ORE
“Guess what?”
Ore roused herself from where she was lounging in the pool chair as she heard her husband’s voice.
“What?” she asked.
“We got the deal,” he leaned over her and kissed her lips.
“Oh…congratulations, love!” she wasn’t sure which of the deals because she’d sat in on a lot of them as eye candy slash moral support.
“The Japanese one, remember?” he settled on the deck chair beside her.
Ore felt her pulse quicken. Yes, she remembered. In fact, she had a memento from that meeting sitting in her phone right now.
“Oh, that one. I’d forgotten about it,” she lied.
“I know. Your pretty little head can’t take in so much information,” he laughed at his unfunny joke and kissed her again.
Ore didn’t respond to the insult, she’d learned to let those tiny remarks slide off her like water off the back of an egg. When they first got married and he started to undermine her capacity in little ways like that, she would make a huge scene and storm off. He would come to her and try to convince her he hadn’t meant it as an insult and then they would make love as though their lives depended on it and Ore would convince herself he was truly sorry.
She had enjoyed that routine for a while especially because it always ended with them in bed, and she’d foolishly thought then that as long as they were having sex regularly then their marriage was healthy.
Until he began to complain about her being too loud in bed and how it made him remember the women he watched in porn movies years ago.
Ore, stunned at the comparison, had climbed out of bed unable to comprehend the fact that she had married a man who had the ability to make her feel dirty with his words. A man who made her feel worthless.
“So, what does this mean?” she asked Ramsey now.
“Well, we start working on a budget right away. He seems to be a very hands-on client. You know, those kinds who want to be available for everything.”
“Hmmm. Isn’t that…good?”
“It is…until he begins to get in the way of the project. I mean, I thought he was going back to Japan soon, but apparently, he’s around for a while.”
Ore kept her face straight, “he is?”
“Yes. He even wants to have dinner again soon,” Ramsey turned to face her. “What do you think? Are you up for more socializing?”
Ore shrugged even though her heart was threatening to pound itself out of her chest.
“Whatever you want, babe. I’m here for you,” she said.
“I was thinking we could have dinner at the house together. You could get Aisha to cook up an intercontinental spread. You could Google some ideas, if you don’t know any. He’s British so he’ll have a wide palate.”
Even though Ore was grateful she hadn’t married a man who expected her to be cooking 24/7, she sometimes wished he gave her the opportunity to. He had Aisha before they met and had been unwilling to give her up after their wedding. Aisha’s cooking was the only one he trusted, he said. Plus he was a picky eater, what if Ore cooked something he didn’t like?
And so, Ore had backed off from preparing any meals in the kitchen. She had now gotten used to Aisha’s cooking even though she sometimes found it bland and without pepper.
Ramsey claimed he wanted her to focus on other wifely duties (translation: look pretty). She’d discovered later how superficial he was, he was a man who wanted things that looked a certain way to others even if it wasn’t really what it was on the inside. His identity stemmed from his material belongings, his money, his possessions. Ore guessed she had somehow become one of his possessions which is why she didn’t let the way he treated her bother her.
Ramsey had problems and she wasn’t the genesis of them. His family probably was, just like hers was the genesis of her problems.
Perhaps if she’d had a better example of a father, she wouldn’t have ended up with a man like Ramsey. Or if her mother had stood up to her father, she would have learned what it meant to be strong and resilient.
She often wondered what her mother would think of Ramsey if she’d met him. Would she have figured out what he was? Would she have smelled him from afar, recognized the red flags that Ore hadn’t?
She knew that her mother hadn’t quite approved of her lifestyle as a single girl. She thought Ore was too adventurous in the ways that women shouldn’t be. Mum was a firm believer in the fact that women needed to be seen not heard.
Learn to hide yourself, Mum always said. And Ore wondered how much she had to shrink till she became small enough.
It was in her second year in the university that it happened. It was a cliché and that was part of what made Ore angry, that she was a cliché.
She’d attended a party of someone she didn’t know, one of those undergrad parties that everyone attended but no one knew who the host was. Her friend and coursemate Angela had invited her to tag along and Ore the adventurous had readily agreed. Perhaps if she had listened to her mother’s warning of “hide yourself“, she would have had a different story to tell.
There was alcohol at the party and Ore who had never really grown up with alcohol and had only recently begun to indulge, had been happy to guzzle bottle after bottle of Smirnoff.
Her friend had left her almost as soon as they walked in the door, gluing herself to an attractive older boy from another faculty. Ore had been slightly resentful at first until she found that she was one of the prettiest girls in the room and a lot of boys wanted to dance with her. So, she danced out on the crowded dance floor in the semi-darkness, letting the boys hover around her like bees to honey, bringing her more drinks until she felt physically sick.
She managed to carry herself off the dance floor to the bathrooms, looking for where to throw up.
The bathroom was at the end of a narrow hallway and she had barely stumbled inside when she spilled her guts, some of it going in the sink and the rest splashing on the floor. She felt sick. She couldn’t move, so she leaned against the wall groaning.
Why had she had so much to drink?
The door opened and through dim eyes, she saw a boy she didn’t know.
“Are you okay?” he asked, coming over to her.
She was about to nod when she felt another bout of bile rise to her throat. This time, she bent over the toilet seat and released.
The boy knelt beside her, patting her on the back in a gentle motion. The movement felt so good that Ore let herself fall limp in his arms.
Next thing she knew he was carrying her out of the bathroom and taking her “somewhere safe” he said.
Her memory from that night blurred after that. She remembered being placed on a soft bed in one of the bedrooms, she remembered his hot, stale breath over her face, she remembered her physical inability to resist as he pulled down her shorts and panties. Then it seemed like her memory skipped like a broken disc and all she remembered was waking up half-naked and sore down there.
She hadn’t told anyone, not her friend or her mother. Her shame and guilt had been too great.
When she eventually spoke up, it was Benjy she told and that was nearly a year after it happened. She’d been having nightmares about that night for months after and had withdrawn into herself because she was scared of the fact that she couldn’t recall the boy’s face or any details about him. He could be anyone on campus, he could be in her class, he could be the boy she passed on the street, he could be anyone and she didn’t know. That was what scared her.
She’d gone home for the holidays and Benjy had immediately noticed that something was different about her. She had lost a lot of weight, had started wearing some of their mother’s clothes, and had lost the ‘adventure’ in her, she spent more time glued to their mother than ever, attending church services with a diligence that she previously lacked.
“What happened to you?” he asked one day after she returned from an evening service with their mother.
He had always been insightful like that, this brother of hers.
Perhaps it was the point-blank way he asked it that broke her. She told him what she remembered.
“It was my fault,” she was quick to say at the end. “I should never have gone there. I shouldn’t have drunk so much. It was my fault.”
Benjy had been quiet but from the way he was breathing, Ore knew he was angry.
“I would never take advantage of a drunk girl like that,” he said, after a while. “It doesn’t matter where or when. I am responsible for my behaviour and that means I can walk away.”
Ore was silent.
“That boy, whoever he is, should have walked away. He had absolutely no right to touch you without your consent or knowledge. I want you to know that, Ore.”
“So, are you saying none of it…was my fault?”
“I’m saying that boy would have assaulted you even if you were on the street. An animal is an animal no matter where they find themselves.”
His words had relieved her in an unexpected way. She hadn’t realized how much of that burden she’d been carrying for nearly a year. She leaned forward and hugged her brother.
“Thank you,” she said, sobbing into his shoulder.
“I wish I knew who he was,” Benjy said. “I’ll kill him.”
“Same here,” she said. “And that’s what scares me. That I carry so much hate for this person in my heart.”
He touched a hand to her face with a sigh.
“Did you at least get checked in the hospital after it happened?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Do you think if I’d taken Mum’s advice, this wouldn’t have happened?” she asked, laying on her back in his bed.
“What advice exactly?”
“To hide myself.”
“How’s that working out for her?” it was a cruel truth that had to be said.
“I don’t know, I’m just…”
“Listen Ore, things happen to us for a reason. We can either learn and grow from them or we wallow in self-pity and had-I-knowns. Were there things you could have done differently? Perhaps. But it’s too late now and all you can do is learn and move on, okay?”
She nodded.
“And if you ever need to talk to someone about it, then I’m always here.”
“I love you,” she said.
“Love you too Ore baby,” he said.
She had taken his advice to learn and move on and decided to never find herself in such a vulnerable position again. She was glad in a way, that she hadn’t been a virgin when the incident had happened, perhaps it would have ruined the experience of sex for her forever. Her lesson was to become sexually liberated. She wasn’t going to hide herself, like her mother advised, rather she was going to take control of her life and her body. She would decide who to sleep with and when.
“Babe?”
Ramsey’s voice snapped Ore out of her reverie.
“Yes babe?”
“What were you thinking about? I’ve been calling you for the past minute.”
“Oh, just work.”
“If that’s your excuse, I wonder what mine should be,” he smirked at her.
She gave a small smile.
“Care for a swim?” he asked. “Bikinis aren’t meant for you to sit pretty in.”
It was another of his power plays. He knew very well that she couldn’t swim.
“You go. I’ll watch,” she said.
“When are you going to learn how to swim? I don’t have this big pool for nothing.”
“Someday,” she said.
He stood, stretching his long limbs. “Let me know what you decide for the menu for our dinner with Terry.”
“When is this dinner?”
“Friday evening…why, do you have plans?”
“No, Friday evening is fine. I’ll speak with Aisha tomorrow.”
“Good girl,” he kissed her again before jogging off towards the pool.
Ore took out her phone and scrolled to Terry’s first and only message, reading it again the way she did recently when she was feeling down.
She shouldn’t be this excited to see him again, she admonished herself. She really shouldn’t.
