Mickey Finn Part 4

This is part 4 of Mickey Finn - Find click here for part one and here for part two and here for part three
Monday
Twitter was giving her nothing but abuse.  Women retweeted her tweets, but men thought they had to respond with something witty or something vile. She wondered if Pinprick himself was twitting obscenities. She doubted it, she doubted he could read or write. She sat at her desk pretending to be busy whilst dying for a fag. She shuffled her papers and sent a few emails then declared loudly she had a meeting to go to and locked herself in the loo and played a few games of Candy Crush. She was a civil servant in the Welsh Assembly, but even she didn’t really know what she did. She collected data and passed it on and got paid a seemingly generous amount for the privilege. Her boss was fine, her colleagues were okay, she wouldn’t choose them but they didn’t really annoy her, and she was mostly left to her own devices. The biggest problem was boredom, sheer, unadulterated boredom. The 8 hours a day she worked (and she never worked any more or any less) were the longest most tedious hours, you could imagine. It wouldn’t have been so bad if it was just one day but she had to go back and do it all again day after boring day. She’d just got through a level on Candy Crush that had been giving her no end of grief when her phone buzzed showing she had a text message. Josh, of course. ‘No Josh we can’t meet tonight’ she muttered, ‘we can’t meet any night. We can never meet again.’

She headed back to her desk wondering how she was going to find Pinprick, it was like looking for a pin in a haystack she mused, smiling to herself at the play on words. Maybe she was kidding herself that she could find him, maybe it would be better to just warn other women about him and others like him. She could start a Facebook site, warning women of the dangers, or was that too corny?  She’d think about it. Bollocks it was smoke time, she detoured out of the building went across to Starbucks for her second skinny latte of the day and lit a ciggie.

Karla spent the afternoon finding out more about date rape drugs. It was fucking scary. These small white pills that could completely incapacitate you. She felt sick to the stomach as she read the accounts of women who’d been attacked. Horrible wasn’t the word for it. She didn’t know which was worse the ones who knew what was happening but couldn’t move or the ones that were completely blacked out only for vivid and shocking memories to come back drip by drip, sometimes days later. So often the police said they were powerless to act or if they did act, the CPS said there wasn’t a case. Karla had so nearly been a victim. If she’d not spotted his slight of hand, that would have been her. Would the police have believed her?  When the little hand was finally on five, she headed home more determined than ever to set up that Facebook page and to find that little wanker.

She managed to set up a page on Facebook that people could post to anonymously, like those ‘spotted’ pages. That was a result. Then she shared all the links she found with info on the drugs, and support groups etc. She also invited women to share their experiences. She advertised the group on Twitter and Google+ and before long it had 12 likes. Not many, but a start and everything had to start somewhere. She felt proud of herself, it wasn’t much, but maybe it would save one woman and that would be better than not saving one woman.

As she smoked a final cigarette before bed she checked the twitter account that she’d set up the previous day. There was a direct message. She clicked on it expecting it to be some man telling her she deserved it, but instead there were just 3 words from a newly set up account. ‘He raped me.’

Karla wasn’t ready for this. She wasn’t a counsellor, or a therapist, she was a civil servant. She really hadn’t thought this through. What was she going to do? Could she face this woman? She took a long drag on her cigarette, exhaling through her nose. She used to laugh at her granddad doing that, calling him a dragon. She looked at the message again. 3 words He raped me. She took another deep lung full of smoke as a wave of guilt washed over her. Here she was worrying about herself, worrying about if she could face this woman, when the woman had been raped by that low-life scum. She composed herself and then composed a reply.  She decided on something simple. ‘I’m here if you need me.’ Not too pushy, not too forward.

They exchanged messages deep into the night. Karla could tell the woman was putting out feelers, making sure she could trust her.  Eventually they arranged to meet. Starbucks in the Bay 5.30.