The Mechanic's Daughter

The Mechanic's Daughter Part 12: Graffiti

In the first week of January, Barbara and Nikki were called in to speak to a young assistant professor who has been asked by the administration to investigate Nikki's rape. This woman was sympathetic and easy to talk to, Nikki told me later. She questioned Nikki about the details of that evening, without reducing her to tears. Her name was Nancy Burden and she had promised to call everyone who might know something about the rape, including me.

Nikki was comfortable walking on campus by herself this term, though she preferred to have someone with her walking home. She was going through the motions of picking up her life again.

So I was optimistic until the end of the week, until I entered a washroom in the science building and some accident of fate put me in the stall with a particular piece of graffiti. The grey enamel of the stall was thick with messages from other women, descriptions of sex, complaints about professors and passages meant to convey spiritual peace. On the left-hand wall, above the toilet paper, was a picture in blue marker of a girl with her head lolling, Xs for her eyes and her legs apart. Beside it was a limerick.

A young lady started to drink

so much that she couldn't quite think

the boys queued outside

till she gave them a ride

But later she raised quite a stink.

A shudder ran through me, because it was unmistakeably about Nikki. I could not imagine the woman who drew something quite this foul. As I washed my hands, I had a more troubling thought. What might be written on the stalls of the men's rooms, not just in this building, but throughout the campus?

That afternoon Barbara and I checked every stall in every women's washroom on the campus. She enlisted Carl to check the men's. We found only one other reference that might be about Nikki in the women's, a drawing that we were able to get off with nail polish remover and a paper towel. But Carl came back from inspecting the men's with a written list of seventeen references to group sex, gang rape and drunken girls, some with Nikki's name or initials in the text. Standing by the doors of the liberal arts building, with cold air flashing over us as students came and went out into the wintry afternoon, Barbara and I read them over. I felt slightly sick.

"What are we going to do?" I said. "Are you going to say anything to Nikki?"

"Of course I'm not saying anything to Nikki right now," Barbara said. "We're going to get rid of them."

"It means people are spreading stories about her. She needs to know what's going on." Though is it going to hurt or help her to hear that she's being slandered on the inside of a toilet cubicle?

"No, she doesn't need this. This is a response to our rally and to the investigation."

"I know how rumour campaigns spread.I'm sure there are all kinds of twisted stories out there." Anyone who had endured high school knew about rumours.

"Yes. We'll worry about that tomorrow. Today, we're just going to get rid of them."

I thought I was a listener – just on the fringes of this group of women interested in feminism. I thought I was not an activist, just someone who knew how to be a friend to Nikki. But this incident marked a change. Now I was angry. Now I was invested emotionally; now I wanted to do everything humanly possible to change the culture around rape on this campus, and if possible, in the world. I called my mother and told her I wouldn't be home for dinner.

Carl had a friend from student council who could help us, Andrew. We bought paint remover, rolls of paper towels and tins of spray paint. With Andrew or Carl at the entrance to the men's room, we got to work. We rubbed off offensive graffiti and, where paint remover didn't work, we sprayed paint over it. Carl and Andrew kept Barbara and me laughing, making up inane reasons to chase men away from the washrooms. "Former nuclear test site," said Carl to one guy who turned up at the door. "Sorry, you'll have to use another one." And once, "This washroom has been liberated by the People's Republic of Chad. You'll need a passport to get in." Probably the sound of women laughing from inside the men's room was enough to convince them to go elsewhere. It was late before we finished and went for pizza and drinks.

I talked to Andrew until almost closing time, when Carl and Barbara got up to leave. He was taller than Paul, though not so tall as Carl, and very slim. He had beautiful hair. It curled to below his shoulders and was a light colour of brown, like sandstone. It was his third year of university, studying political science. He and Carl met on student council. He described council's campaign to keep tuition fees from rising. We discussed why the cost of everything was rising so quickly and how it was related to oil prices. The subject was close to my heart, with my Dad struggling because of the high cost of gasoline and my mother complaining about how much food was costing.

"The real problem is that business is trying to control inflation by keeping the cost of labour down. That's why there are so many labour disputes now," Andrew said.

"Yes, the postal strike last year and now the garment workers." I've been reading a newspaper for two years; I have opinions about the world. But Andrew was the first man since Paul who wanted to discuss these things with me.

"Those women hardly make anything. I don't know why working people should have to make the sacrifices. Why shouldn't people make enough to live on in their jobs."

It seemed an admirable sentiment. We talked a lot about politics, and then a little about geography.

"I'm interested in erosion, the way water gets into rock and blasts it apart when it freezes," I wondered if he was even remotely interested.

He described ice formations along the Scarborough shoreline in Toronto, where he grew up. "There is a lot of erosion every spring. Would you like to see it?"

"Of course."

"Well, give me your number." After I wrote it down and handed it to him, Andrew leaned back in the chair and gave me a dazzling, heart-skipping smile.

I was halfway home before I realized I left the rest of the paint and paper towels in the pub.

The following day someone had spray painted "Stop the Conspiracy of Silence" in large letters on the side of the men's residence where Nikki was raped. There was another sign "Rape is Violence Against Women" painted on the athletics building.

I caught up with Barbara at lunch. "Did you see?"

She nodded, looking delighted.

"Is it who I think it is?"

"I love those boys," she said.

I passed Andrew in hall of the student building later in the day. When he waved to me, there was black paint on his fingertips. He saw my eye following his hand and smiled.

Barbara and I agreed Nikki must hear about the graffiti from us, before someone else told her or she wondered about the big spray-painted signs on campus. Though it won't take much to shake her confidence and send her into hiding. I picked her up to take her home and Barbara prepared tea for us. Nikki wrapped her hands around her mug and looked at us expectantly. She knew something was up.

"About me?" she said, when Barbara told her what we found in the washrooms.

"We've cleaned it up or painted it over," Barbara said. "We got rid of it all, from the men's rooms as well."

"It's really horrible, isn't it?" Nikki turned to look at me. She'll grill me later, for not telling her right away.

"It was nothing really. We think it's because that Nancy Burden from the administration is asking questions."

Nikki looked down, focusing very hard on the linoleum in the corner in an effort not to cry. "There are days when I think I'll never live this down. It's like I have the scarlet letter branded on my forehead."

The flat tone of her voice chilled me. What is there to bring her round? Only cups of tea, endless chat, the occasional hug, little enough considering what happened to her. It took time for these remedies to work. They were a fragile net, spun with various degrees of skill by Barbara and Marion and me, easily unravelled by a misstep. Barbara has read all the literature, coming out of the U.S. and other places, about ways to counsel women about rape. But there was no tried and true formula for getting on with life after a rape. Nikki didn't leave her room for the next two days.