Moderate Violence

by Veronica Bennett

  There was a noise from inside the house. At first Jo couldn’t identify it. She put her ear to the glass and listened carefully. It was coming from the back of the house. The ground floor, maybe the kitchen. There it was again. Suddenly she recognized it: someone was banging something hard.

  Without allowing herself to think, she set off down the side of the house, under the open bathroom window and round to the back, her trainers making no noise on the path. When she looked through the glass panes of the kitchen door, the sight she saw was not the one she expected.

  Holly was standing on a chair in the centre of the room, looking up at the ceiling. In one hand she held a sweeping brush. She was wearing jeans and had her hair in a ponytail like she sometimes wore it to school, and looked exactly like the usual Holly. But on her face was an expression Jo had never seen there before. Deep, desperate panic covered her features like a mask. Her eyes had almost disappeared under her tightly-drawn eyebrows. Jo could see her sticky-out tooth, along with the other top ones, chewing her lower lip. The hand that wasn’t holding the brush was flailing beside her in a gesture of impatience. She was muttering something which Jo couldn’t hear. Again and again, she hit the ceiling with the end of the brush handle.

  A hot feeling, as if all her blood had rushed to her head, came over Jo. Holly was here, just like last night, and she was doing something very suspicious. “Holly!” she called, knocking very hard on the glass of the kitchen door. “Where’s Toby? I want to talk to him!”

  Holly’s face seemed to collapse, as if she had no strength in the muscles needed to keep it looking like beautiful Holly. It didn’t look beautiful. It looked very troubled. She climbed off the chair and came to the back door. “You can’t!” she called through the glass. “I’m sorry, but you can’t!”

  “Open this door or I’ll get a stone and smash the glass!” threatened Jo, with the conviction of someone who knows they’re being lied to. Then, as Holly’s face began to crumple, she relented. “It’s all right, Hol,” she said more quietly. “But I must talk to Toby.”

  Holly leaned against the inside of the glass door. She’d managed not to cry, but her face was pale and her eyes were red. “I’m sorry, but I can’t let you in. It’s beyond my control. I just can’t.”

  Realization flooded over Jo. What Holly had said in Toby’s hallway was true – she had come round to tell Toby about something. Something she couldn’t say on the phone or by text. Well, now Jo knew why. With desperate, breath-shortening certainty, she knew that Holly was standing guard while Toby and Pascale were upstairs in his bedroom. A secret like that was too big to risk it being recorded by an electronic device. That incriminating Inbox, that Received Calls list; the downfall of any plotter who underestimated the power of the mobile phone.

  “Christ, Holly, how could you?” Jo could hardly speak; the words were scarcely above a whisper.

  Holly shook her head. The tears came, but Jo had no sympathy. When she had rung the doorbell, Holly had started pounding on the kitchen ceiling to warn Toby and Pascale. At this very moment, they were probably tiptoeing down the stairs and out of the front door, marveling at the stroke of luck that had sent Jo round the back.

  It was like a comedy film. But it wasn’t in the smallest bit funny. Everyone Jo had trusted had betrayed her. In comedy films, things like betrayal didn’t come into it. But in real life, farcical situations like this weren’t comic, they were tragic. “Please open the door,” she implored Holly. “They’ve probably gone by now, anyway.”

  Holly, her eyes brimming, stared at Jo for a long moment. Then she seemed to make a decision. She unlocked the door, flung it open, caught hold of Jo and hugged her tightly. “I’m so sorry!” she blurted. “I’ve been so miserable! You don’t know how awful this has been, and it’s been going on so long, and I didn’t know how to make it go away once it had started.”

  Jo let her cry a little longer, then gently unwound her arms from her neck. “It’s gone away now,” she said. Her voice seemed to be coming from somewhere far away, like an echo in a cave. She felt as if everything she had ever learnt, understood, memorized, valued, believed or defended had fallen in a heap in the middle of Toby’s mum’s immaculate kitchen, and lay there like an unlit bonfire, waiting for destruction. “You don’t have to worry about it any more, Hol.”

  Holly drew breath to speak, but at that moment there was a thud in the room upstairs, and the sound of a door opening.

  They both froze. Jo didn’t know what to do. She longed, overwhelmingly, for everything to be out in the open at last, but she didn’t want to experience the moment when that happened. She didn’t know if she wanted Toby to kneel and beg forgiveness, or just disappear somewhere very far away, so that she never saw him again. And although she couldn’t avoid seeing Pascale again, before she did she needed longer to have passed since their last, violent meeting.

  “I’d better go,” she said to Holly. “I really don’t want to see them.”

  But it was too late. Jo heard masculine laughter in the hall, and the kitchen door opened. But it wasn’t Toby who stood there. Framed by the kitchen door, wearing his usual tight jeans and T-shirt, and carrying his pointy-toed shoes in one hand, was Gordon.

  Close behind him came Toby, without his shoes or his shirt, smiling. “What was that – ” he began. Then he saw Jo, and stopped. His smile vanished. “Shit,” he said.

  Jo’s body felt suddenly electrified. The sudden realization of what was going on struck her like a million tiny flashes of lightning. She could hear Holly sobbing miserably. A tremor went down her legs; she felt as if she might collapse. She lurched against the worktop, her heart shuddering like a pile-driver. It was hard to speak, but she knew she was the one who must. And suddenly, she found her voice.

  “Shit?” she repeated, fixing Toby with the most venomous stare she could muster. She wished Mr Gerrard, who hadn’t chosen her for Lady Macbeth in the Year Nine Mini-Macbeth because he said she didn’t look evil enough, was there to see it. “How about ‘Sorry’?” She let go of the worktop and advanced on Toby, registering dimly that she’d never seen him without his top before. Their amateurish attempts to be lovers had never reached that level. “Do you realize you’ve never apologized to me, ever?” she demanded. “Even when you were the one deeply, deeply in the wrong?”

  No one spoke. Out of the corner of her eye Jo saw Gordon perch wearily on a stool at the breakfast bar, still minus his shoes, and put his head in his hands.

  “Do you know what ‘deeply in the wrong’ even means?” Jo asked Toby. She could hear her tone getting spiky. She must control it. She mustn’t start to sound like Tess. “Or have you never actually bothered to found out?”

  Gordon and Holly both began to speak. Gordon proved the stronger. “Jo, he is sorry. He’s given me hell this last few weeks, moaning about how bad he feels.” He looked at Toby, who was leaning despondently against the sink, his head down, his arms folded across his naked torso. “In fact, he was going to tell you tomorrow, weren’t you, Tobe?”

  Holly leapt at her chance. “That’s what I was going to say, Jo!” She was sobbing and sniffing so vigorously, Jo almost didn’t understand her. “We were talking about it earlier tonight, and I said he had to tell you, after you came round last night and found me here. I felt so bad, I didn’t know what to do, I – ”

  “You felt bad!” Jo practically spat the words at Holly, then turned on Gordon. “Toby’s been giving you hell!” The same rage that had made her kick the coffee table into Pascale’s legs – poor, innocent Pascale, whose latest conquest, whoever he was, certainly wasn’t Toby – possessed her. “What about me!”

  At last, Toby raised his head. In his face Jo saw anguish. It was the scene, about ten minutes before the end, when everything hangs on a tough decision. The actor emotes, his eyes doing the business. The actress, transfixed by the enormity of his sacrifice, wails, “No! Don’t do it!” But a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.

  Toby pushed hims
elf off the work surface and stepped towards her. He didn’t touch her. He just stood there, the same old Toby with his thin-lipped almost-smile, his neat hair, his far-apart eyes with their watchful expression. But not the same old Toby.

  “You can hate me if you want,” he said solemnly. “But listen, I always really liked you, and I still do. And if things hadn’t been the way they are with me, you’d have been…” He paused, and drew a breath as if he was going to say more. But then he let it out again, and without looking at anyone, opened the kitchen door and went out. A moment later, Jo heard his bare feet padding up the stairs.

  Holly had started crying again. Over and over, she mumbled, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”

  Jo felt as numb, and as dumb, as a doll. “whatever, Hol,” she said. Then she looked at Gordon. “I’d like to hand in my notice,” she said. “I don’t want to come back to the shop any more.”

  She opened the door into the garden. While she’d been in Toby’s house it had got a lot darker outside. She slammed the door behind her and began to run.

  * * * * * *

  When she got home, breathless and sweaty, Tess was still out. Jo turned off her phone and sat in the dark at the side of the house by the dustbins, where Tess wouldn’t see her when she came in.

  Blod came round the corner, padding across the concrete path, inclining her head, beseeching Jo with yellow eyes. Jo picked her up and crouched at the bottom of the wall, the cat draped against her chest. She could feel Blod’s bones beneath her fur, and her tiny wet nose nudging her cheek. The cat began to purr contentedly.

  It didn’t matter what Toby, or Gordon, or anybody said. It was all Jo’s fault. She was the one who had told Toby, stupidly, that she loved him, and then, equally stupidly, that he wasn’t ‘the one’. She was the one who had quizzed him fruitlessly about his friends and his ambitions, but was too spineless to demand to know why he’d been expelled from school. The fact was Toby had never really wanted to be her boyfriend at all. He was just playing some lunatic game with himself, using her to show himself, once and for all, that he only liked men. He’d more or less admitted this. “If things hadn’t been the way they are with me…” he’d said. Well, things were the way they are with him, weren’t they? And because of Jo, he knew it, once and for all. And all the time he was playing his sordid little game with her, he was going clubbing with his friends in London. He was sleeping at Mitch’s place, but not on the floor, of course. And the reason he wasn’t having sex with Jo was very simple. He was having sex with Gordon.

  Gordon. Jo was back in what-the-hell’s-Holly-doing territory. Blod squawked and struggled, so Jo set her down. She watched the white underside of the cat’s tail disappear into the darkness, remembering how Holly, such a so-called loyal friend, had evaded her questions and patronized her suspicions about Toby. But that had been ages ago, on the day of their last exam. Jo had hardly known Toby then, but even so, Holly had refused to discuss him in more detail than her casual “how’s it going?” enquiry had demanded.

  Had Holly known something Jo didn’t know?

  Why hadn’t Jo seen it? It was obvious that Gordon was gay, so why not Toby? The ‘friends’ in London. The clubbing. The clean-shaven chin, the neat clothes and sharp haircut. The prospective career in fashion. And what jobs had he done before he was a shop assistant? A waiter, and a hairdresser, for God’s sake! She unclasped her hands and covered her face with them.

  It was cool in the night-time garden, but suddenly she became almost unbearably sweaty. Her T-shirt was clinging to her back below her shoulder blades, and the waistband of her denim skirt seemed to be melting into her flesh. She’d pulled her hair back into a clip, but all over her scalp sweat was cooling as it touched the air. And something was driving her heart faster and faster. She pressed her nails into her palms, willing herself to fight it as if it were an invisible sparring-partner. But its very invisibility made it too fearsome an opponent. Invisible like The Force. Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope. Or like Frodo when Gollum bit his ring-finger off at the top of Mount Doom. No one could fight what they couldn’t see.

  Her hands still clenched, Jo pushed them into her eyes, so hard that coloured circles chased each other in blackness. She had to shut up about movies, for Christ’s sake. She had enough to deal with in the real world, and no one to help her do it.

  She blinked until her vision cleared, then went back inside. The curtains were open, and moths gathered at the lighted windows. Jo pulled the French windows shut behind her and leant her damp forehead against the glass. She couldn’t see the garden. All that was out there was a black tunnel that ended nowhere. But when she shut her eyes again, the darkness disappeared and the brain-piercingly brilliant light took its place.

  As helpless, and as determined, as a moth, Jo backed from the window and stumbled into the kitchen. She paused in the middle of the room, blinking and swaying. Liars. Stinking, filthy liars, the lot of them.

  The kitchen was full of metal things. Electric things. Sharp things.

  You’re a liar too, Jo.

  Necessary lies. She looked down at the large square plaster on the inside of her elbow. An infected mosquito bite, she’d said to Pascale. Just above her wrist was another plaster, where the compass point had gone in. How long ago had she done that? Three days? Four days? The wound had begun to heal, though there was still yellow stuff on the plaster whenever she changed it. No one had even asked about that, though she was ready with an excuse about burning her wrist on the oven shelf. The marks on her legs – one higher up from the scissors’ single blade, one lower down from her two-pronged attack in the garden – were easier to hide; no bikini, no questions, no made-up answers.

  She opened the cutlery drawer, hazily recognizing the long-bladed scissors, the carving knife in its sheath, table knives, the narrow boning-knife Tess had never learnt how to use, smaller knives, kebab skewers. She took out the vegetable knife. The one with the comfortable, familiar handle. The blade was short, but not too short.

  She stared at the knife for a long time, her heart jack-hammering in her chest, sending her blood sprinting round her body, ready to spill out all over the kitchen floor. She put the knife back and slammed the drawer shut.

  Then she took it out again and put it up her sleeve, in case Tess came back and saw her in the hall. Upstairs, she hid it at the back of her knicker drawer. Then she lay down, spreadeagled on the enormous bed, staring at the algebra formulae she’d taped to the ceiling and forgotten to take down after the exam.

  Her fists were clenched; her eyes burned. The vision in her head glowed so brightly that the dark room seemed full of light. It was a vision of release from terror, like when Tess used to hear her having a nightmare when she was little, and would come in and cuddle her until she opened her eyes. There was a buzzing in Jo’s ears, but she couldn’t tell if it came from inside or outside her skull. The feeling of wanting to run around and scream was intolerable. She pressed her jaws together. So much noise, so much light.

  Then she was moving. Off the bed. Over to the chest. The underwear draw was opened. She glared into the mirror. Was this the person who’d caused all the pain? The person she needed to hurt? She felt as if she were moving in a ball of light, like a spotlight on a stage. Maybe what she assumed to be a nightmare was reality. Maybe, she thought as her fingers found the knife handle, if she inflicted this punishment upon this person, upon herself, she could forgive herself.

  The knife didn’t seem all that sharp. Her leg didn’t hurt much. But there was blood. Jo sat on the edge of the bed, looking at the bright red ooze seeping out of her body and making its way across her thigh.

  Reaching for a tissue, she dabbed and pressed the wound. The blood hadn’t stopped. It looked very red. But there was no pain. Absolutely none. The light all around her had gone, too. She sat there on her bed with the bloodstained tissue in her hand and blood running down her leg onto the carpet. She felt very, very tired – she’d walked to Holly’s and run ba
ck, which was quite a long way. She felt cold, too, though the bedroom was warm. So cold she was beginning to shiver. And her heart felt odd, swelling and contracting irregularly, as if it couldn’t make up its mind what to do.

  She lay down. Her eyes closed themselves. Empty, soothing darkness enveloped her. What a mentally deficient way to behave, she thought, sticking a knife into your leg because your boyfriend is gay.

  The duvet cover felt wet underneath her. Good grief, had she peed without knowing it? The wetness did feel warm, like pee. She had no strength to sit up and inspect it. She’d just have to let the bed get wetter and wetter, and brave Tess’s disgusted scolding.

  Oh. Hide the knife from Tess. She felt for it on the bed beside her, but it wasn’t there. It must have fallen on the floor. And here she was, lying here in a pool of pee like a baby in a cot, unable to reach it. If it wasn’t so stupid it would be funny.

  Ha ha ha. When the results come out you should get A-star for stupidity, Jo-girl.

  She heard the front door slam. A woman was giggling and a man was saying something Jo couldn’t make out. Then there were footsteps on the stairs. “Hello!” called Jo, but then she thought maybe she hadn’t said hello at all. There were more voices, a silence, then the man swore energetically. She didn’t hear anything else.

  There was something heavy on her leg. Maybe she’d fallen down a hole and got her leg stuck. And then she was moving, but she didn’t know how, because she wasn’t walking. It was all too confusing.

  Then it came to her in a flash, like the answers to maths problems came to Pascale. She was in a movie, of course. A stunt had gone wrong. She was messing up in some way. That’s obviously what it was. A movie with a 15 rating? Violence, clearly, or else why would her forehead be crushed against the vibrating window of a car, while something immovable pinned her to the seat? Oh, it was a kidnapping scene. She was bound by electrical cord. That’s what kidnappers always used in movies. The camera was focused on her terrified face. She couldn’t scream because she was gagged. And she was very, very thirsty, though the audience couldn’t know that. Couldn’t someone get her a drink of water?