guess I’ve been seeing things in the glitches regularly. I mean, I keep seeing this same thing over and over – that’s what’s bugging me. Hector jumping up onto that block, then getting shot. Over and over and over, always the same.’
‘Is there a chance that you might be exploring how you’d feel if Hector were to die?’
‘Why would I want to do that?’
‘Could this be a type of imaginary punishment?’
‘Punishment?’
She flicks back in her notebook.
‘In our last session you expressed that you were angry with Hector. That you felt that he’d let you down. Do you still have those feelings?’
I can feel my face reacting when she says his name, and when I have to spit it out of my mouth. He knew what type of guys Mvusa, Sid, and Ntozimbi are. They knew he wanted Sindiwe for himself, and were just looking for a way to show off to their master. Like dogs pissing on a pole. Is it Hector’s fault they decided to do that by beating me, tying me up, and raping me until I lost consciousness? Possibly not, but it was his duty as my friend to stop his own friends from ever even having ideas like that. It was his duty to choose better friends in the first place. It was his duty to acknowledge what they’d done, what had happened to me, instead of pretending not to know.
Of course I’m angry, I’m furious.
‘I try not to think about it. Anger isn’t going to help me feel any better. I have to see him every day because he and Sindiwe are running this show, so—’
‘Have you warned Hector about what you’re seeing?’
‘We don’t talk any more.’
‘You don’t talk any more?’
She’s silent again, wanting to see if I’m ready to dig a little deeper. I don’t feel like it, and I’m starting to regret coming here. I should have just stayed up campus with Sindiwe listening to the students listen to crappy music, taking selfies and singing. But I don’t want to lose this slot. I’m scared if I don’t keep coming, the university will stop paying. Right now I need Doctor Mofokeng to make sure that, like those window-ledge plants, I am changing.
But I’m not budging on this one. I’m done talking about Hector today. I cross my arms and sit back in a perfect sulking posture, and she lets it go.
‘How are things going with Sindiwe?’
‘They’re going good. We’re trying to take care of each other.’
I can’t keep sulking if I’m talking about her. If I were a poet, I’d have filled books and books with words about her, knowing that all of them would not be enough to describe her. She is everything.
‘Tell me about what taking care of each other looks like?’
I think back to waking up on campus after Hector’s pack of thugs were done with me. I stumbled back home, and ignored all the advice I’d ever heard about what to do if you were raped because my desire to be clean was greater than the desire for some two-years-down-the-line-unlikely-criminal-justice. I washed myself until it hurt, scalding hot showers, scrubbing brushes, antiseptic soap. I figured if I wasn’t going to go to the police, then I wanted every cell of those evil motherfuckers off me. Then the soap ran out and I went to the kitchen to find something else and all that was there was bleach. It was feeling tempted to use it that made me call her. I recognised I was too far gone. I didn’t want to die.
‘It looks like … Sindiwe just knows how to make me feel better. To make me feel safe.’
‘What does safety look like in your relationship?’
When she arrived that night, I gave her the short version of what had happened. Telling her had immersed me in the shame and fear and terror again, and it felt as if I hadn’t washed at all. She’d listened, shaking her head and holding my hand. When I was done, she had pulled me up and led me to the kitchen. It had been like going home to a funeral.
Women know grief is hungry work, and though the food can’t reach the sadness, you have to eat to survive. She cooked, we ate in silence, then she made tea, made a shopping list and went out, returned, arms laden with bags, and restocked my fridge as if we were preparing for the apocalypse. We stayed at home for almost a week before she had to go back to class for a test.
‘She cooks for me. She makes sure I eat. She … she tells me the truth.’
‘Do you feel that others aren’t telling you the truth?’
‘I guess what I mean is that she listens to me in a way that allows me to tell the truth. That she holds me accountable to my own feelings, know what I mean?’
‘Can you explain it in further detail?’
Some time that night – after she had forced me to eat and we had packed the fridge – she began to whisper straight into my hair as we spooned in bed.
‘We have to get you to a hospital. You need to get the medicine to protect you. They can take evidence there, so you can send these guys to jail.’
‘I’ve washed all the evidence away, Sindi. There’s nothing for them to find. Anyway, I’m not putting myself through that. You know nobody ever wins rape cases.’
‘But you could stop them from doing it to someone else.’
‘It’s not my job to save other people when I can’t even take care of myself.’
‘Oh, baby,’ she whispered as I sobbed, ‘this isn’t your fault.’
I knew it wasn’t, but I just couldn’t go to the police and look at a stranger and describe how people had taken from me. So we slept, and in the morning she convinced me we should go to the hospital, if only to look at the wounds I had on my wrists, to get some drugs to prevent STDs, to get painkillers.
She said she would be there – she was there – but she couldn’t protect me from the forensic exam or the cold of the speculum. The doctor explained everything in a kind but perfunctory voice, like it was a script she’d recited a thousand times that day already, or had formed a hard callus around whatever pain she might be experiencing. Instead of feeling comforted, I drifted off entirely, right back to the rape. Right back to that moment, reliving it.
When I came back to myself on the hospital bed, it was like nothing had happened. Sindiwe and the doctor were just as I had left them.
‘I went back there,’ I moaned.
‘Flashbacks to the event are a common side-effect of sexual violence,’ the doctor said, her voice clinical.
But even then, I knew the visions I was seeing weren’t flashbacks. They were something else. Now I call them a glitch, so at least I have a good name for them.
Doctor Mofokeng taps her pen on her notebook, bringing me back to myself.
‘Have you told Sindiwe what you have seen?’
‘No.’
‘Why do you think that is?’
‘Because I know she’ll try to save him.’
‘What would that mean for you?’
‘She could get hurt.’
But the myth says she won’t. Says she’s invincible. Says she is the one who has been chosen to lead our movement. Her father died for this myth. Of course, I haven’t told her that I’ve heard about this either, and I don’t intend to test this myth out by putting the person I love in danger. I don’t want to get into the details with Doctor Mofokeng right now either.
‘How does it feel not to tell her?’
‘It feels …’
She waits for me to finish, and this time I avoid answering not because I don’t want to tell her, but because there is just so much