The Dream Wife

by Louisa de Lange

  ‘Your friends?’ he shouts. ‘Friends?’

  I hold my ground, wincing from the force of his voice.

  ‘Yes, my friends. What right do you have to keep them from me?’

  And then, bam. Out of nowhere, something hits me on my right cheek. It hits me so hard my ear bounces on the door frame on the left-hand side of my head. Then the pain starts, in my ear, my cheekbone, to the side of my eye. Blood rushes to my face; I feel light-headed and put my hand to my cheek. My hand feels cold in comparison.

  David is still standing next to me, his right hand raised. And that’s when I realise: he hit me. Took the back of his hand and whacked me.

  ‘What right?’ he says, spit freckling my face. ‘I am your husband, that’s what right. I say who you can talk to, I decide who you’re friends with, and it’s certainly not the bunch of alcoholics and deadbeats you used to hang out with.’

  My hand is still next to my cheek, my mouth open, tears slowly running down my face.

  ‘I saved you,’ he continues, shouting, barely an inch away from me. ‘When we met, you were nothing. You were drunk every night, chain-smoking, out of control. But I saw you, who you really were, who you could be. My wife.’ He softens, and steps back from me, his face changing. He moves his hand towards mine, and I flinch, backing out of the door. ‘Oh now, don’t be like that. I’m sorry. You drove me to this; only you can make me so angry.’ He smiles, taking my hand away from my face and enveloping it in both of his. ‘Those people have no place in our lives now. Friends wouldn’t have let you behave in that way. Sleeping with unsuitable men, wasting your life. You’re better than that, you know that now, don’t you?’

  I nod.

  ‘Good. Now go tidy yourself up for dinner and let’s not talk about this again.’

  He lets go of my hand and points me towards the bathroom. I stumble towards it, my feet barely leaving the carpet, and shut the door behind me.

  I look in the mirror and an unfamiliar face stares back. My mascara has run under my eyes, and a large red mark takes up the whole of my right cheek and cheekbone, from under my eye to the side of my mouth. I can taste blood where I have bitten my tongue.

  I touch it tentatively and I can feel the swelling already starting to take hold. I take a flannel out of the cupboard and run it under the cold tap, before slowly folding it in four and putting it against my face. The coldness soothes me.

  Is he right? In the time before I met him, I certainly had my fair share of hangovers; there had been more mornings with missing memories than I care to remember. Every Saturday night, getting pissed with friends; one occasion in particular when I passed out on the pavement outside the club in a pile of my own vomit, waking up with a strange man leering over me. But wasn’t that what your twenties were all about? Was I better off now, with him and Johnny?

  I take the flannel away from my face and wipe my forehead and my eyes, carefully rubbing away the stray mascara. I retie my hair, stand up straight, and take a deep breath.

  ‘Come on, slowcoach, dinner is getting cold,’ David calls from the kitchen.

  I turn quickly as my mouth fills with saliva. Vomit rises in my stomach, and I retch uncontrollably into the toilet. I throw up what was left from lunch, the cup of tea, the biscuit I ate with Johnny. I retch until my stomach is empty, my hands either side of the seat, hair falling in the way, tears in my eyes. I drop to my knees, holding onto the toilet for support, and spit a sticky ball of whatever is left in my mouth into the lurid yellow splattered mess in the bowl. I gulp down a few deep breaths, then sit back on the carpet, my legs folded under me, my body shivering.

  My limbs feel weak, my head stuffy, and my eyes and face are stinging. I am uncontrollably tired. I pull myself up on the sink, wipe my face down with the flannel again, and go to open the door. It takes two attempts to turn the door handle and a further few to pull the door open and go out into the hallway.

  ‘David,’ I call, forcing my voice to sound breezy. ‘I’m not feeling well. I think I might just go to bed.’

  I hear David’s chair scrape back and he walks to the door of the kitchen. He smiles.

  ‘You’re not looking so good,’ he says, walking up to me. I jump as he raises a hand to gently touch my forehead. ‘Go to bed, and have a good sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.’

  He kisses me on my sweaty forehead, and goes back to the dining table. ‘This lasagne is great, by the way. I’ll save you some for tomorrow,’ he calls over his shoulder.

  I turn, stunned, and drag one foot after the other up the stairs towards my bedroom. As I go, I look back. The door to his study is still open, light from the hallway casting a ghostly glow into the room, and it reminds me of the memory stick, still unchecked, hidden among my socks.

  I glance down the hallway, then shut my bedroom door behind me. I dig in the depths of my wardrobe, pulling out an ancient laptop from my old life, opening the lid and switching it on. The screen flickers, then dies, its battery long neglected.

  Plugged in and working again, it boots up, and I look at the empty desktop, the memory stick clutched in my hand. It’s a Pandora’s box, an insight into my husband that once I wouldn’t have wanted to see. But now, things are different.

  I plug the memory stick into the USB port.

  19

  The old laptop rattles, ancient circuit boards trying to load the data. A small icon appears on the desktop – an image of a disk drive with ‘DAVID’ underneath. I click, and it whirrs, red lights flashing.

  A new window appears, showing a long list of folders, all with two- and three-letter acronyms. I click on the top one, labelled AS, and it opens to show a screen of files, all random numbers, all ending .mov. I pick one, and double-click.

  It’s a video file, grainy and flickering. The screen shows nothing but black, and for a moment I am disappointed. Then a chink of light shines through and I can just make out a bit of movement, shadows in the darkness. A light is switched on, and I can see it’s the master bedroom in our house, David’s bedroom now, although there’s nobody in shot. I squint and work out that the camera must be on top of the wardrobe. The shot is from above, capturing the bed and the bedside table on the left-hand side.

  The door opens and David comes into view, and I gasp as I see him leading me by the hand. He glances directly into the camera for a second, then back at me. I am laughing. I am wearing red lacy lingerie, underwear I remember from way before Johnny was born, now shoved to the back of a drawer somewhere. My hair is longer, and even in these bizarre circumstances I note that I am in good shape. The video must be three or four years old.

  I can’t stop watching although I know what happens next. I remember this particular night, the first time David wanted to do something a bit more adventurous and teased me for being a prude. I was unsure – I can see this now in my face – but went along with it. Handcuffs, a blindfold, a bit of a slap here and there. Nothing extravagant, given what David has tried since.

  My mind wanders back to the other files. AS – Annie Sullivan? Is this folder all about me? I click off the film, and select another few files at random. Some were taken in David’s room, some in the spare room where I now sleep, but all are of me with David; different times, different positions, different props.

  I hear a noise from downstairs and get up quickly, my heart beating hard, opening my bedroom door a fraction and glancing outside. I can hear the television has been turned on, and the sound of football drifts up the stairs.

  I go back to the laptop. If I am AS, then who are all the other folders? There are at least twenty on this drive. My hand jumps to my mouth. I feel sick as I click on another; it opens to show five files, and my hand is shaking as I load one up.

  It seems to be a hotel room, with bland furniture, generic artwork on the walls and a large double bed in the middle of the room. This time the camera angle is lower; the edge of something wooden takes up a centimetre at the bottom of the screen. A woman I don’t recognise comes into shot, laughi
ng and joking with David. She is young and confident, turning and kissing David, undoing his shirt and trousers while he pulls at her dress. They work through a variety of sexual positions, and after a while I fast-forward through the film. The other videos of PB are similar – same hotel room, same woman, but getting more and more adventurous: the handcuffs in one; in another they snort a line of cocaine. In the final one, he holds her hands above her head with one hand and slaps her round the face with the other. She leaves crying, her clothes balled up in her hands as she runs out of the room.

  The video comes to an end, pausing on a blurry image of David’s face, smiling as he turns away from the camera. I open the next, JK, and immediately see Jane, his pretty doe-eyed PA, in front of the camera. The background looks like an office at David’s work, the blinds closed and the film taken from the angle of a desk, by a webcam on a laptop maybe. She turns around and David comes up behind her, one hand undoing his belt, the other groping under her skirt, making no effort not to be rough. I watch, stunned, as my husband fucks his PA as though she is little more than an object to him, a commodity to be used and taken as he wants. I watch the familiar expressions on his face change, then sag as he discards her and she rushes from the room.

  More videos, more folders and files: different women, different hotels. My body is shivering and my cheeks are wet. I feel numb from what I’ve seen, a tiny proportion of what I can only image the rest of the files must hold in their code. It isn’t just one affair, one trip to a restaurant; it is many. He hasn’t just slept with one woman; it is systematic, regular abuse – and the bastard records them all, to play back for his own pleasure whenever he feels like it.

  As I click on the files, something niggles in my mind. I go back to the AS folder, the videos of me, and select a later film, ignoring the embarrassing display in front of me and instead studying the shot, the perspective of the camera. I glance up to the top of the wardrobe, to the small gap between the wardrobe and the ceiling, then back to the film. Grabbing a chair, I pull it across the carpet and move it to the wardrobe, pulling myself up so I am in line with the top. I can just reach into the gap, and I grope around in the dust, my fingers touching plastic. I grab it and pull it forward, but it’s attached to something at the back, so I tug it round to the front of the wardrobe.

  It’s a camera. It’s small and black, with a lens that takes up most of the front, and a long black cable coming out of the back. The cable that I must have caught with the vacuum cleaner all those months ago. It has been here all this time. Watching me. Monitoring me.

  I suddenly feel very tired. I pull the cable out from the back of the camera and hear it drop behind the wardrobe. My face is aching. My eyes are dry from the light of the laptop. I eject the memory stick and close the lid, my mind still playing snippets on a loop. I stare at the camera again, barely able to make sense of what I’ve seen.

  David’s betrayals mount up into a sociopathic playbook; he bears no resemblance to the man I thought I married. I can’t process the truth; my mind is a jumble of disconnected thoughts and memories. I hide the laptop under my bed and put the memory stick and the camera in the sock drawer with the letters. I feel tired, so very tired.

  I fall into bed still clothed, and instantly disappear into a deep, bottomless sleep.

  Blank

  Annie opened her eyes to perfect white. She blinked for a moment, then looked down to her hands, her torso, her feet. She was wearing simple blue jeans and a white T-shirt, her feet bare. She was here, she was dreaming, but there was nothing around her, no floor, no ceiling, nothing. Her mind was blank. She was empty.

  But she knew who she wanted to find.

  She took her time, appreciating the calm and the sheer nothingness of her dream. She thought back to her childhood, to the places she had gone when her life seemed overcrowded and scary. A disused corridor at school – a patch of cold, grimy tiling, empty lockers and worn radiators where she could sit and read in peace. Becca’s house, the chaos and noise from her family demonstrating the love and care within its four walls. And her local library, with its labyrinth of books, alternative worlds and escape within their pages.

  Annie thought of that library now. Closing her eyes, she imagined it around her: the smell of the old books, the stamp of the librarian checking out a novel, the worn but comfortable chairs where she’d spend hours with nobody to disturb her. She opened her eyes and there it was, every detail she remembered, down to the little rows of Dewey Decimal numbers on the spines of the books.

  She picked a book from the shelf and ran her finger over the pages. It was a simple hardback cookery book, but the act of holding it in her hands was soothing. It was nice to have something solid to look at, something to distract her.

  She couldn’t see Jack; she wasn’t sure how she was going to find him. She felt a sudden panic swell in the pit of her stomach. Try another location, go somewhere else.

  She moved. Conjuring up an image, she found herself at the edge of another park, this time at night, and stuffed with the stalls and rides of a fairground. A huge big wheel towered above her on her left, while the dodgems bashed and bumped on her right. A large cylinder twirled into the air, people standing in cages all around the edge, screaming as it spun and rose at ninety degrees. All around her bright lights flashed; she heard the thud of a bass line and the twinkle of a Wurlitzer jingle.

  The noise and lights baffled her. Everything moved faster than she could comprehend, blurs of pinks and streaks of yellow. She moved slowly into the arena, and there he was – David. He was still wearing his black suit, waiting in a queue for a shoot-’em-up game. He hadn’t seen her, his attention diverted as the dodgems stopped and the people spilled out, laughing and joking, jostling Annie to and fro. He moved away, towards the big wheel. She could tell by his movements he wasn’t in control. He flowed, almost hovered as he moved. No hesitation, no thought, his subconscious in the driving seat.

  And what a subconscious it was, truly outdoing itself, pulling together a woman dressed in a tight-fitting red dress, hair styled from the fifties, red lipstick, bright red nails. She stood square in the middle of the walkway, other dreamers needing to move to get round her. Dream David was staring. The woman saw him and slowly walked over, stopping and running a finger up his arm. His expression was transparent and dopey; this subconscious was being run by one organ and one organ alone. Her plump lips pursed as she whispered something in his ear, then she turned his face with her blood-red fingernails and kissed him.

  Annie flinched as they locked themselves in a passionate embrace. All groping hands and sucking mouths, but nothing really compared to what she had just seen in real life, on the laptop. The woman whispered in his ear again, idly chewing on his ear lobe at the same time, and then hand in hand, they walked towards the big wheel, skipping the queue and getting straight on. Annie didn’t follow them; she had seen enough for one night.

  She looked around again, still no sign of Jack. ‘Damn it,’ she muttered under her breath.

  She caught a sudden waft of an amazing hot, sugary smell, and turned to locate it. A fresh doughnut stall shone out behind her, the man inside tossing a bunch of freshly fried rings into the tray of sugar. She paid for a bag, enjoying the warmth seeping through to her now greasy fingers. She moved out of the way of the other fairground goers and took a seat on a bench to the side. She smiled, picking one of the hot gooey doughnuts out of the paper bag and taking a bite. It soothed her, filling her hollow shell of a body.

  What now? Still no Jack, and she would have to get up soon to attend to Johnny. She imagined him in his cot, probably lying on his side with his feet tucked up close to his tummy. Rabbit would be clutched tight in his chubby little hand, his eyes screwed shut. His hair would be sticking up at angles, his cheeks a perfect glowing pink as he slept snug in his sleeping bag. A faint snore would be audible from his lips. She envied the sleep of the baby, so pure, unsullied by adult life. She wondered what Johnny dreamt of; whether she could fin
d him one day here. Did he dream of chocolate buttons and his Rabbit, of Fireman Sam and Thomas the Tank Engine? Or was it monsters and scary things, of being alone and lost? If he did, he certainly didn’t show it in the morning. She would ask Jack when she saw him.

  She sighed and sat back on the bench. What a wasted night this was.

  ‘That took you a while,’ said a voice to her right, making her jump.

  Jack was sitting next to her, smiling, the lights from the entrance to the roller coaster casting his face in an eerie shadow as they switched from pink to green. He reached over and took one of her doughnuts, handling it delicately between his thumb and forefinger.

  ‘Jack! What happened, what did I do?’

  ‘What were you thinking about before I appeared?’

  Annie stopped for a moment. ‘Johnny, and what he dreamt about. And then I thought I needed to ask you about it – is that it?’

  ‘Yes, maybe.’ He took a bite of the doughnut, chewed for a moment. ‘It’s different for everyone, I think, so whatever works for you.’

  ‘And here you are.’

  ‘Here I am.’ Jack smiled again and Annie realised how much she had missed him. She had missed having someone to talk to who actually seemed interested in her, who made her a person in her own right. She hoped Adam could be a friend too one day, but she barely knew him at the moment. She was tired of being David’s wife, or Johnny’s mum; sometimes it was good to just be Annie. Even if she didn’t truly know who Jack was.

  ‘Tell me something about you,’ she said. ‘Where do you come from, what do you do?’

  He smiled. ‘I’m a software engineer. I write little twiddly bits of code and make computer programs. Is that what you expected?’

  ‘I guess I saw you as a bit of a mad-scientist type, conducting experiments with strange women by night, and testing it all out on locked-up monkeys by day.’