The Book of You: A Novel

by Claire Kendal

I think of Lottie coming up her own road and finding that van. Lottie was one against four. My odds are better. One against one. Me against you.

  My hand is curled around the phone, and I’m zooming in without even needing to look, just as I’d rehearsed. My street is well lit. The phone has an automatic flash. You aren’t the only one who can take photos.

  Not feeling my burned fingers, I lift my arm and point.

  Click: your car in my street. I zoom in more. Click: closer, your number plate, just readable. And then I zoom in as far as I can. Click: still closer, your face. It may not come out through the glass, but it’s worth trying.

  Three photos, taken so quickly it has to come as a surprise to you, so that your recognition of what I’ve done, and your reaction to it, cannot help but be delayed.

  You open your door to come after me. This wasn’t part of your original plan for tonight. I’m running already, though I cannot help but turn to check quickly that there is still enough distance between us. But you’re large, not a man who can leap from a car with agility. I glimpse your thin mouth, twisted in rage, and I speed up, flying along the path to my house so fast I know you can’t catch me. My keys are out and ready—another useful pocket in my bag; I’d been thinking strategically when I designed it. By the time the metal slides into the lock and the heavy wood pushes forward, I know you’ve given up. For once, I’m in a nightmare where everything is going right.

  I’m not sure how long I lean against the door, waiting for my breathing to slow down. Long enough for Miss Norton to emerge from her flat.

  “I’m so happy to run into you, Clarissa,” she says. “It’s good to see some pink in your cheeks for a change,” she says. “Will you join me for a cup of tea?” she says.

  A cup of tea is just what I need. And Miss Norton’s sweet, sharp company.

  “I’d love that, Miss Norton.” She looks so pleased I feel a stab of guilt that I don’t accept her invitations more often and extend more of my own. As I follow her in, I grab my latest sewing magazine from the shelf, where she has left it for me.

  Miss Norton motions for me to sit on her chintzy sofa. It is draped in lace antimacassars, once cream, now dyed tan by time. “Just relax and rest, dear,” she commands. “Read your magazine. Let me look after you for a while. You deserve it for what you’re doing. It must be very exhausting and upsetting.” She toddles off to the kitchen.

  I smile to myself as I gaze around Miss Norton’s living room. All of her furniture is dark wood and heavy, and belonged to her parents, who used to own the whole building before Miss Norton sold it into flats; Miss Norton was born in this house.

  I turn my attention to my sewing magazine. I open the envelope, thinking how welcome it will be to wash away the last few minutes, to push you entirely out of my head. But you will never let that happen, will you?

  I exhale as if you’ve punched me hard in the stomach. The blond cover model is not wearing a new spring dress pattern.

  She is wearing belts and chains and wires that circle her arms and legs and torso and hips. She is bound tightly to some kind of specially modified operating table with adjustable limb extensions. Plenty of pale skin is still exposed. Her spread legs are bent at the knees, her ankles elevated. Every part of her is immobilized. Even her hands and feet and fingers and toes are held in place by some kind of surgical tape. Her nipples are pierced with metal hoops, her breasts squeezed by a crisscross of ropes. A leather gag wraps her mouth. A man’s muscled arm, ending in a leather-gloved hand, clasps a shining instrument. The owner of that arm is off camera. The woman’s neck and forehead are attached to the table, too, by dog collars, so she cannot turn her head, but her wide eyes are aimed pleadingly to the side, at the invisible man.

  “You like your tea weak with no milk, don’t you, Clarissa dear?” Miss Norton calls.

  Is the pose really just modeled? I try to tell myself it must be. This cannot really be a captured woman. That table cannot really be real. But her terror looks entirely real to me.

  This is what you like to see.

  “Clarissa?” Miss Norton calls again. “Is that right?”

  “Yes, Miss Norton,” I manage to say, not knowing what I’m agreeing to.

  The article titles are jumping out at me.

  Shivering Slave Girl Confesses: Fear Makes Me Wet.

  This is what you like to read.

  “Biscuits?” asks Miss Norton.

  Straitjacket Seduction: Keep Her Helpless.

  This is what you like to do.

  I think of my arms pinned behind my back in the park. Your hand squeezing my neck, holding me in place. The dreadful things I had to let you say, as if I yearned to hear them, and how you loved my responses—all those yeses—as your glove moved over me. Yes, yes, yes.

  “I baked them this morning,” Miss Norton says. “I’d so hoped to run into you. I wanted you to have a treat. And you were so kind to buy me those wonderful chocolates. You chose all my favorites.”

  Enema Ecstasy and Home Operations.

  “Clarissa? Did you hear me?”

  Realms of Torture: Inside Our Readers’ Forbidden Rooms.

  Do you have such a room?

  “That sounds lovely, Miss Norton,” I somehow say.

  “I’m glad to hear it, Clarissa. You’re much too thin, dear.”

  Bound Beauties Stretched and Plugged to the Limit.

  Again I think of that November night. And the marks on my body the next morning.

  That photo. Should I actually be grateful it is nothing like what this magazine must contain?

  “Clarissa?” Miss Norton appears in the doorway.

  In a panic, I shove the magazine back into the envelope, struggling with my stiff fingers, still swaddled in the NHS bandages, so that I tear the thick brown paper.

  I’ve looked at it long enough. Even with the magazine out of sight the other article titles are popping in my head. The titles are absurdly bad. Annie would laugh at them in disdain. She would tell me it’s all one bad fake. She would smack you, hard, across your horrible face. But I can’t laugh. It isn’t funny. You don’t mean anything about this to be funny. The magazine’s cover photo is the most frightening and ugly and grotesque thing I’ve ever seen.

  Tied Twist: Rough Roped and Ridden Raw.

  I hurry across the room to take the beautiful old china plate from Miss Norton. It is yellowing and cracked with age. The biscuits are golden. “They look delicious,” I say, though nothing in the world could look delicious to me right now. I try to set the plate onto the coffee table gently, but my fingers don’t seem able to grip properly and it crashes onto the wood. I’m astonished that I haven’t shattered it.

  Animal Positions: Restraints for the Farmyard.

  “Will you help me with the tea tray?” Miss Norton calls, oblivious to my spectacular clumsiness. It is a lucky thing that Miss Norton’s usually infallible ability to notice absolutely everything is entirely derailed by the all-consuming attention she gives to her role as hostess.

  I lurch into the kitchen, which is a pristine 1970s time warp of brown and tan.

  Painful Pleasures to Keep Her Captive: Picture-Perfect Punishment.

  I’ll punish you for this. That was what you said in the park. Is this what you meant?

  “I can’t find my tea strainer, dear,” Miss Norton says.

  I rummage blindly in Miss Norton’s overcrowded drawers.

  Obedience School: Lock Me Down and Whip Me Hard.

  I think of your theory about why Bluebeard murdered his first wife. The worst form of disobedience, you said. I remember the alarm bells going off when you used that word. Disobedience. Even as your wine made its way through my veins I could still see what an ugly part of your vocabulary it was, an ugly part of your outlook on what men and women could be to each other.

  You need to do what I tell you. You said that in the park, too.

  The terrible titles may differ, but they all come down to the same thing.

  “What’
s wrong with you, Clarissa?” Miss Norton laughs fondly. “It’s right by your hand.” She takes the tea strainer and places it beside her dainty rose-covered cups and teapot. Steam curls from the spout, and I nearly burn my other fingers as I take the tray, then stagger into the living room and set it on the table, china clattering.

  Fill Every Hole: Lessons She Won’t Forget.

  “Sit down, Clarissa,” Miss Norton says.

  I sit down.

  Taboo Tortures and Training Torments She Can’t Possibly Resist.

  “Take a biscuit, Clarissa.”

  I pick up a biscuit, bite off a tiny piece, and try to chew. I think I may choke. I force myself to swallow, and when Miss Norton concentrates on pouring the tea, I slip the remainder of the biscuit in my bag.

  Workout Equipment for All Parts: Forcing Her into the Shapes and Sizes You Crave.

  Miss Norton chatters happily, excited to have me in her territory, but I am hardly taking it in. “It is so lovely, having you here. You must visit me more often, Clarissa,” she says, and I promise that I will.

  My hands are shaking. As I pick up my cup, I spill tea over Miss Norton’s antique green carpet. I rise to get a towel, apologizing, but my balance is off and I knock into the coffee table hard, bruising the bony front of my shin and letting out a cry as I slosh more tea onto her rosy Axminster flowers. Miss Norton waves me down, telling me not to worry; she can see how tired I am, and anybody would be reeling at the end of a gruesome day in a criminal courtroom; she’ll go herself; I must rest and not even think about moving.

  Shamed Slave Suspended and Flogged in Dungeon of Discipline.

  While Miss Norton is out of the room, I examine the envelope. There is no subscription company name or other identifying detail. There is a stamp. There is a sticky label typed with my name and address. That is all. Did you buy it from the back room of a sex shop, where only their special customers are invited? Order it online from a website that can’t be found through any normal search engine? Maybe you belong to a secret club of men with access to such things. The worst possibility of all is that you made it yourself. But there must be a chance that the police will be able to find out who sent it and somehow trace it to you.

  Quickly, I look again at the front of the magazine itself.

  No glossy airbrush has been used on the cover model; there was nobody to ask any awkward postproduction questions. Her mascara is smeared by what look like real tears; they didn’t hire a makeup artist who could be a witness to what they were recording. Could it be Laura Betterton? The lighting is poor, as if the whole thing was set up in somebody’s soundproofed and windowless garage; they didn’t use a studio where the model could be seen entering and could then freely exit.

  I put your magazine away for the second and last time, knowing that I will never take it out of the brown envelope again. There is something about its amateurishness that makes it more sinister and real. Something that makes me ask again how clear the line is between actuality and pose. I cannot stop wondering who the woman is on the front of the March issue, and how she came to be photographed like that, and who could think up such things, and where she is now. I do not wonder if you have done such things yourself. I am certain that you have.

  Tuesday

  THE WITNESS WAS slumped in her chair, eyes half closed. Dorcas Wykes. The one whose little-old-lady mother didn’t say bad words. Dorcas wasn’t hiding behind her bedroom curtains anymore; a prison guard sat close by.

  Clarissa realized that she was slumped, too, and made herself sit up straighter.

  “I know it was almost two years ago, but I need to talk about something very upsetting that happened to you then.” Mr. Morden spoke gently. Dorcas glared at him.

  “Do you recall traveling by car from Bath to London on Saturday, May fifth?” Mr. Morden asked. “You were driven there by people you know.”

  Dorcas twisted to look behind her. Moved her head from side to side slowly, glaring and insistent. “No,” she said. She shook her head violently. “No.” She wrapped her arms tightly around herself and began to rock. She pulled her blond hair in front of her jail-pallid face, a curtain to hide behind. She began to sob. Her breathing grew labored.

  “I need to ask the jury to retire for a short break,” the judge said, “to allow Miss Wykes to collect herself.”

  THE DOOR BETWEEN Court 12 and the intensely lit waiting room hadn’t even closed before the boy with the purple-tipped hair spoke. “Crazy woman. Good-looking, though.”

  He looked like a male pixie, though in fact he was an apprentice locksmith. What marked him out for Clarissa was that he seemed always to be plugged into earphones, and they were the same shade of purple as his hair. He’d once walked into the jury box still wearing them, though Robert gave him a discreet nudge to take them out before the judge noticed.

  “Shhhhh.” Several of them said it at once.

  Annie actually elbowed him and told him to put a lock on his mouth. But then she rolled her eyes. “She’s wasting my time. I don’t like people who waste my time. How dare she waste my time?”

  “I’m sorry for her,” Clarissa said, deflated. “This case is a contest. Who’s the saddest of them all.” She was rummaging in the main section of her anti-stalker bag for lip balm, digging deeper, moving things around, puzzled when her fingers came across something silky. She pulled it out to look. Immediately, she scrunched it into her fist.

  Tuesday, February 24, 11:45 a.m.

  I try to smooth my face into a composed expression, but I haven’t released my grip on what I found in my bag.

  What I found is a piece of slashed lavender jersey. What I found is the underwear I wore the night I spent with you in November. You must have slipped them into my bag when I fainted in the station tunnel.

  You altered them after you took the photo. You slit them at both hips, at the side seams. You cut away the crotch, which is not in my bag. When did you do this? Was I still wearing them when you did? Did the scissors touch my skin when they sliced the fabric? I can see the photograph as clearly as if I held it before my eyes. Your words are playing over and over in my head. The missing piece. I have the missing piece, Clarissa.

  CLARISSA WAS BACK in her seat in the jury box. People’s mouths were moving, but no words were coming out. Mr. Morden appeared far away and much smaller, as if he were standing at the other end of a long tunnel and she was looking at him through a shrinking glass instead of a magnifier. After a few minutes, the noises started to return, and Mr. Morden began to grow until he was the right size again, like Alice. She wasn’t sure how much she’d missed, but at least she hadn’t fainted, and even Annie hadn’t noticed. Clarissa deliberately pricked the pad of her thumb with the lead of her pencil. Concentrate, she told herself.

  “You voluntarily went to the police station on Monday, May seventh. You spent two days there, Miss Wykes, as a witness.”

  “Don’t remember goin’ there.”

  Annie’s head was moving from side to side in disgust. That could be me, Clarissa thought, understanding the woman’s terror and degradation when faced with talking in public about whatever had happened to her. Clarissa, too, could become a person who filled someone like Annie with revulsion.

  OVER LUNCH, CLARISSA moved numbly from the women’s cloakroom, where she threw up, to the café, where she got a bottle of sparkling water, to the quiet area, where she held a book she didn’t read; then she repeated the circuit.

  When they returned to Court 12, she pricked herself with the pencil again, not realizing what she’d done until Annie reached over and plucked it out of her hand, shaking her head no and looking appalled as she pointed to a tiny pearl of blood.

  Clarissa’s ears were buzzing. Mr. Morden’s voice wasn’t making sense. She pressed her hands to her temples, looking down at her pile of notes, thinking her own handwriting looked like indecipherable hieroglyphics. All she could see were chains and belts and ropes. The woman’s terrified eyes above the gag. The gloved hand and the sh
ining instrument. The horrible titles describing the magazine’s contents.

  Mr. Morden adjusted his wristwatch, straightened his papers, rocked back and forth on his feet, visibly struggling to form his next question. “Did you visit a London park on Sunday, May sixth, just before you journeyed home?”

  Dorcas nearly jumped from the chair but glanced at the blue screen and remained where she was, still under cover but even more agitated. “No.”

  As a little girl, parks had been places of delight to Clarissa. In parks, she and her parents ate the picnic feasts her mother carefully prepared and packed. In parks, her father helped her to build castles and mermaids out of damp sand. Parks were not dangerous places.

  She thought of her local park, the place she once had loved. Now that park was a pair of gloved hands gripping her wrist, leather pressed between her legs, words to humiliate her, a car she had to stop herself being dragged to. Now she hated that park. She never wanted to go there again, even though she knew she’d been lucky.

  There’d been no computer geek to rescue Dorcas from that London park. No Bruce with his silky black head.

  Mr. Morden changed tack. “Miss Wykes, your mother appeared before this jury. She—”

  “The jury can fuck themselves.”

  The judge looked furious. “This court is suspended until tomorrow.”

  IT WAS AN unasked-for gift, finding herself sitting with Robert in a café near the bridge, a whim of his to stop there, to drink something hot before they got a later train.

  She took a small sip of the tea he’d bought her. The nausea hadn’t left her since she’d touched that magazine; it had deepened since discovering the underwear; it had become a kind of poison since the aborted hints of what Dorcas had suffered and the visual spectacle of the wrecked woman in the witness box. Though being with Robert was such powerful happiness that the sickness eased, at least for a few minutes.

  “One time,” he was saying, “not on my watch, a woman was crying outside the house, ‘My babies, my babies, somebody save my babies.’ I told you we always go in in pairs, didn’t I?”