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34

LONDON, 1986

“What the hell’s gone on here ?” asks Michael when he shows up in Ben’s room to find Cassie bleeding and Ben near-hysterical.

“You need to help me,” Ben cries, as Cassie stares into space with a deep self-inflicted gash on the inside of her wrist. “She needs to get to a hospital.”

Michael smirks, seemingly amused by Ben’s inability to control the panic that’s consuming him. “She can’t be going anywhere, mate,” he snipes.

“ What? ” says Ben, disbelievingly. “Look at her! She needs medical attention.”

“Who even is she?” asks Michael.

Ben manically runs a hand through his hair. “I don’t know; she just turned up here looking for you and started getting all weird.”

Michael raises his eyebrows. “Don’t be putting your bad shit on me, bro,” he says. “This ain’t got nothing to do with me.”

“Actually it does, and you’re going to help me, the way I helped you.”

Michael kisses his teeth and rolls his eyes. “Taking the rap for a drug habit is slightly different than taking a fan to hospital dripping in blood.”

“I have done so much more for you than that,” spits Ben. “You’re the one with a car—we need to get her to a hospital.”

Michael looks at Cassie as if weighing up the options. “I want to know what I’m getting myself involved in first. What did you do to her?”

“I haven’t fucking touched her,” exclaims Ben, his frustration evident.

“Well, she could say that you have,” says Michael, playing devil’s advocate. “She could say anything…”

“If you’re going to be an asshole and not help me, then I’m going to get Luke. Stay here with her until I get back.”

“Yeah, whatever, man.”

As soon as Ben leaves the room, Michael wraps a towel around Cassie’s wrist and throws one of Ben’s shirts over her shoulders. “Come on,” he says, lifting her up and guiding her toward the door. “I’ll take you to hospital myself.”

As they ride the lift to the underground car park in silence, Cassie’s sense of abject rejection is ever so slightly buoyed by the change of events. Despite her best efforts, and as much as she doesn’t want to acknowledge it, Ben had made it plainly obvious that he didn’t want her. But as she watches Michael stick his finger into a foil packet and rub white powder on his gums, she wonders whether Ben’s loss might be his gain.

“I don’t need to go to hospital,” she says shakily, as he opens the passenger door of his Ford Escort.

He waits until he’s in the driver’s seat to say, “Good, because I’m not taking you there.”

As they drive south across Waterloo Bridge, listening to Aerosmith at full volume, Cassie wonders where they might be going instead.

“So, I guess Secret Oktober is going to split up,” she says, knowing it will stoke the fire.

“What?” he says, distractedly. He clearly has other things on his mind. “Why would you think that?”

“Well, if Ben is writing and recording with other people, I just assumed…”

Michael gives a false laugh. “Where the fuck did you hear that from?”

“Ben just told me. I thought you of all people would know about it.”

The car very nearly drives straight over the side of the bridge, throwing Cassie into the dashboard as Michael performs an emergency stop.

“I knew it!” he yells, slamming his hands on the steering wheel. “The son of a bitch.”

“Well, maybe it’s nothing,” says Cassie, in a lame attempt to backtrack, though she can’t deny she’s enjoying the power in her hands. If she can create a little discord between the two of them, it’s the very least Ben deserves after everything he’s done to her. But all it actually serves to do is make Michael see red.

He drives another half a mile, the unspoken tension in the car mounting with every red light, while Cassie not only tries to second-guess what he’s thinking, but also where he’s taking her. She looks at him questioningly as he turns into an unlit narrow street and pulls up alongside a derelict warehouse.

“Where are we?” she asks, looking up at the metal gantries suspended between the buildings on either side of her.

Michael turns off the engine and, without warning, lunges across the seat at her. He mauls at her top as his mouth clamps onto hers.

“Wh-what are you doing…?” she manages, pressing herself into the seat in a futile attempt to get away from him.

He doesn’t say a word, just keeps forcing himself onto her as he attempts to lift himself over the handbrake.

Cassie’s flailing hand searches for the door handle and as she releases it she pushes herself out of the car, falling onto the pavement. She scrambles to her feet, her legs feeling like jelly beneath her as she tries to run, but she’s not quick enough. Michael is a second behind, slamming himself into her and bundling her into the open doorway of a disused building. Disturbed by the unexpected invasion, pigeons flap and fly out of the holes where windows should be.

“Get off me!” she cries, desperately trying to dig her heels into the loose rubble under her stilettos, but she can’t get any traction, her feet seemingly skating on ice.

“Shut the fuck up!” he sneers, his eyes hollow and devoid of empathy.

“Stop!” she cries, as he pushes her onto the ground, his crushing weight falling on top of her. “Get off me!” She pushes herself back, feeling the sting of tiny particles of loose stone leaving their imprint on her skin.

“Don’t pretend this isn’t what you want,” Michael snarls, pulling at her underwear until it rips. “It’s what you all want.”

“No!” she mumbles, the word lost as his hand closes over her mouth, making her feel as if she’s suffocating.

She takes herself to another place and another time, back to when she’d been sitting on the roundabout in the park. She must have been only six or seven, but as her mum had turned her back to her to get an ice lolly from the kiosk, a group of older boys had come along and started pushing the roundabout. Hollering as they ran around and around, Cassie had held on to the bar until her knuckles turned white, but the faster they went, the more she could feel herself sliding from her seat. She wanted to call out to them to stop, but she didn’t want them to know she was scared, so she allowed herself to be thrown off, at what felt like forty miles per hour, onto the unforgiving tarmac. Her skin felt much the same as it did now, the sense of burning getting ever hotter as the grit worked its way into the open wounds.

And however brave she’d forced herself to be then, she has to dig even deeper now as Michael pushes himself into her, and his smothering hand cuts off the last semblance of air.