Free Courting Trouble by Kathy Lette

water jug on the side table and crossed to the door to accost a passing medic. ‘Nurse?’
    ‘And I wanna clean my teeth,’ Chantelle’s voice rasped behind me.
    ‘’Fraid not,’ the nurse said matter-of-factly.
    I was so shocked by her brusque reply that I turned to appraise the woman more closely. She was in her late twenties, with pale skin – pre-Raphaelite pale – with auburn tendrils of hair escaping her nurse’s cap – a look that seemed far too delicate for the wards of an inner-city London hospital.
    ‘Not till after forensics.’ The nurse’s harsh, nasal Estuary accent belied her exotic looks. If she’d been born in the 1850s, she’d have been ‘discovered’ by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and made to pose for hours in a medieval dress, fingering a lute, for a series of languorous portraits. Yet here she was, dealing with vaginal swabs, stale ejaculate and genital diseases which she couldn’t quite put her finger on . . . and would much rather not, judging by her off-handedness.
    Her voice was prodding, metallic, cold as a gynaecologist’s speculum. ‘It’s protocol. No interfering with forensics till after the physical exam.’
    ‘But why’s it taking so long?’ I asked the nurse. ‘And shouldn’t she be in a specialist rape suite?’
    Lethargy clung to the nurse like satin in summer. She greeted my query with all the enthusiasm with which you’d welcome a yeast infection. ‘Medical emergency comes first. The girl got smacked over the head. We have to make sure there’s no concussion before a rape specialist can examine her. Plus, there’re internal injuries, too. And bruising around her throat. And cracked ribs.’
    ‘But the poor kid’s been here since last night!’ I protested.
    ‘Yeah, well, so have I,’ the redhead snarled.
    ‘Listen up, Nursey. I’m Chantelle’s lawyer,’ my mother growled. ‘So I suggest you get the rape specialist here right now. Otherwise, all you’ll be putting a dressing on is a salad – in your waitressing job after I get you fired.’
    One of my mother’s attributes which I most admire is her breezy ability to cut through protocol like a scalpel through the epidermis. Ten minutes later, in a flurry of white coats and stethoscopes, a rape specialist arrived. A screen was propped up around the bed. Roxy and I were to wait outside. ‘They have to take swabs,’ my mother explained. ‘Vagina and mouth. They’ll take samples from under her fingernails, plus other scrapings and cuttings, and pubic-hair combings.’
    Happy sixteenth birthday, Chantelle.
    Roxy introduced me to the sexual offences liaison officer who had also just miraculously arrived. While we waited she talked us through what Chantelle had told her. The officer had established that there were two men and that it was a Section 1 rape.
    ‘That’s penetration of any orifice without consent,’ my mother clarified.
    The officer’s description of Chantelle’s harrowing ordeal was interrupted by raised voices inside the room – the teenager was too shy and traumatized to take off her hospital gown. We could hear the doctor explaining that she needed to take a vaginal swab. That she’d be really gentle and would use a cotton bud. That it would be a bit uncomfortable and may sting a little, but would be over quickly, as would the injection for a blood sample.
    ‘I want my gran!’
    My mother and I exchanged pained, wretched glances.
    When the doctor finally emerged, she told us that the perpetrators had scrawled an inked message across Chantelle’s abdomen in felt-tip pen. ‘They’ve drawn an arrow pointing towards her pudenda with the message “Wash this”. And “Dirty bitch”.’
    My toes curled up like dead leaves in my shoes.
    ‘How can you not take this case, Matilda?’ Roxy insisted.
    When Roxy and I came back into the room, we immediately offered Chantelle the glass of water and toothbrush the pre-Raphaelite nurse had now, finally, fetched. The teenager drained the glass,