by Karen Perry
‘You look so tired,’ she says, pityingly.
Working hard to keep my voice steady, I say, ‘I need to lie down and sleep.’
Her eyes flicker over me.
‘And so do you,’ I say.
I hold her gaze, see the bloom of hope in it, the yearning, and when her mouth pushes against mine, I clench my hands into fists, steadying myself, preparing. Our lips part and her face draws back, her gaze containing infinite and mysterious tensions.
‘Shall we go up?’ I ask, my voice a hoarse whisper.
I go first. It’s such an effort to climb the stairs. My heart is beating slow and hard now as we enter the bedroom. Darkness fills the space and we don’t turn on the lights. Darkness is what’s required for what must come next.
I lie back slowly and she perches on the mattress next to me. One half of her face is visible by the paltry light coming through the window, the other half in shadow. There’s a stillness about her now that we’re up here, the two of us, alone. Sitting there, looking down at me, she seems to be deep in contemplation. My eyelids are closing. I fight to stay awake, just a little longer. But I’m so tired, so weary. And then I feel her hands at my waistband. Slowly, she unbuttons my jeans. I don’t fight her as she slides them from me, and I hear the dull drop of them on the ground. My hands are by my sides, my arms weighted to the bed. I breathe in and out, keep myself steady, waiting, wanting this to be done with. For it all to be over.
She gets up and rounds the other side of the bed. Quickly, she unzips her sweatshirt and shrugs it off, then rips off her T-shirt, steps out of her jeans. In the moonlight, she’s thinner than ever, her ribcage protruding, bra straps tracing lines over the ridges of her clavicles, depleted arms hanging limply by her sides. She is staring down at me, composing herself, and I feel a corresponding steadying of nerves within myself. Distantly I remember the bruising on my thighs, the shadowy threat of her from that night.
She slips under the covers and I wait for her to come to me. The touch of her hands on my flesh, the creep of her fingers, tentatively exploring, becoming bolder. And then she is hovering over me and I can feel the weight of her, the unbearably intimate invasion of her skin on mine. My heart thunders in my ribcage.
‘You know I love you, don’t you?’ she whispers, her hand in my hair, her face drawing close now, close enough to see the light of mad love in her gaze.
This isn’t love. This is survival.
I clench my fist tighter, feel the steel warm from the hot clutch of my sweaty hand, taken from the shelf in Jeff’s study, secreted up here, hidden in the dark.
She lowers herself, her face on my face, her beating heart covering mine. I gather whatever scraps of strength I have left, grip the letter opener, and with a hard thrust, plunge it between her ribs. I feel the burst of skin and the sickening give of flesh. She rears back instantly, and for a held breath she seems suspended, the light catching the strain of tendons in her neck, the wild pulse throbbing in her jugular. And then a sound like a sigh of pain or disappointment escapes her. And I will remember this sound, and later I will wonder whether the thought went through her – the realization of the irony? For as the blood leaps out of her and she collapses forward, her fantasy is made real. Her flesh meets mine, skin to skin, finally, here at the end of things, our bodies entwine.
31.
Cara
Four months later
It is evening, and I am alone in our apartment for what will be the last time.
I stand at the window, listening to familiar noises: the rumble of traffic on the high street, the whoosh and ping of the elevator doors, a truck downshifting at the corner on to Kathleen Road, children playing in the gardens along Amies Street. But here, inside the place I have called home, everything feels different. The rooms echo with a new emptiness. The sale, held up for weeks because of some financial error – although Jeff and I both believe the real reason lay in the buyer’s last-minute wobble over making their home upon the site of such a well-publicized crime – is finally going through. Everything has been cleared out and scrubbed clean. There is no trace of blood on the floorboards in the hall. The rug under the desk has been rolled up and discarded, the desk now installed in the new house in Dulwich. The kitchen seems vast without the table and chairs. A few last boxes sit on the worktops.
The buyers have offered to purchase the L-shaped sofa that fits snugly in the corner of the living room. It is the sole remaining item of furniture.
It is April, and the sky retains a quality of brittle blue brightness even though it is after six. From where I am standing, I can see the shiver of a breeze ruffling the petals on the cherry blossom trees that line the courtyard. In a week or two, the trees will be denuded of their flowers, and drifts of confetti-like petals will amass in corners and drains, growing dirty and trodden underfoot. But I will not be here to see it. I look down at them shimmering with hopeful beauty – the promise of summer to come. I turn away from the window, and pad softly over the bare floor towards the kitchen.
I am not supposed to be here. I should be sitting in a dentist’s chair in Fulham, my problematic molar being tended to. But just after leaving the office, on my way to catch the train, I received an apologetic call from the surgery, explaining that Dr Nichol had an emergency to attend to and would have to reschedule. It could not be helped, they said. I did not mind. Perhaps that was apathy born of the fact that I had swallowed my last temazepam an hour beforehand in preparation for my dental treatment. The sedative was already taking effect, so that I didn’t mind my appointment being bumped – I didn’t much mind anything. The decision to come back here to The Village rather than heading home to the new house was made then. I was starting to feel muggy and vague, and not quite up to the longer journey home. Besides, part of me wanted – needed – to come back here one last time. Alone. To feel a different energy in these rooms than I had felt that last night, when all was chaos and fear and violence and bloodshed. Like an exorcism, I needed to leave this place behind me, cleansed of those memories.
I had tried explaining as much to Jeff on the phone just now, and though he said all the right things – Was I sure? Did I want company? Offering to come over with Mabel – still, I heard the bafflement in his tone. He doesn’t know what to make of me lately. I catch him, sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, looking at me with an unguarded expression of watchfulness and uncertainty.
In the kitchen, I poke around the empty cupboards, check the contents of the cardboard boxes. In one of them, along with some jars of pickles and various packages of flour and baking powder and a grimy plastic gallon of cooking oil, I find an old bottle of Marsala I used for cooking. There’s still some left, and I pour a generous measure into a chipped cup that’s also in the box, and carry it into the living room.
My limbs feel heavy, and the Marsala slides down my throat, warming and reassuring as I half-recline on the sofa, the cup clutched to my chest, staring out at the darkening sky beyond the window, alone and weary, but grateful too. Grateful for this chance to be here without the pressure of watchful eyes, of nervy solicitousness. I am tired of being treated like a patient or a victim, or even a survivor. Here, at last, there is privacy, a respite from all those prying eyes and good intentions. I have been so concerned with getting on with it, reclaiming my life, re-establishing and strengthening all those bonds and attachments I came so close to breaking, that I have had little opportunity to properly reflect on that night and all that led up to it.
I finish the Marsala, and put the cup down on the sofa next to me. Somewhere outside a car alarm goes off. My eyelids lower. My thoughts grow long and heavy. Silence in the room surrounds me. I allow myself to drift.
Perhaps it is inevitable that I fall asleep, under the influence of the wine and temazepam in my bloodstream, and when I do, I dream of Amy. She visits me a lot in my dreams, for that is the only way she can get in. During my waking hours, I push back hard against any thoughts of her. That is how I cope. But at night, the
barriers are down and she drifts on through, a vague, troubling presence, the ghost of her laughter, the persistent glint of her fierce gaze still with me when I wake in the mornings, sweating and breathless.
But the dream that I have now is different. It feels like déjà vu, though I don’t remember anything like this ever taking place between us. But the dream is so vivid and real and full of colour that I can almost be persuaded that Amy is right there with me, and I am sharing my secrets once more.
I did not kill Amy that night. But I wounded her seriously. So seriously that she spent the next few weeks under armed guard, first in Intensive Care and then later in a military hospital. They patched her up enough to remand her in custody in Holloway Prison until her trial, a date for which has not yet been set. They are still putting together the charges. Murder, grievous bodily harm, false imprisonment, to name but a few. It’s quite the shopping list.
I have been told that a warrant for her extradition back to the United States is also being prepared. For Connie’s murder. But also for an aggravated assault on a young woman in Philadelphia, whose name I had never heard mention of before. It makes me wonder whether there are more victims, more grisly crimes lurking in her past history, yet to be discovered. Sometimes, when I think on it too long or too deeply, I become overwhelmed at the knowledge of how close I came to disaster. How a brush with terror on a London street led me up a stairwell and into her head, her heart, her dark obsession. An obsession that led her to intimidate and frighten my daughter, to tear apart my marriage, to almost bludgeon to death my stepdaughter, to murder my lover. All because of her own twisted attachment, her dangerous need to love and be loved.
When I wake now, the apartment is in darkness. There’s a chill in the air, the heating off, and despite my earlier confidence, I feel on edge, intimidated by the nudge of that disturbing dream. The sedative is wearing off, and I feel the need to get out of here, to be among those I love, kept safe by their reassuring presence.
The last look I take around the apartment is scant and half-seeing. I don’t go upstairs. My old bedroom is the one room I won’t check. And when I lock the front door and back away, I try to feel some sense of closure – an ending of sorts. But what I feel instead is disappointment. As if the missing piece is out there but I can’t see it. It’s beyond my reach. Instead, I come away without answers, just a frustrating lack of completion. A blank space, like the square tattoo on Amy’s inner arm – dark and meaningless, an empty box.
The days pass and at the end of the week, Olivia finally comes home. We have prepared her room for her – the rear bedroom on the return, with a view of the garden which is coming into bloom. The walls have been painted the gentlest shade of green that I could find – a calming colour after all the trauma she has suffered. I have bought new bedlinen and made the room as pretty and welcoming as I can, and Jeff has installed a comfortable armchair pulled up to the window so she can sit there and look at the apple trees and pear trees, the laburnum readying itself to burst into colour, and feel her wounds start to heal.
Her hair has started growing back, a nasty jagged scar lurking beneath the new growth. One side of her head had been shaved for surgery in the hours following the attack. A skull fracture and a life-threatening subdural haematoma meant she had to be operated upon almost immediately, followed by three weeks in a coma. In that time, I watched my husband grow thin and gaunt and as wraith-like as his beloved daughter lying unconscious in the hospital bed. His vigil was almost constant and, in a strange way, I feel this helped to save our marriage. Neither of us had the energy for anything other than focusing on Olivia and her recovery, scouring the doctor’s words for hidden meanings, researching online and through friends the various follow-up treatments to deal with the long-term effect of brain injuries. It meant that we didn’t delve too deeply into the problems in our own marriage that led to that disastrous night. It was, I suppose, just sweeping those problems under the carpet, but it meant that when we did come to confront them – in the softly lit rooms of a marriage guidance counsellor – we were both ready, our thoughts more composed. We’d had time to mull things over separately before voicing them aloud.
It feels, at times, artificial, the way we are managing. We carry on with our routines – work, school, home – altered as they are to accommodate Olivia’s recovery and all the necessary medical attention she requires. We try our best to make our home a calm and peaceful environment for her, and for Mabel too. Jeff and I are at pains to be kind to each other, to be loving. We kiss each other hello and goodbye, we hug and embrace and compliment each other. All our resentments and grievances are stored up for those sessions with our counsellor where they are released, sometimes with vitriol, other times with reservations, and then picked over and examined like scientific specimens. It is exhausting but worthwhile, and I feel the dividends when we are alone together, preparing a meal or deciding where to put up bookshelves, some simple domestic task or decision undertaken together, a hum of pleasure running along beneath it.
We talk more now than we ever did, making time and space for each other, both of us, consciously trying to be open and honest. When he asks me about Finn, I answer as truthfully as I can – that I loved him once, but I had been wrong – foolish and reckless – to think that I could maintain something of that bond while being married to Jeff. Sometimes, he asks me about Amy, about whether I had any inkling of her obsession. For some reason, my mind always tracks back to that first night, when we were leaving the storeroom, nerves and fear colliding inside me at the prospect of facing the terrorists on the street, and I remember the clutch of her hand around mine – there was an urgency about it that, even in the heightened state of fear, was notable. I had no idea then of the murderous tendencies lurking inside her. But it had still made me uneasy.
I don’t tell Jeff about my dream of her. It is unusually vivid, and unlike other dreams, whose narratives and images fade quickly with time, this one lingers and survives, announcing itself at odd moments – in a break between recording, in the lull of a train journey, that moment of the evening when the light is fading and night starts coming on.
I don’t tell Jeff or any of our friends about it. But I do tell Dr Nichol.
It takes me over a month to reschedule my dental appointment, so that by the time I return to the surgery, the pain in my mouth has become unbearable. Dr Nichol is brisk and efficient but gentle too – almost tender. She has had her baby – a picture of a wide-eyed newborn with a shock of black hair sits proudly next to the monitor of her computer. She looks trim and tired, the familiar smudged shadows beneath the eyes of a new mother showing above her mask as she peers into my mouth.
After it is done, and I have rinsed and spat, rinsed and spat, I swing my legs around so my feet touch the ground and sit for a minute while she snaps off her gloves and slips down her mask.
‘So?’ she asks. ‘How was that?’
‘Fine. It was fine,’ I say, my voice holding a note of surprise.
‘You were able to control your fear?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good,’ she says, sounding genuinely pleased.
I had decided to undertake the surgery without a sedative.
‘What caused you to change your mind?’ she asks, her head cocked to one side, interested.
‘I don’t know. I just thought I should try without it.’
She nods and keeps holding my gaze, like the answer I’ve given is not sufficient. Which it’s not.
‘Actually,’ I say, ‘the truth is, I was a little wary of taking temazepam again.’
‘Oh?’
‘The first time I took it – for the hygienist – was okay. But the last two occasions I’ve taken it, I’ve felt a little odd.’
‘Two occasions?’ Her eyes narrow, a slight frown mark appearing over the bridge of her nose. ‘There was the last time, when I had to cancel your appointment. But the other time …?’
Inwardly, I squirm a little, then decide it’s best
just to confess. So I tell her about the night I took the sedative not for imminent dental treatment but to calm my nerves. I don’t mention anything about waking up the next morning alongside Amy, the bruising, the disaster that ensued.
‘I was going through a bit of a personal crisis,’ I explain, and even now, when I think about those difficult days – the photographs of me sent to my colleagues, Finn’s threats over Mabel – it brings a shudder of fear or anger. ‘And on this particular night, I was upset, and I took the drug to calm me down.’
‘I see,’ she says, keeping any note of judgement or disapproval from her tone. ‘So, what happened? What kind of oddness did you experience?’
‘On both occasions, there was a kind of blankness – like I’d blacked out, or something.’
‘Was there alcohol involved?’
‘A little. More so the first time. Definitely, yes, the first time – I was drinking a lot that night.’ A flash, then, of Amy cupping her hands around mine, pushing the vodka to my lips and urging me to drink. ‘The second night, not so much – a little Marsala, that’s all. But I had the weirdest dream.’
‘The second time?’
‘Right. A really vivid dream. But the thing is, I was dreaming about the first night – the night I blacked out. A lot of the same details, the same circumstances, but then all this crazy stuff as well that didn’t happen. And the thing I find strange is that I keep thinking about this dream. Most dreams, you forget, right? But this one keeps coming back to me.’
‘Are you sure it was a dream?’ she asks quietly.
The air between us changes – it pulses with the sense of imminent threat.
‘Of course. Why, what do you mean?’
She gives the slightest raise of her eyebrows, a careful smile that does nothing to assuage the panic that has jumped alive inside me.
‘Might it have been a recovered memory instead of a dream?’
