Overlapping Lives Read online

  She took the train back to London and thought about forgiving as the South London suburbs enclosed her, wondering if Trevor had thought about how his sex partners felt. Had he understood anything about the needs of the people in bed with him; had he believed they liked what he did to them; and how many more women had he subjected to his sexual proclivities? She wondered how it felt to be Trevor, driven by a feral instinct, cruising from one sexual partner to the next. Instinct implied an intention to survive and breed. But that was not how it felt. His purpose was more basic: to fulfil his own lascivious intentions to acquire the bodies of his partners, or victims, motivated by the pursuit of sexual pleasure, not a desire to please them. The more she thought about it, the more ambivalent she felt, and her sense of self-disgust at how she had allowed herself to be used, grew insidiously. If Julie had explained why she had been so upset at the sight of him at the party, and not impetuously stuck a knife in his neck, she might have confronted Trevor about his unacceptable behaviour. She might have attempted to be empathetic with him or change the way he treated her in bed. Then her thoughts turned to whether she would have had the courage to kill him were he still alive. She arrived at Waterloo Station feeling sad, wondering if she would ever meet a man who she could trust, who would respect her, clothed or unclothed. Returning to the flat, she took off her clothes, which smelled faintly of the stale prison atmosphere, showered, clothed herself in joggers and a tee-shirt, found the yellow-eyed cat and sat down on the sofa with her to ask the cat what she should do. The cat nestled in her lap, vibrating as she purred, delighted to be the focus of attention. That was the clue which Sally needed.

  After Julie and Morag had been sentenced the media were briefly full of prurient headlines about rape and revenge. The rapists and their murderers had been condemned in equal measure. Soon the headlines disappeared and the victims – in reality, everyone involved – were forgotten. Two weeks later the Sunday newspapers revisited the story. A journalist with an agenda about women’s rights wrote about rape, retribution and revenge. She argued about the options of treatment or punishment and invented a Darwinian argument about rapists being parasitic on the female of the species. Natural selection might determine that they should rightly be eliminated in the interest of the survival of the species. Sally cut the article out of the paper for her imprisoned friends.

  Sally knew she must do something to restore her self-confidence; she could not continue to avoid her work colleagues, who had already asked about her welfare, to which she had no answer because she felt ashamed at her inability to feel comfortable with the enthusiastic men. The article she had cut from the newspaper had the email address of the journalist who had written it appended at the end. Sally would seek attention from the press; she had a story; who else had first-hand experience of the murderers and one of the victims? She suddenly felt empowered, as victims sometimes do. An email to the journalist was answered within hours, with a reply asking if she would be willing to be interviewed.

  Before the interview happened Melanie entered Sally’s life. She had appeared at the front door of the flat, unannounced, on a Sunday afternoon. Melanie was strikingly attractive, dressed in a loose, blue silk top and pink, skinny jeans. She had apologised for intruding and explained with disarming frankness that she worked for a Christian charity. Her interest lay in people who had been badly hurt in some way and how they approached the possibility of forgiving the people who had hurt them. Sally was fascinated by Melanie’s charm and appearance. She let her in, apologised for being dressed in her joggers and a tee-shirt, put the kettle on and took Melanie into the garden where the cat joined them to listen. Melanie talked for a long time about what she knew of the psychology of forgiving and also explained that she did not have anyone to forgive, so lacked experience of how the theory might help someone who did.

  Sally had a lot to say on the subject. She knew more than anyone about her imprisoned friends, their rapists and her own experience of being abused by Trevor. Talking to Melanie felt like a rehearsal for the interview with the journalist. The afternoon faded into evening. They arranged to meet again the following weekend. Sally agreed to take Melanie to the pub where Trevor had died. As they parted, Sally could not resist a personal observation:

  ‘Melanie, I’ve never seen such beautiful eyes as yours.’

  ‘I was going to say the same about yours: like forget-me-nots,’ replied Melanie. They smiled their wide smiles at each other and exchanged a brief, affectionate kiss, both feeling beguiled by the other.

  Sally wondered what had gone on between them. The smile and the kiss seemed to hold promise of something erotic. She could not remember being aroused by the eyes of another woman before in quite the same way. It had touched something in her sexuality of which she had not been aware. Intimacy with a woman might be an exciting option. She thought about Julie and Morag who had rediscovered their capacity for intimacy with each other in the confines of their cell. Sally badly needed a way to restore her own ability to be intimate with anyone. She started to count the days to their next meeting and wondered if Melanie had felt the same frisson of attraction.

  The journalist who Sally had contacted came round to the flat on Wednesday evening. She was a short, pretty woman with wavy, brown hair, brown eyes and a small, mobile mouth with which she talked knowledgably about women’s rights, abusive men and forgiveness. Her interest was in gathering information from women who had experience of abusive relationships and how they had reacted to them. Sally had plenty to say and over a bottle of white wine had told the story of Julie and Morag. Then she went on to explain how she had lost her confidence and capacity for intimacy, since realising that she had been abused by Julie’s victim, and felt the need to do something to restore her ability to interact with men. The journalist left with enough material for the next opinionated column. After she had gone Sally felt better about herself. Talking about her experience and the events which had changed her from a gregarious, even glamorous, woman to being withdrawn and introspective had helped her self-esteem. She went to bed and fantasised about her planned meeting with the fascinating Melanie and what possibilities might ensue. She drifted off to sleep thinking of Melanie’s deep, dark eyes and the promise of something that she had never experienced before.

  Melanie

  Melanie’s eyes were large and dark. When she blinked, her eyelids seemed to move in slow motion. Close up, her irises were perfectly round and dark blue, but from a distance her pupils looked oval. Her face was framed by long, dark hair which she kept straight and unrestrained. Melanie smiled a lot, exposing a perfect row of teeth in her wide, attractive mouth.

  She stopped growing when she reached five feet and ten inches at the age of nineteen, by which time she was a lean young woman. Through her teenage years Melanie had waited in vain for her breasts to grow. Her nipples had grown and become sensitive at an early age, but the breasts beneath them stayed stubbornly shallow. She liked their understated shape but wondered why she did not grow like her friends who looked womanly in their mid-teens. The delicate sensitivity of her nipples, particularly before her periods, made her wear a bra although she did not really need to. Inevitably, her nipples pointed through the shallow cups of her bra. She gave up wearing tight tee-shirts, which attracted too much attention, and instead wore loose, silky tops or V-neck jumpers.

  The most alluring thing about Melanie was her huge eyes. They drew people in like lanterns in a storm. Once seduced by the beauty of her eyes, a few men had been granted access to her small, firm breasts and erotic nipples. She was reticent about taking her clothes off but occasionally it seemed the right thing to do. Melanie was always surprised by how much men liked her breasts despite their unconventional proportions. It gave her confidence and she learnt to admire her own unclothed shape, which was beautiful, from head to foot. Despite these occasional naked encounters Melanie remained a virgin. As she got older her virginity became increasingly important to he
r, as did the perfection of her body, which she exercised obsessively.

  During her years at university Melanie became involved with the Christian Union and, despite her agnostic childhood, started to believe in God. She learnt to pray and attended church every Sunday. Her first job after university was working for a charity which raised money for the church. Inwardly, she was content. Outwardly, she seemed full of contradictions. Melanie had become a pious virgin doing virtuous work; her physical attributes and tantalising eyes created a desirability which excited both men and women. The men with whom Melanie worked and socialised came to realise that, despite her lissom attractiveness, she was not available for anything other than benign friendship. Sex did not seem to be part of Melanie’s repertoire but it did not escape her, or the men she encountered, that she radiated desirability. When people complimented her on her appearance she ignored them. She regularly prayed to be forgiven for the guilty narcissism she felt every time she saw herself in the mirror, clothed and unclothed, but did not cease to hone her physical perfection in the gym and with solitary runs through the North London suburb where she lived.

  For Melanie, forgiveness was a regular preoccupation: both to be forgiven for her own unchristian thoughts by the loving god to whom she prayed, and for other people who she considered to be transgressive in thought or action. The nature of forgiveness was elusive. How she should do it and express it became a constant challenge. There seemed to be so many things which happened all over the world that needed to be forgiven, but so little forgiveness. She reflected on this imbalance and concluded that the problem was not that people did not want to forgive but that not enough people, including herself, knew how to forgive, or even what forgiveness really was. In time she discovered that forgiving was good for everyone. Forgetting or pretending something bad had not happened was not helpful. It was more to do with accepting that something bad had happened and releasing the transgressor from the malevolence of their victim. This was key to the process; it allowed the victim to stop feeling ill intent towards their persecutor. It was an emotional and psychological transformation which involved reconciliation, understanding and maybe empathy. The benefit accrued as a result of making victims feel better about themselves; they could stop ruminating about revenge or punishment.

  At the end of May the murder of two rapists by their victims on the same Sunday afternoon in London had filled the headlines. Melanie chastised herself for her initial feeling of admiration for the courage of the women murderers. She knew that she should be reflecting on how the women could, or should, have looked for a way to forgive, not avenge. There had been a witness to one of the murders, who was a friend of one of the murderers, who had been present at the time. She had been persuaded by the police to give evidence against her friend and had been named by the press as a woman called Sally. Melanie decided to seek her out.

  Finding Sally was easier than Melanie had anticipated. She had found the address of the woman against whom Sally had given evidence. Sally was living at the address which turned out to be a basement flat not far from where Melanie lived. She decided to call on her unannounced on a Sunday afternoon. When Sally opened the door Melanie rapidly explained that she was a Christian charity worker and interested in canvassing people’s views on forgiveness. She was relieved when Sally seemed pleased to see her. They spent a long time talking about the anatomy of forgiveness and Sally’s experience of her own abuse during her brief affair with Trevor, who her friend Julie had murdered. Sally went on to describe to Melanie how she had lost her capacity for intimacy since the affair. She explained about her intimate knowledge of what had happened to her imprisoned friends and her conversation with Julie, who had not been able to forgive the man who had raped her. They parted company in the early evening and arranged to meet at the pub, where Trevor had died, the following Sunday. As Sally stood at the front door they had looked admiringly at each other’s eyes, which were beautiful in different ways. They mutually acknowledged each other’s striking attributes and kissed briefly before parting, both enjoying the spontaneity of their flirtation.

  Melanie was filled with happiness after her afternoon with Sally. Something to do with the flirtatious frisson they had shared reminded Melanie that she craved intimacy despite resolutely preserving her virginity. It dawned on her that maybe intimacy with men, which posed a problem, was not the solution to the longing which she knew that she felt. Her sexuality was not a thing which Melanie spent much time contemplating. The assumption that she was heterosexual did not seem necessarily to exclude the possibility that intimacy with another woman might fulfil something missing in her life. She wondered if her thoughts were sacrilegious and promised herself to seek guidance through her prayers; she also resolved to take a risk, when she met Sally at the pub in a few days’ time, and discover if Sally had entertained similar thoughts. In the meantime she would find out how unchristian her thoughts and intentions might be; after all, the church admitted women to its highest offices. People of all sexual orientation were accepted by the church; people of the same sexual orientation could even get married to each other. Melanie also discovered that there were numerous saints, of both sexes, whose sexuality had been interpreted in a variety of ways. She suppressed her longing to see Sally again until she could be sure that her feelings would be reciprocated.

  Sunday came and Melanie set off for her usual service at the church. Arriving early, she sat in a pew at the back of the congregation, closed her eyes, bowed her head and prayed. She found that she was praying that Sally was anticipating lunchtime at the pub as eagerly as she was. This had not been her intention. What she had meant to do was to pray for forgiveness in case her feelings for Sally were sinful. Rationalising her thoughts, she decided to postpone that particular petition to God until she knew more exactly what her feelings were. She sang the hymns, listened to the sermon, prayed some more and chatted to a few of the congregation after the service in the sunlit graveyard. Melanie walked back to her flat, took off her demure church-going skirt, pulled on her pink jeans, which transformed her from a sober-looking Christian young woman to a party girl, and set off to meet Sally.

  At midday they met in the pub, hugged and kissed briefly, bought a bottle of white wine and took it into the garden where Trevor had died. The walls had been freshly painted and the wooden garden furniture replaced: all trace of Julie’s crime scrubbed away. Sitting in the sunshine, they smiled at each other and then started to talk at the same time. They chatted brightly about work, their flats, the neighbourhood and Sally described the horror of the scene she had witnessed at the next table. Smiling a lot, they looked at each other’s remarkable eyes.

  ‘I’ve so been looking forward to seeing you again,’ confessed Melanie.

  ‘Me too,’ agreed Sally, ‘it really is a sort of relief to have got together again. It’s been a long week. Too much work, endless presentations and fending off the predatory men. I really want to talk to you about that – men make me so anxious recently. I feel that as soon as I relax my defences they think I’m available for sex. And I’m absolutely not; the prospect of being intimate with someone of the opposite sex gives me this instant anxiety, ever since Trevor and all that. It’s incapacitating and people notice. They think I’m behaving oddly. I need to exorcise the memory and find a way to connect with people again, physically.’

  Melanie considered for a moment. ‘The trite answer lies in forgiving. The problem is how to do it. I have a problem with men as well.’ She paused. The conversation was becoming a confessional. ‘I’ve never had sex and virginity has come to be important to me. I don’t want to let it go but men don’t understand about being a virgin.’ The wine made Melanie just disinhibited enough to add, ‘Intimacy doesn’t have to be with a man.’ She smiled at Sally and looked steadily at her bright blue eyes.

  Sally returned her gaze with a thrill of comprehension. ‘I’d thought of that but until this moment I hadn’t a clue how to go about
it’.

  ‘I won’t allow myself to have sex but I crave intimacy.’ Melanie reminded herself that she had resolved to take a risk. ‘I do want to be close to someone physically. I’m starved of contact with other people’s skin. When I think about it, I don’t mind whose skin it is as long as the owner of the skin doesn’t want sex. Actually, that isn’t quite right. What I really mean is that I think you’re lovely, Sally, and what’s to be lost by trying? I’ve never done it before either. I’m sure I’m not gay but that doesn’t stop me from thinking about you with no clothes on. Sometimes I wonder why we have to be straight or gay. There’s very few things in life that are that straightforward. I don’t see why you can’t find your own sex attractive without actually being gay.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ decided Sally. She poured the rest of the bottle into their glasses and they swigged. Sally stood up, took Melanie’s arm and led her out of the pub. ‘My flat’s not far and I’m not letting you go until we’ve found out what it’s like.’ They walked, arms linked, looking and feeling happy and excited.

  Sally let them into the basement flat where the cat circled them suspiciously. She took another bottle of white wine from the fridge, unscrewed the top, poured two glasses and gave one to Melanie. They tinged the glasses, sipped, put the glasses down on the table and embraced. Their lips met softly, then their mouths opened a little and their tongues collided.

  ‘That was a first for me,’ said Melanie, ‘you’re delicious.’

  ‘So are you. Let’s do it with no clothes on.’ Sally towed Melanie into the bedroom and hauled the duvet off the bed. They hurriedly shed their clothes, glanced briefly at each other’s long, lean bodies and entwined their limbs on the cool, white sheet. The perfect sensuality of their skin engulfed their senses and the intensity of their intimacy became electrifying. They explored each other’s bodies languidly for a long time and then lay on their sides, their eyes like headlights, each absorbing the sight of the other.