Words Thomas Stichbury
H ands visibly shaking, Finlay McFarlane revisits the fateful fight he was raped after his drink was spiked. He had only just turned 18 and was out with friends at a small club in his home town in the west of Scotland. After he went missing from the club, Finlay was found by his mates face down in a Tesco car park with vomit all around him. “When I came to the next day, my friends were sitting by my bed. I was hysterically laughing.
I don’t know why,” Finlay says. “When [most of them] cleared of, a close friend stayed behind and said, ‘You should check yourself out’. He’d noticed when they found me that my jean buttons were undone and that my scarf had been tied through my belt holes.” At first, he had “zero memory” of the attack and tried to convince himself that nothing untoward had taken place. “You create a narrative in your mind, you do everything you can to prove to yourself that nothing happened,” he explains.