by Louise Voss
But she moved away out of the bedroom. Where had she gone? A few moments later my question was answered: I heard the shudder of pipes, the rush of water. She was running the bath. I took a deep breath.
Right now, just down the hall from me, in a room where I had only recently stood, she would be taking her clothes off, throwing them on the floor, dipping a hand into the water to test its temperature. Maybe pouring a little oil into the water, or some bubbles. Oh God, she might even be shaving her legs or armpits. Or would she do that in the bath? I’ve never lived with a woman, never shared a bathroom with any females apart from Mum and Annette, and I never had any desire to watch them in the bath. I used to sometimes fantasise about dropping a few piranha fish into the water when Mum was in there, but that was where my mother/bathroom interests finished.
The taps stopped running; the water tank continued to clank for a while, then suddenly fell silent. The bath must be full. She would be stepping into it now, her toes breaking the surface of the water, then one ankle, and she would step in, slowly lower herself into the hot, oily liquid, her skin flushed pink by the heat… Oh, Jesus. I could picture her body; I knew what it would look like: bottom like Kylie; stomach like Angelina Jolie; breasts like Halle Berry. Flawless skin, maybe a constellation of freckles on her shoulders. Her eyes would close as she sank into the water.
What was she thinking about?
Was she thinking about me?
One of Siobhan’s dresses was hanging in front of my face. I pulled it closer, against my mouth and nose, breathing in her scent…then snapped out of my erotic reverie. This was my chance to escape. While Siobhan was in the bathroom, I could get out of the house. As long as the bathroom door was shut.
I opened the wardrobe door as quietly as I could, blinking at the invasion of light. Slowly, I eased my way out of the dark space and stood up. I looked over towards the bedside table – the diary wasn’t there! I checked the bed. I lifted up Biggles to make sure it wasn’t under him. He wasn’t pleased, and swiped at me, his claws scratching my hand. I had to bite my lip to stop myself from crying out. I watched the scratches turn red and sucked my skin. Biggles closed his eyes and went back to sleep, and I realised Siobhan must have taken the diary with her.
The bedroom door was open and, looking down the hall, I could see – oh thank you God – that the bathroom door was shut.
I crept down the hall.
The bathroom door had a panel of frosted glass which had steamed up from the inside. I stood just before the door. I trembled. The woman I loved was beyond that layer of glass, naked… a woman who wants to be fucked by a man with a dick like a truncheon. I didn’t know if I would quite measure up to that, but I knew this: Siobhan was as frustrated as me; she was in need just like me. And I knew – I know – that she and I could help each other, could find what we’re looking for in each other’s arms; in each other’s beds.
I stepped in front of the bathroom door and tried to look through the glass. All I could see were vague shapes, misty shadows that fed my imagination. I could hear splashing, rippling water.
My hand hovered over the door handle. All I had to do was turn the handle and push, and there we would be …
Siobhan would turn and smile, raise an eyebrow. Pick up the soap and hold it out to me. ‘Don’t be shy, Alex. Why don’t you come over here and wash me…’
I pulled my hand away from the door handle. I couldn’t do it.
I walked past the door and went straight down the stairs – and as I descended I stumbled, missing a step, having to grab the bannister to stop myself from falling. My foot went bang on the next step.
I went rigid. I could see the front door below me. Above me, I heard a loud splash, the sound of a body emerging from water. Siobhan must have heard me. She would be frightened, wondering what the hell that noise was. Oh God, I didn’t want to scare her; I hated to think of her being afraid. A wave of sickness crashed over me. This was a mistake. What was I doing here? It was all wrong. And I realised that I needed to do what I had come here to do initially: I had to talk to her.
I continued to the foot of the stairs. But instead of going out of the front door, I turned right and went into the living room. I sat down on the sofa and waited, sick with trepidation.
A minute later I heard movement on the stairs: she was coming down, slowly, my angel descending towards me. I combed my fingers through my hair, breathed into my cupped palm to make sure I didn’t have bad breath.
I didn’t have to wait long.
She appeared in the doorway just after I’d checked my breath for the third time. She was looking towards the kitchen at first, but then she turned her head towards me.
She jumped, clapping a hand over her heart. Her mouth formed an O, her eyes an umlaut above it. I tensed, expecting her to scream or at least cry out – but she remained silent… for a few seconds. Then she said, ‘Alex.’
‘Hello Siobhan.’
We looked at each other, neither of us saying a word. I could see her chest rising and falling rapidly. Excitement? Fear? Both, I thought – the blend of dread and exhilaration that we all feel before any momentous encounter; the same gut-churning sensation you get when you take your seat on a rollercoaster. She took a step towards me – she was wearing a blue robe; her bare feet had left damp footprints on the carpet behind her. She was unbearably beautiful – so beautiful that it was painful to look at her, like staring at the sun.
‘How did you get in?’ she said. Her voice was husky.
I reached in to my pocket and took out the key, holding it up towards her. She nodded slowly, a look of comprehension coming into her eyes. ‘How many times have you been in here?’
I shrugged. ‘Two or three. I… I wanted to get to know you better. To learn about you. I met Biggles and he seemed to like me.’
She came a step closer. She had her hands out in front of her, her palms towards me. She glanced towards the phone, which was over near her desk.
‘You don’t need to be afraid, Siobhan,’ I said. ‘I love you. I’m not going to hurt you.’
‘No…’ she said, very quietly.
‘I promise, Siobhan. You wouldn’t hurt me, would you? You’d never hurt someone you love or who loves you.’ I almost added ‘unless’, but stopped myself.
‘You don’t love me,’ she said. ‘You think you do, but you don’t, not really…’
‘I do!’ I stood up and she took a quick step backwards, fear flashing across her face.
‘Sit down,’ she said, her voice a whisper. ‘Please.’
I did as she asked, wanting to obey her: to love, to honour, to obey. When we get married, I thought, I’ll want to say those words – they’ll be part of my vow. To love her until I die, to cherish from this day forward and… what else? For better, for worse, forever and ever and ever amen.
She looked at the phone again and seemed to think for a moment. Then she turned back towards me. ‘Alex,’ she said, ‘you have to listen to me. You don’t love me. You’ve… developed a crush on me, a fixation. You might think you love me but you don’t really know me. This…this isn’t how it’s supposed to work. You’re supposed to meet someone, go out for drinks, go to dinner, date, talk, kiss, go to bed, and then, if you’re lucky, at some point down the line, you fall in love. I know you wanted to go for a drink and I lied to you, but that doesn’t mean – I mean that doesn’t give you the right to stalk me.’
Stalk? It took a few seconds for the word to sink in. I said it aloud: ‘Stalk? You think… I’ve been stalking you?’
‘I… look, it doesn’t matter what you call it, but it has to stop. This is…this is wrong, Alex, this is fucked up. You should not be in my house! You should not have a key. I don’t even know how you got it. But I now know that’s how you got my credit card details.’
I didn’t speak.
‘What do you think the police would say if I told them about that? It’s theft.’
I swallowed. ‘Are you going to call them?’
<
br /> She hesitated. ‘Not right now. But I will – unless you pay me back the money you spent. All of it.’
I hung my head. ‘I will.’
‘And you’re going to have to stop coming to the class as well. I don’t want to see you there again.’
‘But…’
‘No. If you come, if I even see you lurking around outside, I’ll call the police straight away.’
‘But I like the class. I want to learn from you.’
‘It’s too late for that. You’re not going to see me again, Alex. No more cards or flowers. No more presents. Certainly no more visits to my house. I want you to put the key on the sofa beside you and leave it there. That’s it. Good.’
‘How will I pay you back your money?’
‘You can post it to me. You obviously have my address.’ She took a deep breath. ‘And now I want you to go, to leave my house. It’s over, Alex.’
She fell quiet, folding her arms and staring at me. I stood up, leaving the key behind me. I walked across the room towards her.
I stopped right in front of her. There were just three or four inches between us. If I took another step that distance would increase, would keep growing with every step, until I was out of sight, out of her world. The thought made me feel so sick and scared. I knew I had to obey her – to move, to go – but my legs wouldn’t follow orders. And there was something else, something that told me this was all wrong, that Siobhan was making a mistake: I could feel it – a current running between us. Electricity. Chemistry. She was trembling. I wondered if she realised what she was throwing away.
‘Go, Alex,’ she said again, and, finally, I went.
Out of the door. Out of her life.
When I got home I lay down on my bed and cried. But even as I felt myself sinking into a pit of despair, hot tears burning my eyes, I knew it wasn’t over. No way. Fate wouldn’t allow it.
PART TWO
Chapter 15
Siobhan
It seems to be taking a long time, getting over the shock of finding Alex in my house like that. It’s been a week, and I still can’t stop thinking about it. About the way he looked at me; sort of greedy, ashamed, and defiant, all rolled together. I don’t think I’ve ever felt as vulnerable as I did right then, standing dripping onto the carpet. I felt as if my dressing gown was invisible – he was staring fixedly right at my crotch and my nipples. At times he seemed as terrified as I was – although at other times he really frightened me.
What would I have done if he’d leaped at me, ripped my dressing gown off my shoulders, unzipped his jeans and jumped on top of me? Like that creep in the alley, but this time going all the way. I’ve often visualized how it must feel to be raped. The dry unwelcome thrusts, the pain, the humiliation. Wondering if you’re going to escape alive, or be killed so you can’t run to the police.
I don’t know how I would have reacted; how much I could have hurt him back. I know what you’re supposed to do – the poke in the eye, the knee in the balls, the screaming – but knowing and acting are two entirely different things, when you’re standing there petrified and half-naked, like a teenage virgin on a sacrificial altar. Even thinking about it makes me feel as if my lungs are closing up, as if it’s oxygen which is the invader, trying to force itself into my body while I rebel against it.
I’m quite proud of myself, actually, managing to tell him that he has to pay me back. I want him to know I mean business, so yesterday morning I looked up his address in my student files and wrote him a note, a brief but businesslike letter reminding him of the exact amount he owes me for the clothes (£324.98), and that he is barred from my class. If he shows up again, I will not only explain to the college exactly why I barred him, but I will also go straight to the police. Ditto if I don’t receive the money within one month.
I’ve changed the lock on the front door too, just in case he had two copies of my key made. Coming home after my first postAlex venture out, I convinced myself he’d got into the house again. Got in a bit of a state, actually. The air in the hall had that sort of occupied feel to it; an unnatural kind of stillness to the dust as it hung there, lit up by the sun through the stained glass panels.
Mind you, I thought I sensed it before I even opened the front door. I’d turned the key and crept in, really quietly, with my can of pepper spray at the ready in one hand (Jess bought it for me), and my tallest, most pointy stiletto in the other, ready to sink it into his head the second I saw him. But nothing. I tiptoed (well, as much as you can tiptoe wearing one stiletto and holding the other. I kept the other one on in case I needed to kick him in the nuts) round the whole place, but found nothing except a large spider in the bathtub, and Biggles, rolling his eyes at me, in the bedroom.
Actually, Biggles and I had a bit of a drama the other day. I’m sure this was Alex’s doing too. I was just sitting at my computer, trying to think of something interesting that my characters might say to each other, when I heard from upstairs the unmistakeable and depressing sound of a vomiting cat. I ran up the stairs, two at a time, and sure enough, Biggles had chucked up enough of his guts to string a tennis racket. All over my bed. He was heaving and shivering, and he had that terrible ashamed look that they get. So of course we had to dash for the vet’s, with him hawking and groaning all the way there. I was terrified that he was going to die, and that he had been poisoned. But the vet said that this was extremely improbable, and that it was more likely to be a virulent strain of cat-flu that’s going around. Or a bad mouse. I still have my doubts though, and I disinfected all Biggles’s bowls and threw away his opened Munchies when we got home. The vet gave him the world’s most expensive injection – the feline equivalent of Botox, costwise cc for cc, and he seems fine now. It probably wasn’t anything to do with Alex, but everything seems so…I don’t know…amplified at the moment. I can’t seem to help but jump to conclusions.
Funny that I haven’t been able to write about it since it happened; not until now, that is. I haven’t written anything for a week.
I think I know the reason though. It’s just that I always leave my diary face-up on my bedside table, and when I came in from tennis that day, it was face-down. I’ve got a horrible, horrible feeling that Alex might have been reading it. In a way, that’s almost as bad as rape. I mean, I know this diary is more Bridget Jones than Proust, but it’s still totally private. The thought of anybody else reading it makes me feel violated and sick. Every time I’ve reached for it in the last week, I’ve seen it through the eyes of somebody else: flicking through the pages, noting all the banalities and shallownesses.
Ironic, really – being stalked is about the most bloody interesting thing that’s ever happened to me. Was it Dorothy Parker who said, ‘Only good girls keep journals; bad girls don’t have the time’? Probably.
I shouldn’t have the time to keep a journal. I should be hacking through the rainforest with a machete, or building clean-water wells in Africa. Or writing that novel. Or, at the very least, be run off my feet by a couple of small children and a weary but affectionate husband.
But I’m doing none of these things. I’m moping around self-indulgently, blowing some relatively small incident – from which I emerged completely unhurt – into some giant event.
Still, look on the bright side. Everyone is being so supportive (apart from Phil, who’s still not returning my calls. Well, sod him). Mum and Dad wanted me to move home, but I couldn’t face it. They eventually stopped banging on about it after I got the lock changed, and Paula stayed with me a couple of nights after it happened. I even had lunch with Jess and Tom the other day, which was when she bought me the pepper spray. My godson is really sweet. He sits up in a high chair and bangs spoons now – last time I saw him, all he could do was loll around farting (not unlike Phil then, really. No wonder I wasn’t much cop as a godmother). I’m definitely going to try harder to keep in touch with them, and Jess was all ears to get the latest in the Alex saga.
But apart from the thoughts of Alex bu
zzing like a bluebottle stuck inside my head, life continues the same as ever. I write about 75 words a day on the book. I play tennis with Dennis. I lock up the house like Belmarsh every night, get cabs home, rush to the post to see if Alex’s cheque has arrived – but nothing. No hang-ups on the phone, no skulking outside the curtains. He’s got a month to pay me back, then I really will go to the police.
I think.
Nobody questioned it at the writing class when I said that Alex had left. The heart’s kind of gone out of that class since Kathy died, anyway.
Although we had quite a decent session last week. My heart was in my mouth as I got out of the car in the college car park, but if Alex was there, he was hiding himself very efficiently in the bushes. I felt horribly nervous, going back into the classroom, but again, all was the same. Barbara still had her great big purple veiny calves sticking out from under her polyester skirt. Jane’s phone still vibrated noisily in her bag until she turned it off and apologised – this happens every week. The worst thing that happened was my feeling of missing Kathy – it just seemed so weird that she wasn’t there. Even weirder than Alex hiding in my house when I was in the bath, somehow.
Anyhow, I got through it. I burbled a lot about knowing when to write dialogue scenes, and when to use a narrative voice; that kind of thing, then we did an exercise, and then the time was up.
Frankly, I’ll be glad when I can stop teaching this course..
Chapter 16
Alex
