by Sibel Hodge
I pack some toiletries: perfume, body lotion, shampoo, and hairspray. Then I go to my dressing table and open my jewellery box. I don’t want the jewellery he bought me, but I put it all inside a wash bag. Maybe I’ll sell it.
I lift up the top tray of the jewellery box and pick out the personal papers—marriage certificate, birth certificate, passport. I’m stuffing them all inside the wash bag when it hits me with a stark clarity like a knife piercing through my skull. Icy coldness freezes underneath my skin, leaving me lightheaded and shivery. My knees buckle. I drop down to the stool behind me, warning bells clanging through my brain.
Passport. Birth Certificate. Identification.
I told the woman in the estate agent I was coming back with some money and ID. The money and bankcards were in my purse at Sara’s house, but I’d left my ID here.
What if I went to Tom’s Wood Shack and nothing happened? What if I just looked at furniture and left? What if the vision I had when Jordan and I were there was just some kind of false memory like Dr Drew explained? Maybe I wanted it to be Tom so badly I distorted the truth in my head.
And if I did leave there, I would’ve come back here next. Come to get my ID so I could rent that flat and start to live again. But then I disappeared. I never made it back to Sara’s. I just vanished off the face of the earth.
That’s when I know it was Liam. Somehow, and I don’t know how he did it, Liam did manage to get back from Scotland without anyone noticing.
34
Three things happen.
I hear a sound downstairs. My heart stops. I freeze.
‘I know you’re here, Chloe!’ Liam’s voice, calm but chillingly cold.
I can’t move. Can’t breathe. I’m just waiting to die. His footsteps echo on the laminate floor downstairs, heavy and rushed. He’s searching for me. Then he’s going to find a way to kill me. Make it look like suicide or an accident or another bad drug reaction. And, hey, if that doesn’t work, he’ll take me somewhere and leave me to die. Ingenious.
My adrenaline kicks in and I stand up, gaze frantically searching the room. My pulse pounds in my ears like white noise.
Where can I hide? Under the bed? He’ll find me in a second.
In the wardrobe? Ditto.
The bathroom, then. Climb out of the window onto the kitchen extension below. But it’s too small.
I rush to the bedroom window. There’s about a three-metre drop. I risk breaking a bone, or death.
His footsteps on the stairs. ‘You’re so fucking stupid, Chloe. So gullible.’
My hand grips the handle as I look down. I’m scared. Terrified. I hate heights. Don’t want to die. I try to open the window, but the handle doesn’t budge. Every muscle in my body quivers as I yank it has hard as I can.
Nothing. It’s locked.
The terror is like a rope coiled round me, squeezing tighter and tighter until it’s hard to breathe.
‘You stupid bitch.’ Liam pulls me back by my shoulder and I slam into him, the back of my head hitting his chest.
I scream. I’m screaming and screaming.
He spins me round as if I weigh nothing. His fist flies towards my face, punching me hard on the cheek.
My head jerks to the left, a cracking sound reverberating in my ears. I taste something metallic in my mouth. Then I’m flying through the air. Banging into the dressing table. Falling to the floor. Landing hard on my shoulder. The breath knocked out of me. An explosion of colours in front of my eyes.
He stands over me, a manic, twisted smile on his face. ‘You just won’t bloody die, will you?’
I touch my cheek, pulsing from his fist. Tears spill down my face. I scrabble on my heels and hands to get away from him, but when my back hits the wall, I know it’s futile. He’ll outrun me. He’s stronger than I am. He’s blocking the door, and there’s nowhere to go.
And in the end, Liam always gets what he wants.
Something else replaces the terror. A resigned calmness, like the blood has already stopped flowing through my veins. I know I’m going to die, and I give up. It’s easier, just like it’s always been easier to give up and give in. The waiting is finally over. No one can save me now. Summers doesn’t know where I am. Jordan is at the hospital. I don’t have the strength to fight him anymore.
I want him to get it over with. Quickly. I don’t want to suffer. Let Liam win. That’s what he’s wanted all along. And I don’t care now. Too tired to care.
He kneels down next to me and strokes my already swelling cheek gently with the back of his hand. I flinch at his touch. ‘Look what you made me do.’ He tilts his head, like a dog trying to understand a human command.
‘Why?’ I cry. ‘Why couldn’t you just divorce me if you didn’t love me? Why all this? Why try to kill me?’
‘You don’t get it, do you?’ He shakes his head and makes a tutting sound. ‘You’re mine, darling. You’re my wife. You can’t just fucking leave me. I get to decide what happens. Not you!’ He shouts, and a spray of spit flies from his mouth and lands on my face.
I fight the nausea welling up. ‘So you knew? You knew I was going to leave before you went to Scotland?’
‘Of course I knew! I’m not stupid. I’m not like you. Not needy and weak and pathetic.’
‘What happened, then?’ I suddenly want to know. If I’m going to die, and I know I am, then I want to know exactly what happened. I want to finally piece together the hole missing from my head.
‘Shut up, you lying bitch.’ He slams my head into the wall. Bells ring in my ears, and my whole world turns black.
35
When I wake up, the bedroom is dark. I don’t know whether it’s night time or the blackout curtains are closed.
I’m lying on my side facing the door. Someone’s making soft whimpering sounds. It’s me. My hands are tied behind me, wrists bound together. My ankles are tied, too. I can’t open my right eye properly; it’s swollen and painful, like my cheek. A gag is tight around my mouth. I run my tongue over teeth, and one feels loose. I taste blood.
And I can remember something.
I try to move my hands and feet, but plastic cable ties dig into my skin, and my limbs feel heavy and bruised. Pain in my back, my side. A pressure in my chest. It’s hard to breathe through it.
Liam laughs. I turn my head slowly towards the sound. He’s sitting on the edge of the bed to the side of me, watching. Grinning at his wife who’s trussed up like a turkey. He looks surprisingly normal and relaxed.
I try to speak, but it comes out a gargled sound through the gag. I can’t hold my head up any longer, so I let it drop to the floor.
‘What? Does Chloe want to say something?’ He takes a swig of beer from the bottle in his hand. His Adam’s apple bobs up and down as he swallows.
I know what happened now. Not all of it. Most of it. Maybe when my head hit the wall, it did something inside. Or maybe being here with him like this has kick-started my memory spontaneously. Can another trauma recover the memories the first trauma made you forget?
He walks towards me. I don’t move. Don’t even try to struggle. I just lie there and look up at him.
‘What? You don’t want to put up a fight? Not like last time?’ He kneels beside me. ‘Yeah, you were struggling like a wild thing, until I injected you with the liquid Silepine, then you were out like a light.’ He laughs. ‘Katya fought, too, you know.’
I breathe fast, shallow sniffs through my nose. Katya? His ex-girlfriend?
‘That’s what I liked about you both in the beginning. It’s why I picked you. You were feisty and independent, but if you scratched just under the surface, you were vulnerable and fragile. It’s so easy to mould someone into what you want. Watch them turn into your perfect woman and know that it’s all just for you. Their energy dies, and they become compliant and eager to please. It’s all just a matter of control and time. She said she was leaving, too. Said she was going back to Moldova and I’d never see her again.’ He smiles, a faraway look in his
eyes, as if he’s lost in some distant memory. ‘Didn’t get very far, though. Maybe you met her down there, hmm? Probably not much left now, though. Bet the rats had a field day. Dust to dust and all that.’
I close my eyes, hot tears sliding down my face and soaking into the carpet. I know for certain now I’ll never escape. He did it before and got away with it. He killed his girlfriend and never even had a bad night’s sleep over it.
My husband is a psycho.
‘Why did you cut it?’ He strokes my hair and takes another swig of beer, swirls it round in his mouth before swallowing. ‘Silent treatment, eh?’ He yanks my gag down with such force it feels like he’s ripped away some of my skin with it. He leans in close so his face is centimetres away from mine. I smell beer and sweat. The tension radiates out of him like something feral and sour I can almost taste.
My mouth waters with bitterness. I swallow and lick my lips. More blood on my tongue.
‘You can scream if you want; no one’s going to hear you. The neighbours are still at work.’
I won’t give him the satisfaction of it. Instead, I croak out, ‘Go on, then. What are you waiting for?’
He shrugs. ‘The early hours of the morning. I’ll take you somewhere. Somewhere they won’t find you. Somewhere you can’t escape from this time. I didn’t want to make you suffer before. I just wanted to leave you down there to die. But you’ve lied and cheated and defied me, and I have to punish you, darling. You see that, don’t you?’ He shakes his head softly, his crazy eyes glazed with an almost serene expression. ‘What shall I do? Stab you? Strangle you? Break every bone in your body?’
I don’t say a thing. I refuse to let him see how terrified I am.
‘I’m surprised you got out of that bunker, you know.’ He wags a finger at me, chuckling. He actually thinks this is funny. ‘That surprised the hell out of me.’
‘Bunker?’ I swallow again to bring some moisture back to my mouth.
‘It’s an old military bunker that was used for storage. Perfectly hidden and camouflaged. Hardly anyone knows it’s there, but Dad took me a few times when I was a kid. He was stationed nearby in World War II and was responsible for the supplies kept there. And the best thing…it’s not marked on any maps. I thought it was a clever choice. Except you had to mess it all up, didn’t you?’ He runs a fingertip down my neck and along my shoulder. My skin breaks out in goose bumps. ‘The memory loss, though. That was good. That helped me. Couldn’t have planned it better if I’d tried.’
‘How did you travel between Scotland and here without anyone knowing?’
His lips curve in a smile. ‘Cousin Jeremy. Do you remember when he and Alice stayed with us the night of my party?’ He leans over and kisses my forehead. I squeeze my eyes shut and force myself to breathe. When I open them again, he’s peering at me. ‘Remember?’
‘Yes,’ I whisper.
‘He left his driving license here by accident. You know how much we look alike? Only our height makes us noticeably different, so it was easy, really. You don’t need a passport to fly to Scotland. All you need is a photo ID, which I had. Jeremy Shaw flew to Aberdeen and back, I didn’t. I had the perfect alibi.
‘Doctoring the antidepressants didn’t work, so I had to try a different approach.’ He sits back on his heels and puts the empty beer bottle on the floor. ‘I knew you’d be at Sara’s, so it would be easy to find you. I got a cab from the airport. It dropped me off near her house, and I walked the rest of the way. It was getting dark by then. There were no lights on, and you weren’t around. I’d already copied the spare key for Sara’s door you used to keep at our house, so it was easy to get in. Then it was just a matter of waiting for you to come back.
‘Out of Sara’s bedroom window, I saw you walking down the street, and then you suddenly seemed to change your mind and walked in the opposite direction, so I followed you. All the way back here. How convenient.’ He gives me a victorious smile. ‘I wasn’t going to let you leave me. No way. It’s not right, is it? I told you that, didn’t I? I told you that you were mine. We promised each other. We took wedding vows. Something you obviously didn’t take seriously. Till death do us part, forever and ever, Chloe, remember?’ His teeth clench so hard I can see the muscles in his jaw pulsing. I stare at him in frozen silence. He leans in close to me, his breath on my ear. ‘Remember?’ he yells.
I jump. ‘Yes.’
‘This is all your fault. You made me do it. You gave me no choice. I couldn’t let you go. Never. You belong to me.’ He raises his hand as if he’s going to hit me again. There’s an ominous stillness in the air as I squeeze my eyes shut, waiting for the blow to come.
But it doesn’t.
Instead, he says, ‘I’m hungry. Think I’ll make myself something to eat. It’s going to be a long night.’ I open my eyes, and he’s leaning over me. He puts my gag roughly back in place, smiling all the time, his eyes sparkling with what looks like excitement. ‘You can’t go anywhere, so don’t even think about trying.’ He walks out of the room.
The key turns in the door with a loud click, sentencing me to death.
36
They say your life flashes before your eyes when you’re about to die.
Mine doesn’t. Not my whole life, anyway. Just the last few months.
The baby. My baby. It all started there. I remember now. I can see the images clearly in my head.
When Jeremy and Alice left the morning after the party, I could hardly contain my excitement anymore. For the first time in my life, I had something that was mine. Truly mine. Something Liam or anyone else couldn’t take away from me. A life inside me that he couldn’t touch. Even though it was an accident, I was ecstatic.
Except Liam didn’t feel the same.
I sat him down at the kitchen table, a blissful smile on my face. I had hope. Everything would be different now. It would make things better between us. He’d see how selfish and inconsiderate he’d been. Surely, with a baby on the way, it would make him change. When he held that little bundle in his arms for the first time, I was certain it would make the old Liam come back.
I gave him the positive pregnancy test all wrapped up and tied with a bow. His eyes lit up, thinking it was another birthday present. But when he realized what it was, his features grew hard, his face red and blotchy, blue eyes distant. My smile faltered as I waited for him to say something. Then he stood up, stared me straight in the eyes, and said, ‘You never think of anyone except yourself, do you?’ A muscle throbbed in his jaw, a sign I recognized that he was about to blow up. ‘You’re so fucking selfish. After everything I’ve done for you!’ His lips contorted with anger as he pointed an accusing finger at me.
I stared at him open-mouthed, the injustice of his words leaving me speechless.
He thrust his face towards mine. ‘You had nothing when I met you. In debt with a student loan! No house! No assets! You fucking owe me. I gave you everything. You should be grateful someone wanted you, and you repay me by going behind my back and getting pregnant! What kind of idiot do you think I am?’ He grabbed me by the shoulders, shaking me roughly, his fingers digging in so deeply I thought he would actually pierce the skin. I was too terrified even to cry out. ‘I’m not sharing you with anyone. Get rid of it,’ he snarled and stormed off to work as tears flowed silently down my cheeks.
Of course, I couldn’t ‘get rid of it’. I wouldn’t. It wasn’t just about me anymore. I was responsible for another being now. Even if I couldn’t give my baby the gift of life in the end, he or she gave me something precious: the courage to stand up for myself.
He knew. Knew I’d never kill my baby. When he got back from work that night, he had a huge bouquet of flowers in his hand and some champagne. He apologized profusely. He said it had all been a huge shock, and he didn’t know how to deal with it. But he’d had the day to think it over, and he was as happy as I was.
He ran me a bath and massaged my shoulders. He brought up a glass of champagne for himself and a glass of the tin
iest amount for me mixed with orange juice. He toasted the baby and us, and as he watched me drink it, the hope returned. I wanted to believe everything really would be OK now, and when you want something so much, it’s easy to lie to yourself.
Later that night, the miscarriage started. I woke with stomach cramps, the feeling of sticky wetness between my legs. I rushed to the bathroom and wiped myself. The blood was everywhere. I didn’t know then. I couldn’t have guessed what I know now. He must’ve put something in the champagne to make me miscarry. That’s what I believe. And suddenly no life was inside me anymore. Just me and Liam again, the way he wanted it.
But I couldn’t do it anymore. Existing but not living. I remembered the hope and happiness I’d felt when I was pregnant. The idea of possibilities. I wanted that back.
My baby was the last straw.
When the depression hit, I thought about leaving him. Thought about it morning, noon, and night. When I got over the grief and felt better, that was it. I was going to get away. But somehow, he knew or suspected I’d end our relationship, and he couldn’t let that happen. The antidepressants from the doctor gave him the perfect means to hurt me. He tampered with them, I’m sure. Maybe he wanted me to go mad. That would be my punishment for daring to defy what he wanted. A taste of what would happen if I didn’t stay in his control. Or maybe he wanted to kill me then, but something went wrong.
When I came home from the psychiatric unit, I was still unhappy and grieving, but I was something else, too. Suspicious.
No one wants to think their husband can do something like that, but there were just too many coincidences. Losing the baby; losing my mind. I didn’t know what he would do to me next. Things were clicking into place, and I no longer believed the doctors when they said I’d just suffered a very rare and unfortunate reaction to the drugs. I knew it was Liam, and it was time to escape. And when I found out about his affair, it justified my decision and expunged any final doubt in my mind. It was the last nail in the coffin.
