48 The Times Magazineme to be happy, so I left my relationship and
Amsterdam after only three months and came
back to London to find he wasn’t leaving his
wife, never was. So then I had nothing: no job,
no flat, no relationship.
I drank too much and briefly returned
to Bath, found a job on another national
newspaper in London and bounced back to
the capital, still lost and heartbroken, but an
expert at hiding it. I moved in with anyone
who didn’t make me sign a contract: my
friend’s dad, a woman I met drunk at a bus
stop, a player on a netball court or any
boyfriend who asked, before it was right or
I was ready. I was intent on not being trapped
and, after another two years in the office of
that massive tabloid, I left that job and went
freelance. By now I was 28, my career far from
following the traditional trajectory and my
financial situation adding more angst.
With hindsight I can see that everything
I did was designed to allow me to pack up and
leave immediately, as though I were terrified
someone or something were coming for
me. At the time I didn’t know any of that.
I thought then that something was wrong with
me. I didn’t understand that my jumpiness,
my fear of sitting still, was a reaction to the
trauma I’d been blocking out for so long that
it was starting to destroy me.Rape victims don’t always understand
themselves to be rape victims, however weird
that sounds. It’s part of a huge denial that tells
you it’s easier to see it as “consensual”, easier
for you to be wrong, easier for your mind to
try to imagine an alternative reality in which
you might have wanted what happened. The
idea that you had absolutely no agency in an
event that changed your life for ever is toomuch for most minds, especially when you’ve
been spiked, like I am almost certain I was.
I’d woken up, the night after a New Year’s
Eve party, in a far corner of the house, my
eyes rolling in the way only hard drugs make
them roll. This is Ecstasy, I thought. I had
taken it once, with a boyfriend, and disliked it
so much I never took it again. But whatever
was in my system, the situation was as far
from ecstasy as you could get. It felt like a
horror movie. There was a man on top of
me, his face a monstrous blur, his body on me,
moving. My eyes rolled. I had no idea who he
was and how I’d got here. Unable to move or
talk or even see, I lost consciousness.
When I came round, I was lying across the
bed. Dress on, no underwear. I couldn’t turn
my head. I couldn’t move, so I moved my eyes
sideways and saw him. He put his hand on me
and I can’t explain the feeling of cold panic
that swept over me. I knew I had to find the
strength to move. I got his hand away. He
laughed. “You were much more fun last night,”
he said. When I was unconscious. I wish
I could tell you his name. I want to tell
everyone, want everyone to know who this
fraud is. My hands shake every time I have to
talk about this. I watch them shaking over the
keyboard as I type and realise I’m holding my
breath, jaw clenched. The unrelenting panic
is something I can’t control, still. It makes
me want to cry – and I’m tough. People who
know me would sometimes say too tough. But
who would I be if a man hadn’t wrecked my
belief in... everything really, at 21? I would
have loved the opportunity to know.
The next day, after that party, the chance
of going to the police slid away. I was 21 and
all I could do was try to sleep away the grief
of something I knew – was absolutely certain- had happened. And then when I told my
friend who’d arranged the party, who knew
this awful, privileged man, my “friend” told me
this guy had “always been a bit weird with
girls”. He offered no care or apology, nothing.
He didn’t take it seriously, so I shut up, for
years, because clearly I was wrong and it
wasn’t a big deal.
I got on with my life, but what had
happened affected everything. I just had no
idea how much because I didn’t think of myself
as a rape victim. So at work I went to courtI SENT A MESSAGE TO THE MAN I KNEW
HAD CHANGED EVERYTHING WITH
A BRUTAL INVASION OF MY BODY
he pandemic changed life for everyone, but I didn’t
expect my life in the void to become a turning point.
After running away from London, the city where I
spent my hedonistic twenties, I found myself lockeddown at my parents’ house in Bath and looking back
T on the past ten years.
I was 23 when I arrived in London, fresh-
faced, newly graduated and feeling like Dick
Whittington ready to find his fortune. I was
being trained by The Times, had a house
share with friends in Clapham (which wasn’t
synonymous then with violence against
women, only chinos and cocktail jug happy
hours) and while editing a piece on Tinder
one day at work, I wondered if it would ever
take off. I was glad I didn’t have to bother with
it. I’d restarted a relationship with someone
I’d dated at Leeds University. I’ve always hated
conventional, box-ticking timelines, but it
seemed I’d landed the three biggies. My love,
work and home lives were set up and ready to
roll. What could go wrong?
Well, all sorts of things, I now realise,
when you don’t confront trauma. It would be
another seven years before I would tackle
mine, when the pandemic hit and I’d fled the
worst relationship of my life. It wasn’t until
I was in lockdown therapy and writing a
book about my extreme decade as part of
my extreme generation that I saw how pain
from an incident that took place when I was
21 had shaped my life.
On the surface I seemed fine, successful
even, always out, always laughing and dancing
and drinking, but beneath it I was struggling,
my mood dark. I blamed London, a fast,
extortionate city my boyfriend hated and
moaned about constantly. The house share
with friends had quickly fallen apart. Strangers
moved in, so I stayed out all night or, overcome
with lethargy, tried not to leave the small
bedroom I shared with my boyfriend. I didn’t
want to have to fake interest in and have
conversations with people with whom I had
nothing in common. I was 23 and wondering
why it felt like the end, not the start.
Seeing London and sordid rental conditions
as the problem, I left my job and we moved to
Amsterdam, thinking that would alleviate my
constant anxiety. But by then I’d been chased
by an older, married man who’d persuaded me
we should be together and when I left for the
Netherlands, he didn’t stop. He was separating
GARETH IWAN JONESfrom his wife, he said, and he had to be with