Double Bind

by Karen Bell

  DOUBLE BIND

  Karen J Bell

  Copyright © 2015 by Karen J. Bell

  All rights reserved

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for use of brief quotations or excerpts in a book review.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Mila Korovin stood at the edge of her husband’s open grave. She didn’t want to be there, though it was not for the reasons one would normally assume. Having endured eighteen years of his abuse, she resented the loss of even one more day, but she had to see for herself that he was safely entombed six feet under.

  The day was as heavy and airless as a Sydney heatwave could muster, but not inappropriate given their relationship and Mila couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that even now, he was somehow controlling the weather. It was a cruel reminder to her that even in death, she would never be fully free of him.

  The service seemed endless, the minister’s voice catching uncharacteristically in his throat, while his wife sobbed in delicate but audible gasps behind a handkerchief pressed to her mouth. They were burying their only child and while their faith in a better place was strong enough to take the edge off their grief, it was evident that the reality of missing his worldly presence was still acute.

  Despite remaining dry-eyed herself, Mila felt a sharp pang of empathy for her in-laws. She too had been an only child, and the apple of her parents’ eye. She was grateful that her parents would never know the pain of losing a child.

  Mila would dearly have loved to have had more children, but her husband Robert had made them stop at one and Mila was secretly glad to have had a daughter, because it saved her worrying that a son might turn out like his father.

  Holly, standing beside her, was doing her best to be brave, but the pressure with which she gripped her mother’s hand was a dead giveaway. Noticing that they were now the same height, Mila wondered where those years had gone? Less than two years earlier, she and Holly had stood in the same cemetery, laying Mila’s parents to rest. The memory of that day was still recalled through a haze of grief and Mila reminded herself that Holly didn’t know the truth about Robert and that she was grieving doubly, for loss of her father and one set of grandparents in such a short passage of time. It was strange to Mila, how hours and days could pass so slowly and yet years disappear in the blink of an eye. It was at once, forever since she had met Robert and yet the memory was still so vivid that it might have been yesterday.

  She stole a look at the small crowd of mourners. It was an overstatement to call them mourners, as she had never known her husband to have a single real friend. Over their years together, his charming façade had crumbled to reveal a surly and bitter core, although what he had to be bitter about, remained a mystery to Mila. Any other man would have celebrated the joy of a family, good health, and relative wealth. For Robert, none of these blessings had ever been sufficient. His appetite for all things material and carnal had been insatiable.

  Mila couldn’t help surreptitiously scanning the faces before her, to see if she could identify any of his indiscretions. He’d been partial to statuesque blondes before they’d met, and had often reminded her how poorly she stacked up by comparison. No one in particular stood out but Mila knew that her husband’s locked mobile phone, hushed conversations and unexplained weekends away didn’t lie. If there were other women who had played a role in his life, they’d either had the common sense to move on or the common decency not to show their faces today.

  She mostly identified older congregants, attending out of sympathy for Robert’s parents rather than for the deceased himself. They shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot, following the lengthy service from open hymn booklets that did double duty as fans, and triple duty as fly swats as the need arose.

  Mila’s attention was brought back to the service as the gravediggers stepped in and began lowering the coffin. When it reached its resting place, she slipped her wedding band from her finger and paused before tossing it into the grave where it landed on the lid with a surprisingly loud and hollow thud.

  There was a collective gasp from the crowd as they tried to decipher the meaning of the act, but Mila’s face remained inscrutable.

  She watched spellbound as the dirt slid into the grave. First it filled the spaces around the coffin and then began to pile up on top. The process seemed to take forever but with each shovel, Mila felt somehow less burdened. When the hole was finally levelled, she noticed how her legs trembled, and her body felt weightless and transparent, held down only by the tether of Holly’s hand in hers.

  Mila hadn’t cried, even in private for a very long time and was determined not to do so now. Keep it together, she told herself, swallowing hard. But her subconscious had other ideas, and she was powerless to prevent the undercurrent surging through her, drawing an ocean of pain in its wake. Once it found its momentum it could not be stopped, and it was all she could do to channel it into a single long wail that pierced the silence and then hung conspicuously in the cloudless sky.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Soon after moving to Sydney, Alexi and Elena Korovin had decided to attend services at the local church, both as a way to meet like-minded people and to put down roots in the big city. It was not a Russian Orthodox Church but having come from a country where it was dangerous to admit to any religious belief, they were simply happy to become part of a local practicing community. They had great aspirations that their young daughter Mila would grow up with the strong values and work ethics that they would instil and the opportunities and freedoms they could only have dreamed of. The small family had only attended services for a few weeks before the minister’s wife had noticed them and extended a dinner invitation.

  The young girl and her parents sat stiffly in the formal sitting room of the minister’s home struggling for conversation. Mila, by then far more fluent than her parents in English, often acted as translator, and tonight her services were repeatedly called upon as they made small talk while waiting for the Taylors’ son Robert to return from university.

  ‘So you’ve come out from Europe to settle in Australia,’ the minister’s wife began, ‘I’ve always wanted to see the continent but our missionary work hasn’t taken us there.’

  ‘From the Ukraine,’ her mother answered, leaving Mila to elaborate.

  ‘We’ve been in Australia for seven years now. My parents escaped communist Ukraine when I was five but we lived in Bendigo when we first arrived because my father was able to find work there as an engineer for the mines. We moved up to Sydney a few months ago.’

  ‘Oh you’re an engineer, how fascinating,’ said the minister, seemingly relieved to find a topic of conversation. ‘You and our son Robert will get on; he’s a numbers man too. He’s doing an accounting degree. He should be home any minute.’

  Mila had grown up hearing about the miracle that had allowed them to leave the clutches of a communist regime in the mid 1980s. They’d reached Australia by ship after a horrendous month-long journey with little more than a suitcase between them.

  To Mila, the move had felt far from a miracle. She had greatly missed her Babushka who had been too old to travel, and then from the day she’d started school, had constantly felt like an outsider thanks to her difficulty with the language. It wasn’t until her thick accent had disappeared and her parents had enrolled her in gymnastics that she’d finally begun to settle in.

  ‘So what made you move to Sydney?’ asked the minister’s wife Mary. ‘I hear Bendigo is very nice.’

  ‘My fat
her was promoted and my mother was offered an academic post at the University of NSW.’ Mila was on autopilot, saving her parents from making the inevitable grammatical mistakes that could prove embarrassing.

  ‘Mila she is doing the competition gymnastics,’ said her mother beaming with pride, ‘and in Sydney there is better teachers.’

  ‘Are better teachers,’ Mila mumbled. She cringed for her mother at times like these. In the Ukraine, her mother had achieved a PHD in Literature and History and in her native tongue, she was both eloquent and articulate. Mila’s father too was punishingly intelligent but it was his wit that suffered most in translation. Even now, almost a decade after emigrating, when speaking English, it was as though their combined IQs were halved.

  In between translating, Mila was mentally rehearsing her floor routine for the next gym meet. She expected to do well, because unlike many of the other competitors in her age category who’d begun to fill out and lose flexibility with puberty, Mila was still whippet slim and sprung like new fence wire. She was visualising the last tumbling set when she realised the minister was asking her a question.

  ‘Mila, how old are you dear?’

  ‘Nearly thirteen.’

  ‘Well Robert is teaching confirmation, as well as Sunday school classes, so it might be a perfect time for you to join in and get to know some of the other girls and boys.’

  As if on cue, the front door opened, and they all turned. Mila would later recall that it was his physique she noticed first, tall and wiry, unlike the stocky male gymnasts she was used to seeing. He wore a loose T-shirt and faded American Levis like he lived in them and when she looked higher, her eyes met his, intensely blue, and perfectly framed behind a pair of reading glasses. He had a high forehead; according to her father a sign of intelligence, and angular features that reminded Mila of the male models she and her girlfriends drooled over in Dolly magazine. He flashed them a dazzling smile.

  ‘Hi everyone, sorry I’m late, the tutor kept us back an extra half hour. I’ll just quickly wash up for tea and then come and say a proper hello.’ With that he rushed off again, leaving Mila gobsmacked.

  Mila’s child-like appearance belied the proliferation of hormones that were surging through her pre-pubescent body. At that moment a tsunami was stirring, and by the time Robert returned and they sat down at the dinner table, those hormones had multiplied exponentially and settled in all her extremities.

  The minister, sat correctly at the head of the table with his wife to his left. Mila’s mother was seated to his right with Mila beside her. Robert had been directed to Mila’s other side, and beyond that, her father completed the small circle.

  ‘Mary, would you like to say Grace?’

  ‘Let’s all hold hands shall we?’ She smiled graciously upon her guests, before bowing her head.

  Mila’s eyes had not left the table and she hadn’t dared to steal a glance to her right but now she had no choice than to tentatively reach out in both directions. Her mother took one hand, her touch predictably warm and soft and Mila waited with breath held for contact on the other side.

  The electricity jumped the gap even before their fingers met. As Robert’s hand settled over hers, she was lit up with the hottest power surge of her short life and she was immediately convinced that the event was no less than a divine awakening.

  ‘Thank you Lord, for the bringing us together to enjoy this meal, in the company of new friends.

  For food when others are hungry, for drink when others are thirsty, for companionship when others are lonely.

  For all this and your continued blessings we are truly grateful.’

  ‘Amen,’ they chorused.

  Mila spent the rest of the evening wishing to say something brilliant, witty and very grown up but only succeeded in uttering the occasional monosyllabic response to Robert’s small talk. The evening ended early as they do in religious households, and later, she bore no recollection of the trip home, only of the fact that she was somehow changed and would never return to her former state again.

  ###

  Had Robert bothered to give her a second thought on that evening - which he hadn’t - he might have been amused that this child, ten years his junior, had developed a giant crush on him. As it was, he quickly forgot the awkward and uninteresting tomboy with whom making conversation had been like pulling teeth. Still, he was self assured and had laid on the conversation and charisma without overexertion.

  Robert Taylor enjoyed the fact that he had always been able to impress people. From the time he could talk, he had realized how very useful words could be when strung together in the right way. He’d also discovered that if he liberally bestowed his enigmatic smile, he could pretty much get whatever he wanted.

  It had all begun quite harmlessly and looking back, he couldn’t pinpoint exactly when the fascination had turned, from the natural act of a child performing in order to have his needs met, into the powerfully satisfying game where manipulation had become an art form with its own reward.

  In the playground he’d experimented with strategy, observing what made other people tick, not because he wanted to make friends - he never cared much for the company of others - but more as a training exercise to examine the paths and the extent to which his exploitation of people and events could be taken.

  He would spend hours in covert scrutiny, compiling lists and mental folders for each potential subject, focusing particularly on their weaknesses and insecurities. Everyone had a weakness; some just kept it better hidden than others. It was easy for him. He was a quick thinker and a faster talker and he held no obvious allegiances. He had begun with the obvious and easy targets; the fat kids or the book worms, building their trust, sometimes over the course of months. He thought he might get away with it once or twice before they all woke up to it, but even he was surprised by how long it went on for, how easy it was to dupe someone who was desperate for attention. They practically lined up, like lambs to the slaughter, to be cut down, sacrificed in the most public and humiliating circumstance he could conjure and orchestrate.

  By the time Robert had reached high school, what had started as a game, soon became a compulsion, like a constant itch he just had to scratch. Adolescence was upon him, and he’d become bored with bringing down the dullards and the diffident. He didn’t want his craft, dumbed-down to the level of schoolyard bully so he devised ever more complex tactics, surreptitiously pitting jock against jock, pretty girl against pretty girl as a means of breaking up the herd, and to single out prey. These were the conquests that awarded him the bonus prize of sex, a new and insatiable desire.

  Still, he never lingered with any one girl for longer than it took him to engender an attachment from her side. Once she started seeking him out in public or worse still, attempting affection, it was time to move on. He had written out several pages of well-rehearsed exit lines. It had further dawned on him that the real challenge was in undermining someone, in a way that made them believe that they, and not he had somehow caused it.

  At first Robert didn’t know why he was driven to do it; the victims meant nothing to him. He had no motive for revenge or grudges to bear, but with each small victory, he felt a sense of power and control that lasted long enough to give him a high but not long enough to put to rest his ever increasing urges.

  By the age of fifteen, Robert knew he’d already out-grown his parents. As he began to read more widely about science, philosophy, history and human nature, he questioned the blind faith with which they practiced Christianity and concluded that they were singularly narrow minded.

  There were certain passages of the Bible that Robert felt required to challenge. He found it ludicrous that the meek should inherit the Earth and he took exception to those passages about humility in Galatians 5 and Acts 20. But other ideas, such as those contained in Ephesians 5:22 – 24 and Genesis 3:16 suited his emerging beliefs, that women should be subservient to men, that they should maintain ‘a meek and quiet spirit’. He particularly liked the
passage:

  Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Saviour. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

  He often masturbated with the strains of the verse running through his head and images of naked girls prostrated before him.

  By the time he finished school, Robert had plotted his path to success and financial freedom, and although he at times found his parents an irritation, it suited his bigger plan to stay at home while saving money to buy his own place. He found it more convenient to re-interpret the words of the holy book than to declare all-out war on religion.

  The day that Robert came home to find yet another new family of visiting parishioners ensconced in their living room, he had indeed been kept back at university, but it had been entirely of his own volition. He’d spent the best part of three months grooming one very attractive teacher in the hope that he might better his exam grade in a particularly tricky subject. It was of little concern that the tutor was married and possibly twice his age. By the time he knocked on the door of her office, they’d both known exactly what was going to happen. She’d worn a dress that day, and probably matching underwear but he’d wasted little time in foreplay and hadn’t bothered undressing her, pushing her facedown on the desk and fucking her hard from behind; without contest, his favourite position.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Mila was to do her confirmation that year, and her parents marvelled at her enthusiasm for Sunday school classes over the next six months. She became the model student under Robert’s tutelage. She spent hours researching and practicing biblical questions to impress and engage him in the hope that he would notice her amongst the class of twenty. He did not. At least not in the way she wanted.

  And so Mila’s confirmation passed with no confirmation of any returned affection. She was bitterly disappointed and turned him into her obsession. Even her gruelling gymnastics regimen couldn’t keep her from fantasising about him day and night, doodling his name and hers, their married name and the names of all five children she had decided they would bear together. Anyone who’d grown up as an only child – as they both had – would realize how imperative it was to have a big family. Besides, the more opportunities to make babies with him the better.