The dangers of female pr.., p.1
The Dangers of Female Provocation, page 1
Also by Zoë Coyle
Where the Light Gets In
For my daughters, Luna and Viva.
Strong backs, soft fronts and wild,
generous hearts, my loves.
Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.
– William Congreve, The Mourning Bride
*
We speak of men and their rage as if it is laudable. ‘Men just get mad and push each other and it’s over’, we say. ‘Women are just bitches; they never let it go.’ That’s because we never can let it go. Because where would we put it? What system? What faith? What institution has room? Has patience? Has understanding for an angry woman?
– Lyz Lenz, ‘All the Angry Women’, Not that Bad:
Dispatches from Rape Culture (edited by Roxane Gay)
*
The Dalai Lama says that the world will be saved by Western women. Not any woman, perhaps not all women, but burning women. Women who have stepped out of silence and into the fullness of their power… Burning Woman is the heart and soul of revolution – inner and outer. She burns for change, she dances in the fire of the old, all the while visioning and weaving the new.
– Lucy H. Pearce, Burning Woman
COUPLES
Odessa Odin + Ian
Sarah + Stuart
Clotilde + Peter
Mia + George
Athena + Angelo
Kitty + Elliott
Anthony Odin + Bertha Odin / Cynthia Erasmus
Contents
Title Page
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Postscript
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
PROLOGUE
ODESSA WATCHES HER BREATH billow. Late at night, she often likes to walk home from work, taking a detour across the river and back. This deep winter London feels spacious, uncharacteristically settled. Like an undisturbed snow globe. From where she is on Waterloo Bridge, the city twinkles, each light a story, and the Thames snakes black below. Her hands are wedged in the pockets of her coat. She burrows her chin into her scarf, shielding against the cold. Her high-heeled boots clonk rhythmically as she moves between the pools of lamplight. She reaches the middle of the bridge and is startled when, from behind, she hears her name called. She turns and squints towards the voice.
A couple is approaching, and she is derailed by the interruption; she just wants to get home now, it has been a long day.
The figures come closer and materialise into recognition.
‘Oh hello, you two,’ she says.
They shift speed and start running towards her. Odessa’s tired brain strains, trying to process this. The woman, now within striking distance, her face distorting, a flash of teeth like a baboon, twists low. Then, with the primal force of distilled hatred, she uncoils, striking Odessa across the face with a blunt instrument. Odessa doesn’t have time to raise her arms, nor scream out. The man swoops down and picks her up. Her feet lift off the ground and he throws her hard. Her bag slips from her grasp as she clears the railing. For a monstrous balletic moment, both she and the bag are airborne. The latter smashes onto the pavement, bursting open, the computer skidding into the sodden road, a lipstick rolling free, her glass water bottle shattering. Odessa is now on the wrong side of the balustrade. Her clothes flapping in the wind. Unconscious well before she hits the water.
CHAPTER 1
ODESSA SIPS CHAMPAGNE AND watches her friends whirling. George has just thrown himself into the pool in his suit, creating a tsunami of water and cheering. Sarah is clutching onto the curtains, wobbling drunk in her Jimmy Choos. Athena and Mia are in the kitchen roaring with laughter, bent over double, holding each other’s hands.
Odessa re-crosses her legs on the cream sofa and through the opened wall of glass, studies the perfectly maintained garden. Kitty’s homes are all beautiful. She knows how to create expensive spaces. Primarily by throwing a great deal of money and time at them. Kitty was a lawyer but gave it up when she had her first child. Now parenting and wife-ing are her full-time jobs. She is a heart-based creature who thrums with the slightly frenetic frequency of the neurotic.
Peter stoops down and plants a kiss on Odessa’s check.
‘Dessa, look at you. What a wonderful Christening, hey? And congratulations on being the godmother. I’m sure you’ll do a stellar job, as you do for my Hugo.’ He has a small shaving cut on his chin. ‘Speaking of jobs, I hear your magazine now rivals Vogue. I read an article that said you’re the most influential new voice in fashion in the UK. Well done, you.’ He grips her forearm with warm familiarity. ‘I will be back to talk to you, but I’m on the hunt for a little charlie.’
‘Do you mean your son, Peter, because I think he’s with the nanny in the playroom.’
Peter snorts and jiggles on the spot. He is having a good time. The usual stress in his shoulders has liquefied. ‘Oh, you’re hilarious, Odessa. So deadpan all the time.’ Laughing, he darts off, all checked shirt and flushed baby-faced enthusiasm. He gets like this when he takes drugs, which is seldom. Usually, he is quite reserved and has a small grey cloud that trails him.
Peter is dear to her, they have been friends for years, but for a smart man, who has a tendency towards earnestness and self-importance, he can be a bit of a moron. Now jacked on booze and lit with drugs, he seems uncharacteristically more puppy than Homo sapien. Odessa wonders on a scale of Hateful, just how poisonous she is being.
She looks around the dissembling room; her crew, her squad, all of whom she knows well, and the women: she adores every one of them. She likes the men, but they are all still part-boy, not quite grown; yet somehow these lads got lucky and married up. She wonders if she is becoming jaded and when her belief in these men started to ebb. Maybe this is what it is to traverse the rocky outcrop into middle age.
So here she sits, thirty-seven, some would say scintillating with maturity and success. Powerful. Financially independent. Surrounded by friends. Married to a wonderful man. He’s an adult, she thinks with relief. And yet, with all these riches, she is so sad she wants to scream and scream and scream.
*
‘Darling…’ Odessa looks up to see her friend Kitty moving towards her with her baby daughter, Livi, on her hip. The Christening is in her honour. It is apparently of no consequence that both her parents are atheists – well, agnostic, as that is closer to the soft truth – and yet they stood in a church and folded their child into the arms of a god they don’t believe in. Hypocrisy? Tradition? Insurance policy? Or just a culturally sanctioned way to celebrate the birth of their adored baby?
‘Hello Kitty, and hello cheruby Livi.’ Odessa puts down her champagne and stretches out to take the loosely swaddled infant. She pulls the squirming bundle into herself for a cuddle. Kitty perches on the sofa arm and looks even more harried than usual.
‘Are you happy? Are you and Livi girl enjoying your party?’ Odessa rocks the baby against her silk blouse, careful to keep her mouth clear of her, smelling her newness. This is a supremely good-looking baby. That will make her life paradoxically both easier and harder but hopefully not less kind, thinks Odessa.
She turns again to her friend who is finishing the last of Odessa’s champagne. ‘Oh, you know, it’s so much work, I guess so. Looks like everyone is having a good time.’
‘Yes, it does,’ Odessa says, and on cue, another round of raucous hollering rises from the pool as someone else dives in.
Kitty is short, rail-thin, the result of an eating disorder that she has never completely wanted to outrun. Her hair is blazing red and cut expensively short. She wears statement earrings, a bit eighties, and conservative but lovely clothes – think golf club flirt. She has a flaxen sweetness to her, and a fresh jab of Botox has left a small bruise above her right eyebrow. She has a first-rate brain and is a generous, playful and attentive friend.
‘I am exhausted, Dessa. When do you think everyone will go home?’ She looks around and slumps, no doubt anticipating the amount of cleaning up there will be.
‘Do you want me to round them up? You could always just slip off to bed. You know I do that all the time.’
‘No, it’s fine. It’s lovely. Elliott and I love to throw a party, really. It’s just…’ Her chin wobbles and she tries to control herself.
‘It’s just what?’ Odessa looks closely at her friend.
‘This isn’t the time, but I’m in a state.’ She turns and scoops up her mobile from the table behind them and pulls up a photo. It is of an exotically beautiful and naked woman, gazing smokily into the camera.
‘I found it on Elliott’s phone. He’s connecting with women online again.’
‘Oh, darling…’
Kitty starts to crumple. ‘I don’t want to talk about it now. I don’t want to ruin the party, but what am I to do, Odessa? He says it was no one, they’ve never met in real life, they just exchanged photos, it was a one off, they’re not in contact. We’ve been
‘I’m so sorry, Kitty, this is awful. Do you want to come to stay with us for a few days?’
‘No, I can’t leave the children, and I’m afraid to leave Elliott. I need to monitor him. Imagine what he could get up to if I wasn’t here?’
Odessa reaches out and takes her friend’s hand. ‘Well, darling, that’s not going to work. If he knows he’s gotten away with it, where’s the incentive not to carry on doing what he bloody well likes?’
‘I think I’m cracking up. I love him so much. And it would flat-out kill me to go through another divorce.’
Odessa remembers Kitty’s starter marriage in her early twenties. Another lawyer, with a proclivity for coke, anal, and Latino teens. He had psychologically tortured and debased Kitty before he switched to gaslighting. For twelve months she sat sobbing with a therapist, repeatedly asking if she was going mad. Eventually, the husband told her of his intention to divorce her via text. Now he is a barrister who owns a Rothko and has a gaggle of children with the mistress he surprised everyone by marrying.
‘Kitty, just take your time. You’re in shock, and when you get through that, if you’re adamant you want to stay with him…’ Odessa falters as she would be out like a shot. ‘You know this isn’t the first time, he has form. Do you actually believe he just chats to these women?’ Angelo walks past singing and the women offer small, closed smiles to protect their privacy.
Odessa lowers her voice. ‘But if you want to stay, see a good counsellor and find a way to come to peace with it because a leopard doesn’t change their spots, and this bullshit will destroy your self-esteem and give you cancer.’
Astounding how we can convince ourselves to believe what is liveable over what is probable. Odessa saw Malcolm Gladwell speak on the phenomena called ‘the probability of truth’ where we will carry on believing someone well beyond the point of logic. A husband connecting with women in chat rooms and God-knows-where-else should have a stake driven through his cheating heart. And Elliott has the audacity to claim that he does not fuck them, that they just talk, that he craves emotional intimacy and connection. That seems even more monstrous to Odessa. Enmeshment is a fucking brutal slip collar.
Kitty looks defeated, but as soon as her mother, Cathy, addresses her, she pulls herself tall again.
‘Sorry, what was that, Mum?’
Cathy sashays up with a tray of hors d’oeuvres.
‘Kitty, do you want me to take the little salmon things around now?’ She spots Odessa and bobs down to give her a kiss.
‘Hello, Cathy,’ Odessa says. ‘Wasn’t that a lovely Christening? You look elegant, as always.’
‘Odessa, you are charming. It was the most perfect afternoon. When are you and Ian going to have a little baby of your own?’
With this, Kitty is fuelled to her feet. ‘Mum, you have to stop asking Dessa that. She and Ian are very happy without children. It’s totally inappropriate.’
Odessa stands and gently hands the baby to Kitty.
‘No, not at all, it’s okay.’ She smiles. ‘Cathy, with our jobs and how much we travel we just couldn’t be the sort of parents we’d want to be.’ This is her standard response. There is some truth to the part about how busy they are, but they have zero interest in being parents, good or bad. They have too much to do in this life without shepherding dependants through it, too. Also, Odessa is an only child, and Ian hates both his siblings. Somewhere in that chemical compound, the desire for children never arose.
Cathy looks confused. ‘Don’t leave it too long. The clock is ticking. You’ll be forty soon, and if you change your mind, it will be too late. I’ve seen it before. Very sad.’ Cathy sails off to proffer food to the rabble.
Kitty kisses her friend and says, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘No need.’
Kitty adjusts the earring in her left ear. ‘Don’t mention the Elliott thing to anyone, Dessa. It will all be fine. Thank you for listening, and please just ignore my bloody mother.’
‘Truly, it’s all fine. I know for her generation, a woman isn’t complete without being a mother. I’m suspect to her. Barren.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. She adores you.’ Kitty looks down at Livi. ‘I’d better get this baby into bed. Will you be here when I come back down?’
‘No, I’m going to head off. Thank you for the lovely party, and I’m so honoured to be her god-mummy. I love you both.’ Odessa cradles the baby’s strawberry-blonde head and gives her a kiss.
Kitty puts her free arm around her friend. ‘And we love you too.’
*
Clotilde staggers a little as she intercepts Odessa. She is wearing an animal-print dress, high at the collar and low at the hem. An interesting sartorial street fight: Amish versus couture.
‘Dessa, you’re not going, are you?’ she asks in her Parisian accent.
‘Ah, yes, I am. It’s been lovely, but Ian has just landed at Heathrow, so I want to get home to meet him.’
‘Do you want a little MDMA for the road?’
‘No, thank you, my friend, I’ve drunk a lot of champagne, and I’ve work to do tomorrow.’
‘What? But tomorrow is Sunday, isn’t that sacrilegious?’
Odessa smiles. ‘For some, Clotilde, for those who believe in God, yes maybe. Tell me, how is your father? How are your boys? They both looked so smart in their outfits today.’
‘Well, the bad news first. The cancer is more aggressive than we thought, but Papa is holding up fairly well with this next round of chemo.’
‘Oh, Clo… I’ve been thinking of him, of you all.’
What Odessa doesn’t say is that her own father died ten days earlier of a stroke. Odessa is not sure why she hasn’t told anyone, but keeping his death completely private is essential to her. As if speaking it will make the devastation more real. She is aware it is wildly irrational, but that doesn’t dissuade her. Perhaps it is because their relationship was so close that she is struggling to calibrate the magnitude of her loss. Or because she can’t bear the idea of everyone’s sympathy when she is still deranged with shock. Her working theory is that when the numbness lifts, and when she gets home and is finally able to tell Ian face to face, she will then be able to speak about it to her friends.
‘Thank you, Dessa.’ Clotilde notices a stray hair on her shoulder and picks it off only to find it is still attached to her head. She carries on talking. ‘But my boys are just wonderful. Did I tell you Hugo has been diagnosed as gifted?’
Odessa sets her face to mask mode. She suspects a more accurate diagnosis for little Hugo would be ADHD and a helicopter mother. Apparently, this next generation is littered with geniuses. Get a glass of wine into any parent in central London and they will share with you the struggle of supporting their virtuosic child. And what of emotional intelligence? This is much more interesting to Odessa. When she was cloistered in her enrichment school, she found the others brilliant at one or two things but freakishly impoverished when it came to interaction or navigating the everyday.
She rows the conversational boat to other waters. ‘And Peter, how is your man? I saw him briefly before, hunting for a line.’
‘Oh goodness, I think he’s had enough of that. As our boys are here, we can’t get too out of it; but you know, generally same-same. He’s travelling all the time for work. It’s lucky he’s so great with the boys, or I’d take a lover.’ She grins like a naughty child. ‘I mean, I never would. I only want him.’ She pauses before continuing. ‘Dessa, do you think Ian really knows you? I don’t think Peter understands me. We hardly ever talk about anything other than the children or his work. And I know it’s paranoid, but I’ve started to worry he’s attracted to our au pair. I shouldn’t think it, let alone say it out loud. I should have employed someone less stunning; I swear to god, her skin is like a peach.’
Usually, Odessa would be open to this conversation, but she has had this one with Clotilde many times and tonight it makes her tired.
‘Clo, I’m sorry you’re in this Groundhog Day with him. I wish he was around for you more, but will you forgive me for rain-checking this conversation? I don’t want to be late home to see Ian. He’s been away for nearly two weeks.’
