The Tape

She’d made the tape a long long time ago, and Christ did she regret it. It’d got to the point where all she could think of was the thing, and the threat it represented to her happy, normal life. What if it appeared, the archetypal bolt out of the blue, as some kind of blackmail demand? Everything seemed to end up on the internet these days, what if it made it up there and her husband saw it, or one of her boys?

She’d forgotten about it for a long time. It had barely registered as a part of her past. But somehow, she’d gone from being the young, dangerous kind of person that could have done such a thing to being a secure, married adult with children to whom the thought was abhorrent.

She’d remembered it on holiday. They’d been on the kind of horrible fucking package tour she’d sworn never to go on again. He’d found the ‘bargain’ online, and talked her into it, telling her that any time away in the sun would be better than nothing. They’d wound up in a dirty white high-rise overlooking a sullied beach that made her feel sad.

One the second day, she woke up early and walked along the seafront. She passed an impossibly long complex of whitewashed residents apartments decaying in the sun, the swimming pools long emptied and containing only brown tide marks and rotten leaves. Each tiny apartment was exactly the same in dimension, but they varied wildly in appearance. Somehow, the ones with the small, lonely flower boxes under the sills were more tragic than the dirty, ill kempt majority.

Before long she had turned back, feeling as she usually did only on Sunday afternoons and wanting an early drink to dull her acute melancholy. As she returned to the hotel, walking up the path that lead from the beach to the swimming pool, she heard the unwelcome, multi-tonal sound of a large gathering of people; yelps, shouts and shrieks filling the air.

She rounded the sharp foliage of the pale green bushes raised above a red-brick wall to the side of the path, and saw a large girl with generous, bouncing bare breasts running alongside the pool, covered in some sort of white froth and bellowing loudly. At the other end of the courtyard there stood twenty or thirty teenagers, laughing hysterically as a boy with a lopsided, died blonde hairdo tried to catch the girl, finally dragging her into the water and attempting to press his mouth to her chest. A grinning holiday rep in a green shirt was holding a silver, glinting video camera and steadily following the action.

For a very brief second she felt a defensive rush of indignation as the red-faced girl splashed around the shallow end of the pool, and then she felt the sudden upward pull of nausea in her stomach. She was taken aback by her own memory. Why had she never considered it with such a sense of shame as she felt now? Drained, she had taken the lift back to their hotel room, and had barely stopped thinking about it since.


She had been living in a shared house when the tape had been made, staying on in London after her time at university and, looking back, probably suffering the same well-trodden malaise as many of her friends. She’d lived with two other girls as they each tried to start their careers and replace the dreams of their early twenties with the realities of being normal, everyday people with bills to pay. There had been a few drugs and a lot of drink to make the situation easier, and it was reassuring to pretend this constituted a romantic ideal of life in the capital city.

One of the girls had a boyfriend who worked in the square mile and whose friends would regularly populate the tawdry, post-student flat, paying for the weekend’s amusements in return for the company of the three pretty young women. Toward the end of their period together, one of these friends had suggested the tape.

She hadn’t had much money, the job she had dreamed of having revealed itself as a hierarchy of insecure oddballs rather than the network of cutting edge creatives she had envisioned. Two thousand pounds was more than she could make in a month of long days, and would clear some of the debts that had become difficult to ignore. The tape was to be for personal use only, she was assured. She had become used to unwanted, resigned sex in those days. Like much else, seeing it as part of a brave, experimental life made it seem easier.

At the time, it hadn’t been so bad. She and her closer flatmate participated. They knew the two boys involved. It had been odd, but they’d felt as superior as they always did around these unsophisticated, eager men. ‘Give them their fun,’ she thought, ‘I’ll take the money.’ Then, like many experiences from those days, she’d locked it away and moved on.


At first she tried to think of solutions. Perhaps she could contact the boys, men now of course, and ask what had happened to the tape. Surely they too would be married and moved on by now? All she needed was to put her mind thoroughly at rest.

But when she considered the process required to track the thing down, the dragging herself through the dead relationships and sour memories of the past, she felt as sick as she did knowing the tape was still out there. She came to regard her life as a lie, the current state of affairs being built on a rotten foundation. She couldn’t accept that she was any different now, that a mistake she’d made then had been made by another person. She had done it, after all.

And so the tape came to dominate every waking minute, her attempts to dispel it as some sort of forgivable error in themselves becoming a preoccupation, and she came to believe that her life could never be definite.

One night she decided to tell her husband. She walked into the bedroom, seeing him sitting in the weird orange light of their overpopulated street that poured in through the blinds she wished she could replace, and froze in the doorway. She felt all of a sudden that even go to sit with him was more than she deserved, that her admission would be made less valid with the drama of his worry. She leaned against the doorframe and closed her eyes, and started to shake uncontrollably as the tears ran hotly down her cheeks.