by Steve Harris
Janie could neither speak nor move. Billy-Joe laid down the keys on the arm of the sofa now, as if challenging her to try to take them and her eyes followed his empty left hand as it moved back to his lap. You could tell how close he was to violence by keeping a careful watch on his hands. When they clenched into fists things would take a distinct turn for the worse. The hand that now fell into his lap was open and relaxed. Then, for the first time, she looked at his right hand. His business hand. The one which had skinned knuckles from hitting her. When she spotted that hand, she began to feel as if she might faint.
Because Billy-Joe was holding a pair of pliers.
Billy grinned at her. ‘And you were right, my little babe. Old Billy’s Peter won’t perk. I’ve pulled him, twisted him, stroked him and prodded him and if I’d been able to bend over far enough I would have given him a nice wet kiss, but poor old Peter ain’t interested. I gave due consideration to your argument about it being the booze that causes it, but it don’t hang together. ‘Cause I’ve been sober all day you see. So I’ve reached a conclusion and that conclusion is, it ain’t my fault. And if it ain’t my fault, it must be yours. And I think it has something to do with that better-than-thou way you’ve had about you ever since I gave up my job to become a professional guitarist. Y’know, that idea you got in your head that you’re wearing the trousers around this house. That you’re the almighty breadwinner. It just makes me mad. And it’s because I’m mad with you all the time that Peter won’t play. Do you get all this? Nod if you do, or I’ll come over there and make you nod, rolling-pin or no rolling-pin.’
Janie nodded
Billy-Joe grinned and nodded back. ‘Now, another question I have been considering is this: what should I do about it? Have you any good ideas, O talented editor?’
Janie found her voice. ‘Let me go,’ she managed and cursed herself for sounding so feeble and terrified.
Billy-Joe screwed up his face and knitted his brow. Then he shook his head as if he was suddenly confused. ‘Go? You mean to say that you were lying to me earlier?’
‘I want to go, Billy,’ Janie said. ‘Please give me the car keys. We can talk about it later, when I feel better.’
He shook his head. ‘If I let you go now, you won’t come back, will you? So we stay here and thrash it out. Now what bright ideas do you have?’
‘Don’t hit me any more!’ Janie said. She’d meant her voice to sound even, but it came out of her mouth sounding like a cross between a plea and a command.
‘Well it’s a crying shame you think that’s the answer, babe, because it means our views are now diametrically opposed. You see, I wasn’t telling the whole truth about Peter. The fact is, that he ain’t dead, just sleeping. I know that because when I reached the final solution concerning what I ought to do about you, old Peter began to perk up. And I bet you can’t guess what that final solution is.’
‘You’re going to kill me,’ Janie said with the utmost certainty. She also knew with the utmost certainty that the front door was open and only about four feet away from her and that she should put herself through it as quickly as possible. And she also knew that the moment she tried to move her iced legs, they were going to betray her and throw her to the ground.
Billy-Joe chuckled, low in his throat. ‘Now what good would that do anyone? You’re my wife, Janie, and I only want things to be back like they were before. No babe, I don’t intend to kill you, all I intend to do is to get your respect. Get the head-of-the-house trousers off you and put ‘em back on me where they belong. What d’you think about that?’
Janie knew exactly what she thought about that. She thought that Billy-Joe had consciously discovered what his subconscious knew when he was drunk. That violence wasn’t just a substitute for sex, but an actual expression of it. The power bit of it anyway. Billy-Joe had discovered that the sober thought of beating up his wife gave him a hard-on.
‘So, today’s lessons are these: Number one, you don’t think of running out on your old man. You don’t even consider it for one moment, ever. Got me?’
Janie nodded.
‘And number two, men don’t make passes at girls who have no front teeth. So you can think of what I’m going to do as a little favour to you. I’ll still love you when you’ve got a three-quarter-inch gap between your upper front teeth and that’s the important thing. Now, I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. There’s two ways we can do it. The easy way and the hard way. The easy way is, you come over here, lie down with your head in my lap and I remove those loose teeth of yours with these pliers.’ He picked up the pliers in both hands and worked them: open and shut, open and shut. Then he grinned.
Janie could barely bring herself to believe that this man -who she had once loved so deeply - expected her to lie down on his lap and allow him to yank out two of her teeth with a pair of pliers.
‘So which way d’you want to do it?’ he was asking. ‘The easy way, or the hard way?’ He paused, looking at her. ‘It’s not that I want to do it Janie - I really do love you - it’s just that you have to be put in your place. Do you understand that?’
‘Yeah,’ she heard herself say.
‘How about you come over here, lie on my lap. I read your goodbye letter, then I make you eat it, then I pull your teeth and it’ll be all over and we can be friends. It won’t even hurt - those top teeth are already waggling about like little doggy tails, aren’t they?’
‘Yeah,’ Janie said. The crazy thing about it was that Billy-Joe no longer seemed to be speaking to her, but to a deeply buried part of her that she was ashamed to admit existed. This part of her was rising steadily towards the surface and it wanted to do exactly what Billy-Joe commanded.
She knew when she was beaten. ‘I’ll scream if it hurts,’ she said quietly.
‘I know you will, babe,’ he said. ‘You scream for your old man. Just like you used to.’
Janie’s legs bore her towards him easily and smoothly. The part of her that wanted her to be tortured gathered momentum when her feet started moving and rose up inside her like a warm well-spring. Janie began to feel very good indeed about things. She smiled and relaxed.
Billy-Joe reached out for her as she approached, the pliers still in his right hand.
Apart from the instrument of torture, Janie thought distantly, they might have been two lovers meeting after a lengthy separation. She found she wanted to giggle. Everything was going to be all right after all. Things were going to work out just fine.
‘Come here, babe,’ Billy-Joe murmured.
And Janie hit him with the rolling-pin, as hard as she could.
She leapt back, snarling, distantly realizing that the part of her that had taken over was something as cunning and as quick as a tigress. And it had been there all along, plotting and planning. She’d merely had to let go of her conditioned intellectual processes in order to let it take control.
The target she’d chosen hadn’t been Billy-Joe’s head, but his outstretched right wrist - which presumably me
ant the part of her that had the controls thought it was important to disarm him before finishing him off.
Billy-Joe was howling now. ‘You motherfucking cow!’ he screeched, spittle flying from his mouth.
In that second he became the ugliest thing that Janie had ever seen.
He put both his hands down on the sofa to push himself up and the tigress in Janie saw her chance. She leapt forward and smashed the rolling-pin down on the crown of his head.
As he sat back down again, Janie saw the rent she’d put in his scalp. Blood was already welling up in it.
I’ve killed him! she thought, panicking, as Billy-Joe gently collapsed into the sofa. She watched his eyes roll up, watched his neck muscles loosen and his head tilt back.
He’s just knocked out, she assured herself, but it didn’t look as if he was just KO’ed. Billy-Joe didn’t draw a breath and she could see no pulse in his exposed throat. He was moving slightly, but it wasn’t the movement of a man who’d been knocked unconscious, but that of an ancient and rickety car, settling after a long and bumpy journey.
Then Billy-Joe heaved in a breath and let it go in a long sigh.
The demon that had last popped into Janie’s mind in the office where it had advised her to hit Martin over the head with her computer keyboard, now spoke up again. Hit him again, just to make sure he isn’t going to get up and cause any more trouble! it said.
I think I’ll just leave, now, she told herself, touching her loose teeth with the tip of her tongue. She snatched the car keys from the arm of the sofa, said, ‘Goodbye Billy-Joe,’ and went outside.
It wasn’t until she was half-way through stuffing her bags and work things into the boot of the VW that she began to feel angry at having to run away from her own house.
But the sensible thing to do was forget the anger, get out of here and begin legal proceedings - and not just for the dissolution of her marriage. Assault would go down quite nicely too, she thought.
‘That’s what I’ll do,’ she said aloud. ‘Get in the car and go to the police.’
She picked up the last bag, leaned forward to place it in a space in the back of the car and managed a grim smile.
Which was when Billy-Joe hit her in the back.
For a moment Janie was so surprised she didn’t realize. she’d been struck. Several things happened at once. Her vision flashed white, her kidneys felt as if they had spontaneously exploded and her head somehow caught the rim of the car’s boot.
In that moment, the thing that Janie was most aware of was the fact that her rolling-pin, which she had held while she was loading the car, was sailing away from her, end over end, in what appeared to be slow motion.
Billy-Joe heaved her out of VW’s hatchback and this time, her head struck the tailgate.
‘Now what are you gonna do?’ Billy-Joe wanted to know, shaking her. Her head rolled about, dizzying her. He dragged her close to him, embracing her in a hug that forced the air from her lungs and drove spikes of pain through her ribs. The sensation of something cold clamping itself around her ear lobe and starting to bite brought her senses snapping back to her.
Billy-Joe had the pliers again. And he was starting to use them.
‘I love you, Billy,’ she said.
He leaned back from her and the grip on her ear-lobe lessened. ‘What?’ he asked.
And Janie found out two things simultaneously.
The first was that her leg did come up when she asked it to, and the second was that her husband wasn’t expecting a knee in the groin.
She was too close to him to get a clear shot and the blow wasn’t powerful enough to put him down, but it did make him let go of her. He yelped in surprise and staggered backwards a pace.
This would have been all fine and dandy as far as Janie was concerned… if the pliers hadn’t still been gripping her ear-lobe. But when she kneed him, Billy-Joe’s reflexes made his muscles tense and the pliers snapped shut.
She was wearing a pair of twenty-four carat gold hoops in her ears, the left one of which was instantly crushed flat, pinching her flesh. The sprung steel closure which fitted through her pierced ear was a great deal more brittle than the gold, however, and snapped in two. One of the ends drove a fresh hole through her lobe and the other spiked its way up into the gristle of her ear itself.
Janie didn’t realize any of this at the moment it happened - but she did know that the pliers were dragging at her flesh and that it hurt very badly. And that if she didn’t want her ear torn right off her head, she had to move in the direction she was being dragged.
She took a pace towards Billy-Joe, and the tigress inside her woke up again. She grabbed the strong hand holding the pliers, held it steady, then snapped her knee up again. This time it was a good one. A corker. Peck on that Perky Peter! she thought.
Billy-Joe yelped, let go of the pliers and folded double.
Hissing, and bent over, he hopped towards her, looking like a great clumsy bird. Janie dodged him, turned and spotted the rolling-pin.
‘Motherfucking little cow-bitch!’ Billy-Joe squealed from behind her as she ran for the rolling-pin.
She distantly realized that things hadn’t only got out of hand, but had gone as far as murder now. If he came out on top he wasn’t just going to pull some of her teeth, he was going to kill her. She was certain of this. Since yesterday, when she’d first heard those magic words ‘Black Rock’ and begun to visualize what the haunted house must look like, her life seemed to have taken a distinct turn for the worse.
She snatched the rolling-pin from the ground and went back towards Billy-Joe who was birdy-hopping towards her - in agony, but not believing he was beaten, it seemed.
‘Enough!’ Janie said. ‘Stop!’
Billy-Joe looked up at her with those dark and wild eyes and his agonized face adjusted its contours until his expression became something which wasn’t quite a grin, but was very scary. ‘Never!’ he hissed and hopped towards her. He was still bent almost double, his arms were outstretched and his fingers were splayed as if he was an adult playing bogey-man to throw a thrill of fear into a wide-eyed child.
‘Stop!’ Janie shouted.
And grinning, Billy-Joe hopped another foot closer to her.
Janie hit him over the head. Very hard.
This time the thud sounded different. Previously it had sounded rather like the hollow sound a coconut made when hit with a hammer, but this time the resonance was deadened. It sounded soggy.
And when Janie looked, she saw exactly why it sounded like that. There was a five-or six-inch indentation across the crown of Billy-Joe’s head.
You’ve done it now! she told herself. You’ve murdered him.
Janie wasn’t sure if it was murder or not, but it had to be up there somewhere in the realms of manslaughter. She felt very sick and dizzy and the only thing she could think of was to run away.
She walked towards him, her heart hammering and the panic building in her and poked his ribs with the toe of her shoe.
He didn’t move.
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She squatted down beside him and felt his neck for a pulse. There wasn’t one.
She looked up and down the empty street, checked the neighbours’ windows she could see in case anyone was watching her - which no one was - and went back indoors, trying to summon up her fairy godmother or any passing genie. Anyone would do. Anyone who could wind back the time that had passed and undo everything that had happened. Or perhaps alter history. Until last night Billy-Joe hadn’t been a maniac. He’d been pretty handy with his fists, but he hadn’t wanted to pull her teeth.
Yeah, well, that’s because you’ve been doing a Typhoid Mary impersonation. You caught the Black Rock madness-plague when Drezy told you the book’s title. And you brought it home and passed it to Billy-Joe. And today you gave it to Martin too. What’ll he be like the next time you see him? A drooling psycho, like Billy-Joe?
But in spite of this thought, it all had to be coincidence. She had done nothing to change Billy-Joe. He’d been on a downhill slide for a long time and the only thing that changed last night was that he’d finally hit rock-bottom. His long metamorphosis from loving husband to violent drunk to psychopath had been completed. She’d seen it coming a long way off, just hadn’t done enough to prevent it.
The telephone was just inside the front door. Janie took a deep breath and lifted the receiver. Then she put it back again and went to the kitchen. She dipped her head into the sink and rinsed her mouth until the flow of blood slowed, washed her face, then got a pair of tweezers from the drawer and turned her attention to her ear.
