Our Kind of Cruelty

by Araminta Hall

  Verity and Hayes split up at Christmas last year, but she had already met Metcalf by then and begun an affair. Friends describe them as seeming blissfully happy and they were engaged within months and married this September at a lavish ceremony in the grounds of her parents’ home. Bizarrely, Hayes attended the wedding, but guests have said he seemed agitated and out of place.

  No one knows when Verity and Hayes reconnected or what happened. All we know for certain is that they were seeing enough of each other for her to now accuse him of assaulting her in her own home 24 hours before the murder took place, whilst Angus was on a business trip in LA.

  Perhaps they never stopped loving each other? Or perhaps Verity never loved Hayes or Metcalf? Perhaps she saw an opportunity in both men and played one off against the other? Because Verity Metcalf is now a very rich woman, being the sole beneficiary of her husband’s substantial fortune.

  We’ve all known a Verity Metcalf; I certainly have. She’s the prettiest girl in school, the one who gets all the boys. She’s clever and bright and funny and always invited to all the parties. She looks good in clothes but never seems to work out. She gets the dream jobs and the sunniest holidays; she eats in the best restaurants and drives the fastest car. She knows the power of her sexuality and isn’t afraid to use it.

  Except, when you try to have a proper girly chat with her, you realise there is something missing. She doesn’t want to curl up in her pjs with a bottle of Pinot Grigio and compare dating disasters. She keeps herself aloof, with one eye trained over your shoulder in case a good-looking man should walk in.

  The last time I trusted a woman like Verity Metcalf she walked away with my husband, and since then I’ve been able to see past the glitz and the glamour and look into these women’s eyes. They’re dangerous, the Verity Metcalfs of this world, and they know it. It’s just a shame it takes the rest of us too long to learn the lesson.

  One thing’s for sure: whether or not Verity is responsible for her husband’s death, I doubt she’s really innocent or truthful underneath all her perfection.

  Xander looks more and more pleased with himself every time he comes to visit, bringing with him bundles of news clippings, which I’ve now stopped reading. I can’t look at one more picture of Verity with her eyes meeting the camera as the flashes pop in her over-exposed face. I know what it is costing her to hold herself together like that, how inside she will be crumbling and weakening, how all that might be left of her is a ruin.

  I think of my garden sometimes. Anna said that we had to tear it all down to rebuild it and make it better and I have to believe that is right. Verity and I might appear as nothing more than rubble at this moment, but I am doing this for the best reasons. Out of this mess I am going to create something truly spectacular, something so much better than what we had.

  The police have been to see me a few times about Verity. They go over and over the same questions, asking me to repeat stories about our lives so that it almost feels salacious. They ask me about the things we’ve done together, the promises we made, the connection we shared. They can’t understand why V’s tone was so friendly in the emails she sent, and they go through them line by line, asking me to show them where she is talking in our secret code. Why do you think she didn’t tell anyone about your contact, they ask again and again and I tell them it is because we are in love.

  Mainly though they want to know why she rang me on the night of the murder and why, when the police arrived, she was in my arms whilst Angus lay dying on the floor at our feet. Don’t protect her, Mike, they say, sounding like Xander, she’s not worth it.

  Sometimes, after these interviews, I feel guilty, not because she didn’t do all those things, but because I could never have imagined a moment in which I wasn’t laying down my life to protect V’s. But I’m starting to see that is a very simplistic way of thinking. My life belongs to V as hers does to me. We do not exist without the other and as such we can’t be parted, we can’t go off on different paths. We have to stay together, whatever that means and whatever it takes to get us there.

  It’s odd to think I’m only down the road from home; Clapham to Wandsworth Prison is only a brisk half-hour walk. I can’t see anything other than sky from my small, high window, black birds circling like vultures in the grey clouds. But still I can trace the route between here and home, walking the streets so thoroughly in my mind I can almost feel that wonderful ache in my legs when I stop. There is nowhere near enough exercise given to us in here. No wonder the men all scream and shout and spit and swear. Our bodies are useless, leaving only our minds to puff and pant along. I spend hours each day exercising in my cell, even though Fat Terry says he’ll deck me if I don’t shut the fuck up. But we both know he won’t, or more accurately he can’t. His tub-of-lard stomach against my taut muscles wouldn’t stand a chance and he knows it. I don’t even bother to answer him as I dip towards the floor on my hundredth push-up or exhale my breath against the pain of razor-fast sit-ups. I cannot let my body wilt and falter. I have to look good for V in court and I have to be strong enough to save us both.

  V said we had a bright future and because of that I always imagine us bathed in golden sunshine. She wanted us to work hard and earn lots of money so we could kick back and relax later on. What is the point, she used to say, of working three-quarters hard all your life and dying of a heart attack the day after you retire, when you can push yourself when you’re young and fit and have fun, then retire early and have even more. I wonder how what is happening now fits into her plans and I wonder if we will still have enough money to live the life she dreamt of when I get out. I don’t want ever to have to use a penny of Angus’s money and I doubt she would either. Thoughts like this can keep me awake at night as I spin through scenarios which see me searching for a job as I approach forty, a blackened criminal record hanging over my head.

  Xander says I’m not allowed to write to her or try to contact her in any way. He says it would be very bad for my case if I so much as ask to do so and he’s made me promise not to. Instead I talk to V all the time in my head. I know she’s still angry with me for telling Angus in the way I did and she’s right to be. If I’d just waited a bit longer and let her handle it she would have known how to let him down gently and he wouldn’t have got so angry. He wouldn’t have drunk too much or attacked me and he wouldn’t have made it necessary for me to punch him so hard.

  Xander calls this self-defence and he says I must not forget the facts: I was woken from sleeping, Angus was threatening and intimidating, he threw the first punch, I tried to reason with him, I never wanted to hurt him. Say it to yourself every night before you go to sleep, Xander says, remind yourself that you acted in self-defence.

  I go over and over the conversation V and I had in Angus’s house the night before the incident. How I said I wished Angus didn’t exist and how she told me she wished things had worked out between us. But how she also told me to go home and wait, how she needed to be the one to tell Angus. How she was not just giving me what I wanted, but also protecting me. She knows me so well she knew I would get angry. I see now that she was trying to save me from myself and I didn’t listen to her. If only I had just understood and left when Angus said she was ill, then by now they would be on the way to divorce and V and I would be living together at home.

  That thought affects me physically. It climbs inside me and burrows into my gut like a parasite, so I have to roll on to my side and clutch my stomach. Because we were so close, we were within touching distance of all we had ever wanted, and I had to ruin it.

  But I am well practised in ruining things. If I am feeling weak my mind sometimes pounces, dragging me backwards through the detritus of my life. I scramble and scrap, clawing my way back up the hill, but on the way down it treats me to some fine views. Carly of course is near the top, but if I slither further I can watch myself opening the door to those social workers a thousand times, the film scratched and grainy against the pitted inside of my skull. I see mys
elf standing back; I feel the will to protect my mother drain out of me.

  She used to come and see me for the first few years I was in care. Controlled visits they were called and they all took place in a room in the home which was shut off from the rest of the house. It was painted a sickly yellow and had peeling stencils of rabbits and bears on the wall. There was a sad plastic tub of toys in one corner and a worn purple sofa running along one wall, under a shelf of books. None of the books ever changed places, their spines sagging under the weight of neglect.

  She was usually sober, although she pretty much always stank of booze and fags, mixed with a lavender scent which she bought from the market and thought masked the poison which constantly oozed out of her pores. She cried quite a bit and her make-up would clump and run and make me feel sick. Her clothes were dirty in that way where you can see the grime layered and ingrained, and she smelt disgusting, a mixture of mud and fish and decay which caught you in the back of the throat. She apologised a lot, her eyes darting over my face, as if I was meant to know how to respond. She told me about where she was staying and said soon I’d be able to come back and live with her, even though we both knew it wasn’t going to happen. Or at least, I knew; maybe she deluded herself right up till the end. She asked what I’d been up to and I shrugged and told her nothing.

  She came a few times to Elaine and Barry’s, sitting nervously in their front room while Elaine bustled with tea and biscuits. Her hand shook when she raised the mug to her lips and there was lipstick on her teeth which didn’t wash away when she drank. I could hardly believe it when I saw that. My mother, I realised, was the type of woman who wasn’t even lucky enough to count on tea washing away her embarrassingly applied lipstick. It felt, as I sat on Elaine’s green couch, almost the worst of all her sins against me. It felt unforgivable. It felt cruel and vindictive. It felt like a summation of everything that was wrong about her.

  I have decided to grant Elaine’s application to visit me because sometimes I surprise myself with my need to see her. Maybe it’s nothing more than sentiment for me to look back fondly on those evenings with them, the drone of Fat Terry’s TV in the corner, rehashing Christmas songs in a desperate attempt to make us buy trash, in between terrible shows where inarticulate people shout at each other about who has fathered their baby. Elaine and Barry love Christmas and I spent nine very happy ones in their home before I met V. I wonder if this Christmas will be better or worse than the last one and then I can’t believe it’s only been a year since all that. How sometimes life can drag and turn and other times it speeds and shunts, propelling you forward however hard you want to stay back. About this time last year I was fucking Carly and my life.

  Xander told me today that V has been formally charged with accessory to murder, although she’s been granted bail. She will have to wear an electronic tag around her delicate ankle and report to a police station once a day.

  ‘The things you’ve both said just don’t add up,’ he told me. ‘The tone of the emails she sent you were too affectionate for you to have been threatening her and she never reported any of your so-called harassment of her to the police. She didn’t tell anyone she knew, including Angus, about the times you met one another. She’s now saying you assaulted her the night before the murder, but she didn’t call the police or mention it until recently. And then of course there’s that phone call she made to you on the night of the murder and the fact that she was in your arms when the police found you. And you keep going on about how in love with each other you are, which just makes the police think you’re protecting her. None of it looks great for her, which is no bad thing for us.’

  I presume V will spend Christmas at Steeple House, but I wonder if Suzi will have pushed the boat out as she usually does. I wonder if they’ve decked the tree and if there are lavish presents beneath it. I wonder if the turkey is ordered from the butcher’s, the cake made, the mince pies browning. I wonder if they’re lighting candles and opening the door to carol singers. I wonder if they’ll turn up for the Christmas Eve service at the chapel.

  Xander said that he’s been told to expect a trial date for early January. In all likelihood it’s going to take place at the Old Bailey because of the nature of the case and the public interest. And, as he assured me, we will be tried together, sitting for the duration within touching distance of each other at the back of the courtroom.

  He knows V’s barrister, Petra Gardner, and says she’s formidable. I asked if we’re on the same side, V and I, and he laughed and said no, not really. It made me feel odd, him saying that. It was nearly enough to make me tell him to stop, but I have to keep remembering how this will really be a new beginning for us. I have to hold on to the fact that we are not fighting each other and ultimately both want the same thing. We both need to look to the future.

  Elaine and my mother arrived on the same day. Elaine in person and my mother courtesy of the Daily Mirror. I folded my mother in half and laid her on my bunk, but she stayed in my head as I walked down the steps towards the visiting room and Elaine. My mother was alive and the thought gave me an unexpected rush of joy which pricked at my heart and lifted me along.

  Elaine had lost weight and her winter coat hung off her frame as she walked between the tables towards me.

  ‘Oh Mikey,’ she said, reaching over for my hands. ‘My poor boy, what have you done?’

  The shock of her kindness made me start. ‘I’m sorry, Elaine.’

  ‘I just don’t understand. What happened?’ Her kindly face fell and swayed beneath the weight of it all.

  ‘It was an accident. He came to the house in the middle of the night and attacked me and I punched him in self-defence.’ Xander had schooled me so well I couldn’t remember any more what was really true and what was necessary truth, as Xander called it.

  ‘And now Verity’s been arrested too. It doesn’t make any sense.’ Elaine’s eyes were begging me to tell her something palatable, something she could take home to Barry like a present.

  ‘Verity was going to leave him to be with me.’

  ‘Oh, Mike. But she says you assaulted her, that you’d been hassling her.’

  ‘It’s very complicated.’

  ‘But were you two having an affair?’

  ‘Not an affair exactly. It was more like it never stopped between us. We’d met a few times and talked about her leaving Angus. She felt very guilty about it all.’

  Elaine’s eyes were small like a mouse, but she kept them on me. ‘If that’s true then why is she saying all that stuff about you forcing your way into her house and turning up outside her work?’

  I was arrested for the assault last week, a technicality really considering I am already in prison. When Xander told me what was going to happen I think I got a bit angry and shouted, although it’s hazy in my mind. He said it wasn’t ideal and asked if I could be sure I hadn’t assaulted V, which was a preposterous question. Then he asked why I thought she might be saying I had. I couldn’t answer him at the time, but I can now. I’ve worked it out. It’s another part of the Crave. My information got her arrested and so she’s throwing it back at me. She’s angry because she doesn’t yet understand what I’m doing, but really we’re just playing, we don’t mean any of this, it will all pass as everything does.

  ‘Mike,’ Elaine said. ‘Did she ask you to hurt Angus?’

  ‘It’s hard to explain.’

  Elaine lowered her voice. ‘Do you think it’s possible you have a different perception than Verity of what happened?’

  ‘No,’ I said, remembering how our lips had met, her gasp of desire, ‘no, absolutely not.’

  ‘I just can’t make sense of it,’ Elaine said again. ‘Verity was always such a lovely girl. I was so fond of her.’ She squinted at me. ‘Your lawyer asked me lots of questions about your relationship. I don’t believe you planned this together.’

  I looked down and felt my heat rise. I couldn’t think of a way of explaining it to Elaine. ‘It wasn’t like that. It’s
not a simple case.’

  They say visiting time lasts for two hours but I often hear inmates shouting from their cells about how they only get an hour and a half and their (insert a female name here) has had to travel seven hours to visit them. Elaine was my first visitor so I have no idea if the hour and a half we spent together was normal or not, but I could have done with the time being halved. In the end she gave up trying to ask me about the case and began one of the polite conversations I’d heard her have too many times with neighbours and shopkeepers. I couldn’t bear that and almost wished we could go back to talking about what I’d done. It felt like I was falling away from her eyes, as if the more she looked at me the less she could see me, so all she could think to say was how awful the fog was and what did they serve for Christmas dinner in here?

  As soon as Elaine left I wished I’d been brave enough to tell her what I really thought: V had married Angus because she believed herself to be in love with him because of the pain I’d caused her with Carly. She thought I didn’t love her any more and made herself believe she was in love with Angus. It is even possible that she still doubts my love, which would explain why she is accusing me of assault: because she can’t believe I meant it when I kissed her. She didn’t want Angus dead, but she didn’t want to remain married to him and she needed my help to achieve this, help she asked for in a way only I would be able to interpret.

  If only I could write to V or speak to her just once on the phone. I want to soothe her mind and lay my reassurances all over her fears. I know V inside out and I know how she works and what she thinks. She isn’t as strong as she likes to make out and she isn’t particularly sure of herself. I can’t bear to think of her out in the world by herself without me and if that means enclosing her in a concrete box for a few years, then that is the kindest thing to do. We will both be in our protective cells, and that is a comforting thought. Once the trial is over Xander says we will be allowed to write to each other and I plan to do so every day, throwing my love at her until she realises I absolutely do mean it. I will remind her how she once told Suzi she found the idea of writing letters romantic. We will have years of letters, letters we can tie together with ribbon and keep forever.