The Exes' Revenge

by Jo Jakeman

  “I—I don’t want to disappoint you. There’s too much to choose from. Remember Tunisia? And the hotel entertainment with those dancers and—”

  “Pathetic,” he said. “It seems my memory is better than yours. We got food poisoning, didn’t leave the room for three days, and when we did, I got stung by a jellyfish. Remember now?”

  I did. It was ten days of torture where everything was my fault for booking such a terrible place, even though he’d chosen the resort.

  He leaned his chin on my shoulder. I could feel his breath on my cheek. I looked at the table, four feet away from me, and wondered whether I could use it on him again. I could grab it, swing it, run for help. He seemed to sense my thoughts, because he tightened his grip around my shoulder and with his free hand he stroked my cheek.

  There was a shift in the atmosphere, as if talking of times we’d shared brought back memories of physical intimacy I’d rather forget.

  “You really need to go,” I said. “People will be here soon. They’ll find you. They’ll call the police.”

  “What people? You said yourself that Alistair won’t be back until tomorrow. And who else is there to care where you are? And as for the police . . . it was you that locked me up, remember? I’m sure the police would love to hear all about that.”

  “Fine. You call them,” I said.

  His hand moved to my neck and he stroked one finger down to my collarbone.

  “There’s three of us who will all testify to the fact that you attacked us and chained us up,” I said, arching my body away from him. “Witnesses. They’ll believe us, not you. You don’t have a leg to stand on. I’m sure you’d be really popular in prison. Lots of old friends.”

  His hand continued snaking down my body, over my breast and down to my waist, where he rested it on my hip.

  “And why,” he began, “would they believe a bunch of bitter exes?”

  “You’d back me up, right, Ruby?” I called over my shoulder.

  “Pip, this isn’t like you. You need help. What’s going on with you? They told me you’d attacked them and I didn’t believe them. I didn’t believe them, Pip, because I thought I knew you. And I do. So tell me what this is really about,” she said.

  He sighed, as if dissatisfied with us for ruining his fun. Then he stood up. He frowned at Ruby, and I wondered whether he was considering what she’d said.

  I relaxed a little now that his hands weren’t on me, and my breathing slowed. I looked at the floor, making myself small so he wouldn’t think of me as a threat. I needed him to let us go.

  “You’re a waste of space, Immie,” he said at last. “What did I ever see in you? Look at you. You’re pitiful. Now, Ruby, she’s smart. And Naomi, she’s hot. But you? I felt sorry for you. I only proposed to you to stop you from crying. Couldn’t stand the wailing. I needed someone to look after Alistair for me—otherwise I’d have got rid of you years ago.”

  He bent over and took my chin in his hand. He tilted my face upward so he was looking directly at me. His blue eyes were icy, his pupils enlarged and glaring.

  “No one would miss you if you were gone,” he hissed. “You’re middle-aged and on the shelf. Has anyone even looked twice at you since I left? No? Your own mother hates you. Even Alistair would be better off without you.”

  His opinion didn’t matter. Shouldn’t matter. And yet.

  I’d muttered my insecurities across the pillows back in the days when he said he’d never hurt me, and he used them as ammunition. The fear of being so unlovable that not even my own mother could love me. The fear of losing Alistair, the only thing in my life worth keeping.

  Phillip knew what kept me awake at night and he made my nightmares come alive.

  He smiled as tears escaped my eyes. Phillip let go of me but stayed bent over with his smug face two inches from mine. I raised my chin, swallowed back the tears, and spat in his face.

  He reeled backward, then hit me across my face with the back of his hand. I fell onto the bed and laughed out loud. Mocking him and his pathetic attempt to control me.

  “Is that all you’ve got?” I shouted.

  Phillip gave no indication that he’d heard me. He simply went to leave.

  I scrambled off the bed and stumbled over Naomi’s outstretched leg. Phillip kept walking.

  I got to the foot of the stairs as he switched off the light and plunged us into darkness.

  “Wait! Phillip, wait. You can’t just leave us,” I shouted.

  “Sweet dreams,” he said.

  He was illuminated momentarily as he went through the door. A scrabble of dogs was at his knee.

  I heard him say, “Down! Get down!” before the bolt slid across the door and the key turned in the lock.

  And then there was nothing, except Ruby’s gentle sobbing in the impenetrable darkness, and the fear in my chest that Phillip was going after my son.

  CHAPTER 18

  10 days before the funeral

  “Naomi?”

  She was blinking at me, dazed but conscious. The bruising was already starting to bloom at her neck. Ruby had helped me untie the scarf around my wrists with her free hand and her teeth. Putting our personal issues aside, we would have to work together to get out of here.

  Ruby was trying to pull her wrist out of the handcuffs, but there was no way it was going to slide out. She was grunting to herself in frustration, and occasionally shouting in the direction of the closed cellar door, “Pip! I know you can hear me!”

  I helped Naomi up. Her ankle was chained to her wrist, so she had to kneel rather than sit.

  I skated my tongue around my mouth and felt it snag on the jagged edge of a broken tooth. I tried swallowing, but I tasted metal and my throat was too dry to let anything down without a fight. I opened my mouth, poked the insides of my cheek with my tongue, and wriggled my jaw. It clicked and shot pain into my temple like a whip.

  I couldn’t breathe through my nose, but taking in air through my mouth began a wave of nausea that threatened to drench me. I turned suddenly, bent double, and vomited on the floor.

  “What the—”

  Naomi turned away as the warm contents of my stomach hit the floor beside her. I closed my eyes thinking the word “sorry” over and over again.

  Sorry.

  Sorry.

  Sorry.

  I hoped she could hear me, even though I couldn’t speak. I was sweating and shivering, unable to move because of the pain, yet unable to stay put. I had to find Alistair before Phillip did.

  Naomi struggled to maneuver her foot in front of her and passed the cuffs under her and to the front.

  I groaned and wiped my chin. I pressed my lips together and held my breath until the pain became bearable. I was stiff, sore, and my head was threatening to split every time I moved. But I had to get free.

  I steadied my breathing. Listened. Footsteps above my head. At least Phillip was still in the house and we knew where he was.

  Naomi’s white top was ripped and there was dried black blood on her lips. I touched her shoulder and she flinched before crossing her free hand across her body and placing it on top of mine, giving it a squeeze.

  Such a good idea to lock him up and yet so idiotic. I thought it would subdue him, show him who was boss—and, in a way, I suppose it had. It wasn’t me.

  Ruby was on the floor leaning against the radiator, a sad, bitter smile on her face.

  She had made me pity Phillip, believe that I was the one being cruel. She had made me doubt what I knew to be true. Her I-see-the-best-in-everyone attitude didn’t make her better than me; it just made her more gullible. I shook my head at her and looked away. Looked around. Looked up. Down. Looking for a way.

  I stood up quickly, desperate to find a way out. My head was swimming.

  “Are you all right?” asked Ruby.

  The darknes
s was spreading like ink on a pristine white tablecloth. The floor swayed and dropped from underneath me. I gripped the wall. It was the only thing stopping me from falling.

  Danger was breathing down my neck. I could hear it like a gentle tide over a pebbled beach. I could smell it and it caught in the back of my throat. I tried to cough, but the cough turned into a choke. I couldn’t breathe. Nothing. I pulled at my jumper, trying to let the oxygen in. There was no air in the room. I was suffocating. I pushed at the walls, hoping for a loose brick or a covered window, even though I knew there to be none.

  I blinked to clear my vision, but the figures before me blurred and danced away as I tried to make sense of them. The room was full of darkness and low ceilings. Pain in my nose, in my ribs, in my stomach. I bent over the unmade bed and groaned. The sickness was coming and I didn’t want it. It would stop me from getting what little air there was in the room.

  Ruby said, “Imogen? Sit down. Can you take some deep breaths for me? Nice and slowly. Listen to my voice. In, two, three, four, out, two, three, four, in, two, three, four . . .”

  I tried to do as she said but could only grab at the air in short gasps. I had to get out and I had to get to Alistair before Phillip did. He would take him away because he knew it was the only way to hurt me.

  I could have let myself go, given in to the panic and despair, but I knew if I was going to get out of here I had to keep my mind clear and get the others to help me.

  Naomi’s eyes skated between curious and fearful. I tried to speak, but my mouth was dry and my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. My head throbbed and I coughed to check that I could still make a sound. My entire face hurt. As I mentally traveled down the length of my body, I found that every inch of me ached to some degree. I had little control over my mind. Simple words were difficult to grasp. All I knew was I had to get out.

  “Phillip’s still here,” I said. “Which means he’s not worked out where Alistair is yet.”

  Despite the pain, I shook my head to reset it. On and off. But I was struggling to think clearly or form a plan. There was a series of images and feelings, but they were out of order, a dropped deck of cards waiting to be shuffled.

  “Listen,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry about this. It’s my fault that we’ve ended up down here, that he . . . hurt you both. I never thought he’d go this far. If I hadn’t . . .”

  “It’s not just you.” Naomi was mumbling through swollen lips that she was doing her best not to move. “I bought into that crap about the cancer.”

  “You weren’t to know,” I said. “Why would you suspect him of lying about it?”

  “You did,” she replied.

  And yet I’d let myself be convinced.

  Ruby coughed. “If anyone should say sorry, it’s me. I didn’t believe what you were telling me upstairs. I—I—er, I’ve never seen him react like this. Not physically. He has a temper—I know that much—but I’ve never . . . He only raised his hand to me once, and it was more of a push than a hit. But I’ve seen how he likes to punish people who’ve hurt him. I blame his parents, of course. His mother was a piece of work. That woman knew how to hold a grudge.”

  I wanted to shake her for blaming anyone but Phillip, but in her own way, I knew she was trying to make amends.

  “He adored his mum,” I said.

  “She has a lot to answer for,” Ruby continued. “The woman breast-fed him until he was five. Used to tell him he was better than everyone else. Cleverer, better-looking . . . but she never put store in kindness or helping others the way that other mothers would. It hit him hard when she died. He proposed to me just afterward. It wasn’t lost on me that he was replacing her with me, an older woman. But I did so love him. And don’t get me started on his dad . . . Never met him, of course—he died when Pip was young. What was he? Ten or eleven, maybe? There were always rumors that he wasn’t Pip’s real dad and that’s why he was so harsh on him. I’ve always tried to bear that in mind, you know? When he’s behaving badly, I try and take into account that his childhood wasn’t all it should have been and he was never given the tools the rest of us were. But still . . . he’s not the only one who had it tough.” She sighed. “Perhaps I’ve excused too much. Maybe I am like his mother after all.”

  I closed my eyes as Ruby spoke. Her voice was low and smooth, with a melodic lilt toward the end of each sentence as if, way back, she’d spent time in Wales.

  I was back on my feet checking the camping equipment, the discarded clothes, the boxes of things with no homes. There had to be something I could use on Phillip when he came back.

  “It’s all right sitting here now, covered with blood, saying he’s a bad person, but why did neither of you warn me or something?” Naomi asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose I suspected that it was just me. Something between Phillip and me that was toxic. That maybe I provoked it? And what would I have said anyway? That he was mean to me and called me names? It wasn’t until I saw the way you reacted when I spilled my tea that I began to suspect that he was abusing you too. I wondered about saying something at the time, but you didn’t make it easy for me.”

  “You don’t seem the type to hold your tongue,” she said.

  “You know as well as I do that not every victim of domestic abuse is timid and quiet. For every abuser who looks like butter wouldn’t melt, there’s a woman with a smile painted on her face. God forbid the neighbors should find out.”

  Naomi nodded.

  “He never abused me,” said Ruby. “He was no saint but . . .”

  Perhaps she was telling the truth, but I suspected she just wasn’t ready to admit it to herself.

  “Do you hate me?” Naomi asked me.

  I stopped searching through boxes. I didn’t know what I’d expected to find, but it wasn’t there. “Why would I hate you?”

  “Me and Phil.”

  I considered her question. Two weeks earlier I would have said yes without missing a beat, but now I had to reconsider my feelings.

  “I used to. I knew that he had affairs, but you were the one he couldn’t walk away from, I suppose. If I stop and think about it, I was jealous. Which is ridiculous because I wanted shot of him. Him leaving me was . . . humiliating. It made me look like I was the one to blame. And the fact that he left me for a younger woman made me look undesirable too. Old. God, if I couldn’t even keep a man like Phillip . . .”

  “That’s not what other people think,” said Naomi.

  “Well, it’s how I felt at the time. No one knows about the years of abuse that have led to that point or that you’re actually better off without him. And then when he says it’s your fault because you’ve had depression . . .”

  Naomi nodded.

  “The things he said I’d done—they were half right. There was just enough truth in them to sound plausible. I couldn’t argue with the fact that I’d had serious depression after I lost the baby. But that wasn’t the reason that our marriage broke down.”

  I picked up a fractured leg from the broken table. It was light, probably wouldn’t do much damage.

  Naomi said, “I didn’t know you’d lost a baby.”

  I stopped studying the wood and stared at Naomi.

  No. Why would she know? It wasn’t something I would have told her, but wouldn’t Phillip have mentioned it? Of course not. It didn’t mean anything to him.

  “Yes,” I said quietly. “At twenty weeks. There was a car accident.”

  I looked over at Ruby, but she had her eyes closed.

  “That’s hard,” Naomi said. “I was pregnant once. Had an abortion, though. Some days I regret it, some days I don’t. I know it’s not the same, but it were hard. Really hard, and that were my choice. Can’t imagine how difficult it must’ve been for you. Shit.”

  I coughed to clear my discomfort rather than my throat.

  “Your b
aby—” I began. “Was it Phillip’s?”

  “No. It were when I was with a foster family. You know, the posh teenage son. They kicked me out soon after. No. Phil had a vasectomy, didn’t he?”

  I was still digesting the fact that her foster brother had gotten her pregnant, so it took a moment to react to the news that Phillip had had a vasectomy.

  “Vasectomy?”

  “I know what you’re going to say. People have vasectomy reversals all the time, but neither of us were that hung up on having kids so . . .”

  “Actually, I was going to ask when. It seems like an oddly selfless act. I would have thought he’d rather you got your tubes tied or something.”

  “Wasn’t it when you were pregnant with Alistair?”

  I shook my head. “No. Another lie.”

  “He told me he knew he wouldn’t want any more kids so had the snip before Alistair were born. Wait. Does that mean he could’ve got me pregnant?”

  I put my fingers to my temples, closed my eyes, and swayed slightly. “Actually, Naomi, there’s a chance that he might have been telling the truth for once.”

  I remembered him going to the doctors with a “swelling.” I was worried for him. He said it was a cyst and it could be taken out at the doctor’s office. Just a day case, he’d said. I’d offered to go with him, but I was eight months pregnant and huge with discomfort. Phillip was a little tender afterward and I’d looked after him as well as I could.

  After I’d had Alistair, two things happened. One, I experienced love like I had never known possible. Holding that sweet baby in my arms was a moment so close to perfection that I never wanted it to end. Two, I felt my biological clock speeding up. No time like the present, I’d said. I refused the midwife’s recommendation to go on the pill. My family wasn’t yet complete and Phillip had agreed. Hadn’t he?

  We tried and we tried but each month I had to cope with disappointment. I shouldered the heavy burden of failure while he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Not my fault.” I’d badgered him for sex. I peed on sticks, I kept charts for my ovulation, and I took my temperature daily. I called him at work and said, “Now. Come home now. It’s time,” and he went along with it. Of course he did.