Nine months after my rape I gave birth to a beautiful little boy who I named Tom.
Due to my position and condition, I had to put myself at the mercy of the welfare. They placed me in a low-rent shit hole on the worst estate that you can imagine. My life took no turn for the better, as even the local scum looked down on me and assumed my unmarried status showed me to be a dirty slut.
For years I struggled to make my way on my own. I had a friend now and she would look after Tom for me while I did evening work and tried to make ends meet. All I could ever get for employment was minimum wage drudgery, as everyone who ever interviewed me for a decent job, shunned me – as the immoral unmarried mother.
The only attention I ever received from men was the worst kind. They all simply expected me to sleep with them at the drop of a hat, because I was a slut.
The irony of all this terrible reputation that I endured, was that I actually considered myself a virgin. I had neither deliberately nor consciously given myself to a man, the only evidence of such had been between my legs all that time ago and my baby boy sat on my knee now.
Throughout the next few years I determined to keep my self respect even though I received none from anyone else. I kept my dignity and brought my child up clean, tidy and respectable. Tom was taught right from wrong and was a studious and respectable pupil at school. However even Tom was shunned by his peers as the bastard son of ‘Rebecca the slut’.
Although Tom and myself were both attractive in both face and body, no one wanted anything to do with us for fear of peer pressure. I am sure that both of us would have attracted plenty of attention from the opposite sex had it not been for ‘our’ reputation.
Some days I would be stoic and think to hell with everyone else but some days I was desperately sad, not just for myself but for what my innocent son was being forced to endure because of me.
Then suddenly one day our lives changed, I won the lottery.
Don’t get me wrong this wasn’t hundreds of millions but it was tens of thousands and I meant to use the money wisely.
Suddenly I could now afford a higher bond on a rental property and I could afford the higher rent on a nicer house in a better area. My son was now eighteen and was hoping to go to university. We moved town and house but the old problem now had a different context, we had both become so insular and didn’t mix, that now we found ourselves alone even still.
I struggled to make new friends and found that I was still unhappy. I may have had a little money to ease the pressure on me, yet I was terribly lonely.
One day Tom came home with a few cuts and bruises on his face. When I asked him what had happened he didn’t want to tell me but I eventually squeezed enough out of him to get the gist of it. He had been fighting a boy to defend my reputation, I needn’t say more!
It was all too much, my life ruined by a rapist, the loneliness and unhappiness terrible but yet even worse, now my son was having his life destroyed by the same thing.