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Walking high on moonlight

Zemni

    You’d think it would be easy. Walking over the meadow from college to home. Even blind drunk. High on moonlight. Walking with nightingales at early summer dawn. Or any other time. A piece of you-time every day. Just normal. After all, you have a human right to freedom. In your own country. Walking home. Walking anywhere.
    But it isn’t easy, believe me, at 20. When you’re a girl. No, not a girl, a woman. So many thoughts creep in. Life brighter, pumped by adrenaline of uncertainty. But never normal. Not everyday enjoyment. Not relaxing. Not free. Even when there’s no Cambridge Rapist in the newspapers. When there are no excited reports of slit-eyed black hood masks. Not even lip sticked signatures on bathroom mirrors to prove their existence. No real justification in fact for your ever-present Bogeyman - the next Yorkshire Ripper or Film Noir knife always lurking to jump out of shadows. Scaring all sensible women back to their place. Your unofficial, tacit and permanent ‘natural’ curfew.
    You are just walking happily home one night. Just after midnight. Humming softly to yourself that last song from the college disco. Not bothering anyone. Along a normal road. Full of love for the world. In a reasonably straight line. Not even really drunk. The streetlights shine brightly. Outshining the moon. You are wearing your long end of ‘70s skirt, ‘60s miniskirts long out of fashion – too daring. Your long coat - nothing showing. Wearing sensible shoes - no sexy heels. Door keys clutched painfully between fingers. Just in case. No one even around. Night peace to yourself. Suddenly there are footsteps behind you.
    ‘Let’s rape her,’ one voice suggests to another. Unseen.
    You cross the road. Walk faster. Two sets of footsteps walk faster. You stop. Calculating it is too late to run. Maybe better to hammer on the door with the light down at the end of the path on the right. You weigh up your options. The footsteps continue – still faster. Two smug grins lit by the streetlight pass you by on the other side of the road. Laughing at their normal everyday joke.
    ‘How would you like it?’ your voice screams. More a release of anger than expecting a response.
    Those memories never leave you. Even when nothing really happens. Even if you always manage the situation. Even if you are never actually physically or violently raped. Even if you convince yourself of the statistical improbability of serious attack. The unlikelihood of actual death – after all even the Cambridge rapist did not murder anyone. Some women got away. So could you. Even men get mugged. More men get knifed in the street. Why all the fuss?
    ‘You shouldn’t go there,’ they say. ‘Never walk alone.’
    You try self defence.
    ‘But don’t rely on that. It may not work,’ warns the tutor. ‘Better to just avoid putting yourself in danger. Make sure you stay safe.’
    Though they never say where exactly they think safety is. That would seem too old-fashioned, too sexist. Though you know they what they really mean - with a nice man like them, at home.
    But you know that’s no solution either. Statistically speaking. My grandfather used to ‘love’ me when I was eight. Nothing ‘serious’ happened. I did not even understand what was happening at all. That surreptitious jiggling with strange hardened stirrings as he balanced me playfully on his lap. While he talked to the family. All innocence. Awkward rubbings against the wall when he had me alone. I didn’t know what to say. So I said nothing. My grandmother asked me why I didn’t visit any more. She blamed my mother. My mother said my grandfather was such a nice man, always so friendly. Not like my grandmother. Much later, before she died, my grandmother asked me again. Another young girl – one of his French students - had accused her beloved Henri of trying to kiss her when they were alone. Impossible, he was too old at 80! The stupid girl must have made it up to cause trouble. But I sensed my grandmother really wanted to know, somehow suspected. It was too late by then, no point in bursting her last dreams. I said nothing.
    But I ignored the advice. I went to India for study. I walked through the streets of Calcutta, home alone from the late bus - in the moonlight. A Bengali friend had to do that often, late after work. She said nothing ever happened. I went travelling, hitchhiking defiantly through Turkey, Iran, Pakistan. Sometimes with men I decided I could trust – proud of my second sense. Body language intuition. Sometimes I hitchhiked alone. For the thrill. Or because I was fed up of men. Up the Khyber Pass with a lorry driver with a big smiley moustache who suggested I might like to be one of his wives. He took ‘no’ for my answer, no more questions asked. Hitchhiking through solidarity with Nicaragua because there was no transport in areas where the contra militias were fighting, murdering pregnant, shooting unborn babies in their womb. Everyone had to hitchhike – including local women and very young girls. For foreigners it was a badge of political initiation. That was probably stupid. Nothing happened.
    But that night - aged 28 – I grew in statistical significance. My boyfriend landlord had hit me. Thought he was entitled to show physically how angry he felt. He said because he loved me. Because I was cold, unresponsive. I walked out. Without thinking. No idea where I would go. No idea where I would sleep. Down the road. In the moonlight. I was lucky. That was easy.
    Years pass. You have children. Self-preservation restructures your parental brain. The children need you. More years pass. You wonder what to tell your daughter. To tell your son. You get older. You try to relax, start to go out convinced you are finally safe. Now too old to be of interest, at risk. There’s another incident. A police rapist. A ninety-year-old woman raped in her bed – or was she just seventy? Collateral damage of burglary – icing on the cake. Just the tip of an iceberg. In UK 2020 7% of us 16 to 74 have been raped. 15% of rapists are a stranger. 16% of us report it. 1% of reported rapists are charged. You know the ‘game-changing’ events are just those random incidents that happen to fit the day’s news cycle. Current ‘Me Too’ spotlights will probably just move on.
    Many years later the boyfriend calls me, expecting a sympathetic ear. Another girlfriend has accused him of rape. He says he is confused. Asks me what he has done wrong. Asks me how he could know. I remember the time my husband invited him to stay overnight to help with our young children while he was away. As a mutual friend of the family. He thought that was an invitation of another kind, waiting for me with hopeful anticipation on the landing. Awkward. I think he is truly sincere in wanting to understand. I don’t know what to say. I haven’t seen him for years now.
    You know it doesn’t really matter what you do. What precautions you try to take. Things will happen – or more likely not happen – anyway. So you might as well go walking high on moonlight. Enjoy the nightingales at dawn. But, even at age 70, it’s not easy to break out of curfew.

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