17.
It was a night of choosing between lesser evils.
1. Should I stay at this party that’s finishing up, on my own, on the other side of town on the off chance my friends actually do come back to get me?
2. Should I go with this man who has been plying me with banana flavoured cocktails for the last few hours to a bar in town?
3. Should I stay with the local football team at the bar in town?
4. Should I call my parents?
The thinking went a bit like this:
I could stay at this dwindling party on the other side of town and hopefully my friends come back to get me. But what if they don’t? I’m miles from anywhere, I have no money and how am I ever going to get to my friend’s house or even home from here?
So…
I’ll go into town to a bar with this man. I don’t feel great about this, he’s a bit creepy, but at least I’ll be closer to home and in town I might meet someone I know.
So…
Shit, there’s no one I know at this bar in town. I’ll chat to these guys, they look nice. Oh, they’re part of a football team celebrating a win. They’re asking me who I’m with, I tell them that guy, but I don’t know him and I’m not sure about him. They are telling me to go with them and the team and not to leave here with that bloke.
So…
Do I really want to be the only girl with a whole team of football players? How safe is that going to be? Am I leaving myself in a really risky position with a whole team of men as opposed to just one man? Shit, who do I trust?
So…
I’ll get in a taxi with the man that brought me to the bar. I say goodbye to the football team. Shit, now the bloke is taking me to his house, it’s further away from my home, where the hell am I, this is a rough part of town I really don’t know. I’m looking at the taxi driver in the rear-view mirror. I’m telling the man I really don’t want to go to his house and I shouldn’t be in this taxi. He’s trying to talk me down and tells me it’ll be fine. I say I shouldn’t be here loudly enough that the taxi driver can hear me. The driver looks at me and I’m looking at him with pleading eyes hoping he can see that I need his help.
It's too late.
The taxi driver does not help me and I am decanted from the taxi at the man’s house. I am very drunk.
Within 20 minutes I am lying on the floor of a lounge room, weirdly on some makeshift bed of random linens, in a house in a dodgy part of town and the other blokes staying at the house think this is funny.
The man tries to have sex with me. I have not had sex before. It is a horrible, degrading unprotected experience devoid of pleasure and without an ounce of consideration for my well-being. I was shoved about to make it work until it did. And that was that. It was messy and bloody and humiliating.
He wanted me to pay him for the petrol to drive me to my friend’s house the next morning.
Option 4 was discounted out of hand. I decided better to take my chances with a strange man or a football team over the long-term implications of Option 4 right from the outset.
The visceral cold-shouldering, the retraction of all freedoms, the complete breakdown in our relationship, the rage I would have had to deal with, from a midnight call home to my parents, when they thought I was at a friend’s house; it wasn’t even worth serious consideration.
