This Little Dark Place

by A. S. Hatch

  ‘So you’ll be making videos of yourself doing yoga?’

  ‘To start with. And then maybe nutrition advice and meditation techniques as well as some gym-based workouts for women.’

  ‘I remember when I couldn’t even get you to walk to the shops with me.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ she coughed dryly, ‘that was a long time ago. Scott has a real sense of mission,’ she added sombrely, addressing her feet.

  ‘Would you like to come see the cottage soon?’ I surprised myself by asking. As I heard myself saying these words, tears began inexplicably to form in my eyes. I looked to the ground so she would not see.

  ‘Maybe,’ she half-whispered.

  So much invisible weight hung in the air between us. I felt it, this weight, pushing me down, pinning me in place, crushing me. Did she? Knowing now how she acted that October, I feel certain that she must have. But then, looking down and being mesmerised by the complex and baffling patterns on her orange trainers, and being unable to open my mouth to say … what exactly? … I felt alone in my despair. The heat from the spotlights was unbearable and I began to sweat. Victoria stood before me serenely. Ruby had asked me how Victoria was maddening; this was how! I wanted to scream, to rip and tear at her flesh and drag out the real Victoria, my Victoria, who was trapped inside.

  ‘When will I be able to watch you?’ I said, miserably.

  ‘I don’t know. Scott says I should practise until I’m comfortable in front of the camera first.’

  ‘I see. Well, I’ll leave you to it then. Do you want the door shutting?’

  ‘Please.’

  I went into the kitchen and stood at the sink. I looked at my reflection in the black window. Like my mother in Jerusalem, I was diminished, distorted and blurred, half filled in with darkness. I heard Victoria’s suddenly loud and happy voice from the back room. Hi, I’m Vicky …

  Later that evening I wrote again to Ruby. There’s no need for me to describe how I felt writing it. It is better simply to copy it out below:

  3 February 2016

  Dear Ruby

  I’m fairly certain Vic’s having an affair with her personal trainer.

  I met him recently. He is a cartoon character. All muscle and hair. She sits there texting him night and day and thinks I don’t notice. Well I do, and I am a fool and a coward for not saying anything. I think she knows that I know. And I think she knows that I will say nothing, will do nothing.

  How did we get here? We tried for years for a baby but couldn’t conceive. The failure hardened her. Then, through IVF, we finally conceived but she miscarried at thirteen weeks. Too young for a birth certificate.

  There was time before the miscarriage and there is time after. We stopped trying.

  And now there is Scott. I don’t know what to do. What if she loves him? What if he has found a way to insinuate himself into her life?

  And now I have this cottage. Building us a new home, making a place for us to begin again is all I feel I can do now. I fear that if I confronted her about Scott, I would be handing her something with which to twist and wrench free the last nail holding us together.

  I want to leave this place, this ghost house. I want to tear it down. I want to destroy it. I want to destroy him.

  Writing this letter has not made me feel better, as I hoped it would. But it has at least aired the wound, allowed me to look down and see what I’m dealing with.

  Dan

  I spent the following days wandering around in a stupor. I didn’t want to think about him, them together, or anything. But I found myself looking at her, watching her texting him (undoubtedly him!) and smiling that smile which used to be shown only to me. I was tired and irritable all the time. I told myself it was stress, cumulative fatigue. Every night when I went up early to bed she’d say ‘I’ll be up soon,’ but I could never stay awake long enough to feel her lying down beside me. And every morning when I awoke she’d already be up and gone.

  I continued working on Lanes End. By the time I finished the kitchen, most of February had passed. Ruby still had not replied to my last letter. One evening I sat at the kitchen table and wondered: have I said too much? Had I scared her off? I felt my face blaze with shame and embarrassment. Had I been abandoned now by a convict, as well as my girlfriend?

  As I looked up and watched the bare light bulb swing in the draught, which seemed impossible to eradicate, I had a premonition that I was destined to inhabit this place by myself, that it would become a tomb.

  ***

  I’m almost better now. Today I felt strong enough to go outside. Happily, I haven’t completely missed summer. The light is still soft, the air warm. I couldn’t wait to get out there and feel the sun on my skin. It was so beautiful, I was surprised not to encounter anyone else on the path. But I did see a man in a baseball cap shambling around, hands in his pockets, head bowed. I recognised his hunched gait. Was it …? I began to trail him. At one point he stopped and turned around. I had been sure it was Robbie but when I saw his face I didn’t recognise it. The features were wrong. He began talking to a small group of people congregated in the shade of a wall, people I did not recognise or know Robbie to have an association with. He did not take his hands from his pockets as he spoke, and when their brief interview was over he continued on along the edge of the gravel and around a corner. I followed him but when I rounded the corner he was gone.

  At around quarter to two the sun darted behind a cloud and I felt a droplet of rain on my nose. Before I returned inside I called on Robbie but he did not answer. I have written him a note (copied below), which I will slip under his door tomorrow.

  Robbie

  I haven’t seen you for nearly a month. I’m worried. Have you seen Gordon lately? He’s acting weird. Call soon.

  D

  If he doesn’t come over after that, I will have no choice but to report it.

  ***

  After some more fretful but productive days I finally received a response from Ruby. I took my laptop up to bed to read it while Victoria sat playing on her smartphone in the lounge.

  Here is what she wrote:

  22 February 2016

  Dear Dan

  I cannot even begin to imagine what losing a child feels like. I had patients who lost children. But I never really knew what to say to them. Their problem seemed so much bigger than my experience. I felt totally unequipped to help them. All I can say to you is that I am so terribly sorry.

  Regarding this Scott person, sometimes people just do things and they couldn’t tell you why if you asked them because they haven’t even stopped for a second to ask themselves the same question. Sometimes people just act. No thought, just action. Especially when they’ve been through something awful they become sensory creatures, operating purely on the basis of what feels good or least bad.

  You spoke of anger in your letter. Be careful, Dan. If you let anger build up inside you it will find a way to come out by itself. Trust me on that. Jade says that I absorb the feelings of others, that I’m like a jar of water a painter uses to wash his brushes. In my line of work I was exposed to so many extreme situations. I had to listen and not react. I cried sometimes, in the toilets while they were drawing or painting. It was like opening a valve, releasing the pressure. I felt I could have cried for days. I controlled everything pretty well for a time. But when I met Lee everything changed.

  Lee was a patient. We became lovers. Ethically it was wrong, morally it was wrong. Plus, yes, stupid. Nuclear stupid.

  Lee was quiet during our sessions. A big guy but softly spoken. As a child he was beaten regularly by his father. He’d seen his mother beaten half to death and spent three months in care while she recovered. He asked me out after our last session together. To begin with I said no but there was this attraction I couldn’t overcome. One evening about a month after he left my care he turned up outside my clinic. He asked me out again. I couldn’t help myself. We went to a bar and that night I slept with him. For a long time it was great. But I could
tell he was acting. He was conscious of his issues – anger, general anxiety disorder, panic attacks, we’d discussed them in the clinic – but when we were together he hid them.

  We moved in together. Things began OK. But then he started being cold towards me, snapping at me over little things. And then he started to hurt me. He’d grab my arm a little too firmly or shove me aside with his shoulder. He hit me once – out of nowhere, over a squabble – and then immediately fell into torrents of tears and begged for forgiveness. He didn’t hit me for ages after that. But he devised another, far more insidious way to hurt me. Piece by piece, he arranged everything in our lives so that every move I made resulted in my own defeat. Let me explain.

  First, he began announcing the time when I arrived home. ‘Six forty.’ ‘Six thirty-nine.’ ‘Six forty-one,’ when I came through the door. If I got home even just one minute later than he expected he’d be displeased for the rest of the evening and I’d be fighting to win back his approval. He used this to get me to have sex with him every night. I was too afraid to disappoint him again, so I just went along with it. My work suffered. I zoned out thinking about which route to take home. I found myself rushing the last couple of patients so I could get away sooner. The odd time I had a cancellation in the last session I’d race home and park around the corner until it was the ‘correct’ time for me to arrive home. Then he put all the household bills in my name. He didn’t like being left alone, so if I ever went to visit Jade or a friend he’d say ‘you’ve got one hour’ and for every minute I was late he threatened to run up all the bills until I got home; he’d call expensive numbers, turn on all the appliances, stuff like that. So I started cutting short my social engagements to make sure I was home on time. Inevitably, I stopped seeing people altogether. He made me sell my car and started ferrying me to and from work himself. Without my car I was cut off, completely isolated. Now I relied on Lee for everything. He convinced me to let him have control of my money. He made me add his name to my bank account. He didn’t work. When I got paid he transferred the money into another account, his own I suppose, and then he’d pay me a weekly allowance of £50. This was for everything. My personal hygiene began to suffer. And I was so tired. He had me up until one or two in the morning having sex. It always hurt. I started fantasising about buying soothing gel for my vagina that could take the burn away. But I couldn’t afford anything like this. So I sat on bags of ice wrapped in paper towels. One day the bag burst. I was too ashamed of the real reason my trousers were damp so I told my manager I had ‘had an accident’.

  He rarely hit me, and he was savvy enough never to touch my face. He’d jab me in the base of my spine or in the stomach. He broke my right big toe once under the heel of his boot. I couldn’t walk without pain for weeks. This violence only ever happened about once or twice a year. But it was enough to keep me in line.

  This went on for about two years. One day a patient asked if I was OK. She’d suffered similar abuse herself and I could tell she recognised the signs. I burst into tears. I couldn’t stop. I was hysterical, struggling to breathe. She comforted me. She understood. He’s controlling you, she said. You have to leave him. I knew then, as I was crying in front of her in my office, that it was over. The next day I called Jade from the office and asked her to meet me. As soon as I saw her I cried. I managed only to say the word ‘Lee’ and she intuited the rest. She said she knew some guys who could hurt him. When she left me that day she simply said: sit tight.

  That night during dinner the doorbell went. Lee looked at me across the table. He put a finger to his lips. The doorbell rang again. He dropped his fork onto his plate and went to open the door. I saw two men in baseball caps. Lee tried to slam the door shut but one of them shoved his arm through. In the struggle I ran upstairs and out of sight. My phone rang. It was Jade. She told me to get out now. I heard the front door slam and the chain lock go on. Then I heard footsteps pounding up the stairs. Oh my god he’s coming, I said and hung up. I was on the landing. When he was almost at the top of the stairs he reached up and yanked my ankle from beneath me. I fell backwards onto the landing, stunned and winded. He climbed on top of me and began punching me in the stomach and ribs. I kicked and struggled and managed somehow to rise to my knees. He wrapped his arm around my waist and started to pull me down again. I grabbed the banister. He was trying to pull me free so he could throw me down the stairs but he lost his grip and fell backwards himself. I turned to look down. The thick wooden post at the bottom of the stairs had been snapped like a cocktail stick. His legs were bent completely back at the hips. His feet touched the floor either side of his head. His right arm was underneath his body. His left arm was out by his side but facing the wrong way. I heard then the sound of the door being kicked. It burst open and the two guys in baseball caps came in, their fists primed. But they took one look at Lee’s broken body and ran off.

  Jade waited with me for an ambulance to arrive. They took me to hospital and treated my injuries, which were many but not serious. The next day a female police officer interviewed me from my hospital bed. I told her everything. I should’ve held my tongue. But I thought I was the victim. I thought I was just giving a statement, helping them sew this thing up. I’d suffered Lee’s supremacy for years; it didn’t even occur to me that I might be in trouble.

  The next morning I was arrested and charged with attempted murder. I was facing a sentence of twenty-four years.

  The prosecution accused me of plotting to kill Lee. Jade had put the idea in my head, they said, and we had been scheming for weeks. The kicked-in door, the fact that the two guys had ran off both proved this, they said. They used our relationship with our father as ‘evidence’ we hated men. Lee testified that I’d pursued him romantically when he was my patient, that I manipulated him into being with me. He made out I was the one who’d been controlling him. He gave a real performance, making out he was on sedatives and anti-depressants because of me, when the truth was he’d been on various combinations of drugs since he was thirteen. My lawyer tried to convince the court that Lee had been the one controlling my life for years. But I wasn’t the one with the history of mental illness. I was the one in a ‘position of authority and trust’, trust I had criminally abused, the judge declared later. Everything was stacked against me. The jury cleared me of attempted murder but found me guilty of grievous bodily harm. The judge gave me seven years. The two baseball cap guys were handed warnings and ordered to pay the cost of replacing Lee’s door. My lawyer had the charges of conspiracy against Jade thrown out. A few months later my countercharges were brought against Lee in his own trial. I testified, again giving a full account of everything that had happened. But it was no good. By that point my case had been in the local papers, the jury would have known who I was. I was a head case, a monster. He was given a suspended sentence of twelve months for what he did to me. He’s never seen the inside of a prison. Three years later, I’m still here.

  So now you know everything. I have debated for weeks whether or not to tell you. I was scared that if I did you wouldn’t write to me any more. But you shared your biggest secret with me. It wouldn’t be fair if I held mine back now.

  I appreciate this is a lot to take in. I’d understand if you needed some time to process your thoughts. But please do write back soon. Your letters help me.

  Ruby

  The letter raised a number of questions: How could such a dreadful miscarriage of justice occur without anyone outside of Stoke-on-Trent knowing about it? Was this the whole truth, or was she tricking me?

  And then another far more troubling question.

  Can I stop this, whatever this is, now?

  The letter also made me think of my mother. I remember as a boy overhearing her on the phone saying I was the only thing preventing her from leaving Frank. I felt such guilt over that. Still do. I remember her muffled sobs. The air was so heavy in our bungalow, thick and hot like before a storm. Thinking of it brought that horrible heat back to me. I kicked off the
duvet but it was no good. I climbed out of bed and went downstairs for a glass of water. As I drank I was suddenly seized by an irresistible idea. I would google Ruby!

  Back in bed I searched. It took a while but eventually I found a hundred words about it in a local paper. The headline:

  GUILTY: LOCAL THERAPIST

  GETS 7 YEARS

  The reporter’s account seemed to align with Ruby’s. I didn’t learn anything more than what she had chosen to share. Of more interest to me was the photo accompanying the article. Evidently, it had been cropped from a portrait (the photo was credited to Facebook). The caption: 7 years: Ms Holland. Ruby’s mouth is smiling but the slope of her tired eyes betrays her true feelings. Looking into those eyes it was difficult to mistrust what she had told me. She was very beautiful. Her wavy brown hair was tied back but a lock had escaped and hung, like a pincer, on her cheek. Large, clear eyes stared out intently. Full lips softened the grimace of her teeth, transformed it – just about – into a smile.

  ***

  Someone has pushed a note under my door. It says:

  Don’t trust G.

  I have it here in my pocket. I will dispose of it later. Could the G refer to Gordon? If not him, whom? I don’t know any other Gs. But who could want to warn me about Gordon? Gordon is everyone’s friend. At least he makes out he is.

  I don’t recognise the handwriting. The note was clearly written in haste; there’s a uniformity to the lettering that can only be achieved when one is writing quickly, from muscle memory. The pencil (a carpenter’s, I’d recognise 2H lead a mile off) has dug deep down into the paper and the full stop has pierced all the way through it. Did Robbie write this? If so, where is he and how did he convey it to me?