by Voss, Louise
‘Why?’
He gives me a pitying look and I notice that stubble has sprung up all over his jaw, neck, and cheeks overnight. He must be one of those men who need to shave every day without fail. I hope he doesn’t shave into the basin in my guest bathroom; imagining all those bits of black hair sticking to the porcelain makes me shudder. I don’t like hairy men.
‘I told you. I want to know everything about you. We have a lot of catching up to do.’
‘Can I have my diary back, then, to help me remember stuff?’
He sticks out his fat lower lip and it glistens like an organ, like something private and internal that oughtn’t ever be on show.
It strikes me afresh that if I hadn’t been so desperate for a relationship, I wouldn’t ever have given Claudio a second look. Why did I want a new partner badly enough to endure terrible dates with awful men like Gerald and Claudio? I should be able to be happy on my own. But I’m not, and now I’ve ended up here, aged forty-three, locked in my own bedroom by a deranged but apparently functional lunatic.
‘Your diary’s from eighty-six. You weren’t married then, let alone divorced.’
‘I know. But it’s got . . . relevant information in it.’
I suppose it did have. Eighty-six was the year I first met Richard, the year he first fell for me.
He sighs heavily, as though I have made a great imposition, and moves to leave. ‘Very well. I’ll get it for you.’
‘Thank you, Claudio,’ I say meekly as he leaves the room.
What I don’t understand is how I could have believed that this, any of this, would be better than being married to Richard. Especially up until last year, when I thought I was happily married. I had security, mutual trust, affection, validation. Yet I divorced the man whom I loved more deeply than I’ve ever loved anybody else, and he wasn’t having an affair. He didn’t beat me, or roll his eyes if I said something inane. He wouldn’t dream of kidnapping a woman and attempt to make her love him.
I can’t stop thinking about him. We told each other ‘I love you’ every day.
When Megan was a baby, Richard didn’t wrinkle his nose at the mere suggestion of changing a nappy, nor did he feign sleep when she cried, leaving me to get up and give her a bottle. He’d get up and feed her himself, and I’d hear him singing to her. That song that goes It’s all about you, it’s all about you, baby . . . was a particular favourite. Every time I hear it, I think of him.
He bought me clothes and jewellery that, nine times out of ten, were things I would actually have chosen for myself. He did DIY around the house, expertly and without being asked. And he could cook—boy, could he cook. He cooked for me every single night, even though he didn’t get in from work until eight thirty most evenings. Pale and hollow-eyed with exhaustion, he would pour us both a glass of wine, wrap the navy and white striped apron around himself, and set to in the kitchen, knocking up something delicious and often unexpected—tuna steak with chilli and water chestnuts, or a quick Thai curry with fresh lemongrass—‘Ricky meals,’ he called them, although he hated being called Ricky by anybody else.
To top all that, he’d been in love with me, and only me, since he was sixteen years old, apart from a brief relationship with a skinny girl called Chrissie when he was eighteen. He says he never loved her, though. She picked her nose in her sleep, allegedly.
It took me a lot longer than that to come round to his way of thinking, but that only serves to give him more credit for persistence and patience.
Well, that’s one way of looking at it. The other way is to say that I should have trusted my instincts. I should never have allowed him to talk me into falling in love with him. But when you’re twenty-one, and insecure, and your instincts have let you down so many times that you can only regard them with the deepest of suspicion, it’s easy to accept that perhaps someone else knows what’s best for you.
Perhaps by this reckoning, Claudio is the man of my dreams . . . After all, you could say there are similarities between his behaviour and Richard’s. They both decided that I was the only one for them, and I didn’t fancy either of them when I first met them.
This thought makes me feel sullied. I can’t believe I even thought the words ‘Claudio is the man of my dreams.’ He’s the stuff of nightmares.
I don’t understand it. I wouldn’t fancy me, if I was a bloke. They probably only fancied me when I was a teenager because I had massive boobs, and I don’t even have those any more. It occurs to me that I seem to attract these needy, persistent men—but then I feel guilty for bracketing Richard with Claudio.
Richard was—is—a lovely man. He looked after me. He rescued me from myself. He gave me a home, stability, self-respect. We loved each other. So how could I have let it go all the way to separate houses and solicitors and signed divorce papers? His new girlfriend must be helping him regain his happiness, because he’s putting back some of the weight that fell off him after my shock desertion. The stress-induced psoriasis that cracked the skin between his fingers is healing, and he’s laughing again—or so I hear, via Megan.
I have a whole new file in my filing cabinet, with a plastic tab containing a little slip of card with the word DIVORCE written on it, splodged with my tears. And the answer to my question is: I’m not sure that I even know.
I thought I didn’t love him any more; I really believed that I didn’t. Funny, isn’t it, how the mind plays tricks. What I’d like to attempt to get to the bottom of is this: was my mind tricking me into believing I didn’t love him then, or is it tricking me now, by telling me that actually I did love him all along? Did I do the right thing by letting him go, or not? Which history am I rewriting?
Another of my sneaking suspicions about the whole thing is that perhaps it was just a manifestation of my seemingly bottomless capacity for self-destruction. Lots of people apparently have this. Maybe it’s a defective gene.
There is a certain irony to the fact that we stuck together through the ten long years of pain and grief at not being able to conceive. The expense and heartbreak of two failed IVF cycles. The hours of discussions about adoption, fostering, surrogacy. The eventual and earth-shatteringly joyful revelation that we had conceived naturally, and our elation when Megan was born.
We went through all that—and then I left him. Either I’m mad, or I definitely do have that self-destruct button somewhere.
Chapter Seven
Day 2
Claudio reappears with my diary but whisks it out of my reach when I go to grab it. ‘Don’t snatch,’ he says meanly. ‘Apologise.’
Arsehole, I scream at him inside my head. ‘I’m sorry, Claudio,’ I say contritely, not quite risking fluttering my eyelashes at him. I still wouldn’t put it past him to punch me in the mouth, or worse. There’s a horribly volatile air about him—a phrase I once heard springs to mind: madder and more unstable than a box of frogs on a one-legged stepladder.
When he leaves again, I carry on reading it from the torn-out first page.
I wish I hadn’t, though. I’m not sure there’s any way I can talk to Claudio about this part of it. I’m mortified to think that he’s already probably looked at it. What if it turned him on, got him going?
I can’t think about that. I force myself instead to think that it serves as a reminder that I’ve been through really tough, shitty experiences before and survived them. Just about.
19th December 1986
I don’t want to write about this, but I feel like I have to. What’s that word that means something that makes you feel better for having talked about it? Am going to look it up in the dictionary.
Cathartic. Will it make me feel better? I doubt it.
I’m going to write about it like it’s an English essay, just a story that I’ve made up. Mr Merwood would have a shock if I handed him this one to mark.
It was freezing cold. I walked down Endless Street towards hom
e, my cold purple fingers fiddling with the plastic toggles on my coat to give me more of a shield between me and the biting wind, dreaming of the day that John realised he couldn’t live without me.
It got really quiet, after the shops turned into houses. Every front room I walked past seemed to have a silently winking Christmas tree in the window, and the only sound was the plastic bag banging against my leg. I had hooked it over my wrist so I could walk with both hands jammed deep into my coat pockets.
When I reached the swimming baths’ car park, I hesitated. There was a gang of teenagers messing about by the bins against the side wall of the pool building, smoking and pushing one another for no apparent reason. Swearing, of course, and laughing self-consciously, all of them wearing toad-coloured parkas with furry hoods and what looked like the tails of beavers trailing down behind their knees.
Mods aren’t usually as intimidating as punks or bikers, en masse, but I felt scared straight away. The trouble was, though, in order to avoid passing them, I’d have to cut across the car park, which was deserted, and down the alley that’s a shortcut to the end of our road. Mum’s always told me never to go down that narrow, unlit alley after dark—and I’ve never had any wish to, either.
I had to decide. I couldn’t just stand there dithering—it would draw attention to myself. All my instincts screamed at me to keep away from the Mods by the bins. It’s only a short alley: if I hurried, I’d be through it in thirty seconds.
That’s what I thought, anyway.
The alley it was, then. I set off, head down, relieved that none of the boys appeared to have noticed me—I could still hear them faintly cursing and sniggering. A fragment of a song appeared in my head, chasing itself insistently round and round: ‘It’s my instinction, it’s my instinction’—it’s a song that’s always bugged me with its grammatical inaccuracy and nonsensical lyrics. Was there even such a word as ‘instinction’? Who sang it? It was around when I was about ten and still at primary school. Even then it irritated me.
Deep breath.
I went into the alley and suddenly, from nowhere, running footsteps came up behind me. They made me jump, and I forgot about the song. I glanced round, and moved to one side to let the runner pass. He was tall and skinny, with baggy jeans, but it was when I registered what was going on from his neck up that my heart started pounding so hard I thought I was going to faint. The man was wearing a balaclava, his eyes two circles of horror surrounded by blackness.
I still couldn’t believe it. I forced myself instead to believe that this must be some kind of joke, and I waited for him to run past or rip off the balaclava, revealing himself to be a friend of John’s, or even John himself, going ‘Boo—scared ya!’ Any alternative to that just did not seem possible.
But he didn’t run past. Instead, he sort of lunged at me, pushing me against the wall and making my head bang against it. Then he started trying to kiss me, his tongue sticking out through the mouth hole in the woolly face mask in a really obscene way. His breath stank, and there was another smell, too, which took me a moment to place—damp wool. He must have been sweating into his balaclava even though it was freezing.
I shook my head to try to get away from his hideous tongue, closed my eyes, and then opened them again, in the ludicrous hope that I was just imagining the whole thing. My first ever kiss.
I’m crying my eyes out writing that.
But he was still there, and he still hadn’t said anything, not a word. I leant against the wall to keep my balance, trying to think of my feet planted like tree roots into the ground, thinking that he wouldn’t be able to rape me if I stayed standing up. But then it was like he read my mind, about trying to stay standing. I felt his hands grab the sides of my arms, twisting me around until my cheek was pressed against the rough bricks. I could smell chlorine from the nearby pool, and dog poo. He was forcing me to the ground. Even at the height of the crisis, I thought I would actually die if I had to lie in dog poo to be raped. He pushed and I fought, but he was stronger than me and I felt my knees begin to buckle. The plastic bag with the record in it flew off my wrist and across the alley.
Then it was like he suddenly had a different idea: he pressed one arm across the back of my neck, and his other hand shot down and then up under my dress. He was actually trying to pull down my tights. They were already too small for me, like the dress, I’d had them since I was in the Second Year, and the waistband was always annoyingly low on my hips. It meant that his cold hands touched my bare hot skin and I gagged, at the smell of the dog shit and the shock, my hands flailing to try to bat him away.
Finally it occurred to me to make a noise, to attract some attention, but the best I could manage was a pathetic little yelp, more of a feeble shocked ‘eek’ than a full-blown ear-splitting scream.
Or maybe it did work because suddenly, from nowhere, a boy in a beige macintosh ran into the alley. At first I thought it was an accomplice, and I bit my lip so hard that it started to bleed. My legs began to give way and I thought, oh no, oh God, I’m really for it now.
Then there was the sound of a fist connecting with a stomach, once, twice, followed by a loud grunt from my attacker, who instantly released me and reeled back against the wall next to me.
The boy shouted at me to run. But even though my knight in shining mac was smaller and much younger-looking, about my age, the man in the balaclava reacted as if he’d been told to run.
There was this totally surreal moment when the three of us set off up the alley together, all running in the same direction like a starting gun had been fired: me and my attacker with a head start, Mac Boy chasing after him. But then he—the attacker—must have realised that all running off together was a bit, well, silly, and so after about ten yards he wheeled around a hundred and eighty degrees, pushed past Mac Boy, and sprinted back the way he’d come, into the swimming baths car park.
I ran without feeling my legs, aware only of a dull throbbing pain between them, until I reached the front gate, which was open, as was the front door. Mum was standing there, bathed in the yellow hall light, fidgeting from foot to foot, clearly very reluctantly listening to a reedy rendition of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen sung by the small Women’s Institute group of singers gathered around the doorstep. I hurled myself down the gravel path, almost knocking a lady in a hairy tweed coat into the lavender bush by the front door, and I didn’t even stop to apologise. My whole entire being was focused on reaching the safety of my house. All I could think was, Why, oh why, did I go down that alley? If I’d gone past the Mods, I’d have been fine.
So much for my bloody ‘instinction’.
My fears about Claudio having already read it are confirmed when he returns about twenty minutes later, wearing jeans with creases in them and a boring button-down canary yellow shirt. He looks very well groomed—he’s had a shave, and his thick dark hair is gelled back off his expanse of forehead. Is he trying to impress me?
Without preamble he says, ‘So that was your first kiss?’
How did he know which bit I’d been reading? Guessed, I supposed, since it came after the entry we ‘discussed’ last night. I hate him.
‘I thought you wanted to talk about my divorce.’
‘Jo, Jo, Jo . . . I told you, I want to talk about everything.’
I hate him.
He sits down again on the bed in his ‘listening’ pose, chin in hand, expectant expression.
I stand up. ‘OK, I’ll talk. But not facing you. It’s not exactly easy to talk about, you know.’
He shrugs, so I go round to the far side of my bed and sit with my back to him. I notice faint white splatter marks around the legs of my bedside table, the residue of when I had to get the pest guy round to spray everywhere. Lester had fleas, and I had to get the flat fumigated.
‘Where’s my cat?’ I say suddenly.
‘It’s fine. It’s in the kitchen.’
‘He’s a boy. Lester. Have you fed him?’
‘Yes, yes,’ he says impatiently. ‘I told you that last night. Anyway, let’s get back to your first kiss. Stop trying to change the subject.’
Horrible, evil man.
‘Not much of a first kiss.’ I stare at the wallpaper, the big peachy rose print that I put on one wall to make the room more overtly feminine now that I was no longer sharing it with anyone. I had been thrilled when the landlord gave me permission to redecorate, and Donna, Steph, Megan, and I had gone mad with pastel shades, wallpaper paste, and Victorian ephemera. I loved it.
I used to love it, until now. Claudio’s presence in my beautiful haven has spoilt it forever.
‘Did they ever catch the guy?’
I shrug. ‘Don’t think so.’
Suddenly I feel something on my shoulder. His hand, tentatively touching me, not like the meaty clamp of yesterday. ‘Must have been tough for you.’
I don’t want his fucking sympathy! I make a noncommittal noise and twitch my shoulder out of his grasp.
‘And did you find out who the boy in the mac was?’
‘Richard. It was Richard Atkins.’
Claudio makes a girly, simpering noise. ‘Awwww, how sweet. Little Richard to your rescue. That why you married him, was it?’
‘I didn’t know it was him until ages afterwards.’
‘I’d have rescued you, if I’d seen it happen,’ he says. ‘Tell me how it made you feel.’
I try to imagine he’s my therapist, Eileen.
I fail.
But I answer him anyway. ‘What—the attack, or reading about it again now?’
‘Both.’
I hesitate. It’s so personal, it makes my toes curl. ‘It made me afraid of ever walking anywhere on my own after dark. If someone was walking behind me, I’d freak out. If anyone ever pounced on my shoulders, just for a laugh or whatever, I’d scream. I feel—’ My throat suddenly closes up.
