Splinter the Silence Read Online Free PDF Page B

the underlying fear that infused the abuse she’d experienced, and its wider impact on women’s lives. A lesser person might have buckled under the loathsome bile that was by now a daily feature of her online life. But Ursula stood firm. Her only concession to the depravity was to ask TellIt! ’s IT guy to ID the worst culprits, in the hope they could hand the police enough evidence to prosecute the cowardly bastards.

The door of her study swung open to reveal a burly man in a T-shirt and checked fleece lounging trousers. He was waving a pair of steaming mugs in the air. ‘Fancied hot chocolate and thought you might too,’ Bill Foreman said, moving into the room, surprisingly light on his feet for so stocky a man. ‘Put a splash of rum in as well. Reckoned you deserved a bit of a livener.’

Ursula sighed happily. ‘You are my hero. I was about to send this off then call it a night.’

Bill handed her one of the mugs and she cradled it in her hands, savouring the warmth and the rich aroma of the chocolate and the rum. He lowered himself into a battered chintz armchair and Ursula swivelled her office chair round to face him. ‘So what did you go with in the end?’ A journalist himself, he understood how often the finished piece ended up in a different place from the initial plan.

‘A tangent. I’m writing about female genital mutilation. How we’ve become much more aware of it in the past couple of years here in the UK and how we need to make a safe space for women to be able to speak without fear of reprisals.’

Bill grinned. ‘Nothing controversial, then. It’s not hard to imagine how they’ll come back at you on that one. You’ve found a way to upset the fundamentalist Muslims and the right-wing arseholes in the same article.’

Ursula sighed. ‘Depressing, isn’t it? It was a lot easier to be optimistic about equality when you didn’t have to confront the Neanderthals on a daily basis. When you could imagine that people were actually changing their minds because they’d stopped groping secretaries at the photocopier.’

Bill’s mouth turned down at the corners. ‘And all the time, it was burrowing underground, hibernating and growing stronger. Baffles me. I’m a bloke. I like football and beer and playing GTA with my mates. But that doesn’t mean I have to despise women. It’s not a binary. I genuinely don’t understand the thought processes that go into the kind of abuse you’ve been getting.’

‘That’s because it’s not got much to do with thought processes.’ Ursula leaned forward, her face animated. ‘It’s emotional. I think it’s got a lot to do with the fact that the kind of work men do has changed dramatically. Their fathers and grandfathers did hard manual labour. Yes, it was brutal and exploitative, but society constructed an identity round that. That kind of work made you a man. That was how you could prove yourself.’

Bill swigged his cocoa and nodded. ‘A kind of indoctrination, and the memory lingers on. There’s a lot of men out there with a feeling that they don’t measure up. Buried so deep they don’t even know it’s there, never mind how to fix it. And shouting at women makes them feel better.’

‘Literally or figuratively. I used to feel sorry for them till I found myself on the receiving end.’

Bill stared at the carpet between his feet. ‘Speaking of that, have you been looking at the news feeds at all tonight?’

‘No, I only pulled up what was relevant to what I was writing about. Why? Is there something I should know about?’

Bill sighed and shifted in the chair. ‘That woman we liked on The Big Ask – Jasmine Burton. The one you emailed about writing something for TellIt! She’s…’ He scanned the room, corner to corner, as if he’d find the right words there.

Alarm made Ursula sit up straight, eyes wide. ‘She’s what? Has someone attacked her?’

Bill shook his head. ‘No, it’s… it’s worse than that. Ursula, she’s