This Little Family. Inès Bayard

you really didn’t have to. I’m sorry but I need to go now, my husband’s expecting me and he’ll be worried.” She doesn’t know exactly why she came up with this lie. A subtle discomfort grips her stomach like the protracted suspense a viewer feels watching a film, before everything becomes clear at the end.

      “Wouldn’t you like to stay here with me for a while?” the man asks, still looking dead ahead, his hands resting loosely on the steering wheel.

      Marie starts to feel the first inklings of panic. She curses whoever destroyed her bike this evening, cornering her in this uncomfortable situation. “I really think you should stay awhile,” he insists. Marie hears the sudden clunk of the lock on her door. He’s locking her in. His shadow—an imposing, frightening presence—moves slowly closer, approaching her with implied intimacy. She feels something cold and smooth slide over her thighs. A shudder runs through her whole body, which is still secured to the seat by her seat belt. She struggles and asks him firmly to stop and let her out. She wants to scream but, strangely, doesn’t dare to. She wonders why this is … Maybe she doesn’t want to disturb the whole neighborhood, draw attention to herself for nothing. She doesn’t want to embarrass herself in front of her CEO for seeing an assault in what might simply be a rather clumsy attempt at seduction.

      He anticipates her every reaction and swiftly flattens one hand over her mouth while his other hand insinuates itself inside her blouse and works progressively down toward her knickers. He drives his fingers inside her. Marie’s body shakes, sweating from every pore, her flesh frozen into the thick leather of her seat. She starts to fight, pushing against his chest that’s pinning her down. He’s too strong, much too strong. She now knows she won’t be able to escape. Marie is going to be raped here in this car. Like those women on TV who describe how they were attacked, she’ll have to go through that too. She struggles with all her might. Her wrists are bruised, her legs pinioned, her voice silenced, her stomach crushed. She can hear the man’s moans, his little gasps of pleasure in the crook of her neck. He unhooks her seat belt and presses firmly on the lever to lower her backrest. She jolts down and back. He spreads himself over her, mounts onto her. Marie can feel his erection through his trousers. She keeps fighting, screaming. No one will hear. Her thin arms are gripped by just one of the man’s hands while his other hand labors to undo his belt and the fly buttons on his suit. She feels her phone fall onto the car floor mat, vibrating and ringing under her feet, and is overwhelmed with frustration that she can’t reach it. The silk knickers that Laurent bought her for Valentine’s Day last year are torn in a fraction of a second. He scratches her at the same time. One last surge of energy convulses her, twisting her body in every direction, her feet stretching as far as they can to get away from him. She’s very soon exhausted, drained of strength. All her limbs ache for failing to help her. He penetrates her. The to-and-fro starts up, slowly at first, then harder. It hurts. Her vagina is dry, its walls rasped until they bleed. She remembers the slight burning sensations she had a few years ago because of genital herpes, and how much that hurt.

      The man suddenly stops. With a single confident hand he grabs her hair and forces her over onto her stomach. Marie hears him mutter a few words, but can’t give the sounds any meaning. Reality distorts, nothing exists anymore. She’s going to wake up. Maybe she’s just in the bank’s staff rest area. Maybe her mind misinterpreted the look the man gave her before he left the meeting. She’s fallen asleep. Hervé’s going to wake her. His penis is hard as a weapon. He strikes deep inside her belly with violent thrusts. The pain makes her throw up over the rear seat. He doesn’t stop. His breathing accelerates. “Come here!” he says, lifting his heavy body toward Marie’s face. His hard penis hovers expectantly under her mouth. “Go on, put it in your mouth.” She twists her head in every direction, begs him to stop, tries to free herself from his hold. He stills her face with his hands, and his knees restrict her movements, then he rams his penis into her mouth, right to the back of her throat. It smells slightly of urine. She’s going to choke. She bites into it with her teeth. He pulls out and slaps her. “Filthy bitch! So that’s what you want!” He still has an erection. He comes back into her from behind, sodomizing her. She’s never done this with anyone. Marie can feel liquid trickling over her legs. The pain is intolerable. He switches back to her vagina and eventually comes inside her with a groan of pleasure. It’s over. His penis is limp, soaked in semen, vomit, blood, excrement, and vaginal fluid. He’s satisfied and clambers furtively back to his seat to button up his trousers. “That’s it, you can go.”

      Marie sits up painfully, her body burning, swollen, weighed down with the agony of her slack muscles and her taut compressed skin. The locks click open. She steps out of the car, her trousers still hanging down over the tops of her thighs. He grabs her arm firmly and pulls her back onto the seat. “If you talk to anyone about what happened, you, your husband and your career are all finished. No one’ll believe you, so you keep your mouth shut and everything can go on like before.” In the feeble yellow glow of a streetlight Marie surreptitiously notices the gleam of a wedding ring on the man’s finger. The car engine starts up. She climbs out and stumbles a few steps out of the car park. The door slams behind her and the car pulls away.

      Marie doesn’t tell herself it’s over. She knows this is just the beginning. The entrance to her building is a little farther up the street, on the corner of the boulevard Voltaire. It’s not quite eight o’clock; Laurent is most likely having his dinner. He must have been on the way to the restaurant, joking with his colleagues and his new client while his wife was being raped by her boss, penetrated in every orifice on the seat of a car. She goes into the building and meets the caretaker wheeling out the rubbish bins. “Hello, Madame Campan, how are you?” Marie keeps her head down and slips away into the shadows in the corridor, answering with “A little tired, but I’m fine! Good night” as she goes up in the lift. She hopes he didn’t notice anything unusual. She knows already that she’s in the process of hiding the evil event, that she won’t say anything, that no one will ever know about the assault.

      The apartment is shrouded in darkness partially diluted by the open curtains allowing light from the boulevard into the living room. There’s no one there. She’d like to call her husband to reassure him. Every step toward the kitchen is painful. The central corridor that leads to all the rooms in the apartment seems never-ending, almost ridiculous. She picks up the handset that she left on the sideboard this morning and dials Laurent’s number. She hopes he doesn’t pick up so she can leave a controlled message with no fluctuations or lurching in her breathing. He doesn’t answer. “Yes, it’s me. So I finally got home, one of the Métro lines was blocked … I’m going to take a shower and go to bed, I’m exhausted. I hope everything’s going well with your client. I love you.”

      She hangs up, feeling absent, empty. She thinks this is best, and anyway, if she wanted to admit anything to him she wouldn’t find the right way to do it. He would always look at her differently, not only as his wife but as the victim, the woman who was raped, sodomized for the first time by another penis than his. Marie is suddenly aware of the smell of vomit on her. She doesn’t have the strength to take a shower but she still needs to. If she were single she would just take some sleeping pills and go to bed, but if she doesn’t wash now Laurent will notice this aftershave that isn’t his on his wife’s body, the sheets will be impregnated with the smell, and everything will fall apart all over again.

      Standing in the middle of the bathroom she slowly unbuttons her blouse and painfully lowers her trousers with the shreds of her torn trousers still clinging to them. Blood has dried on her thighs. Foul-smelling brownish marks trail over her stomach. Now completely naked, she catches her reflection in the mirror above the basin. She moves closer and makes out traces of dried semen at the corner of her mouth. One eye is slightly swollen where he slapped her, but that will almost certainly have disappeared by tomorrow. This vision of herself floods her with unbounded sadness. The anger is sure to come later. The scalding water runs between her breasts, washes over her stomach, flows down the nape of her neck and relaxes her muscles. She collapses against the wall, hunches over, limply holding the showerhead above her. Everything she does becomes an ordeal, as if she’s never previously noticed how difficult it is to perform on a daily basis—stepping out of the shower, wrapping herself in a towel, putting on her pajamas. She knows she won’t be able to get to sleep tonight, nor perhaps for days to come. She needs