“Well, yeah?”
“Good,” she snickered. “It’s weird, but also kind of cool in my mind. But one thing I want to stress is that we don’t tend to pronounce the ‘shire’ in a lot of our counties like The Lord Of The Rings pronounced it—we say ‘shur’.”
“What does that mean for Worcestershire Sauce?” I blinked, asking a question that’d always bugged me. I mean, who the hell can say it without stumbling?
“It’s easy. Woos-tur-shur, that’s it.”
I blinked a couple of times, struggling to understand how the spelling equated to that. “How’s that possible?”
“Do you pronounce Connecticut—Connect-eye-cut?”
“Well, no, because that’d be dumb.”
“Exactly,” she winked. “People overcomplicate things. Borough is pronounced—buruh or bruh, too.”
“Fuck me, it’s like a whole new level of English.”
Chuckling, she squeezed my hand. “I’m thinking we all need to make a trip over there so you can see it and hear people saying it in a real setting. It’ll sound normal after you hear it twice.”
I seriously doubted that.
“Back to your story. The neighbor was the deputy mayor?”
“Yeah, and a total twat. When we moved, he made a huge production out of how he wanted to continue supporting us, blah, blah. My sister, Cynthia, got her A-Levels and went to uni the following year, and he also lost his position in the elections.”
Seeing as how I could only just keep up with politics in my own country, I was drawing a total blank on the UK's politics as she told the story.
“Was he pissed?”
“Pissed?” she snorted in disbelief. “He was fucking triggered into an evil bastard. He started stalking me and parking outside my school, offering me rides and just being really over the top. I came home from my friend’s house one day during the summer holidays, and Gran was at a hospital appointment, so it was just me. Somehow he found out, and while I was listening to music in my room, he got in downstairs and attacked me.”
Her tone was monotonous, almost like she’d removed herself from the situation and was reading it from a book she had no interest in.
“He attacked you? Like, hit you?”
Clearing her throat, she whispered, “He beat me until I was unconscious. Then he tried to rape me. I’ve told you about my brothers of the heart, but I don’t think I’ve ever told you how much they’ve done for me. One of them, Leroy, was coming over to see me, and when he found the front door open, he knew something was wrong. He found… him pulling down his trousers and my ripped leggings on the floor.”
The tears I’d felt building spilled over. “Jesus Christ, Sadie. But he stopped him, right?”
“Yeah, he beat the shit out of him. One of the neighbors heard the screaming and things breaking, so she called the police, but they took one look at who he’d beaten up and refused to believe he’d done what he had to me. I was taken to hospital to get looked over and have a rape examination done, and when I gave my side of the story, they called me a liar.”
I wanted to believe it wasn’t the truth, but I knew no matter what country you lived in, shit like that happened.
“How’d they find out it was?”
“Because forty-three other women came forward when the news broke, all saying he’d raped or tried to rape them.”
“Fuck me. I can’t even… What the fuck?”
“Unfortunately, they also looked like me, except my hair’s naturally this blonde and theirs were dyed. He was charged and went to court for it, and during the trial, they said he’d been obsessed with me since I was ten but was adamant he wasn’t a pedophile, so he’d looked for older ‘lookalikes’ to take it out on until I was old enough.”
“Sadie, is he in prison?”
“Yeah, for another three months.”
“What?” I screeched, making her jump. “What do you mean? How long did he get?”
“Seven years, because his lawyers claimed he was an upstanding member of the community who’d been ‘triggered’ by the loss of his position, so part of it was down to temporary insanity.”
“And that bullshit worked? I mean, he’d been watching you when you were a child, for fuck sake.”
“Ah, but being a pedophile would be wrong, so he resisted,” she said with absolutely zero humor in her voice. “At least in his mind that was a good defense, except for the fact I was fifteen when it happened and the legal age for having sex there is sixteen.”
“That’s fucked up.”
“Yeah, it’s really fucked up. Anyway, I have moments when I struggle to hold back anxiety and panic attacks, and a lot of the time, if a man moves suddenly around me, I flinch.”
Blowing out a breath at her story, I tried to put the lighthearted and funny Sadie I knew next to the young girl who’d almost been raped. I couldn’t do it. “The world’s a fucked up place—” I started and then groaned. “He’s getting out soon. That’s why you moved here.”