The Cirque du Soleil clown lookalike rapist

This post is a fictional entry to Parenthesis’ Dazzle Me competition and should not be taken literally or figuratively.

The museum is buzzing. Artistic types wearing bohemian skirts, flowing shirts and beaded jewellery mumbling to each other in front of different art work pieces, old women in and out of the Mallacology section, young children screaming in and out of the Africa golden circle. I muse on how the lions grabbed their attention every time. I’ve wondered in the past why, they’re only stuffed animals after all. Their lifeless eyes do nothing for me, yet for the little ankle biters under a foot high, the stuffed lion captures their full attention.

Over the loud speakers I vaguely hear a name announced but I pay no attention to any of it, to the voice or the people around me – I hear all of it but it goes in the one ear and out of the other, not connecting at all with my conscious. I’m far too enraptured with what I see before me:

The eyes. They eyes foretell of a secret, a dirty one. His eyes, the man who raped me stands before me in the form of a picture hanging in the Natal Museum. It is not really him, naturally. But without the makeup and Cirque du Soleil hat and outfit, that face could belong to him. To Sarah’s Dad.

My best friend Sarah’s father was an eccentric man, he believed in star signs, tarot cards and fortune cookies. For hours on end he would muse over astrology and tell stories of gypsies and their kin. He would pick us up from school and drop us off at whichever venue we had chosen for the afternoon. He would cover for us when we came home late or snuck out of the house to go visit the boys across the street. We were fourteen and we could get away with murder when he was around, do anything we liked.

Sarah couldn’t understand why this was so, but she knew it was only when I was around. “He trusts you for some reason,” she said to me once. If she only knew the truth. The truth that involved him creeping into her room at night after we were asleep and the house was silent, whispering in a demanding voice that I follow him to the pool room.

Taking my reluctant hand until he would open the door, lead me to the pool table where he would bend me over, run his hands along my inner thighs and force himself inside me over and over again. I could smell him, feel him, hear him as he violated me, abused me, debased me with his actions every weekend for three years. It terrified me to think that by going to Sarah’s house it meant my body would have to succumb to this treatment, but it terrified me even more to not have a friend. Sarah was the only one who would talk to the nerd, the quiet girl, the girl who wore glasses and was too skinny.

I knew what Sarah’s dad was doing was wrong. I knew that I could have had him stopped. I knew that it was termed ‘rape’. But I also knew that every time I cried while he was grunting on top of me, he would threaten me with the chance I might never get to see Sarah again. That Sarah wouldn’t believe me. That I wouldn’t be allowed to spend time with her anymore. That, to me, was far worse.

A loud announcement brings me back to the museum. I stand here staring at this freaky picture in front of me thinking back to the days before Sarah decided that I wasn’t cool enough for her at school and stopped talking to me because her new friends wouldn’t invite me into the ‘cool’ circle. I realize for the first time how desperately sad and how dirty I feel that I had sacrificed my innocence, allowed someone to invade me in the most intimate and unwilling way for a friend who so shallowly and easily sacrificed our friendship.

“Listen to me and remember this,” he would say menacingly, out of breath, shoving his shirt back into the top of his pants after cleaning himself, and in his hippie way of speaking; “the guardians of the rainbow don’t like those who get in the way of the sun”.