I Can Change

It’s still there – dancing monster, permanent mask, possessed puppet. It’s still inside me as small as the child whose companions moved away or died or stopped wanting to be friends. It’s still in the middle of the Russian dolls I’ve crafted around myself. My rat persona, my night searches, my scavenging in the face of others’ contempt.

All that I am balances as finely as a hair on a finger. What happened that day mapped my true emotions as precisely as a pinprick. The words he used stripped my essence of all my buffeting nonsense, took me down to cheap, white bones.

I was standing before my supporters about to thank them for our victory, to crow at his failure. I thought this was the best moment of my twenty year climb to power, the moment I finally got to pay him back for the times he forced me to my knees. All those back room hours when I had to do his bidding, my eyes averted, my feelings arrested, just a price I had to pay

I looked across the chamber at him as he lowered himself and the triumph flooded me before I realised he was bending to pull a brick from the bottom of my wall. He made the years collapse in on themselves. He made my friends and family skirt the ruin of whom they thought I was. He told them what I’d done to elevate myself. He had the gall to tell them what his friends made me do and make it sound as if it reflected badly on me.

So I’m smeared across the floor in front of everyone I respect. I’m something they won’t even notice stepping on. He rears up above me, sure of his perch, his command, his place in history. How quickly he forgets his own Achilles heel. How much he underestimates the speed with which I can change. The network at this level isn’t made of Rotary, old Etonians or secret chapters. The network on this dirty floor is all twitching noses, pink feet and whipping tails.

I’m still one of them and, for once, I don’t want that to change. Our black eyes send silent messages. We sing our siren songs to his closest advisors, most admired friends. We pull them on to the rocks and post pictures of them on instagram. We pluck holes in their perfect reputations, encourage them to share our love of sleeze, debasement, public shame. We ruin every single one of them with their unholy desires, their passion for subjugating others.

Now there’s just him and me left. Everyone knows what I am – a tart, a manipulator who slept her way to the top and got dropped from a great height. Few know his true colours, this strange man who now stands alone with his aura of credibility barely bruised by his friends’ fall. Like a blessed Icarus who got too close to the sun and still flew on, burning in hellfire.

He’s told the press I’m a liar, that I was never forced to prostitute myself to him. He says he never had anything to do with me. He stuck the knife in deep saying he wouldn’t lower himself that far. He says there’s absolutely nothing to link him to me.

I may be a low thing, a chancer, a pull myself up by whatever opportunity presents itself but I’d never damage someone else in the process. Live and let live, I say. That’s why, a long time ago, I didn’t have the abortion he casually gave me the money for. That’s why the most precious thing in my life is the only provable link between us.

How ironic that I can prove I have changed by not using my son to bring his father down. That I will not expose my son to his rat of a father whatever the personal cost. That only I will ever know I'm better than him.