Butterfly Girl

CW: Sexual violence, domestic abuse

The people near the picnic tables have been let down by the delayed train. I too should be surging through Northern England, on my way to my new home. A barman steps outside and tells us the train is often late because of a problematic junction ninety miles down the track. Everyone moves indoors to order drinks and make the most of the unexpected hold up.

I settle in the sun with a pint and a bowl of chips. The pub neighbours the little, rural train station. It must make a fortune from these delays. This was meant to be a brief stop. A quick peek at a nearby village where I lived at the turn of the century. How surreal that phrase sounds. I chanced a swift visit, but lunch wasn't part of the plan. Truth be told, I’m uncomfortable being stuck here.

Then I see her, at the next table, texting rapidly, the way younger people do. And I’m back there.

#

Millennium Eve. The Village Green. She holds a lit candle and a plastic wine glass. She stands near the front of the crowd. Angels by Robbie Williams fills the air. The whole village celebrates the New Year together. As the local vicar, I have just delivered a heartfelt speech about God watching over us as we move into a new century. A few days later, she knocked at my door.

"Hello, would you like to come in?"

Her uncertain smile endeared her to me. She lived with her boyfriend in the house where people congregated. Loud laughter spilling out. Young men and women smoking on the driveway. Each of them armed with a bottle of lurid-coloured alcopop. The smell of weed in the air. I imagine they gathered at her house because she had a child upstairs in bed and needed to be at home.

I recall her carefully easing out of my enthusiastic embrace on New Year’s Eve, and flush with discomfort. I was aware I had overstepped with several of the women in the village that night. I dismiss the thought; everyone was engrossed in the magic of the evening, and the booze would have diminished any lingering doubts.

We drank coffee in my office. She perched on the edge of a chair, her hair busy with tiny plastic butterfly clips. She wore oversized jeans and a tiny vest, one of the straps slipped unnoticed down her arm. Braless.

"I can hear it through the wall," she’d said. "The smacking. It sounds hard and she’s only a toddler. The mum, Lindsay, works in Woolies. She seems nice when I see her out and about. I don’t want to cause trouble."

#

Twenty years later, she looks self-assured. Mature, I suppose. Back then, she seemed innocent, or do I mean vulnerable? When her fingers blur across the screen of her phone, her slender wrist is exposed, and I remember it from back then, in my office, a tattoo of a dolphin. I wonder if she regrets it now she’s older.

We get talking. I don’t say who I am. After a while, it’s clear she doesn’t remember me. She carries her glass across to my table and sits opposite me. I start to enjoy myself and relish my upper hand. It’s the sort of thing that gets my dopamine flowing.

She’s meeting old friends for a hiking weekend. Best part of the country, she says. She’s from the area, grew up in the county town, and for a time, she lived in a nearby village. Do I know of it? I tell her I do, but only in passing.

"I regret I only lived there a year," she says.

I nod and reply, "I know about regret."

She studies me for a moment, "Sometimes I think it would be good to run away and start over somewhere new."

I start to agree but then she adds, "The penance is to stay. To carry the weight of the shame."

I’m thrown but she doesn’t seem to notice.

She tells me she loved the village at first. Moved there with her boyfriend, Pete. He grew up there, so they had lots of friends and family, babysitters on tap. She loved the warm hug of belonging. It was magical that first Christmas. A pub full of laughter and community. The millennium celebrations continued well into January. She says she doesn’t know why she’s confiding in me, but it’s not new to me; women often do. After all, it’s not the first time she’s trusted me.

#

The pub glows with warmth. Red cheeks, full pints, happy noise. Adults and kids crammed around tables. That inescapable bloody Angels song. I stay for a quick drink to show my face, drop my change noisily on the bar, alerting people to my presence. It’s a brief visit. I have plans for the evening. I slip out quietly and cut through an alleyway. My heart races in anticipation and I almost trip in my adrenaline-fuelled haste. I pause and compose myself. When I reach her door, I calmly let myself in. Lindsay looks up, startled. "I wasn’t expecting you," she says, worried. I know she wasn’t.

#

There was a bluebottle in the ointment, she says. Pete drank too much, grew nasty. She didn’t feel comfortable leaving the baby with him. They were too young. They wouldn’t have lasted at all if not for the child. He slapped her, spat at her, then cringed with remorse when sober. Always when the baby was in bed but it was only a matter of time before she saw something. Eventually, she asked him to leave. And that, she says, was the start of her downfall.

"Immediately, there was a shift. Fewer people came over. More men than women. I think there was a bet on who could get me into bed first. My negative reaction was enough to make me the enemy. The men felt rejected in the way men do when nothing is on offer in the first place. The women became wary. Rumours flew up and down the village streets. It got ugly."

Her nearness is seductive; she is barely two feet away from me. I can almost inhale her scent. I force myself to focus and ask her what happened next.

"I left, I had to. Pete’s family hated me. Even a visit to the corner shop felt like a hundred eyes on me and tumbleweed rolling across the floor. I had to pass the house he now lived in with his parents to leave my street. If he saw me, he would shout abuse from the window. It was unbearable." She picks at a roughened piece of the wooden table. I can see she’s lost within the memory.

She resurfaces. “In the end, I moved to East Yorkshire. I had a friend who’d gravitated there. It gave me a starting point. I went to university before I eventually came back to my home town. Gave it time to blow over and for Pete to move on with his life. He developed a relationship with his daughter eventually but it’s to my shame they lost those early years together. I can’t help but feel selfish about my choices.”

"Those regrets don’t seem too bad in the grand scheme of things," I say.

"I took my daughter away from her father. I wish I had found a better way."

#

The kitchen smells of sherry. She’s making a trifle. I don’t help. Instead, I guide her into the lounge, not unkindly. I tell her I’ll call social services if she doesn’t cooperate. She’s frightened. I justify my behaviour to myself: she deserves this. The butterfly girl reported her to me, after all.

Not long after, I was moved to another parish. There was always a Lindsay. Someone weak who’d committed some minor misdemeanour. In their isolation, it would grow to be monstrous. I helped fuel it. I was a shoulder to cry on. I was nice to them. Until I wasn’t.

Eventually, it caught up with me. But what did I lose? A poorly paid job. A mousy wife I barely looked at. None of it mattered. I avoided prison, helped by the weight of society’s judgement of single mothers. My reputation was ruined though. Doors closed. Sometimes, new boyfriends of the women threatened me, establishing themselves as the protective man on the scene.

I moved and moved again. Someone always found me out. I should have planned it better, but I was greedy and couldn’t stop, still can’t stop. If there were fewer women, fewer broken lives. There were just too many of them, too many opportunities. Those silly, meek women.

I don’t get as much these days. The vicar-like manner still helps sometimes. The good listener, the aura of decency, the warm hand. But I’m older now. No car or decent job. They sense the desperation.

#

Someone’s phone beeps. The train is due. I stand.

"Thank you for your company," I say.

"No, thank you. I’m sorry to unload. You must have a trustworthy face."

"It’s been my pleasure."

"It’s a shame we didn’t have time to talk about you, your own regrets," She says it lightly. The sun behind her blinds me. "Anyway, where are you headed?"

"A little village just north of Inverness,” I speak without thought, but it’s okay, I feel safe in the knowledge that once we part, she’ll forget all about me.

From the train window, I glimpse her on the platform, her arms around a friend. A group of them gathered together. It warms me. She has not learned to curtail her proclivity for confiding in dangerous men. She thinks she’s had a nice chat with a lovely stranger. How I would have loved to get my hands on her. But she was never mine. I wondered for a moment the day she knocked on my door, and I wondered again today, but the moment passed. Not self-loathing enough for me.

#

And then, later, it hits me. With horrible, slicing clarity.

She knew.

She knew the whole time.

I replay our talk. Her mention of East Yorkshire. The name of a town. I missed it then, in the glow of her attention. But she said it. The place one of the women had come from. The place she moved back to after the scandal. Butterfly girl would have seen it play out on the local news, remembered me, remembered talking in my office that day.

The horror ebbs just enough to stop feeling like a knife to my throat and I consider why she talked to me.

Out of solidarity? Her shame isn’t the same as mine. But to her, it matters. We both carry it. The kind that still stains you, years on. Did she recognise it in me? Did she offer forgiveness? I doubt it. Women don’t look kindly upon men like me.

Or did she feel superior? Will she laugh about it with her friends, the dirty old man she fooled to pass the time? The hiking weekend could include Lindsay for all I know. Am I to be the entertainment or the ghost story told late at night?

It sits uneasily. She knows where I’m going. Should I get off at Edinburgh? Start again? Lose myself in the anonymity of the city? No, she was just messing with me, it would be fine. But there is no certainty.

She seemed so benign, but she must have clapped her hands when it became obvious I thought she’d forgotten me. Fucking butterflies and dolphins. How stupid I’ve been.

And I’m left with a deep, unsettled sensation. I’ve been played. She knew that I would realise. That the knowledge already planted in my brain would trickle down and nudge me. This sickening feeling would fill my senses and I would be eaten alive with unease. She wanted this to happen. She gave me a penance to carry.

The End