Until Death

by Knight, Ali

  Medea didn’t turn her head.

  ‘It would be better for the children if we separated.’ Kelly grew bolder; her argument had not been rejected so far.

  Medea took the cloth she had been holding and began to fold it in half, creating smaller and smaller squares as she went. ‘It sounds to me that you’re being very selfish. You can’t just walk away when things get tough.’

  It was as if she had slapped Kelly. ‘Medea, he’s got a mistress.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. He’s married to you.’

  ‘He’s having an affair with Sylvie.’

  Her mother-in-law’s face contorted like she’d tasted something bad. ‘If he is, then that’s partly your responsibility. You need to think about what you’re not giving him, what he’s seeking elsewhere. To love and to serve are in your marriage vows—’

  ‘I don’t believe what I’m hearing—’

  ‘There are a lot of pressures on a powerful man. You need to support him, help him through. You need to think about the family name.’

  ‘We need to think about the happiness of our children.’

  Medea had folded the square as tightly as possible and now was unfolding it, reversing her actions. ‘Where were you living when you met Christos?’

  ‘In a flat in the Elephant and Castle.’

  ‘Did the paper peel? Could you smell the stale cigarettes from other flats, Florence looked after by whoever came to hand so you could wash dishes and serve?’

  ‘I loved him so much. I have tried and tried to make this marriage work—’

  ‘You think that a few years down the line you can walk away? Abandon the man who saved you, who pulled you from the gutter and placed you up here? Who gave you everything you wanted? Look at yourself, girl, if you’re in a cage, it’s a golden cage.’

  Kelly tried to keep calm. ‘You know him better than anyone, Medea. You know in the long run this is the only solution. At the moment he flatly refuses to consider a separation. Please help him to see sense.’

  ‘You need to find your sense of duty.’

  That was it. What Kelly had given up to do her duty! She didn’t see her mother or old friends, couldn’t visit her home town. She had faced down injustice and it had cost her nearly everything … Kelly could control herself no longer. ‘You shove duty down my throat so hard you make me want to puke. He’s a brute and you know it. You can cover your ears and shut your eyes but I know you hear it and you see it, what he does to me!’

  Medea was unmoved. ‘My husband was a very religious man. A union was sacrosanct to him. A marriage would be lifelong, whatever hardships were thrown up along the way. What he believed, we believe. Union, family honour, stability, they are more important than the whims of a girl from nowhere.’

  Kelly had a memory of the arguments she used to have with her own mother about Michael, about how he wasn’t good enough for her, that he was a wrong’un. Her mother was keen to stop her daughter repeating her mistakes. She hadn’t seen Mum in years; the aftermath of the trial made it difficult, her fear for Florence meaning she had been scared to go back home. And now she was broken and she didn’t know how to get back in touch. ‘I may be no one from nowhere, I may have had no money but I know what’s right and what’s wrong. You’ve raised a psychotic brute and you’ve blinded yourself to it.’

  ‘How dare you talk about my son like that!’ Medea threw the cloth down on the side.

  ‘Let the children grow up in a happier home. As a mother, make him let me go. I beg you.’

  ‘You’ll be on your knees begging a long time. Only God can free you from this marriage.’

  ‘Please, Medea, help me!’

  ‘I was married for forty-five years, Kelly. Long years. I nursed my husband through the cancer at the end. I emptied those bowls of blood, stood by him as he moaned in pain. I did it. I endured. I took pride in my service to my marriage. I put the lives of others before myself. There is a glory in the selfless life …’

  Kelly couldn’t take any more. She slammed her hands over her ears and let out an incoherent wail in the kitchen, the frustration and the horror of the many potential years to come bubbling from deep inside her.

  ‘Do that, if it makes you feel better. Take your pills. But he will never let you go.’ And Medea turned and began the never-ending and ineffectual wiping away of the stains.

  7

  ‘Can we play planes?’ shouted Yannis, jumping up and down and pleading. Florence joined in, their faces staring up at her. Kelly smiled. Medea had gone home, and the bitter aftertaste of their argument was washed from her mouth by her children. They were just back from school, the time of day she liked the most, particularly on the days Medea didn’t come fussing into their lives, and before Christos got home. After the commotion so early in the day and after the customs officers had left, Christos had gone to work and she had spent a long time wondering where to hide the passports in a way that couldn’t be seen by the relentless green light in the corner of every room. She had decided in the end simply to leave them where they were, in her back pocket.

  ‘Come on then.’ They bundled into the kids’ bedroom and Kelly lay down on the floor, her legs stretching up towards the ceiling. She grabbed Yannis’s hands and put the soles of her feet on his stomach and lifted him into the air. He squealed with delight. ‘Arms out wide, make a plane,’ said Kelly. He purposefully stuck out his solid little legs rigid behind him, jutting his chin forward purposefully. ‘Turbulence,’ said Kelly theatrically and began to jiggle her feet as he protested at being bounced up and down. ‘Coming in for landing,’ she said and lifted her legs behind her head so that Yannis could roll over on his hands and land with a thump on the carpet behind her head.

  ‘Again, again,’ he shouted.

  ‘The planes are stacking, Yannis, Florence first.’

  She laid one leg straight out on the floor and the other up towards the ceiling. Florence was slim and light, and took off on Kelly’s one raised leg, arching her neck and flinging her arms wide, graceful as a swan, her stomach a taut drum on the sole of Kelly’s foot. Kelly looked up at her daughter hovering, eyes closed, before she started jiggling her leg and Florence crashed to the floor. Her children shrieked and Kelly’s heart soared. Her children were happy; they were loved. She sometimes had her happy moments. Maybe she should endure it all for the sake of the children. Get some therapy, maybe try to make it through the day without feeling the crippling fear, of her husband and of the past … She glanced out of the kids’ bedroom and saw the office door, bolted shut. As if. Even if she wanted to put the passports back, pretend she’d never done it, the door was locked and she couldn’t.

  ‘Again, again,’ shouted Yannis as he clambered on to the bed to launch himself at her. Yannis was in the air above her now, making loud revving noises when the lift door slid apart and Kelly instinctively dropped her legs, Yannis clattering to the floor in an untidy heap.

  Christos was home. The game and everything else was instantly forgotten as she searched his face for signs she might be in danger, that he might repeat what had happened a couple of weeks ago. She tried to anticipate what he might do or say. She mentally ticked off with a flash of panic whether she had done everything in the right way since he had left this morning. After all, today had started with a surprise and that had thrown the routine out. She had laid out the newspapers, put his clothes away just as he liked. Was there cold water in the fridge? God, had she forgotten the water? She sat up in a hurry. ‘How did it go at the office? Is there anything you need help with?’

  They were playing the charade of the happy family. He shook his head, one hand holding a briefcase and the other smoothing back his hair. He still wore his tie. She allowed herself to breathe out. Still wearing the tie was a good sign. When he got frustrated he had been known to rip it off and whip the furniture with it, before moving on to other things. But he seemed keen to see the children, who gave him a hug. ‘I’ve got a call to make,’ he said. ‘I won’t get my phone
back until tomorrow; it’s unbelievable what an inconvenience it is.’ He made to leave the room, then turned back. ‘If customs come by again and ask you questions, you tell me, OK?’

  She nodded and tried to swallow the saliva draining into her mouth. The threat hung heavy in the air. They were to stick together, through anything. ‘Do you want me to make you some dinner?’ she called after him. There was no reply. She thought very hard, trying to concentrate through her chattering fear. No reply meant yes to food. She sank back down to the floor on her back to calm herself for a moment.

  ‘Mum, what’s that?’ she heard Florence ask.

  Kelly opened her eyes. Florence was sitting cross-legged on the bed, staring at her stomach. Her baggy black shirt had rucked up around her waist and her trousers had worked their way down low on her hips and her daughter was staring at her stomach. Kelly yanked her shirt back down. ‘It’s nothing.’ Florence was silent. ‘I accidentally splashed myself with boiling water when I was making tea. It looks much worse than it is.’ She had the sensation of staring down at herself from above, unable to recognise this woman who lied to her own daughter, who made light of her searing injury, who was so broken and cowed.

  She followed Christos out of the room, as obedient as a dog to its master, and was blindsided by what he said next.

  ‘I had a call at the office from Yannis’s school today.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘It seems he’s been in trouble again.’

  ‘That’s strange, they didn’t mention anything to me when I went to pick him up. What did he do?’

  ‘Threatened a teacher or something.’

  ‘Threatened?’

  ‘He probably brandished a ruler, you know what kids are like.’

  ‘I don’t understand—’

  ‘What’s to understand?’ he said, irritated. ‘It’s simple. He’s been misbehaving.’

  ‘No, I mean, they didn’t phone me.’ She paused, knowing she was entering dangerous territory by bringing it up. ‘They normally do if there’s a problem.’

  ‘I am their father.’

  ‘Yes, but often you’re busy, in meetings. I would have thought they would have contacted me.’

  ‘They want to see us tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow? But it’s Saturday.’

  ‘The older boys have Saturday school.’ He gave her a look like something was her fault. ‘It must be important to call us in then, but I’m too busy, you’ll have to go on your own.’

  ‘OK.’ She paused. ‘There’s something else, Christos. The night of the party, Florence said something about me going away. Sylvie told her I was going away at the end of the month. I didn’t know what she meant.’

  The home phone began to ring. Christos turned away so she couldn’t see his face. ‘She must have got that wrong.’

  She tried again. ‘Florence doesn’t usually misinterpret things.’

  ‘I don’t agree. She’s a bit like you, a bit of a fantasist.’

  She watched him walk away into the bedroom. So that was how this was to be spun. Christos and Medea would make her out to be unhinged, belittle her sufferings.

  ‘Mummy?’ It was Yannis, calling for her.

  She turned back into the children’s room. ‘Come on, let’s fly to the clouds and back.’

  ‘I don’t want to fly any more. I want to kill Barbie. Die, Barbie, die!’ He picked up Florence’s old toy and banged her head against the bedpost three times before Kelly yanked the doll from his hand and placed her on a high shelf beyond his reach.

  8

  Kelly woke with a start, heart pounding from a bad dream. In the half-light her youngest daughter Amber was climbing on to the foot of the bed in her Winnie the Pooh pyjamas. Amber turned and sat cross-legged and smiled at Kelly, her dimples huge in her little face. Kelly’s heart soared and she blinked. The end of the bed was empty. Her daughter wasn’t there. She wasn’t in Southampton, the man next to her wasn’t Michael. She could feel Christos’s leg with its scratchy hair, lying heavy on her thigh. She forced herself not to whimper. Christos didn’t like it when she cried for her lost family. She was now the wife of a man she feared, in a flat with no air in a city she didn’t like. She felt she was lying not in a bed but a box, with a heavy black lid that was sliding slowly over her.

  She wriggled out from under Christos’s leg and got out of bed, the tears slipping silently down her cheeks. She walked through into the bathroom but didn’t turn on the light, she didn’t want Christos to wake. She began ticking off hiding places for the passports. She knew Medea searched the house under the guise of cleaning it and cameras covered the areas that Medea didn’t. At the moment the passports were still in the back pocket of her jeans, tossed casually on the chair in the bedroom, but if they were found she could be in very great danger. She was under no illusions as to the violence her husband was capable of.

  She opened the bathroom cabinet. The panty pads were still in their opened box. Her eyes rested on the third in on the left. Wrapped inside the mint-green cover was the one cashpoint card she had managed to apply for and hide a few months after Christos had started to question every bit of spending she’d incurred on their joint account. She walked soundlessly out of the bedroom and across the corridor to the children’s bedroom, sandwiched between the lift and the stairs. The green light on the bottom of the hall camera pierced the darkness.

  There were ample bedrooms in the flat, but the children preferred to share. She took pleasure in how close they were, half-brother and sister. She had never had siblings, it had been just her and Mum. Yannis had thrown off his covers and lay sprawled the wrong way round on the bed. His checked pyjama top had ridden up, exposing his stomach. She watched the line of sweat on his hairline as he snuffled and snorted in his sleep, his mouth working through his dreams. She sat down on a small armchair and pulled up the blind that covered the window. The view this side of the flat was north, over the wide stretch of train tracks from St Pancras right below her, the tracks of King’s Cross Station to her right, snaking and curving away through north and east London. At this hour, just a touch before dawn, the railway was still moving, lights coming and going. The inky black crescent that was the Grand Union Canal, which ran to Birmingham and the heart of England, bisected the railways, and she spotted the faintest winking red light of a cyclist heading north past the side of the British Library. She didn’t know all the destinations served by those trains, all of the north of England and Scotland, Paris and Brussels and places further afield. They were a tantalising glimpse of all the places Christos wouldn’t let her go. Those trains could take her back home to her mother, to her old life, if only she could go there.

  Sometimes Christos changed the code on the lift so she couldn’t get out. He would take the children to school and leave her there, shut up like a princess in a twisted story, invisible in her tower. The first time he had done that she had ranted and railed, the second time less so. Now she endured. On those days she would sit here in the children’s bedroom, her head resting on the double glazing, and she would stare for hours at the lives of others beneath her, feeling invisible to the entire world bar her children.

  She missed the beach. She used to race Michael on beaches near their home, her husband just beyond her fingertips, his shouts loud and free, his long legs thumping across the sand and his heels leaving deep holes when he suddenly changed direction. But now those memories felt so distant they were less substantial than a dream. She had met Christos when the foundations of who she was had been hollowed out. Kelly knew that her identity was buttressed by her children, family and friends, but these had been stripped away, leaving behind a teetering façade overlain with grief.

  Christos had picked apart what was left. Now he was smothering her to death, slowly erasing the other facets of her life that didn’t revolve around him or the children. The fact that Yannis and Florence needed her was what stopped her disappearing altogether.

  She stared out, trying to summon the belief t
hat she could live through Yannis and Florence – that it was enough. She still clung to her job. Christos let her work doing what she loved and before she had met him that hadn’t been possible, she had had to spend long hours as a waitress to pay the bills. Yannis twisted in his sleep and threw out an arm. A mother’s love is boundless. A mother would die for her children. She endured the life she did for them and she prayed that they would never know the dark side of that life.

  She shifted in her chair and put her hand on her stomach, feeling the undulations of the scar tissue through her T-shirt. A shaft of anger pierced her; the old defiance was still burning there, the old Kelly was buried under the layers of grief and shame. She knew what was right and wrong. She watched a train snake away from King’s Cross, wobbling as it picked up speed. The passports were a piece of good fortune that she had a duty to use. Since Christos would never give her or the children up voluntarily, she had to run, and run far. She thought about Lindsey, her friend from when she worked as a waitress. Lindsey had gone back to the country a long time ago, but Kelly had her email address.

  She heard a faint shuffling out in the corridor. It sounded like someone walking around. Maybe Christos was up. She stood uncertainly and came out of the bedroom into the dark corridor. She stared for a long moment into the deep shadows, the flat silent, the faintest hum of night-time traffic outside. Christos had never hurt the children. Yet this didn’t give her comfort, it was the thing that terrified her most: that put her and her children in the greatest danger. She turned with a heavy heart back to her bedroom. She had read about mothers attaining superhuman strength to save their children – women able to lift cars off bodies, break down doors with their bare hands. Because the day he laid a finger on one of them would be the day she was taken away from them, because it would be the day she murdered him.