Rude awakening

I had a rude awakening just as I was enjoying myself finding out about myself, my sexuality and generally discovering what it was like to be a young woman of 18.

I was trying to find my own life but did not find it instead I was raped by a group of five dickheads who was lead by one nasty bastard who could not take my having ignored him at the local pub.

I had had the audacity to laugh when he tried to make a move on me. I had not meant it personally he just was someone I did not trust, he was too slick and too full of artificial artifices. Such youthful exuberance had to be punished so the nasty bastard lay in wait for me and got me into his car on a false pretext of taking me to see a flat. He knew I was desperately looking for somewhere to live.

Somehow he got me into his car for the trip back into town via a pub, called the Butler where I was not allowed to get out of the car but instead he filled it with other young men then after insisting I drink a lot of mountain wine he sped off in the car out of town and up into the hilly woody bits at the edge of town.

Hours later I was dumped back in the town center. Now many years later I think I was lucky they did not panic and kill me. Could so easily have happened. People do stupid things and then panic and make it worse by making it murder.

Although I do not remember much in the way of clear memories I do know that I was humiliated and stripped of my clothes and made to go round from one to the other masturbating them in turn with my hands and mouth while the others watched and waited for their turn, the guy whose idea it had been was constantly laughing at me and running me down. I recall him calling come on you can do better than that and is that all make it harder come on and more such exhortations.

Then at the end they all took it in turn to rape me lying in the back seat of the car. It was brutal stuff I am glad in a way that I cannot recall all that happened and also that I did not have it on my mind all the time, but it had also come back from time to time, every ten years its come back.

Until now I feel that I have looked at it enough I have seen the nasty memories and now I can finally bury them but I know they still have me in their grip, as this sort of stuff sits in your very body and can be reawakened at any time even when you are enjoying yourself.

That’s the cruelty of these memories they come back when you do not see any connection and they hit you at your core and cause great confusion and distress over and over and even when you know it should be gone, its now too long, a whole lifetime of being restrained from your own intimate expressions.

I was homeless and living with friends in a squat so I went there, and was really shocked by how they reacted. They told me to fuck off as soon as they heard what had happened to me. They told me that I was bringing them down and I should go away. I did leave as I was really shocked that these people who had seemed to be friends would treat me like that. After all had we not all been living there for a while sharing everything as friends.

It seemed they did not mind sharing the nice things like food and drink and grass but anything else, anything real that was to be avoided and kept outside the door. I went back out into the hostile unfriendly world and was down by Reading bridge looking at the water when a voice behind me said ‘don’t jump its not worth it” just for a moment I did consider this new option but did not take any action.

I had bumped into a funny scarcastic little bloke known as the professor, he was not too popular with my now ex friends and luckily I bumped into him as he wanted to help me. First he insisted I went to the police which worried me and I was very dubious about this course of action.

What good would it do I wondered. The police were well known for their prejudices. We went to the head office in Reading behind the old town hall and library. And the police behaved just as I thought they would, in fact they surpassed themselves by their sexism and racism.

The way they talked to me was quite incredible, really demeaning, disrespectful and totally intimidating. "Oh you want to make a charge of rape" "oh yes so you fancied abit of black and now you want to cause the lads abit of trouble by coming down here". I was put into a room for an examination by the police doctor but left just before this ordeal.

The professor was waiting outside for me and he was very indignant that the police had not been helpful at all so he then took me round to the house of some hippies he knew who lived up by the cemetery junction. They were nice people who he said would want to take me in and so I had somewhere to stay until I was back on my feet again.

I guess my mind put it away for some years as I even forgot it had happened to me and only remembered after I had been to a couple of meetings about rape also attended by several rape victims who had come to speak to us, it was only after that when I was very incensed at a meeting when I realized with a huge shock that I was also one of those victims!

I think losing my country and identity as a West Indian and a Trinidadian was very hard, losing all my family and friends even harder and then I lost my parents through the move. And then finally just when I was enjoying life discovering myself and my sexuality I was raped and lost my own identity and I was also homeless with the prospect of nothing and still I wanted to fit in to make the best of it all. I guess victims always want to fit in everywhere. And probably rape victims want to fit in more than others.

Some years later to my shock horror I realized the man whose idea it had been to rape me lived not far from where I was now living. This really shook me up so much so that I was walking really tortuous routes to avoid seeing him, for days and weeks I was walking home a very long route and feeling very scared.

Until one day I said no more this is enough and that day I did not take the back roads no I went straight down the road where I knew I would see the dick and sure enough there he was. Well I just went over and said hello and looked him straight in the face and said you do not scare me anymore.

I saw he was very nervous and that he was actually really worried. He wanted to know what I wanted I told him nothing and walked away. I then just went on my way home not sure what had happened but somehow his power to scare me had been broken. In the end he had been proved to be nothing more than a sad man.