Good For It - by Lillian Telford
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLYContent warning: this essay discusses rape and trauma
2021
Whenever it happens, the tweets and subtweets say similar things. I join in the shared rage, retweeting heavy words of condemnation. Our stories of trauma are sent into the ether, where screams and cries become whispers against the backdrop of coding and HTML.
In the Twittersphere, someone asks how we can be mad at Morrison’s comments when an old white man will speak like an old white man. After all, boys will be boys.
2019
A few years ago, I was working in Surfers Paradise. I finished a Saturday night shift around 2 am, set the alarm in the restaurant and slipped out the side door. My car was a five-minute walk away. The night was at its peak; the heavy hum of music slipping from the club doors, vomit on the street, fights over kebabs. On busy Cavil Avenue, a man spotted me. He gestured to a busker strumming his guitar and asked me to dance. I knew the game and politely declined, but he began to follow me. I walked by dozens of people while this stranger yelled that I was a fucking bitch, and to get right back here. No one turned their head.
Until that night, I believed the grease on my body, the salt in my hair, the pallor of my skin after finishing a nine-hour shift would camouflage me in the night.
I tried to ignore him. I called my boyfriend, but his phone was on ‘do not disturb’ and it rang out three times. The man continued to follow and shout, until I walked by a tavern where broad-shouldered security guards deterred him. I waited there to dig my car keys from my bag. When I reached the carpark, I ran down the escalators to my car, convinced he was still following. When I got home, I felt sure he’d somehow followed me. I was too afraid to walk to the front door.
2021
My chest aches when I look back at photos from 2019. I was at my fittest, getting out of bed before five am to train for seventy minutes before opening the restaurant. Most of the time, when I woke up, the sun was still down. When I finished work, it was setting. At the time, I thought I was ugly. I pushed myself further and cut my calories, considering a bunch of grapes and a black coffee to be a meal. I hit my skinniest, cried often, lost my hard-earned muscle and scrutinised my reflection at every chance. And I wonder, when was the moment I lost sight of my body?
2013
When I’m seventeen, one of my closest friends openly says in our classroom that the way a woman dresses directly correlates to how she’ll be treated. He tells us that if a nurse is dressed as a nurse, she will be treated as such. A criminal act of aggression is justifiable if enough of her skin is on display. The conversation comes up in History, because our unit for the term is ‘feminism’. My teacher at the time is a young woman who, to my horror, simply nods and tells him you’ve raised a good point.
A few months before all this, my boyfriend began having sex with me for the first time, while I slept. I was in pyjamas and had fallen asleep watching Hercules. For a time, it was a joke among our friends. He wanted it so bad; he was so ready for it. I laughed too. It wasn’t violent; he didn’t pin me down; he kissed me. I didn’t say no; he didn’t ask. The relationship didn’t end for two more years; we moved away and lived together for one.
One day, I will call it rape and the word will stick on my tongue.
2021
Emily Clements writes in The Lotus Eaters, ‘Once you start agreeing to sex you don’t want to have, it’s hard to stop.’ A matchhead strikes against a strip; tall flames light up my brain.
2013
Later in that same school year, we’re on a ski trip to New Zealand. I end up sick halfway through the trip, with a throat infection that robs me of my voice. I’m alone in my cabin with my boyfriend. He wants to shower together. I say no. He tells me that I don’t like trying new things. Through his insistence and the fear of losing the relationship, I fall to other pressures too, wanting to be the girl he wants. Pretending I like the sex he likes, however rough, however embarrassing, when really, at seventeen, I don’t like sex at all. I shy my body away from him.
When we’re caught, a teacher whom I previously had a good relationship with yells at me in front of other students. She’s disappointed, disgusted, calls me a liar. She’s so angry with me that she cries. I don’t know what I’ve done wrong. My mother tells me my teacher is disappointed, that’s all. My grades in her class slip for the rest of the year and she no longer looks me in the eye. Someone else gets the award for topping English and I’m crushed. My boyfriend receives no punishment, no public discipline. His grades do not change; he doesn’t understand why I’m upset. He just wanted to fuck.
2014/2015
Sometime after my high school boyfriend and I break up, I’m visited by my friend who believes that a woman will be respected if her skirt is long enough. He’s still one of my best friends; we message often and talk on the phone. I trust this person. We watch movies in my room late into the night. He holds me, and we talk. I’m comforted, I’ve missed him. Missed having someone to hear me. I don’t want the kiss to continue, but I don’t know how to end it. I don’t know what to say, what to do. I’m afraid it will escalate; I just want my friend. I do the only thing I’ve learned how to do; I let it run its course. I turn away, feigning sleep.
A few days later I confide in someone about my conflicting feelings, and she tells others. It spreads. My friend sends me messages; I’ve betrayed him, ruined our friendship. I made it sound as though he forced himself on me.
2015/2016
Eighteen months later, and I’m in bed with a substantially older man. I’m barely twenty and he has a decade on me. I’m lonely and tricked into thinking we’re connecting, that this is the person I’ve been waiting for, that he is seeing me beyond the body I’m fucked for. But layers of clothing are quickly removed. All I want is for someone to really see me. I want the connection to continue, but telling him I don’t want to have sex tonight will mean I’m unworthy of his time. There’s a commodity here, and it’s between my legs.
I can’t stop thinking of my body: how much I hate it, how it’s ruined me. He goes down on me for twenty mortifying minutes and is frustrated that I don’t come. I’m desperate not to disappoint this person, so I tell him I do. I grip the blanket, trying to be outside of my body, the body I’m beginning to resent. He’s too annoyed to have sex. I don’t sleep. When I leave the next morning, he is friendly. In the coming days, he drunkenly tells me he’s still in love with his ex. He stops replying to my texts, starts sleeping with a mutual friend who is even younger than me. He tells people I’m too emotional. Another friend is on my side until she finds out we never actually had sex; because that just means he’s free to do whatever he wants.
This same year, my ex sends me explicit sexual messages over Snapchat. I block him. He texts me, why did you block me? I’m in a bad place. We talk on the phone for almost an hour; he’s been thinking of hurting himself. I feel disgustingly guilty and unblock him. It starts over until a friend tells me to block him from everything.
Time goes on; I fear intentions, never trusting what’s really behind the offer of a ride home after a late shift, a confession of growing feelings, or a text too close to midnight, and I lose good friends – friends I continue to miss even now, as I sit and write this piece.
I stop reading. It is years before I write creatively again.
2021
I watch as the conversation around consent is reduced to a murky milkshake. I listen to the raw voices of those who march, who demand better. So many of us have glass-sharp recollections of assault, and yet we deny, accept, pretend.
Who taught them to be like this? Who taught me? ▼
Image: Stewart Munro
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