Offending The Goddess

“What did you do to offend this Goddess of yours, anyway?’

‘Well. . . ’ Danny took a deep breath. ‘If you’re gonna go away anyway, you might as well go thinking badly of me.’

‘I won’t think badly of you.’

‘You will. There was this girl, mate of a mate. Met her at a club. 

This is when I was still looking for something to be, in my rocker gear. I was really young.’

‘When?’

‘Last year. We got pissed, ’cos I drank then, and she told me that she’d been raped. Long time back. Didn’t know the guy. 

Before that, I’d kind of been thinking that maybe, well, yeah, but that stopped me from thinking that. 

We went back to her place, and spent a few hours talking about stuff and listening to Lou Reed. I was well out of it, but I knew what was going on, I wasn’t totally gone. 

For some reason, I took her hand, and kissed it, and tried what I thought was gonna be the ideal bloody seduction number on somebody who’d been raped. 

I told her that she had every choice, that everything was up to her. 

And she just froze. She went out, told me she wanted to go to the loo, fetched a couple of her flatmates, who came in and sat with us. 

I felt like a worm. 

I left, and thought about it a bit, and then went back and knocked on her door again, wanting to explain, wanting to get back to that great evening of talking and stuff. 

There was also this element of realizing what I’d done, what it’d sound like to other people. I wanted to establish my own version of The Truth.

She called the coppers. Don’t blame her. I got taken to the nick, and would have been up on something, ’cept she didn’t want to press charges. 

The bloke who’d introduced us saw her a few days later, and she said that she’d just felt unable to tell me to piss off, that she’d felt that rabbit in the middle of the road feeling that you get, I suppose, when you’ve been through that. I wrote her a letter, trying to say that I really liked her, and that I didn’t go back to her place thinking about sex. 

Shouldn’t even have written the letter. 

Well, after that, I couldn’t go to the same clubs, couldn’t hang out with the same mates.’

‘Couldn’t?’

‘She didn’t want to see me. I didn’t want to limit what she could do. Everything changed. So that’s what I’ve done. My expertise lies in the field of human betrayal.’

Ace put her hand on his shoulder. ‘I –’

He shrugged it off. ‘I didn’t ask. 

Feel sorry for her. 

You feel sorry for me, it means you don’t understand how bad she felt. 

I’m The Villain, okay? Me.

“If you want to be The Villain, that’s all right.’

‘Good.’

‘But we all want to be The Hero, right? You know we all want to be The One Who Saves The Day?’

‘Yeah. I know just where I am.’

‘Do you often dream about it?’

‘Yeah. Often.’

‘And is that woman in the dreams?’

‘The one with the hair and the eyes? No. I dunno what Freud would have said, do you? Dirty old man. 

You and me, we had the same dream. . . I still can’t believe that.”

“I met her. She’s trapped. Just like you are.’

‘Yeah? That’s probably my fault too. I probably tied her down.’ 

Danny sighed, throwing a chunk of brick into the river. ‘So where are you going, then?’

‘Where The Traitors live,’ Ace told him. ‘Where it’s dark.”

Excerpt From “No Future” by Paul Cornell