Read Bodily Harm for Free Online

upholstery of the car, some derelict from the fifties, while the driver goes far too fast through the winding narrow streets, honking at every bend. The car is on the wrong side of the road, and it takes Rennie a moment to remember that this is in fact the British side.
    They wind up a hillside, past houses she can make out only dimly. The headlights shine on massive bushes overhanging the road, with flamboyant red and pink flowers dangling from them like Kleenex flowers at a high-school dance. Then they’re in the lighted part of town. There are crowds of people on the streetcorners and in front of the shops but they aren’t walking, they’re just standing or sitting on steps or chairs, as if they’re inside a room. Music flows through the open doorways.
    Some of the men wear knitted wool caps, like tea cosies, and Rennie wonders how they can stand it in the heat. Their heads turn as the taxi goes by, and some wave and shout, at the driver rather than Rennie. She’s beginning to feel very white. Their blacks aren’t the same as our blacks, she reminds herself; then sees that what she means by
our blacks
are the hostile ones in the States, whereas
our blacks
ought to mean this kind. They seem friendly enough.
    Nevertheless Rennie finds their aimlessness disturbing, as she would at home. It’s too much like teenagers in shopping plazas, it’s too much like a mob. She discovers that she’s truly no longer
at
home
. She is away, she is
out
, which is what she wanted. The difference between this and home isn’t so much that she knows nobody as that nobody knows her. In a way she’s invisible. In a way she’s safe.

    When Jake moved out, naturally there was a vacuum. Something had to come in to fill it. Maybe the man with the rope hadn’t so much broken into her apartment as been sucked in, by the force of gravity. Which was one way of looking at it, thought Rennie.
    Once she would have made this man into a good story; she would have told it at lunch, with the strawberry flan. She wasn’t sure what stopped her, from telling anyone at all. Perhaps it was that the story had no end, it was open-ended; or perhaps it was too impersonal, she had no picture of the man’s face. When she was outside, walking along the street, she looked at the men who passed her in a new way: it could be any one of them, it could be anyone. Also she felt implicated, even though she had done nothing and nothing had been done to her. She had been seen, too intimately, her face blurred and distorted, damaged, owned in some way she couldn’t define. It wasn’t something she could talk about at lunch. Anyway, she didn’t want to become known as a man-hater, which was what happened when you told stories like that.
    The first thing she did after the policemen had gone was to get the lock fixed. Then she had safety catches put on the windows. Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being watched, even when she was in a room by herself, with the curtains closed. She had the sense that someone had been in her apartment while she was out, not disarranging anything, but just looking into her cupboards, her refrigerator, studying her. The rooms smelled different after she’d been out. She began to see herself from theoutside, as if she was a moving target in someone else’s binoculars. She could even hear the silent commentary: Now she’s opening the bean sprouts, now she’s cooking an omelette, now she’s eating it, now she’s washing off the plate. Now she’s sitting down in the livingroom, nothing much going on. Now she’s getting up, she’s going into the bedroom, she’s taking off her shoes, she’s turning out the light. Next comes the good part.
    She began to have nightmares, she woke up sweating. Once she thought there was someone in the bed with her, she could feel an arm, a leg.
    Rennie decided she was being silly and possibly neurotic as well. She didn’t want to turn into the sort of woman who was afraid of men.