by Naomi Joy
Blog Entry
25th November, 10.10 p.m.
The sound of the soaring classical music Anthony’s listening to snakes its way under the bathroom door with each crescendo. He’ll be right where I left him: lying back on the sofa, hands behind his head, eyes closed, occasionally raising his fingers to conduct the invisible orchestra in the room. It’s one of his favourite night time routines. I should be in there with him, playing his game, but he just said something I couldn’t wait to write down, so I’ve excused myself, pulled my laptop from under the bed and have barricaded myself in the bathroom to write. I’ll have twenty minutes before he comes looking for me, asking with a smile if I’m being sick again. Is there any blood coming up? he’d pry, rubbing his hands at the prospect.
First, a recap, I haven’t written to you for a while because I’ve been busy planning. I am playing the long game. I hadn’t realised how messed up he is. How caught I am. How the only thing he covets about me is my descent into illness.
It’s my belief that Anthony has been leaving the notes, that Anthony planted the autopsy reports for me to find. I don’t know why, but I think he wants to scare me. It’s all beginning to make sense now.
I cannot seek help, he’s cut off every option.
I cannot talk to my parents, or the authorities, Anthony already has them all on-side.
I cannot run, but he wants me to try.
He’s goading me with his past, tempting me to act out, to try to get away. If I try, he’ll kill me, frame my death as a suicide. If I don’t, he’ll continue to make me sicker and sicker until I die from natural causes.
I thought about packing a bag and leaving whilst he was at work, waving goodbye to my entire life and catching the next flight out of Heathrow, but I know it won’t work. He made it clear how far he was willing to go when I tried to leave the other night. If I run, he’ll find me – no matter where – and, for as long as I’m running, I’ll have to keep checking over my shoulder for him, wary of every stranger, waiting for a man in the dark to push me down a flight of stairs, or to poison me when I’m least expecting it.
So, I have chosen a different plan, the only one I could feasibly concoct that might bring me out of this alive and, most importantly, free.
First, I must play along, I must not arouse his suspicion, I must not give him the motivation to hurt me.
Second, and this is imperative, I must get better. I must bore him. I must make him fall out of love with me. If I am well, he will not love me.
Third, my plan B. If I cannot succeed in escaping Anthony, I must play him at his own game.
If I fail on all three counts, one of two things will happen, either he will kill me slowly, or, he will kill me quick.
It will be like walking a tightrope, but it’s what I have to do to survive.
I have already taken some important steps forward.
I started by surprising Anthony with a new found love for cooking. I knew he’d be reticent if I told him I was thinking about learning, of course he would, so I’d dodged about behind his back and contacted the chef at Casa Maria to help me cook him a surprise meal to celebrate a year since we met. He’d come home that night and, with the chef in our kitchen, couldn’t complain. I’d told him then that, as a ‘thank you’ for looking after me for weeks on end and, as a treat for this relationship landmark, I’d taken cooking lessons so I could expand my repertoire beyond beans on toast.
Though I know I won’t be able to completely take over, he’ll have to relent a few nights a week when he comes home from work to dinner on the table and, even better, he can’t complain that I don’t know what I’m doing. The five meals I’ve perfected are of equal, if not better, quality to his.
Next, I applied for my own credit card. Anthony has access to my current account and can easily monitor its activity. So, I’ve written a couple of articles under a pseudonym to earn some money, and I plan to write more, especially now I’m beginning to feel better. Money in my new, secret account, I’d used it to order my own groceries and now I have a stash of high protein bars in various places round the flat so I can skip his infected lunches when I need to. I have no choice when we’re eating together and I haven’t cooked, of course, so in those scenarios I’ll puke up the food immediately afterwards so his poisons can’t take hold.
Last on my list: I want to rent my own place, somewhere small, a studio perhaps. I need somewhere ready to go if things get bad, a safe space to conceal the evidence of what he’s doing to me, somewhere hidden to gather some weapons of my own.
Ultimately, once I’m free and I have the evidence I need, I will turn him in.
I won’t let him get away with this.
I take a breath and re-read the entry, my toes curling with the thought of Anthony bursting in here and catching me red-handed. What would happen if Anthony found out about this blog? My retreat, my haven, the place I can always escape to, my sanctuary, the only thing that keeps me sane. I shiver as I think about it, about him finding me here, locked in the bathroom in my night vest and shorts, my laptop balanced precariously on my knees. It would be bad enough if it were a diary, but a public diary, letting people in our lives… I’m sure that he’d be livid, incandescent, beastly. Worse.
And yet, I can’t stop.
Back to this evening and to the reason I’ve been desperate to write.
I’d started our evening conversation on safe ground. We’d been cosied up in the lounge, the fire burning on full in the corner. He likes it when I act normal, as if I haven’t remembered that he tried to kill me, as if I am blissfully unaware that he’s poisoning my food in order to satisfy a morbid fetish. It is taxing, though, playing this ignorant version of myself.
‘I’m feeling poorly again,’ I’d said, wanting to put him in a good mood. ‘And I’ve been doing so well recently. Do you think I’ll ever be well again?’
‘Of course, darling,’ he purred. ‘Why don’t you lie down?’
He patted the cushion next to him as one of his feet beat in time to the music. I lay down beside him, sinking into the velvet, listening to the steady sway of the music.
‘You’re so patient with me,’ I said.
He ran his hands down my back, stroking me like a cat. ‘I guess you’ve always looked after people, haven’t you? I’m so lucky we found each other.’
‘Well, certainly, my mother was always sickly when I was growing up,’ he began, pausing as a memory floats.
I met Anthony’s mother at the wedding, but never before and never again since. Questions about her are discouraged. Answers are never forthcoming. I remember thinking there’d been something in the turn of her neck and the hollow of her eyes that had been Anthony-like but, otherwise, I couldn’t easily see the resemblance. His father hadn’t attended. He’d been away. I’m under the impression that this particular excuse has been rolled out on many previous occasions and that, if I really wanted to dig into it, Anthony would crack. My mother finds it easier to say he’s away than to explain why he’s never here.
‘… And then there was my ex, of course, she demanded a lot of care. I suppose I’m well practised.’
‘What happened to her?’ I didn’t dare move in case I spooked him, trying hard not to tense my body, to keep everything neutral and calm.
‘She was anorexic,’ he said, after a while, and my eyes widened. Was he about to admit that she died?
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, shaking. ‘I didn’t realise.’
He slowed the pace of his hand, coming to a stop between my shoulder blades.
‘Oh, darling, it’s not your fault. She was very ill.’
I felt his body stiffen.
We stayed like that, for a while, me too nervous to speak, shuddering at the sensation of his hands on my body.
‘She was hospitalised, in the end,’ he added unexpectedly.
‘What was her name?’ I asked, my pulse quickening.
‘Holly,’ he said, his voice dreamy and distant, the music lulling h
im into this false sense of security.
‘She’s in a better place now, I’m sure of it.’
He caressed my jawline with the back of his hand, an affected move that wasn’t real, at least not to me. I half expected him to grab my neck, crushing my voice in his hands as I dug too deep.
‘And you will be too, one day.’
I shook as he smiled sweetly to himself, his eyes closed.
I know now he’s going to kill me, exactly like Holly, starved and forgotten, stiff and skeletal, if I don’t succeed in making him fall out of love with me first.
It was those girls at university, then Holly, and now me. And it won’t stop there unless I make it.
I have to end this.
Before it is too late.
*
Tonight, I play along, letting him pour a plastic teaspoon full of berry-red liquid down my throat, feeling it swell in the pit of my stomach, tenderising my organs, letting him kill me, one sip at a time, until I can rush to the toilet and send it back up again.
I must get better.
And, if I can’t get better, I’ll have to act.
I’ll have to take matters into my own hands.
Blog Entry
29th November, 9 a.m.
Vast metropolises like London, with their enormous, sprawling populations, time and again report the highest levels of loneliness amongst their inhabitants. And, as I sign on the dotted line to rent a run-down studio apartment in a high-rise block just off Regent’s Park, a stone’s throw away from Anthony’s flat with a picture-perfect view into his living room, I can think of a couple of reasons why. One: we’re all so isolated in big cities because we’re constantly surrounded by people. You can see into your neighbour’s bedrooms, their kitchens, their living rooms, their lives. You get to know them, the people living nearby in similar rabbit hutch accommodation, on an intimate level without enduring the inconvenience of actually meeting. Two: within the hour I’ll have had food and furniture delivered and, before anyone’s realised, I’ll have moved in without having to say more than a few words to anyone along the way. It’s so easy – so normal – to be lonely in this city, that it’s becoming increasingly as though living any other way is the anomaly.
I sigh as I lean against the windowsill, my attention drawn to a dim light glowing in the window of the house opposite. Behind it, sits the faint outline of a woman painting. I shift my weight and squint, wondering what she’s drawing, what’s inspired her, if it’s just for fun or if she’s working on a commission. I watch her, for a while, as she moves from palette to canvas and back again, then grow tired, exhaling, and look back into my room, considering whether she can see me just as easily. I inspect my new surroundings. The studio itself has been haphazardly touched up for my arrival: a sloppy lick of paint and a lacklustre attempt at cleaning, the dust from the skirting boards swept onto the moss-green carpet, sitting now in mini tumbleweeds, filthy, thick with other people’s dry hair and dead skin. But, though it is derelict and disgusting, for what I want to achieve, it is perfect.
I use the money from my most recent commission – an article breaking down the Roman diet and comparing it to today’s Western eating habits – to pay the first month’s rent and to order the following items:
Evidence bags
Rodenticide
Battery Acid
Syringes
Binoculars
A mini fridge-freezer
A selection of emergency food
A blow-up mattress and some covers – should I need somewhere to camp out
Painkillers – though I am much improved health-wise I am not out of the woods yet, and I have no idea how much damage Anthony’s poisons have done to me
Tasks completed, I sit down in the grubby splendour of my new studio – finally, a room of my own – the distant smell of rising damp covered recently with a thick layer of cheap paint, stinging at my senses, turning my head fuzzy and my eyelids heavy. It’s been an exhausting day and I let my head sink back against the wall, taking the weight, cradling me to sleep.
*
I wake with a jump, pick my cheek up off the moss-green carpet, detach the wheel of filthy fluff that’s affixed itself to the sleeve of my woolly cardigan and dust myself down with both hands. The sun is setting, a fierce, burnt orange, and a small shaft of it glares at me through the single-glazed windowpane, brown-rimmed with neglect. I look back at the wall behind me, amazed. Somehow, a tiny beam of sunlight has found a path from the sky to the earth, skirted the skyscrapers of the city, snaked through the trees in the park, and has looped through the high rises and new builds that surround me, to find a way directly into my flat, shining full strength and uninterrupted onto my left eyelid. This solitary beam of light is the only reason I have woken up. I say a quick thank you to the sun, for her divine intervention and power as an omnipotent alarm clock. If I’d slept through the night Anthony would have had a search party out and all of this would have been over before it had even begun.
The dull ache in my body throbs as I move to standing, reminding me it hasn’t entirely disappeared, and I rush to the window to check if Anthony’s home yet. The lights are off in the flat, which is a good sign. I’m sure I’ll have enough time to get back if I’m quick.
*
I pull the sleeves of my cardigan down over my fists and bunch them up into my palms to create make-shift gloves. The city is dark now and, though I only have a short way to go, the chill in the air bites at the exposed skin on my face and in the nook between where my ankle socks finish and the bottom of my jeans begin.
I jog up the stairs, fear propelling me, and open the door cautiously. I call out for him but no one answers. Breathing a sigh of relief, I pour the soup Anthony had left for my lunch down the sink, then I put the bowl on top of the work surface, dirty, plus a spoon, so he’ll assume I’d eaten it. Then I pick up the ice-cream tub I stuffed with infected food and race back to my studio, unlock the door, pull the mini fridge-freezer open and store it away for future use. It is this small act, a goal accomplished, that leads to a weight lifting from my chest and I rush back to Anthony’s flat, no time to waste, then change into a smart set of clothes – a beautiful blue dress I haven’t worn for years, and a shiny pair of court shoes. I touch up my make-up – red blush, black eyeliner – and re-do my hair in a tight ponytail that I know will irritate him.
You know I prefer your hair down, Emelia.
Over dinner tonight, he will try to poison me. He will be worried that my body has somehow readjusted to the dose he thinks he’s given me for lunch. He will get desperate, I know this already, and things may get worse before they get better. But I must be strong, I tell myself, because it won’t be easy for him to let me go.
*
The front door thumps closed and I listen intently as Anthony enters, removes his coat, and loops his scarf over the stand in the hallway. He’s just realised that the TV’s on and it’s worrying him because this routine is different to normal – I’m not usually watching the TV when he gets back from work. Usually, I’m wrapped up in bed, the covers tight round my body as I surf on choppy waves of pain.
‘Darling?’ he calls. Even his voice sounds different to me now, the saccharine faux-sweetness of it. It’s like he speaks with aspartame but pretends it’s sugar.
‘Yes!’ I reply, engaging in my own bit of character deception. His footsteps glide steadily through to the lounge, the timbre changing as they strike the carpet. As I hear him approach, I straighten my blue dress against my legs, turn to face him, then rise from the sofa. My stomach clenches in protest as I stand – as ever – but I’m able to ignore the pain, to pretend as though I am unaffected well enough to fool him. I press my hands either side of his thin arms and kiss him on each of his sunken cheeks. ‘How was your day?’ I ask with cherry-pie eyes.
‘It was… fine,’ he stutters, trying to compute the images he sees before him. ‘You’re not in bed?’ He looks through his glasses and down his long nose at me,
trying to work out where he went wrong today.
‘No,’ I sing back, delighted to witness the wires and connections in his brain tying themselves in knots. ‘I’m not. I’m feeling so much better.’
‘Great,’ he concedes, grey froth pooling and crusting at the corners of his dark lips.
*
He teases the ends of his moustache as he flits round the kitchen preparing a soy glaze for the salmon fillets he’s pan frying. We’re pirouetting round each other now in an awkward dance, me dodging his attempts to ply my food with poison, him trying to control his temper as I succeed.
I can sense his eyes following me, they track me round the kitchen and, as I blink up to catch him doing it, I spot his expression twisted in resentment, just for a split second, before it reverts to banal indifference. What’s interesting is that he doesn’t immediately resort to violence when he’s irritated. I am toeing the line perfectly, he hasn’t pinned me down and plunged a needle deep into my neck like the night I tried to leave and it’s led me to understand his perversion on another level. His desire to control me, to look after me, to be my knight in cold-compress armour, doesn’t manifest itself like that unless it has to. He likes to keep a degree of separation between what he’s doing and how it makes me feel. In his mind, it’s whatever medicine he’s giving me that’s hurting me, nothing to do with him, so he can suspend his disbelief, deluding himself into thinking he’s not doing anything wrong.
‘Don’t you think it could use some ginger?’ I suggest, keeping my hawk eyes on every move he makes, teasing him, toying with him, wrapping my hands round his waist, hugging him, kissing him, doing all the things we used to do that I now realise he hates unless I’m an inactive participant, too sickly to kiss back. Although what I’m doing – standing on tiptoes to loop my arms round his neck – looks like love, it’s really torture, and I enjoy doling it out, in control for once.
