The Same City

TW: assault, violence against women

That’s the thing about this city, about all cities: they’re different places for different people. A free drink in a bar is one round you didn’t have to pay for, or it’s a risk of a roofie. A trip on a packed tube is the fastest way home, or it’s somewhere you might get groped. An alleyway is a shortcut or it’s the setting of your own personal horror story. The city is different when you’re a woman. You don’t walk the streets alone. There are places you don’t see after the sun has set. You don’t take a step without knowing where your keys are in case you need to use them as a weapon. The city is loud and beautiful and wild, but it is not ours.

When I was a child, the city was a treat. It was a day out with my parents; a wonderland of culture and experience. It was museum gift shops and animatronic elephants in the Rainforest Café. It was walks through Chinatown and down Oxford Street. It was a kind of playground, a theme park. Nothing bad happens in a theme park.

When I was 15, my parents let me go alone. I felt at home in the crowds, the city a familiar friend whose streets I knew like the lines of my own palm, curving and winding their destiny into my skin. I needed no map to navigate my way, kicking off curbs to run across roads without waiting for traffic lights to change.

I would get the train right to the city’s heart after school, still in a bottle green kilt and striped blouse, and sit writing in a coffee shop before the curtains rose on a West End show. I did exam revision in the interval; my seat became my desk as I breathed in the lingering smell of dry ice. When I left the theatre, it would be dark and I would walk to the station and catch a tube and then a train and then a taxi until I made it to my front door, where everyone would be asleep. If I hadn’t made it back, no one would have known for hours.

There was nowhere else I could have thought about moving to. When I had to fill out a UCAS form with university options, all my choices had one address in common. I didn’t want to stray far from my heart’s home. I fell asleep each night in undergrad accommodation to sirens and car horns and the hourly sounding of cathedral bells. I would walk home through dark streets and parks. There was no one waiting for me to find out if I made it back.

They teach you to be careful from as young as you can remember. Dress conservatively, carry a panic alarm, don’t take shortcuts, don’t take taxis, wear flat shoes, call someone, walk in groups. It is impossible to do it all at once and still leave the house, so you pick and you choose, trying to balance living a life without risking losing it. You learn to fear groups of men, men in shadows, men walking towards you. It all becomes second nature.

Still, the city felt safe.

I walked home in heels. I took shortcuts. I went out alone at night. I left the alarm I’d been bought in a drawer – it had been a gift when I’d announced I was moving to the city. Not a bunch of flowers or a greeting card or a gift basket of ramen and Pot Noodles. A rape alarm.

The longer I lived there, the safer I started to feel. No one hurt me or followed me to my door. No one tried to threaten or kidnap or rape me. I was reassured, each time I broke the rules I had been taught and nothing bad happened. It was a kind of proof that maybe things really were safe. Maybe everything we’d been warned about didn’t happen here.

Until it did, only not to me.

The words ‘it could have been me’ are messy. They’re survivor’s guilt, they’re a perverse relief, they’re a connection. When the only thing that determines someone’s fate is timing, you can’t help but recognise all the things that you have in common. There’s a kind of collective grief. You all feel a little bit of the pain. The loss is greater than one person and their potential. They were similar enough to be a friend, now they’re someone you’ll never know.

I rescheduled an appointment that would have gotten me home after dark. I replaced the long-dead batteries in my panic alarm and put it in my coat pocket. I remembered every mistake I had ever made. Every shortcut, every time I’d put in my headphones, every time I’d gone out without telling a single person where.

A city is not a city without its people, and while they can be friends and acquaintances and partners and family, you can’t know all of them. There are people you cannot trust. There are parts of people you cannot trust, buried down inside people you thought you could. A city of potential is a wonderful thing, full of possibility and art and life. And danger and manipulation and threat.

Every step that I took thinking that I was safe was one that could easily have been my last. The city was never safe. I was just lucky, Even if you do it all; the keys between your fingers, the trainers, the panic alarm, the phoning a friend and having someone to expect you home by a certain time; sometimes it still isn’t enough. We put so much effort into trying to know the same city that men do. One where we can be certain we can walk the streets and still make it home.

I had turned the filter off, the one that tints everything a little differently. It makes it harder to see what I love about the city – the shadows appear darker and potential threats glare red – but a name spread across every headline reminds me of why it’s necessary. This is not the same city for us. Not if we can’t even make it home.