by Voss, Louise
‘I don’t want it,’ I said, handing the Smiths bag back to Donna again. ‘Get rid of it. Please.’
Donna took it and put it in her sports bag. ‘Come on, Jo,’ she said uncertainly. ‘It’s only Europe. It’s a good song! Well, not bad, for an American hair band. Hairband! That’s funny. They all look like they need hairbands.’
I feel bad for what happened next. It wasn’t her fault. But I sort of screamed at her, something about why she always had to make a joke out of everything. Then I ran upstairs and slammed the bedroom door so hard that a crack appeared down the middle of it.
I suppose I’ll have to apologise soon. I don’t even know if Mum told her or not. She hasn’t rung me.
Some things just aren’t funny, though.
Chapter Thirteen
Day 2
I can’t read any more; it’s really not helping. Don’t I have any diaries from happier years? Perhaps I gave up keeping them after 1987, with some kind of prescience that my future self wouldn’t want to revisit the girl I was then.
I have a sudden random flash of inspiration and dash into the bathroom. Somewhere I have a packet of Diazepam the doctor gave me when I sprained my knee doing aerobics. I could crush them up and slip them into Claudio’s drink, return the favour. I don’t remember seeing them in the pile of banned contraband that he unearthed yesterday. I haven’t got around to tidying up the bathroom yet—but sifting through the packets and toiletries on the floor doesn’t yield anything more potent than Lemsips and Bisodol. Damn. Where are they?
It’s 7.00 p.m. and I’m scared, hot, bored, and fed up. It’s suddenly got really stuffy in here even with the desk fan on all the time. The ribbons of cool air on my face feel like the only good thing in the world. Claudio is still cooking.
My room is almost completely tidy again, and I’ve put back all the contents of my bedside drawers apart from a load of paperwork I’m now aimlessly sifting through whilst sitting cross-legged on the carpet in front of the fan, listening glazed-eyed to the radio. People chatting about films I haven’t seen and probably won’t ever. I’d forgotten I had this radio until Claudio dumped it on the floor with the rest of my stuff.
My throat is raw from screaming earlier.
I want to have a shower but I’m worried that Claudio will come in, having decided he’s been ‘patient for long enough’, or whatever fresh hell is going on in his head. There’s no lock on the bathroom door. The thought of him seeing me naked makes me feel so vulnerable that I imagine myself shrinking to the size of a drinking straw and slipping down the bath plughole. Right now I’d take my chances with drains and rats and claggy wads of hair.
I’m fretting continuously about whether he’s serious in his insane proclamation, until dread has blunted and exhausted me.
I hear my bedroom door being unlocked and all my muscles immediately tense into fight-or-flight mode. Either would be good, I think grimly, but I’m too scared to do the former—Claudio is a big guy—and the second isn’t an option. Not yet.
‘Dinner’s ready, darling!’ He comes in, smiling, holding one of Megan’s flowery plastic beakers.
‘Little pre-dinner drinkypoos?’ he chirps, and hands it to me. I take it wordlessly. ‘I’ll give you five minutes to get a tiny bit dressed up. Just knock when you’re ready and I will escort my lady to the table!’ He laughs like the maniac he so obviously is, and exits.
Oh shit. He really is insane.
I grab a brown spotty silk dress from the pile on my closet floor and put it on. It used to be a struggle to do it up—the top of the zip would sometimes snag the skin under my armpit—but I notice that it’s already much looser on me. Shame, because I know I will never wear it again once I get out of here. I’ll burn it, and everything else that I associate with Claudio.
Then I comb my hair with my fingers, slick some lip gloss on my lips, and powder my nose. When I see myself in the mirror I almost get a fright at the sight of the black circles under my eyes and the pinched expression on my white face. Overnight, several grey hairs have appeared on either side of my parting, and fine wrinkles that have nothing to do with laughter lines now decorate my cheeks. If I’m still here in a week, God forbid, I’ll look about eighty.
Claudio comes back to escort me to dinner, which involves him tying my hands behind my back with one of my confiscated silk scarves. I submit meekly. I’m going to do things his way tonight. He shows me into the kitchen and pulls out a chair from the table. Or rather, I should say he shows me into my own kitchen and pulls out one of my chairs, from my table. He didn’t untie my hands first so it isn’t possible to sit naturally. I perch, leaning forward like I’m about to be executed.
Yet I feel heady with relief at getting out of my room into the familiarity of the rest of the flat, Lester weaving round Claudio’s ankles. A new chair to sit in, different walls to look at, fragrant scents of ginger and coconut coming from the hob and, best of all, a summer evening outside a window I can actually see out of. Not a great deal to see as my kitchen window only looks out at the blank second-floor wall of the house next door, but at least it’s real, actual light. I wonder why he hasn’t boarded up the kitchen window too, but I suppose he’s realised that even if by some miracle I managed to smash the double-glazing I wouldn’t be able to do much else.
At least he hasn’t harmed Lester, who actually seems to have taken to him. Furry traitor. If this was a horror movie Lester would be in deep trouble. I refuse to think that he might be.
Claudio pours me another plastic beaker of white wine, out of a wine box on the counter, and puts it on the table in front of me, where of course I can’t touch it because my hands are tied. The first beaker is still in my room. I downed it in four gulps as I got dressed. I have to be careful not to drink too much, though.
He seems to have thought of everything, down to a wine box instead of a bottle.
‘You look beautiful, Jo,’ he says. ‘I love your dress.’
He looks odd—defensive and simultaneously slightly thrilled, as if we were on a hot date. He’s dressed up, too, in a cream linen suit over an open-necked blue linen shirt, so I presume he believes we are on a date. He must have gone home at some stage and brought back clothes, unless he’d packed a suitcase in advance and put it in the boot of his car . . . no, wait . . .
‘How did we get back here from your place? Where’s my car?’
‘It’s here. I drove it back the other night because you were . . . unwell.’
Unconscious, rather. Still, it was faintly reassuring to know that my car was outside.
‘You have a change of clothes with you here?’
Claudio nods matter-of-factly. ‘I suspected you might need looking after for a while, so I brought a few essentials.’
I resist the temptation to reel off a list: ‘power tools, sheets of MDF, locks for every door . . .’ Instead I look him straight in the eyes, those big brown eyes that I found so appealing up until the other night, and nod towards my full wine beaker.
‘Claudio, how am I supposed to drink that with my hands tied? Or eat dinner? If you’re planning to spoon-feed me, you can forget that shit right now.’
He hesitates, rubs his top lip with a finger. ‘Of course I’m going to untie you. Just a moment.’
He walks over to the kitchen door, and I see that he’s even fitted a lock to that too. It’s shiny and new. He turns the key and drops it deep into the front pocket of his suit trousers.
‘Oh for God’s sake, Claudio, this is ridiculous! How long do you think you can keep this up?’
When he comes back across to me to untie the scarf I contemplate my options: the elbow in his balls, the fingers in his eyeballs, the frying pan across the side of his head—but then what? The key is still in his pocket so unless I knocked him out altogether, I still wouldn’t be able to get out of the kitchen, and the front door was bound to be Chubb-locked too.
‘I’ve made us a fresh chicken curry,’ he says, avoiding my question. ‘I’ve been really looking forward to our dinner together.’
OK. I decide to change tack, indulge him.
‘I’m looking forward to the curry. It smells amazing.’ I manage to smile at him.
He smiles back and all my internal organs shiver with disgust, but I think I manage to hide it.
‘Thanks for dressing for dinner too,’ he says, that horrible faux shy tone in his voice again.
‘Nice to have an excuse to dress up,’ I say through gritted teeth, even though it actually kind of was. Anything for a change from my bedroom prison. I had put on my smart kitten heels—not the suede stiletto ones, which he confiscated—and I had make-up on for the first time in three days.
I will try to get inside his head. I just pray he won’t take it as encouragement and try to get inside me. The thought that only a week ago this would have been welcome makes me want to rip my skin off. I don’t ever want to have sex again.
There’s some music—just acoustic guitar and a voice—on in the background and I can’t work out where it’s coming from at first until I see an iPad on the kitchen counter by the toaster. I make a mental note of it as the only link to help from the outside world that I’ve yet seen. If I did manage to incapacitate him, I could send a Facebook message to Donna or Steph. I’m not a very active Facebooker, although I know that Steph is. She’d see it immediately.
‘What are we listening to?’ I ask.
He looks surprised. ‘You’re joking, right?’
‘Er . . . no, why would I be?’
He stirs the curry and something about the set of his shoulders makes me realise I’ve upset him somehow. He has an odd way of standing and walking, buttocks permanently clenched as though he has something stuck up his backside. He’s doing it now, and the fabric of his suit is trapped between his bum cheeks.
‘I don’t recognise this song,’ I repeat, uncertainly.
Claudio lays down the wooden spoon—my wooden spoon—on my kitchen counter and turns to face me. He looks deeply disappointed.
‘What’s the matter, Claudio?’
‘You really don’t remember?’
I take a slug of wine—mustn’t guzzle it; I need my wits about me—and shake my head.
‘There’s gratitude for you,’ he whinges, in a high querulous tone like an old lady. His voice sounds like nails down a blackboard. He’s trying to be jokey but I can tell I’ve mortally offended him.
‘I’m sorry . . . what is it?’
He pours himself a good half-pint of wine, in the plastic cup that used to have a base with small LED lights that flashed red, green, and blue. Richard brought it back for Megan from some work trip to Vegas. The lights stopped working long ago but we kept the cup.
‘Listen carefully. I’m sure you will remember it soon. I suppose it was a very long time ago.’
I listen. The song is OK, nothing special, some wishy-washy lyrics about loss and heaven, in which the singer claimed to be always looking out for you.
‘It’s nice,’ I comment. ‘Who sang it?’
He beams suddenly, and then his face droops again as he realises I really don’t remember.
‘I did. It’s the song I wrote for you when your father died.’
I’m momentarily speechless. What song? I have no recollection of this whatsoever. There’s no mention of it in any of the diary entries for that year I’ve so far read. In fact there are only a few mentions in passing of Claudio himself, just as one of John’s gang.
‘You wrote me a song?’
He tips his head to one side and closes his eyes, transported by his music.
‘I think it’s the best one I ever wrote.’
‘Claudio, that was a lovely thing to do. I’m really touched. I’m sorry I don’t remember. That year was such a blur, with everything else that was going on. When did you give it to me?’
He gazes at me, still disappointed. ‘I put a cassette through your door. It must have been just before you started going out with John. I was so jealous when I found out.’
‘Maybe I never got it?’ I venture. ‘I didn’t even know you knew my address. Are you sure you got the right house?’
He jumps up again and busies himself at the hob, stirring rice and turning the gas off under the curry. ‘Yes, I am,’ he says curtly. ‘You thanked me the next time you saw me in the New Inn. I thought you might have rung me up or something—I put my number on the tape—but you didn’t. Then you and John got together.’
Wow. I’m surprised I didn’t remember, not least because the act of writing me a song would have revealed Claudio’s crush, and I had always been so flattered to learn that someone fancied me. But I have absolutely no recollection of any of it—the song, thanking him in the pub. I don’t even remember ever having a single conversation with him, him liking me, none of it. He had just been someone who hung around with our crowd. It’s so strange. My memory is bad, but it’s not that bad. And I’ve not yet spotted anything in my diary about him other than a mention in passing. Perhaps it’s him who’s misremembering, or who has rewritten history. After all, he’s clearly mentally ill.
‘It was a very long time ago, Claudio. Over twenty-five years. And my memory has always been terrible.’ I hesitate, not sure if what I’m going to say next is a good idea or not: ‘I didn’t know you liked me then. But I was so crazy about John that I suppose I didn’t notice anyone else. He was the love of my life. Richard—my ex-husband—he liked me too, apparently, but I didn’t know that either.’
‘I remember Richard,’ Claudio says, his lip curled. ‘He used to hang around you like a pathetic little puppy.’
‘Did he?’
‘You must have noticed, surely.’
I shake my head. ‘Everything from that time is such a blur. I suppose I was in a state about my dad, and I was obsessed with John. I was in my own little world.’
‘When did you and Richard get together, then?’ He says Richard’s name as though it is the most abhorrent word in the English language.
‘A lot later. After university. We started hanging out back in Brockhurst, just as friends, and things just sort of developed from there.’
I don’t want to tell Claudio how it really was. How, shortly after the first few times Richard and I hung out, he confessed it had been he who had saved me in that alley, my little ‘knight in shining mac’, as I put it in my diary.
I remember when Richard told me. We’d been spending time together for a few weeks, having reconnected when I was working, temporarily, in the pharmacy at Boots. Richard had come in one day, all swollen and yellow from having his wisdom teeth out, and I think the state of him, looking so vulnerable and hideous, had made me let down my guard enough to agree to go out for a drink with him. It became a regular event. I was still hurting from losing John, even almost five years on, so Richard and I hadn’t kissed or anything—I hadn’t had any sort of romance at university, either, having rebuffed all advances. Yet I found myself warming to Richard, starting to gradually trust him a tiny bit, because he was generous and funny and kind.
He’d been walking me back to Mum’s from the pub, and we passed the alley. Its dark maw gaped at me as we passed and even then, several years after the event, I couldn’t prevent a shudder.
‘It still scares you, doesn’t it?’ he said softly, once we were safely past.
I stopped. ‘What?’
He put his hands on my upper arms and gripped me gently, his hazel eyes dark under a dim streetlight. ‘Didn’t you know?’
‘What?’
For a moment I thought he was going to say that my attacker was his dad, or something ridiculous like that. I started to shake.
‘I was there that night. I was the one who saw what was happening to you and ran in.’
I stared at him
. Of course it was! I couldn’t think how I hadn’t realised before. I’d just tried so hard to block the whole thing out of my mind. I opened my mouth to speak, to say thank you—but what came out instead was a furious screech of ingratitude: ‘And you never told me before?’
Then I actually ran away, leaving him standing there looking hurt and stricken. I ran home, just as I had done on the night of the attack, so excruciatingly embarrassed that he had seen me like that, with a stranger groping me, that I refused to speak to him for three months. To my shame, I ignored his calls and his letters and the gorgeous love tokens he left on the doorstep for me—a book of romantic poetry, compilation tapes, a moonstone necklace that I still wear.
He later admitted that he’d been following me home that night, that he had quite often done so when he saw me out and about in town, even when I was with John. It made me feel for the first time that odd, confusing frisson of gratitude and discomfort that comes of being loved from afar.
I hate to admit it, but I feel flashes of it now with Claudio too. Just flashes—obviously I’d rather be anywhere else than here with him—but a tiny, tiny part of me thinks, ‘Wow, he really loves me . . .’ and down in the insecure depths of me, I’m impressed.
How sad is that?
Claudio looks around for a knife to slit open the plastic packaging of the chapattis he’s bought, then remembers that he’s hidden or disposed of the knife block and its inhabitants. I have to suppress a smile as he tries and fails to rip open the packet by hand, then with a normal knife, and eventually by stabbing the tines of a fork into the plastic. He must have wrestled with it for a full three or four minutes. Serves him right, the dysfunctional idiot. All the time his trousers are getting more and more bunched up around his arse as he gets increasingly flustered.
Finally he manages to extract the chapattis, which he shoves in the oven for a few minutes while he dishes up the curry on my two Pyrex plates—at least I’m spared the plastic flowery picnic plates. He puts one in front of me with a flourish.
