talking herself out of her own truth. But I don’t tell her that. I just listen, and let her know that I believe her.

And I tell her that everything will be fine.