We were asked to leave in the end. It came out that it was my sister, not me who’d been abused, and the group leader said my influence was ‘unhelpful’. She said it as if she thought it was the worst thing she’d ever said to anyone before, taking me to one side after the meeting, and hardly giving the word breath.
‘Unhelpful.’ She pressed her fingers to her mouth, face scarlet, then handed me leaflets about other groups, advising me to be honest from the start. ‘I just want to make it clear, honesty is the key here, and I just feel that, well, some of the others feel that you’ve … you’ve not fully committed to the circle of trust, you know?’
Mary Contrary was sympathetic when we told her. She said she was joining a group online, and sent me a link or something. I can’t remember which now, but it was like Facebook for the damned, people posting their true life experiences so you could comment and chat, offer support. Their on-screen names were verbs, rather than nouns – still-laughing, standing-tall, never-going-to-cryagain-forty-seven.
After a while though, you entered into an arms race of abuse, top trumps of real life horror. When I first joined, I’d read all of them with a sick sense in my stomach, but after a while, I found I was judging them. Abuse story blackjack; I was looking for a hand of twenty-one, the story that would trump all others. When I started, I was reading headlines like ‘my brother touched me’ and feeling angry, appalled that anyone would feel able even to write those words, let alone share them in a public forum, but after a while that sort of thing had me snorting with derision. Okay sister, so what? Get over yourself, look at this one, this one here: ‘my father sold me to his friends for sex when I was eight’. Now that’s abuse, that’s shocking, that’s worth my sympathy.
Christ, when did that happen, when did I become so immune to everything that I was scoring each out of ten, looking only for ones terrible enough to feed my rage? And when I found them, I didn’t just hate the men, not just the men – I hated the women too. The ones that knew, the ones that shut the door and closed their eyes and wouldn’t believe. The ones that helped hold their children down, that advertised them for sale, that helped get them drunk first. I hated them too, perhaps even more so.
I’d go running in the dark, headphones on, running and running, with their words and their stories rattling and screaming round my head, until they were my stories, until they were Lisa’s story. Was I one of them? Had I shut the door on her? Had I looked away when I could have done something?
A key in the lock, loud as gunshot, my feet echoing behind me in the dark.
I told Mary Contrary about it, how I felt; she understood. It was good to talk to someone about it, someone other than Margarita. I got to hoping there was a message from her every time I logged on. Mary was an abuse survivor too, like Lisa. She’d gotten angry with her groups too, she said she was on her own now, like me, that she really liked talking to me, because I’d been there. I had to admit that it was my sister who was abused, but Mary understood that too, she said she felt my pain.
‘I’m so full of rage,’ she said. ‘Because there was nothing I could do to him. That was it, he got away with it.’
‘They threw me out of the group,’ I told her. ‘They said I was destructive, said I wasn’t really an abuse survivor, and that I was unsettling the other members. I broke the circle of trust.’
‘That blows,’ she said. ‘Anyway, they were wrong. Your father forced you to witness what was going on, and then he called you a liar when you tried to get help. He made you a partner in his abuse, and that’s pretty twisted.’
I thought about this for a while, and though she was right, it didn’t make me feel any better. It made me angrier, because I hadn’t done anything, hadn’t been able to do anything. Angry because I’d been a child.
‘I let her down,’ I said. ‘I didn’t do anything. Jesus, if I were back there now, if I were me now and not some scared little kid, I’d have broken his goddamn nose for him.’
‘Yeah, I think you could, too,’ Mary said. ‘You didn’t think you could do all the other stuff at first, did you, but you did.’
‘Yeah,’ I said and I have to confess, Margarita was grinning at me with pride when I wrote that. I’d told Mary about the man at the truck stop, about the others, even a little about Ralph the instructor and the day I’d laid him out flat.
‘That’s so cool,’ she said when I’d told her about him, poor Ralph, and how surprised he’d looked. ‘I knew you could do it, that’s like … awesome – you’re like a super hero!’ Ralph hadn’t thought so. Don’t hang around to see if they’re okay, ladies.
‘I’m not a super hero,’ I said. ‘I’m scared all of the time, I throw up and everything. And I can’t bring her back, can I? What good was I to my sister?’
‘You were there for her,’ she said.
‘But I didn’t stop him, and then she ran away to marry that man and now she’s dead.’
‘Are you sure she’s dead?’ The word ‘dead’ seemed to pulsate on the screen, white on black. Made me think of bones.
‘I don’t know, I think so. Why hasn’t she contacted me if she’s alive?’
‘But you know him, who he was, this guy she married?’
‘I do now. I’ve found out everything I can, everything. There was even a boyfriend, you know, someone who tried to save her. That should have been me; I should have saved her.’
‘You should find him, this boyfriend, find out what he knows. And, you’re sure he did it – her husband – you sure he killed her?’
I asked myself that question over and over as I ran through the dark, as I trained, as I swam, as I worked out at the punchbag. She was my sister and I’d let her down, but she would have contacted me if she was alive, I knew it. I believed it. Are you sure he killed her? Bone white words, dead black screen.
‘Yes,’ I wrote. ‘I’m sure.’
‘Well,’ Mary Contrary said. ‘So what else you doing all this other stuff for? You’re going to get him, right?’
‘He’s not like the others,’ I said. ‘He’s a soldier, he’s bound to be real hard.’
‘You’re stronger,’ she said. ‘And he won’t expect you to be. I mean, he won’t be scared of a woman. They’re all the same – my daddy, all of them – all think they’re the boss and they can do what they want.’
‘I don’t know if I can do it,’ I said.
She went offline then. I checked back the next day and the next but nothing, just a silence which lasted for days. When her message finally came it was a relief; it was like I wasn’t just alone with Margarita, that there was someone else out there who understood.
‘Go get him,’ Mary Contrary said. ‘You said yourself, you’re sick of the way we do nothing but talk about it, the way they never get made to pay, so you go get him and you make him pay. He killed her. He deserves to die.’
That night I ran for an hour, then another hour, my feet impacting on the ground as if they were my heartbeat. When I stopped running, I was standing on a walkway above the railway tracks. I felt giddy, as if the ground were rushing away from my feet, as if someone had picked me up and placed me on a high shelf and I’d no idea how to get down. I held onto the handrail and closed my eyes. It began to hum, began to vibrate. The train came roaring out of its tunnel, and the whole bridge shivered and rang with its noise, so much noise I could almost feel it hit me.
‘You ain’t gonna jump, is you?’ Margarita whispered in the silence after the train had gone. ‘You don’t want to kill yourself, do you?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I want to kill Red.’
‘So do I,’ she said, and we laughed.
Chapter 20
A DAY OR SO BEFORE we did it, I woke in the Pelican Inn and I saw the bed was empty. When I looked round, I saw Paris leaning against the window, a shadow against the glass. He was watching the road, and without me speaking, he knew I was awake.
‘I don’t want to do this no more,’ he said. I waited, my heart thudding panic through my che
st. ‘After we done here, that’s it for me.’
‘What ‘bout us?’ I asked after a while, making my voice small and lost, because Margarita wouldn’t want him to go without her.
I felt the bed subside a little as he sat down. ‘You still want me, when it ain’t about this?’
‘’Bout what?’ I asked, still unsure if he meant the thing with Red or not.
‘When it ain’t ‘bout us runnin’ round workin’ cons, living in motels, y’know? When it just me and you and regular life?’ I went to answer but he carried on. ‘I can’t do this shit much more. If I get caught again, I’m goin’ away for a long time – I don’t want that, n’ I don’t want this to be the only thing that mean’ you with me.’
‘It ain’t,’ I said, sitting up on my knees, putting my hand on his shoulder.
‘Y’know, when we hooked up, I first thought as how I was enjoying workin’ these things with you, cause you were good at it. Then I got to thinking, I liked workin’ these things cause it meant bein’ with you. Now I’m thinkin’, I want you to be wantin’ me even if we ain’t workin’ cons.’
‘Sure thing,’ I started to say, but he cut across me.
‘Don’t you go sayin’ just what you think I wanna hear. I ain’t never been this close to someone, so you be honest. If you like this life more than you like me, then …’ he bit his bottom lip ‘… then you take the money what we make, and do your thing. Without me.’
‘Course I wanna be with you,’ I said. ‘Once this is done, we’re gone, outta here, together. I ain’t never gonna leave without you.’ I was glad it was dark, because I hated myself for saying it.
‘Why?’ Margarita asked. Paris was asleep again, I wasn’t. I was watching the pulse of light passing cars drew across the ceiling, picking out the map-work of cracks in the plaster. ‘You tellin’ me he ain’t done the same? Told some poor dumb bitch in a motel room like this exactly what she wanted to hear, so as she’d do what he wanted?’ I didn’t answer. She was right, but so what? Did me doing it to him somehow make it a better thing to do?
He was still asleep in the morning when I got up and went down to the pool. Hell, all couples need time apart, even Paris said so. I swam a perfunctory length for the sake of appearance and stretched myself out on a towel. It was early, way too early for the people of the Pelican. I had the water to myself, just me and a Carolina mantis, perched in one of the shrubs in tubs.
‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Hope you don’t mind, but …’ I reached into its shrub and eased out the local paper I’d hidden there a few days back, with its densely packed type and rows and rows of small ads. I hadn’t circled the one I wanted, just in case. Before I turned to the right page, I looked back at the motel and the window of our room, but all was quiet, all was orange stucco walls and roof tiles.
The place I called was an early riser like me, up with the dawn to catch the night fishermen. Perhaps it never closed, one of those establishments you still got round there, where there’s no need to lock the door and if no one’s about, you can just leave the change on the counter, and fill up with a scoop of mealworms, or maggots, or whatever shit you wanted, knowing nobody would mind. I imagined it had one of those bells outside, the sort that rings when someone phones, so that you’d hear it if you were fixing boats out back. That morning, it rang a long time before it was answered, and the sound of it must have been loud as hell in the bright, wet morning.
The voice that answered was higher pitched than I’d been expecting. As he told me his name was Dave, Dave Delahoussaye, I wondered if he was one of those guys who looks like a grizzly but sounds like a chihuahua.
‘I’m callin’ ‘bout the place you got advertised, page twenty-seven.’ Because there’s nothing like superfluous detail to make someone warm to you. ‘The fishing place out in the reserve?’ I listened while he told me everything that was wrong with it, and how it was for people who weren’t much for creature comforts, but if you took the time to get all the necessary paperwork, well, it couldn’t be beat for a spot of fishing, if that was my bag?
‘Not so much,’ I told him. ‘I’m a wildlife photographer, got an assignment for a travel website, doing a feature on the Southern states, and…’ that impressed him enough for him to talk himself down to a very reasonable price, all things considered.
‘Sounds great,’ I told him.
‘You best come by an’ check it out, let me show you round,’ he was saying, and I was agreeing to do just that, when I heard the creak of the gate in the fence that circled the pool.
I was still saying goodbye to my new buddy, when I rolled round and smiled up at Paris. He was wearing the hotel bathrobe over his shorts, shades on, expression impossible to read.
‘Hey,’ I said, ‘you up already?’
He didn’t answer, but came and sat on the lounger a foot away from me. There was no way I could have hidden the paper without him seeing and so I didn’t. I picked it up and flicked it over, ‘So, hey, look,’ I got to the section advertising beauty salons, ‘I’ve found this place, yeah?’ I couldn’t tell if he was watching me or the paper, so I pretended he was looking at what I was trying to show him. ‘Says it does wigs and hairpieces, a discrete service for the discerning—’
‘Who ya been callin’?’ he asked, petulant.
There was no point denying I’d been speaking to someone either, so it had to be someone who might be awake, and not a threat to him. In the rush to appear natural, I said, ‘My sister, s’all,’ just like I might have when caught out at high school.
‘Ya what?’ he said, frown lines creasing his forehead.
‘What, you think I don’t got family?’ Sister. Why sister for fuck’s sake? Because she was on my mind, of course, all the time I was talking to Dave; Dave who’d no idea I’d already driven by his place out in the reserve weeks before, when I’d quartered the parish, trying to find what I needed.
‘You never said,’ Paris said, like he was real hurt about it, because he’d gone and told me all about his family, all those sisters and cousins and aunts, and hell, I hadn’t shared nothing with him in return, now had I? Which was odd, what with us being so close and all.
‘So?’ I folded my arms. ‘What you care? She’s back home anyhow, hence me havin’ to call early. You rather I woke you up?’ He shrugged at me, the silent treatment. So I slapped the newspaper at him. ‘Whatever. You got things to get, like a wig an’ all the other shit you been’ banging on about. Me, I gotta go get me a white trash makeover, remember?’
He let the paper fall into his lap, then finally took off his shades. ‘You wanna do this, then?’ he said. ‘You weren’t out here, lettin’ y’sister talk you out of nothin’?’
‘Hell no,’ I said, wishing to God I had been. ‘This is the big one, ain’t it? After all we’ve been building up to, all we done? Or what, you think I’m not ready yet, you think I can’t handle it?’
‘No,’ Paris said, and relented and took my hand. ‘I seen what you can do.’
Oh yes, he’d already seen what I could do, what we could do together. We would find a boutique, a small one, and the more exclusive the better. I’d stand outside on my cell and have an argument with my voicemail. The key was to be loud; the key was to be salacious and annoying in equal measure. I’d go in and look at a few things, start talking to the manager when she didn’t want to talk to me, but had too because that was her job. I’d reveal how I’d just caught my boyfriend cheating on me, I’d get their sympathy, the knowing looks and eye rolls. I’d be irritating though, and after a while they’d be sick of me. I’d try stuff on, waste their time, text on my phone, weep, that sort of thing. I’d choose a dress in the end, and then I’d come to pay and guess what – not enough cash.
‘We take cards.’
‘I don’t got no cards, that bastard took them all. Oh shit, I really want it, look, can you hold it for me and I’ll go find the cash back at my motel?’
They wouldn’t want to, they’d think that I’d skip, and I’ve been wasti
ng their time and offending the other customers.
‘We really can’t do that without a deposit, miss. I mean, if another customer comes in, we’ll have to let it go I’m afraid.’
‘Look, I’ll take my wallet. You hold my watch; it was the last decent thing that bastard ever gave me.’
The clerk would want me gone, but she’d want to make a sale also; they never get much commission and she only made minimum wage for all her air brushed make-up and killer heels.
‘Sure,’ she’d say.
‘Just put it on the counter, plain sight. I’ll be right back, you get me?’ and then I’m gone.
Paris would come in after, in a nice suit. He’d start looking for a gift for his girlfriend and get one of the assistants to help. His girlfriend was picky, demanding, nothing seemed quite right. He’d show them a picture of her in his wallet, and then he’d see my watch on the counter.
‘Hey, can I get a look at that? Now, she’s always goin’ on ‘bout this stuff.’ He’d offer them money for it; offer them hundreds because he knew they were going for a thousand dollars in New York. The clerk would say no at first, after all, it’s not hers, though she’d give anything right now for it to be hers. Paris would say that he didn’t want anything but that watch, not now he’d seen it.
‘Hey, look – take my card,’ he’d say finally. ‘If the owner comes back and she’s interested in selling, would you get her to call me?’ And then he’d be gone, his big fat wallet going with him.
Now the shop assistant had lost another sale, and then I’d come back, her customer from hell.
I’d start saying how I didn’t get quite enough cash; can she give me a discount? She’s had enough now, but then she remembers the watch. At first she asks for it to cover the dress, but I’m not that stupid, I know it’s worth something.
‘Hell, I reckon I could get a hundred for it round at the pawn shop,’ I’d say, getting real above myself. Now she thinks she’s going to lose this chance too, and she’s sure the watch is worth ten times the dress and commission together. In the end, she’d give me a couple of hundred for the watch and throw in the dress as well. As I leave, she’d watch me, fingering the card Paris gave her, itching to ring the number and collect her reward.
Nemesister: The gripping women's psychological thriller from Sophie Jonas-Hill Page 16
