by Jane Rogers
And then she met Bill. The council were finally getting round to decorating the flats. Leonie’s kitchen and bathroom were ruined with condensation. Bill and his mate Ted started work in the kitchen one April morning at 9. Leonie cleared stuff out for them, then went off to do the shopping. When she returned, Bill was on his own. She made them both a cup of tea. He stared at her in silence until she felt uncomfortable.
‘Where’s your mate?’
Bill laughed.
‘Go on.’
‘Two floors down.’
‘I thought you were all finished down there.’
‘Yeh – well. He has a little job down there that keeps needing a bit of touching up.’
Leonie stared at him blankly. Bill raised his eyebrows, then shrugged, and returned to his tin of paint.
Putting clothes away in the bedroom, Leonie realized what he’d meant. Sitting down heavily on the bed she imagined the workman, in the flat two floors below, taking off his overalls and watching the woman as she unbuttoned her dress. Leonie had not imagined such a thing for a long time. Moving slowly, she went to the bedroom door and opened it a crack. She could see, through the half-open kitchen door, the painter’s shoulder and arm pushing the roller rhythmically up and down, covering the wall by the sink with white paint. Hypnotized, she moved into the corridor and along to the kitchen doorway, where she stood still, staring at him. Eventually he turned and saw her.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked sharply, angry that she had made him jump.
Leonie didn’t answer.
‘What’s the matter?’ he shouted, approaching the blank-faced woman in the doorway. ‘Have you lost your bloody tongue?’ Something in her attitude and her silence filled him with blinding rage and he grasped her roughly to shake her. Unbalanced, she swayed heavily against him, and he saved her from falling by pushing at her other shoulder with the hand holding the paint roller. It clattered to the floor, splashing them both with paint.
‘You stupid bitch! What the fuck’s the matter with you?’ He was propping her up, hands pushing against her shoulders. When she still didn’t speak he gave her a slight push, and she bumped back against the wall.
‘What? What? What d’you want?’
With a grotesque movement, her head and shoulders lolling against the wall, her hips suddenly jutted forward. He moved quickly, pushing her back against the wall with the weight of his own body.
‘You want that? D’you want that? A fat ugly cow like you?’ He ground himself against her, and she began to press her crotch rhythmically to him. Her plump face, slightly upturned to him, was still expressionless. Raising his right hand he slapped her across the cheek, while their hips continued to press and gind rhythmically. They both climaxed quickly, pressed against the wall, fully clothed. When he stepped back from her Leonie slid down and slumped on the floor.
‘You dirty bitch. Look what you’ve made me do.’
She watched him dully as he pulled open his overalls and wiped himself on a tea-towel he’d picked up from the kitchen floor.
‘Filth, you,’ he said; picked up his roller, and continued with his painting.
It was like a drug. While he was still painting her flat they did it two or three times a day, while he hit her and abused her. Leonie moved about her life in a stupor. She had never experienced such a thing before: hadn’t touched a man, or wanted to, for years. When he moved on to other flats he returned to hers at least once a day; when the children were out she sat, almost paralysed with longing, waiting for him on a kitchen chair, her body beginning to tremble and jerk at the first sound of his voice in greeting,
‘Well, you filthy bitch – what’re you waiting for?’
Lynda one evening noticed the bruising on her mother’s face, and asked what she’d been doing. Leonie talked vaguely about walking into a door. She had no idea what the children were doing – anything. She was just waiting for the next time he’d push open the front door.
Then one day he didn’t come. She went through the evening in a trance, and went to bed once the younger children were in. She left the door on the latch, and heard him when he swung it open. He grabbed her by the throat as she moved down the corridor towards him.
‘Back to the bedroom, bitch!’
‘No. Gary’s there. We can’t.’
‘Get rid of him.’
She shook her head. ‘Not tonight. Tomorrow.’
‘Now.’
‘I can’t.’
He tightened his grip on her throat, then loosened it slowly. ‘I’ll have to make you wait for it then, till tomorrow, won’t I?’ He unclasped his hands, turned and left so quickly that she could not catch hold of his jacket, although she was running after him.
Gary cried when she told him he had to move beds. She was uncertain where to put him. If she put him in with Wayne and Darren they would torment him – and there was no question of putting him with the girls. If she put him in the sitting room he couldn’t go to sleep till everyone else had gone to bed, and he needed to go to sleep early. In the end she decided to leave him in her room, making him a bed on the floor in the corner. He slept deeply – never stirred in the night – so why shouldn’t he stay there? He wouldn’t be any the wiser.
And for the first few nights it went smoothly. He whimpered when she put him to bed in his new place, and stretched out his arms to her bed, but she was firm, and by the time Bill arrived he was asleep.
Then Bill stayed all night. Leonie was woken in the morning by Gary’s terrified howls. He had crept up to the bed to climb in with her, and come face to face with Bill.
‘What’s wrong with him?’
Leonie hugged the sobbing boy, his face buried in her shoulder.
‘What’s wrong with him, I said.’
‘Nothing. He’s – he’s just a bit slow.’
‘Mental, is he?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does he usually sleep with you?’
She nodded. Gary’s sobs quietened.
‘Do you fuck with him?’
Leonie turned to face Bill, who was propped up on one elbow in the bed, watching her. ‘Get out.’
‘He’s a big lad.’
‘Get out. Now.’ Gary began to scream again, terrified by the tone of his mother’s voice. Bill climbed out of bed and pulled his clothes on. When he was dressed he stood still, looking at Leonie.
‘Get out, I said.’
He went.
He came back three days later, in the afternoon. And from then onwards he stayed at the flat two or three nights a week. Gary still cried at the sight of him, but he was learning to calm down more quickly. The boy became more withdrawn – his mother had hardly spoken to him for weeks, and although he painstakingly continued to make her cups of tea, she rarely acknowledged them or thanked him. Gary slept with his face to the wall, and no longer tried to creep into bed in the mornings – even when Bill wasn’t there.
The other children were full of resentment. ‘What have you brought him here for? We don’t want him in our place!’ There was no explanation Leonie could have articulated to herself, and she simply replied that it was hard luck, they’d have to put up with him. He and Wayne had a fight one night, on the way back from the pub – Wayne had been lying in wait for him. Bill must have thrashed him because Wayne didn’t come home for a couple of days, and when he did it was only to collect his things. He told his mum he’d joined the army. Leonie said good, better than hanging about the estate with no job and no prospects. But when she heard he was going to Belfast she cried.
A year later Bill was living at the flat. Sex between himself and Leonie made up in violence what it had lost in intensity and frequency. The children all knew how violent he was, and were cautious not to cross his path. Donna was married now, and had a flat of her own. Lynda, who’d got a little baby, moved out after a couple of months, and stayed at Donna’s. Leonie had told her she’d help out with the baby, but Lynda didn’t dare to leave the child with her for fear of Bill. Tracey
fixed a bolt to the inside of her bedroom door. Leonie, whose last dregs of will and self-determination seemed to have been drained by him, serviced him as she did the children – shopping, cleaning, washing, cooking. He gave her money from time to time, but she never knew when it would be, nor how much, and it was never enough.
Gary, more subdued and self-contained now, lived in total fear of him. Normally slow, fear had the effect of stunning him. If he was making a drink and Bill shouted, ‘Hurry up with that!’ he would spill it or continue to add more and more spoonfuls of sugar, or simply freeze in mid-air like a chameleon and be unable to continue at all until Bill’s attention shifted from him. His misery was compounded by the fact that, when startled, he sometimes wet himself.
Leonie defended him. It was the only thing that ever made her turn on Bill. The other children knew she would do nothing if he knocked them about – they knew he hit her, anyway. But when he started on Gary, she was ready to fight.
‘Leave him alone, you bullying bastard. You lay a finger on him and I’ll kill you.’ Bill usually backed down. But if ever he was on his own in the room with Gary, he would start to taunt him. ‘Thick head. Throwback. Loony.’ And pull faces, with lolling tongue and rolling eyes. The boy lived in terror.
Bill’s comings and goings were erratic. He was generally out during the daytime, and sometimes for the evening and night as well. There was a constant tension in the air because of the fear of his return, since no one knew when that would be; but when he hadn’t appeared by 6.30, Leonie and Gary, and Darren and Tracey if they were in, would eat their tea together then sit around the telly in fragile peace. Leonie would put her arm around the boy’s shoulders and he would rest his head against her.
Once when Bill came in he marched straight up behind them, where they were sitting on the sofa, and struck Gary’s head sharply with the side of his hand.
‘Grow up, you fucking baby.’ Gary began to cry and Leonie started shouting at Bill. He slammed her in the face too, and went out to the kitchen, where he broke every plate and dish, hurling them against the wall.
Tracey comforted her mother, when she was sure Bill had gone out. ‘Why d’you have him here? We don’t have to put up with this. Just lock the door and don’t let him back.’
But Leonie, bleeding from the nose, her arms around a sobbing Gary, shook her head. He was hurting her children, beating her up, destroying her life. The physical need he had served for her was long gone. But she knew it was impossible for him not to come back. Like an animal on its journey to the slaughterhouse, Leonie knew she hadn’t arrived there yet. She had never made a conscious choice in her life; you get herded and pushed where they want you to go. And there are a few times when your own dumb animal instinct – for food, sex, survival – drags you down a one-way route. Had there been any choice? At the point at which she leant in the kitchen doorway, watching him paint, unable to support herself for the weight of desire in her limbs? No.
She accepted her own powerlessness in the face of the evil that had entered their lives.
Since cruelty to Gary was the only thing that provoked a reaction from Leonie (even the dumb animal protects her defenceless young), Bill began to persecute the boy more systematically. He shouted at him suddenly for no reason, and laughed at the boy’s panic and distress. If he could creep up behind Gary he would slap his head or pull his hair.
One night when Leonie lay still as a lump of lard beneath him, he suggested waking Gary up. It produced the desired effect; she began to scratch and wrestle with him, and he had to fight to hold her down. They rolled off the bed and on to the floor, and Bill, who had achieved his aim as they made contact with the floor, climbed off her and back into bed. He fell asleep immediately, and only noticed that Leonie was still on the floor when he woke an hour later. She felt cold. He heaved her up on to the bed. She was breathing, so he slapped her face a couple of times but there was no response. After a while he slipped out of bed, dressed, and left.
When Leonie came round she could not remember what had happened. She had a bad headache, and felt sick.
Mon. 24
What’s the matter with you, Marion? You’re making me sick. Rubbing my nose in dirt, like a dog. Leave it, for Christ’s sake.
Perhaps she likes to write it. Does it give her a thrill? Perhaps she likes the power: watching characters caged like rats. Perhaps she likes to line them up along the edge of the pale, and slowly, one by one, push them beyond. She likes dirt. If you give her the News of the Screws she’ll read it before she throws it away. Isn’t it disgusting? Ooh, let’s look a bit closer. Just hand on while I fetch my camera – God, I can hardly bear to look. Ooh!
Is that her? Perhaps it turns her on. That careful cataloguing of pornographic detail, of lust, of violence – the slow burning moves of Leonie from the bedroom to Bill, the tension and climax on the page – doesn’t she love it? Perhaps she’s Leonie and wants to be beaten; she’s a woman, all she needs is a good thumping and a fuck. How do I know what she’s up to, under that long black narrator’s mantle – and then under that reader’s cloak of respectability: what are you up to? Enjoying yourself, are you? Getting hot? Marion?
Leave.
Leave and away. It’s enough. Listen.
What am I doing with Leonie? Why dabble in this? I can walk about my quiet, pleasing room, where I have spent the time since I’ve been ill. The room is simple: white walls, blue woodwork, deep blue carpet. Blue curtains with white spots; and a faded candlewick bedspread that doesn’t match, and eases me. From the window the view is small: an enclosed, snow-filled garden, bordered by a garage and a hedge of snow-covered domestic firs, green-black and white. I like this room, I am living in this room. The luxury in this room is the table and chair, an unpretentious white formica table, at which I sit, in comfort, by the window – and write Leonie. Now why?
Maybe it’s letting something out. Like lancing a boil; letting the pus and poison which have made a hurting pressure flow out on to the page through my moving pen. Even though it never happened to me. In one form or another, dirt will out.
Maybe. Before, while I was writing, I thought, this is the worst. I am drawing the bottom line, the base level, people sunk to half-formed animals in the slime and now I’ll know it can’t be any worse. Wanting to know the worst, as a child strains its eyes in the darkness to make out the evil face of the beast that haunts its dreams. Yes, I want to know the worst. But once I’ve looked up from the page and broken the hold of that ‘worst’, it’s milk and water. There are always worse. Tortures, gas chambers, massacres, people who take little children and –
There’s no bottom to evil, if I dive in for a penny at the deep end, I’ll be sinking still for ever. It goes on down.
All right then. These combine. There is a thing to be let out. It is to be named. Naming it will let it out, and I will know it. I imagine it a creature in a sack, something alive and vicious with fear, like a ferret or a pig or a wild cat, tied in a sack. The story is the sack; inside it is the thing I know, the creature I know well. I can’t name the creature, it is too familiar to describe. But I can make a sack for it, and in the sack the beast threshes about – tenses, scrabbles in frenzy, feigns sleep. The sack moves, stretches, sags: it can resemble different things. But inside it the creature remains the same. The sack is the clearest I can get to naming it, containing it – dumping it outside the door for someone else to take away.
It won’t go away, of course. It’s my beast, it lives with me. But each time I bag it, catch it in a sack – no matter how ugly and unfamiliar the shape it makes – at each capture I strike a blow for freedom, diminish its power to harm. I will know it.
Bill did not return for eight days. As each day passed, it became more possible to consider the thought that he might not return at all. The days were long; fragile, suspended time waiting for a thunderstorm to break, a bomb to fall. Time long in its isolated acts of tenderness, Leonie’s arm around Gary’s shoulder as they sit watching telly; Gar
y’s jump of fear when the door is opened; the mutual wryness of relief as it’s Tracey who comes in, not Bill. Leonie daren’t let Gary back into her bed, although she longs for his warm comfort; but when he goes to bed she sits with him, legs tucked under the sheets, to read him a bedtime comic as she used to, long ago, before Bill came. In the silence and space she can see Gary again; his beautiful spreading smile, his timidity, his desire to please. He’s such a good boy to her, for no reason, her eyes keep filling with tears.
On the eighth day there was a knock at the door. She didn’t guess it was Bill, because he’d always walked straight in. When she opened it he stared at her, then pushed her aside and walked in in silence. Gary was sitting at the table, laboriously filling a sheet of paper with uneven letters. She’d been finding him things to do because he was lost, in the holidays – he always was – moping around without his school to go to. What she’d do when he finished there she didn’t know. Bill ripped the sheet from under the boy’s pen in a single movement, and Gary froze, a look of terror on his face. Bill glanced at the uneven jumble of letters on the page then crumpled it and hurled it viciously into a corner.
‘What you got him doing?’ he shouted. ‘Think he can write? That thick cretin?’ With a snort of contempt he cuffed Gary across the head then barged out of the room to slump in front of the telly. ‘Cup of tea!’ he shouted. Leonie put her arms around Gary’s head, cradling it to her breast. The boy was crying quietly, and they both froze into silence as the man’s threatening voice rose a pitch.
‘Cup of tea, I said, you fucking idle cow. Now!’ Leonie moved automatically to put the kettle on, and Gary sat at the table, his arms by his sides, staring ahead of him. He had wet himself, and the urine dripped slowly from the chair to the floor below. As she made the tea she watched the way he sat unmoving, hopeless, like a dog.
