He did these things to make her feel special and desirable. And it worked. But she had begun to feel the space between them more and more. When she was younger and had only been growing accustomed to Jackson’s desires she did not notice: she focused more on when he was there. Now, as she found herself depending on him more, she had begun to focus on the time he did not spend with her. And her focus on that empty place in her life began to make her feel angry and depressed. Part of her wanted to demand that he leave Lula for her, but she knew she could not ask that, so instead she decided she wanted someone else, too.
School had always been an unhappy experience for Dakota, who had never fitted in a primary school and went on to secondary school with the same problems. Her parents had died not long after she started at St Mary’s High School, and she had taken time off school for a while to help Lula get herself back together in some way. She knew that she would be put back a year but she had no friends to miss anyway.
By the time she had returned, the other pupils looked on her as an even bigger freak who had somehow wangled a year off school. The fact that her parents had died didn’t matter, in the minds of the crowd; she was probably a bit mental now her parents were dead, and the music she listened to meant only one thing: she was totally weird.
There were of course a few other kids who liked the same music as her, but they were all a lot older than her so they didn’t really hang around together.
The girls of the school hated her for how different she was and how unafraid she was of their taunting, so she kept her distance from them and often hung around with a group of boys, feeling more at ease with them than with girls. Girls were far often too bitchy and spiteful for her to trust any of them. Instead she kept it simple by hanging out as ‘one of the lads’ and they accepted her. Two of the boys she was friends with lived locally, so they often met up at weekends to sit in the park and smoke cigarettes. One day she went over to her friend Jimmy’s house for an afternoon of computer games. When she got there, the door was answered by a tall handsome boy of around eighteen. He had short spiky blond hair and an angular face, similar to Jackson’s, only younger and somehow softer.
“Umm is Jimmy home?” she asked after a few seconds of silence.
“Yeah, you’re Jimmy’s girlfriend?” asked the boy, a look of disbelief on his face.
“Uh no!” She almost laughed. “I’m his friend. We’re just friends.”
“Oh sorry, come in,” he said stepping aside. As she walked in past him she looked up into his eyes and he winked fiendishly. He laughed as she shut the door behind her.
“I’m Charlie. What’s your name, gorgeous?”
“Dakota.” She smiled back at him.
She found that out of her years of silence and sexual secrecy, she had developed a sudden desire to flirt.
It only took a few more visits to Jimmy’s house before Dakota managed to get into bed with Charlie, or rather into a car with him. She did not want Jackson to know about him yet, and Charlie did not want anyone to know he fancied a fourteen-year-old. But when they finally got down to business, he was shocked to find she was more sexually experienced than him. She refused to answer any of his questions on how she had come to know so much at her young age, and instead told him that he could come over to her house one night and they could have sex there instead of in his car all the time.
Dakota began to fill up with loathing every time she had sex with Charlie. She had no real feelings for him, and she just wanted to use him, to make Jackson jealous. She also hated it because she knew she meant nothing to Charlie. He used her as much as she was using him, and it made her feel like a whore.
But she gained some satisfaction from it. Though it made her feel disgusted with herself, she felt she was taking something out of life for herself, something she could shove in Jackson’s face as if to say, “I can do this on my own!” She wanted Jackson to be as jealous of her as she was growing of him.
One night she invited Charlie over when she knew that Jackson and Lula would be at home.
“Hello love, who is this?” asked Lula when Charlie arrived.
“Oh, this is my boyfriend, Charlie,” replied Dakota loudly enough to make Jackson come storming out of the lounge.
“D, I didn’t know you had a boyfriend,” Lula replied, smiling falsely at the obviously much older boy standing beside her sister.
“Well, I kind of kept him a secret – y’know, like you did with Jackson?” replied Dakota, feeling a wriggle of pleasure as she saw Lula’s expression change and almost heard the words ‘that means I can’t tell her off’ flash through Lula’s eyes.
“How old are you?” Jackson asked Charlie brusquely.
“Eighteen, and I know Dakota is younger than me, but she is very mature,” Charlie said, trying to quell any kind of argument.
Dakota watched Jackson’s expression turn from interest to anger.
“Well, Dakota isn’t allowed friends over on a school night so you’ll have to go,”
“Shouldn’t we discuss this first, Jackson?” said Lula, quietly turning to her boyfriend who by now was visibly enraged but was keeping it harnessed.
“No, Dakota knows the rules: no guests on a school night… Oh yeah, and no eighteen-year-old boyfriends, so just bugger off, OK?” Jackson’s voice rose slightly and Lula looked embarrassed, while Dakota was almost physically wriggling with pleasure.
“Look mate, it’s all right—” began Charlie, but before he could say another word, Jackson was frog-marching him out of the front door, whispering in his ear, loud enough for Dakota to hear, “Come near her again and I’ll call the police.”
The door slammed shut and Dakota began to feign disgust.
“Lula, he can’t do that – he’s not my dad. I can see whoever I want.”
“You are a bit too young to be dating an eighteen-year-old, sweetie,” replied Lula, softly.
“I might not be your dad, but I look after you and I don’t want you messing around with stupid teenagers under this roof,” Jackson said, growling.
“It’s not your flamin’ house. Our parents left us this; it’s ours. I can do what I like,” she snapped back, loving every second of his rage.
“Yes, but I pay the bills, and I put food on the table, so as long as I do that I think I have some say in how this house works.”
“He is right, sweetie. You should respect his wishes. Now go and do your homework, and we don’t want you seeing that boy anymore, OK? Wait till you’re a bit older for all that relationship stuff.” Lula spoke softly and touched her sister’s hair briefly.
“Bit fucking late for all that,” snapped Dakota and shot an angry glance at Jackson, her own rage simmering again.
That night, after Lula had gone to sleep, Dakota got into bed and deliberately didn’t play her Nick Cave CD. She already knew he would come storming up the stairs at any moment, ready for a fight.
Sure enough, just after 1am, he stormed into her room smelling of whisky, his eyes wild with anger.
“What the fuck are you playing at?” he growled, his voice low and terrible.
“What?”
“That prick you invited here. What are you doing with him?”
“Nothing that you didn’t teach me.” She smiled and giggled. His rage boiled over and he flew across the room grabbing her throat with his large hands, the force of his anger pinning her against the wall.
“And who said you could share that with anyone else? That’s what I am here for. How dare you go fucking around behind my back!”
“Well, you fuck her all the time. Why can’t I get some elsewhere?” She struggled to get the words out under his grip.
“You are mine! I never said you could go elsewhere. We are together and that means you don’t get to go around letting any old bloke stick his dick in you. You get it?” He was still speaking low so as not to wake Lula but he wanted to shout. Dakota could feel the rage in his body. He was shaking, and while she had never seen him like this, she had fe
lt his strength before, all the times that she played at submission. It wasn’t the first time he had used this force with her, and although she could feel fear thumping wildly in her chest, each word he spoke with anger and jealousy made her want him more.
Her little experiment had worked. She had reduced Jackson to an angry wreck by letting him imagine her with another man. She knew that she had some power over him then. She knew he was so obsessed with her he couldn’t stand the thought of her being anyone else’s lover. She knew that she owned him as much as he owned her, and that if she wanted to, she could hurt him.
After that, it became a game between them. He would start touching Lula and being intimate with her in front of Dakota. Sometimes he even left his bedroom door open when he and Lula were having sex, just so that Dakota could hear them.
In return, Dakota would write little notes to Jackson, describing sexual encounters she had had with Charlie in great detail, hiding the notes in his trouser pocket so he would find them while he was at work. Or she would say goodbye to Charlie, with a passionate kiss on the doorstep in full view of Jackson. Jackson would always chase Charlie off, or threaten to call the police, but he never did. Dakota knew his temper was dangerous. It often boiled over, leaving Dakota with bruises she had to hide. At one point she had to wear a neck scarf for a whole week to hide the huge bruises his hands had left on her throat. She was realising more and more that she had a reason to be afraid of him, but she could not stop provoking him. She felt like a child with a new toy – a very dangerous and volatile toy whose unpredictable nature kept her wanting more and more.
And every night that followed a jealousy-invoking encounter, they had angry, violent sex together, laying claim on each other all over again.
It was five years since her parents had died in a car accident one summer night. A few months had passed since that particular anniversary, and Dakota was back at the cemetery to wish her mother happy birthday. She had stopped by the church that day. Even though she clung to the religious icons her mother adored, Dakota had stopped attending Mass on a Sunday. And since her relationship with Jackson had begun, she had felt too ashamed to even set foot in the church. But that day it felt right.
The church was small and cold. Her footsteps on the wooden floor echoed around the walls and ceiling, and she eventually stopped to sit down on one of the pews. The faint smell of incense still lingered, as her eyes travelled around the Stations of the Cross wood carvings that hung evenly spaced around the church walls. Her childhood returned to her in a series of religious memories: saying the Creed in Latin every Sunday, the taste of the wafer bread and how it often stuck to the roof of her mouth. She remembered Easter and its long church services, the black sooty mark of Ash Wednesday on her forehead and not being allowed to wash it off, the feel of palm leaves and the long walk up to the alter to kiss the feet of the crucified Christ. She remembered reading the Bible at home during Lent, Mum and Dad and Lula and her, sitting in the lounge taking turns to read sections from the gospels. Dakota always loved reading the parts in red ink, because only Jesus’s dialogue was printed in red.
There had always been comfort in going to church when she was a little girl, but as she sat there now, she noticed that everything seemed creepier than before. The shroud that sat ghostly over the tabernacle, the long empty aisle to the alter, the staring dead eyes of the statues, blood frozen over the holes in Jesus’s hands, and the closed doors that led to places she would never see, their mystery frightening her in the dark cold church, its wooden echoes reminding her more and more of a huge coffin.
It was a cold afternoon in early November outside, and she was alone at the graves as Lula had visited earlier that day. Dakota stared down at the huge bunch of flowers her sister had laid and was pleased she had waited until twilight to come by herself.
Hannah and Jack Crow lay beside the tiny graves of their lost children. She had not visited since July, whereas Lula came by whenever one of her dead siblings had a birthday. Dakota felt less inclined to do so, as she never knew any of them. She also worried that visiting the grave left her more vulnerable to her parents’ discovery of her relationship with Jackson. She knew it was silly, that they probably visited the house all the time to keep a ghostly watch on her misdeeds, but she felt easier in the belief that they had no idea about her life now… unless he visited the grave and informed them of it.
Had there been fewer clouds she could have watched the sunset, but instead she stared at the cold grey headstones, feeling half-angry at her parents for leaving her when she was so young, and feeling half-grateful.
What would her life be like now if they were still alive? Jackson would never have moved in nor had the opportunity to take her virginity. Perhaps she would have had a boyfriend of her own by now, one that she did not have to share. Or would he have found a way anyway? Was it her destiny to belong to him?
It made her so angry that she had to keep quiet about Jackson, that she had to deal with losing her virginity and having an abortion all alone. The few girls who didn’t pick on her at school always talked about their own exploits, and she had to lie over and over and only admit to her relationship with Charlie. She could never tell anyone, no matter how much she trusted them. And every night she had to let her lover walk away down the hall and climb into bed with his girlfriend. All her pain and confusion dealt with alone, and in silence. She knew the consequences if she ever told Lula: their pretend-perfect world would shatter, and she would lose Lula and Jackson forever. Her life wouldn’t be worth living. As far as she was concerned, the only real and permanent things in her life were Lula and Jackson. If she didn’t have them, she would have nothing left, not a friend or relative to be there for her. And above all things, she feared being alone.
The chill winds of autumn whipped her hair around her face. Leaves scuttled around her feet like scarabs and she wished that the gravesite was more sheltered. Skies overhead took on the twilight grey of a promised storm as the first spots of rain darkened tiny circles on the concrete headstones of her dead family.
“Thought I’d find you here,” said a voice behind her. She turned to see Jackson, his hair tousled and blown across his face, his blue eyes accentuated by the black hair that semi-shielded them.
“What are you doing here?” she asked frostily, turning back to her parents’ grave.
“I wanted to see you alone, somewhere other than your room.” He smiled briefly and brought a lit cigarette up to his cold lips.
“Why? What do you want? I just want to visit my parents alone!” She heard anger in her voice. Somewhere in her head she was afraid that her parents were there, reading the body language between them, putting two and two together. She was afraid that they would be angry with her, shouting in disgust somewhere beyond her hearing.
“They aren’t here, D,” he said as though he had been reading her mind. She turned her green eyes to him, surprised. “You think they’d be hanging around this place?” He laughed. “They’ve probably been reincarnated by now. Their souls could be in Africa or Russia, living new lives, unable to remember the life they had with you.”
She wanted to be angry with him for ruining her graveside ritual, but she tended to agree with him. She believed in reincarnation, but she had never put that belief into action where her parents were concerned. She had never imagined her parents being born again somewhere else, starting a new life far from her. And those few words spoken by Jackson had made her feel altogether stupid for standing staring at lumps of stone and marble.
“Seems so silly, really,” she began, not looking at him, “to come here every year just to stare at stones and flowers, just to let the dead know we haven’t forgotten them, that we remember the significance of the day, that we will always remember them and we will always miss them. But they aren’t even here, not my parents, or my brothers and sisters. Not any of these people. All there is is stones, words, bones… and regret…”
Rain was falling more heavily now, and her han
ds felt cold. Realising that she had been speaking aloud, she turned back to look at Jackson. His face was intense, as though he wanted to shout or scream. But instead he reached out and put his hand on her face, his fingers wet, his hair moving less, now it was heavy with rain.
“I love you so much,” he whispered, and a tear broke from his jewel blue eyes.
Dakota suddenly filled with emotion. Her stomach surged and her heart flew up into her throat. Tears brimmed over in her eyes and she turned her cold face into his hand, smelling his skin, feeling the smoothness of his fingers.
Without a word, he took her hand and led her away from the grave, further into the thicket of tombs and headstones. In moments, they were sheltering inside a large tomb, rain clicking at the stained glass window, and he was kissing her, his hands raking through her wet hair, his lips roaming wildly about her face and neck.
Dakota realised where they were when she saw the name ‘Boncoeur’ on the sepulchre. He had taken her to the place where he had taken her sister’s virginity many years before. She had heard the story from her sister’s lips a hundred times and now she was there, in the same tomb with the same man. She had never been here with Jackson before and yet it all seemed strangely like déjà vu.
“No wait,” he said, pulling away from her. Again she wondered if he had read her mind. “Not here, come on, let’s go to the woods.”
Before she could speak he was pulling her back out into the rain and leading her off to the woods that lay beside the cemetery. Behind the cemetery wall, the fields rolled on for miles, rippling in the rain and wind. She knew Pan’s Wood well, for she had taken walks there all her life. As a small child, she’d joined the whole family for Sunday walks and picnics there, and as she grew older she used to take walks alone with Lula.
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