Normal rules of behaviour

 I was sitting on my friend’s bedroom floor, stretching to touch my toes, that were clad in   incredibly uncomfortable but suddenly trendy multicoloured toe socks. Two other friends (one whose name I can’t remember) sat on the bed. Marion was lying on her stomach on the rug next to me, kicking her legs over her head and sucking the end of a pen.

“What shall we ask for?”

“It’s got to be something good.”

“Yeah, otherwise we won’t get on.”

“What about driving with James Hunt.”

My friend was obsessed.

“No. They did Graeme Hill last series.”

“How about asking to experience weightlessness,” I said.

“Don’t be silly. That’s impossible. What are they going to do? Fly us to the moon.”

“A black ski run,” said Marion, “That would be exciting.”

The others agreed but I wasn’t sure. Skiing has never been something I’m interested in and the idea of skiing on black snow sounded even worse but being a people pleaser I agreed to write the letter ready for everyone to sign next time we had a play date.

The next week Marion’s mum showed me up to her room and I took the letter out of the pocket of my poncho.

“Oh, bad news, I’m afraid girls,” said the girl whose name I can’t remember, “Mum says I can’t go.”

We were disappointed but prepared to dump her like a shot if it meant we would get on the telly.

“She doesn’t think any of us should go. She has a friend who is a secretary at the BBC and she says it’s not safe for girls to be near him.”

“They say that about all famous men, don’t they?”

“Girls throw themselves at them.”

“One of the ladies my Dad works with warned me about that man who came to Town to do the It’s a Knockout show but I wouldn’t have been interested in him. He’s really old.”

“So is Jim. I don’t know why these girls do this.”

“It’s for the fame.”

The nameless girl listened to our chat, silently.

“No. I don’t think it’s like like. Mum thinks he’s really dangerous.”

“Yeah but we’d be safe wouldn’t we? Our parents would be with us.

Luckily, our letter wasn’t chosen so we never learnt the hard way that some abusers don’t follow the normal rules of behaviour.

I only learnt about how Saville operated when I watched the latest Netflix documentary. Until then I still thought that, although he hid in plain sight his abuse happened behind closed doors and this new knowledge has really upset me. Not least because it means hundreds of children could be suffering like this and we would never know. I mean, you can’t go round imagining that every man is sticking his hands in passing girls’ knickers. It’s just too horrific. You have to assume that most people follow normal rules of behaviour.

Except they don’t, do they?

You’d assume that a Prime Minister, caught lying would resign but that doesn’t happen. You’d assume that if there’s a public will to take refugees from Ukraine that would happen, rather than shipping them to a country with a similar flag but with a terrible reputation for being embroiled in a war with terrible human rights.

You would also assume that you’d be able to stop and take a photo of your favourite shop and the cherry blossom without a random woman jumping in front of the camera but that doesn’t happen either.

Honestly, it was weird. She laughed and her boyfriend said, “Not as pretty as the flowers.”

“Definitely not,” I told her, “but you photobombed.”

“I did,” she giggled again, clearly proud of herself.

It’s probably against the normal rules of behaviour to use the photo in a blog about Jimmy Saville, so that her face appears whenever anyone searches, ‘Saville abuse photo,’ but what can you do?