The Other Half Lives aka The Dead Lie Down

by Sophie Hannah

  Over the next few weeks, I worked on designs for their garden. She’d said at our first meeting that she wanted ‘something eastern’, which turned out to mean a large granite Buddha on a plinth that she’d seen in a catalogue. I didn’t try to talk her out of it. If she wanted the centre-piece of her small Lincolnshire garden to be a fat stone man sitting on a pillar, that was her choice.

  Work started in March 2000 and took a month. I got landscapers in to help me, which at first she protested about. ‘I thought you were going to do it all yourself,’ she said, and I had to remind her that I’d told her I did only the design and the planting. I never challenged her about her lie, and she didn’t refer again to her made-up terminal illness.

  Whenever I had a moment alone with him, I badgered him about leaving her. I told him I’d wanted to respond when he’d tried to kiss me, but I couldn’t, because he wasn’t available. Sometimes he said he understood, other times he lunged at me, saying, ‘Come here,’ and trying to grab me, but I wouldn’t let him touch me. I told him if he stayed with her he’d be a prisoner for the rest of his life, whereas if he left her he could have me. He couldn’t leave her, he said, which only made me more determined. I was convinced no one besides me would ever be able to liberate him; I had to try harder. I started wearing revealing clothes to work, making sure he caught glimpses of my cleavage, wearing short skirts and bending over when he was standing behind me so that he could see my underwear. I wanted him to know what he was missing.

  By this point, I was too involved to see the difference between love and an unhealthy obsession. It was a battle between good and evil as far as I was concerned: I was good and she was evil, and I had to win if I wanted to save him. I played dirty without giving it a second thought, trying to bribe him, bringing money into it. I told him how much I earned-more than a primary school teacher-and that financially he’d be better off with me than with her, all the while congratulating myself on my virtue for refusing to have sex with him. Guessing that she either couldn’t have children or didn’t want them in case they disturbed her perfect white living room, I told him I wanted to have his children. That didn’t make him leave her but it made him cry. ‘I can’t,’ he kept saying. ‘I just can’t.’

  The garden was finished one day while they were both at work. It looked dreadful, but it was exactly what she’d ordered: regimented pink flowers, purple slate, gravel crossroads, eastern deity. They owed me twenty-three thousand pounds, give or take some small change. She got back from work first, saw it and burst into tears. ‘I hate it,’ she said. ‘It’s disgusting.’

  That I had not been expecting. When I asked her what the problem was, she said, ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t look like I imagined it would. I hope you don’t think I’m paying for this!’ She started weeping, got back into her car and drove away. I had no choice but to wait for him. When I told him what had happened, he raised his eyebrows, as if at a minor inconvenience, and said, ‘She’ll come round. Don’t worry, you’ll get your money.’

  ‘Damn right I will,’ I said. ‘You signed the contract.’

  ‘What will I do when you’ve gone?’ he said. He took me in his arms and clamped his lips on mine.

  I pulled away and said, ‘We need to talk. Properly.’ Finally, I thought, he’s realised he needs to leave her.

  He was the blushing boy again. I hadn’t mentioned my religious upbringing to him so far; now I was going to use it to my advantage. I’d suffered eighteen years of it, so the least it could do was help me now, I thought. I told him I was a Christian, that I was gagging to go to bed with him, but I couldn’t persuade myself it was all right to go to bed with someone who had a partner. I wittered on about marriage being sacrosanct, adultery an unforgivable sin, all the things I’d heard my parents say. He wasn’t married to her, but they lived together as man and wife-I told him that from my point of view it amounted to the same thing.

  I didn’t mean a word of it. I was using sex, or rather the promise of sex, as leverage to make him leave her for me.

  ‘Are you saying you want to marry me?’ he asked, looking as if the idea was hurting him, scorching his brain. I hadn’t been, but only because it hadn’t occurred to me. I read the truth in his eyes and I knew I was right: he’d proposed to her, perhaps several times, and she’d said no.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I want to marry you.’

  He gritted his teeth, grabbed his hair with his hands and closed his eyes. ‘I can’t leave her,’ he said.

  I went home, defeated. Three days later a cheque arrived for the money they owed me. Two weeks after that he rang me. I said, ‘Hello?’ and heard only silence, but I knew it was him. I said his name-a common, popular name, one that gives me a jolt of shock every time I hear it, even all these years later.

  He asked me to come round. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘Please.’

  ‘Have you left her? Are you going to leave her?’ I asked.

  He said yes.

  I didn’t believe him, but I got into my car and drove to Cherub Cottage because I wanted it to be true. He was alone when I arrived. He gave me a glass of red wine. It tasted funny but I drank it anyway. He told me she had gone, that she wouldn’t be back, and tried to persuade me to go upstairs with him. I refused. Her possessions were still all over the house-her dog slippers, her magazines, her diary. I knew he was lying to me. ‘Give me a cuddle, then,’ he said. It seemed like a harmless request, and my desire to touch him after not having seen him for a fortnight was stronger than ever before. We lay down on one of the white sofas in the lounge. I didn’t care, as I fell asleep with his arms around me, that he hadn’t told me the truth. I could well understand why he wanted to pretend, and I assumed he knew she wouldn’t be back any time soon. Perhaps she’d gone to stay with a friend, I thought. I kidded myself that he might still leave her, that he’d obviously found he couldn’t go on without me, since he’d summoned me so urgently.

  I didn’t resist the sleepy feeling when it came. If I thought about it at all, I probably put it down to the wine, or to feeling happy and relaxed with him. I didn’t find out until later that he’d drugged me-crushed four two-milligramme Clonazepam pills and put them in my wine.

  When I woke up, or came round, I was tied to the stone plinth in the back garden. My arms were tied against my sides so that I couldn’t move them, and there was something in my mouth, which had been taped shut with the thing inside it. I know now that it was a pink bath sponge. A lot of the detail I only found out later from the police, or in court.

  I couldn’t scream or move, or understand what had happened to me or why, which was the worst thing of all. At first I was alone in the garden, alone with my terror. Then she came out of the house. She laughed when she saw me, and told me she’d take the gag out of my mouth if I promised not to scream or cry out. I nodded, because I’d been crying and my nose was starting to block up-I was afraid I’d suffocate.

  She took the sponge out of my mouth. ‘You’ve been fucking my partner, and thinking you could get away with it,’ she said.

  I told her it wasn’t true.

  ‘Yes, you have. Don’t lie.’

  I swore to her that I hadn’t, begged her to untie me.

  ‘You told him to leave me, didn’t you?’

  That I couldn’t deny. She stuffed the sponge back in my mouth, taped it shut again and went back into the house.

  The next time she came outside, it was almost dark. She reached down and picked up a handful of gravel from one of the new paths. She threw a small pebble at me from a distance of about a metre, and it hit my cheek. It hurt more than I’d have thought a tiny stone could. ‘In some parts of the world, they stone you to death for fucking another woman’s man,’ she said. That was when it got worse. I couldn’t speak to defend myself. She kept throwing the stones, some from further away, some from right in front of my face-at my head, my chest, my arms and legs. It went on for hours. After a while, the pain became unbearable.

  She brought a table and chair out
into the garden, then a bottle of wine, a corkscrew and a glass. All night she drank wine-two more bottles after the first one-and threw stones at me, stones I’d ordered for her. I’d brought samples in two sizes for her to look at, and she’d chosen the smaller ones, thank goodness. If they’d been any larger I’d have died-that’s what I was told later. She didn’t throw them constantly. Sometimes she stopped and sat down, drank, lectured me. She said I was lucky I lived in England and not lots of other places, because this was nothing compared to what would happen to me in some countries.

  The next morning it got worse. She took the sponge out of my mouth and pushed in a handful of gravel. She told me to eat it. I spat it out but she forced more in and tried to push it down my throat. In the end I swallowed and she did it again, kept doing it. She preferred making me eat the stones to throwing them at me, once she’d tried it.

  After that, my memories are blurred. I started to pass out and come round, so that I was never sure how long I’d been there, whether this night was the same night or a new one. I found out later that I spent seventy-two hours tied to the stone plinth. At one point she ripped the tape off my mouth and I vomited blood all over her. That made her angry, and she slapped me across the face.

  After a while my chest and stomach filled with a burning pain that seemed to radiate through to my back. I felt unbearably thirsty. Sometimes when she took the tape off, I asked for a drink, and she laughed at me. I expected to die of thirst if I didn’t suffocate. I began to vomit clear liquid-it seeped out around the tape. She sneered, ‘You say you’re thirsty, but you’re puking water. Swallow it instead and you won’t be thirsty any more.’

  I lost my grip on my mind, became incoherent, and when she let me speak, it didn’t make sense. I was aware of what she was saying, but couldn’t think straight. Everything seemed remote apart from the pain. Waves of it started to pour through me: powerful, uncontrollable spasms in my stomach, which were worse even than the thirst. Then I started to pass the stones I’d eaten. I couldn’t help it. That was the worst agony of all.

  Later, the doctors told me the names of all the injuries I’d suffered. My throat and oesophagus were badly cut, which had caused something called mediastinitis. I needed surgery to sew up the cuts, an endoscopy to inject the lacerations that couldn’t be sewn with adrenalin. I had rectal fissures, a perforated bowel, peritonitis, a paralytic ileus. These are words most people will never hear, but I heard them endlessly in the hospital and in court. They went round and round in my head, what she’d done to me. I had to have a laparotomy, which was what caused the scar.

  I was in hospital for three weeks. It’s easier to race ahead to that part, to after I was free and in the hands of people who were trying as hard to help me as she had to harm me. The strange thing was that she must have decided, at a certain point, to let me go. She could have killed me-all she needed to do was leave me where I was-but instead she called the police, in tears, and told them to come to the house. They played the recording in court. She said, ‘Come quickly, there’s a woman in trouble, I think she’s dying.’ The police had found her hysterical, drunk, claiming not to know how a half-dead person had ended up tied to a stone column in her back garden.

  He pleaded guilty to false imprisonment and GBH. He admitted to drugging me with Clonazepam and tying me up, but would say nothing about his reasons for doing either. Though she was the one who’d done the damage, he was still guilty of GBH by law because he was ‘more than ancillary’ to her attack on me. He admitted to knowing in advance what she’d planned to do, though her plan had contained only the throwing of the stones, in accordance with the punishment, under Sharia law, for adultery. Making me eat the gravel had been an improvisation on her part.

  After that one moment of weakness in which she saved my life with her phone call to the police, she became herself again. She pleaded not guilty, against the advice of her legal team, claiming he had done it all and she’d had nothing to do with it, hadn’t even known about it.

  Once I’d recovered and was let out of hospital, all I wanted was to put it behind me insofar as that was possible. I can’t remember at what point I realised that the people who were supposedly on my side were trying to force a whole new ordeal upon me, one I didn’t have the stamina for: a court case, publicity. I was told I wouldn’t be able to stop the papers printing my name because there had been no sexual element to the attack. I refused to talk to the press, so they presented her version of the story as fact: I had been sleeping with her boyfriend and she’d stoned me as a punishment. In court, under cross-examination, she emphasised more than once that I was an adulteress and had deserved it, even though she stuck to her story that it was he who had done the stoning, not her. The jury didn’t believe her. Everyone could see she was proud of what she’d done.

  I don’t know what he told her. I can’t see why he’d say we’d had sex when we hadn’t-what good would that do him? My guess is that he told her the truth but she didn’t believe him, or she believed him but chose to pretend she didn’t. After all, the more grave my offence, the more justified her response. I can’t prove it, obviously, but I don’t think she was punishing me for sleeping with her boyfriend, whatever she said in court. She was punishing me for the terror she’d experienced when she found out I was waging a campaign to split them up. Maybe they had a fight and he told her he was leaving her for me, and in a moment of ragged, uncontrollable horror, she saw herself disintegrating without him. A person can lose everything that makes them who they are in a moment like that.

  Having my name and a distorted version of the story continually in the papers condemned me to a living hell. I knew that everyone knew, or thought they did, and that I would never be able to escape the rumours. One night I heard, on a local radio station, a caller expressing the opinion that I had ‘probably deserved it’, that ‘women should keep their hands off other women’s property’. Then came the next blow: the police told me I would have to appear in court and give evidence against her. I collapsed-actually physically collapsed-when they told me. Of course I didn’t want her to get away with it, but I also didn’t want to be anywhere near her ever again, no matter what protection I had. I didn’t want to have to sit in court and listen to PC James Escritt describe the state I was in when he found me in the garden of Cherub Cottage.

  My medical records were needed to secure a conviction, and I had to authorise the hospital to make a statement about my condition when I arrived. I begged to be spared a court appearance in exchange for agreeing to the medical statement, but that wasn’t possible. I was told that without me as a witness, the CPS would drop the case, because the chance of getting a guilty verdict would be less than fifty-one per cent. James Escritt, who had been my main point of contact throughout, even after CID got involved, did his best to arrange for me to deliver my testimony from behind a screen, or from another room in the building by video-link, but the judge refused. I’d had bad luck, apparently-more bad luck-in being assigned a judge who was known for his inflexibility.

  I was a mess in court: shaking, dribbling, unable to move my limbs in the way I wanted to, feeling as if the various bits of my body weren’t properly fitted together and might fall apart at any moment. I held up proceedings by fainting twice during cross-examination. My parents had wanted to come to court with me, but I’d managed to persuade them not to. Ever since I was a child, their presence has made me feel worse in times of trouble, not better. Fortunately, I was able to put them off without saying anything so tactless or honest. I distrusted those of my friends who claimed to want to come and give me ‘moral support’, suspecting them of wanting nothing more than proximity to a juicy story that they’d be able to dine out on for years.

  He testified against her, endorsing my version of events. There was no need for him to stand trial, because he’d admitted his guilt. She was found guilty, and burst into tears when it was announced. ‘It’s not fair!’ she screamed. ‘Why does the system always punish the victim?’ He also
cried on hearing the verdict, even though he’d helped to convict her. I watched him mouth, ‘I’m sorry’-at her, not at me.

  That was the last time I saw them. I didn’t go to hear sentencing, but I was informed of their sentences: seven years for him, ten for her, because she’d pleaded not guilty. Via the family liaison officer who had been assigned to me, I made it clear that I didn’t want the CPS to send me any more information about either of them. It sickened me to think that one day a letter might arrive saying one or other of them had been released early for good behaviour. I didn’t want to know.

  I stuck it out in Lincoln for another three years after the trial, feeling as if I was in prison too. Everyone I met either asked prying questions or appeared mortified to have to speak to me. No one wanted me to design a garden for them; even if they had, I’d have found it impossible, unthinkable. Still, it didn’t occur to me to move and start a new life, not until one day in 2004.

  I had gone to my parents’ house for dinner, and, for once, decided to risk a little honesty when they asked me how I was feeling. ‘Bad,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever feel anything but bad again.’

  They started to talk about prayer, as I had known they would, about asking Jesus for help. And then my mother said, ‘He would forgive you, you know. We forgave you straight away, the minute we heard what had happened. Jesus is loving and merciful-’

  I interrupted her and asked, ‘Forgave me for what?’, because I knew what they meant. They could only mean one thing. It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that my parents didn’t believe my story. They believed her lies, the newspapers’ lies, the late-night radio phone-in lies; they thought I’d been having sex with him. After all the lying and pretending I’d done over the years for their sake, they didn’t believe me against the woman who had nearly killed me.