Sexy as Hell Box Set (75 page)

As we walked through a small market, with a few lingering stallholders packing away their goods, I finished off telling Victor what he needed to do and say to me. He was balking internally—his winces and sharp intakes of breath told me that—and probably fighting with himself as to whether he could go through with it. I knew he would, though, and perhaps it had been mean of me to ask him to participate in a recreation of a time in my past I really ought to forget. I thought I
had
forgotten.

But
not dealing with it, just burying it, hadn’t done me much good. I was a train wreck, although not damaged enough by the crash not to be able to keep going along the tracks. No, I had enough in me to trundle forward and crash some more, over and over until there was nothing left of me.

Victor steered me down an alley strewn with the slats from broken crates. It could have reminded me of the man in Tuscany, who’d taken me down a similar alley and tried to control what I’d thought would just be a casual sexual experience.
A quick romp back at his place he’d said, and yes, he liked a woman who could take him in hand. Had Victor not been following, I dreaded to think what might have happened. It certainly wouldn’t have been consensual or pleasant. Yet Victor
had
been following, so there was no point in dwelling on what could have been.

What-had-
beens…I had plenty of those already. Thankfully only a few remained, those that needed to be faced and dealt with, and perhaps this weekend was the ideal time to get them sorted. I’d be using Victor, I knew that, to help me to bury the past once and for all, but…

But what?

Did I really think after this weekend was over we could do what he’d said, be like he’d said? Us, a couple, returning to London and being together? I could admit, as I stepped over a particularly jagged slat and clutched his hand tighter, that I wouldn’t mind giving it a try. Yes, since my eighteenth year I’d barrelled through life, charging along as though nothing could or would ever get to me again, but was it time to change?
Could
I change?

My personality as it was
now was so ingrained that I wondered how long it would take to get the old me back. And who the hell
was
the old me? I’d never really had the chance to see what I would be like if my life had taken a different route. Barely out of my youth, I’d been thrown into the seedy side of life and hadn’t left it. Yes, I’d broken free from those lads, had gone home hoping that for once, just once, my mother would have shown she’d loved me, but of course she hadn’t, not at all. If only she’d been the sort of parent who liked her child and…

No. No, I wasn’t going down that particular
track. She hadn’t cared. Didn’t care. That was the way it was. I’d accepted that now, there was no point in doing otherwise.

As Victor guided me left and along a deserted street no wider than my outstretched arm span and lined with windowless brick walls as high as Hyde Park’s tallest trees, I asked myself whether I was prepared to tell him the
pièce de résistance. Could I ever talk about my deepest, darkest secret with him? No one except my unmoved and unconcerned mother knew about the worst things. It really was just me and my huge skeleton, which rattled around behind me wherever I went, something that was there but that I never acknowledged.

I couldn’t. It hurt too much.

“I wonder,” Victor said, pointing to another, even smaller alley that had a wonky gate at the end, “whether anyone actually lives in that little house? The windows are shuttered and unlike the others we’ve been past back there, there’s no smoke coming from the chimney pot.”

I thought of it being brick and that the setting wouldn’t be right. I wouldn’t smell the wood, that unique scent only sheds seemed to have, and it possibly being empty of the usual paraphernalia wouldn’t lend the type of ambience I was after either. Then again, we were abroad, so how could I expect to get our surroundings exactly as they’d been before?

“Even if it’s empty,” I said, “it might be locked up.”

“We could try. There really isn’t anywhere else that I can think of, and if you need to face this now…”

“I could wait,” I said, knowing I couldn’t. Now that I’d made my mind up to revisit this shit, I didn’t want to back down.

“No, you can’t.” He took my hand and led me to the end of the narrow, slightly damp passageway, dodging a broken pal
let as we went. “It needs sorting, even I can see that.”

He clamped his jaw, and I knew he was battling with internal demons. I loved him to death for being prepared to do this for me, knowing that at the end of the weekend I was going to fuck him over again, tell him we should go our separate ways. Yet he knew this and was still prepared to go ahead. I’d made my feelings perfectly clear—we were here to try this romance business.

And then it hit me.

“I’m ruining this weekend,” I said. “Just like I ruin every-bloody-thing else.”

He stopped, his hand on the peeling paint that covered the old gate, and looked at me. “Pardon?”

“We’re supposed to be being all lovey-dovey, yet here I am, making you find somewhere to go so you can treat me like shit.”

I was angry with myself—so damn angry.

“Look,” he said, drawing me to him, holding me tight and squeezing. “We have time for the romance angle, all right? This needs dealing with, and, after what you’ve said, it’ll take what, an hour? We’ll do this then carry on as we’d planned. Or as I’d planned.” He sighed. “Zara, there’s so much I want to show you, so much I want to do with you. A weekend isn’t going to cut it, but if I can cram as much in as I can, maybe…”

I suspected he didn’t finish because
he
knew that
I
knew what he’d left unsaid.

Maybe you’ll see loving me isn’t so bad and you’ll want to give it a more permanent try…

“Let’s go inside then,” I said, pulling back and smiling brightly at him. “If someone’s there, we can make out we’d got lost. If it’s empty and locked, well, we’ll find another place. Even that deserted alley back there will do.” I smiled again, harder. “It’s quiet, it has wood, and no one will go down there once the market’s been packed away.”

“And it might also be too much for you to take—two memories to fight at once? That man in Tuscany and…and them? No, I can’t allow that.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to say he wasn’t allowing anything, to snap at him that if he thought he was in charge here he was damn well wrong, but I held all those words back. I needed to learn not to take things out on him—things he hadn’t caused, things he was trying to help me to get over. I needed to learn to accept a helping hand. But how could I when it had just been me for all these years? How the hell did someone who had relied only on herself let another in?

I tugged his hand and stepped forward. “We’ll go and see what’s in here.” I nodded at the gate. “And if it’s a no go, then…” I shrugged. The hotel room would have to do. “Go on. Open it.”

He placed one foot on a stone slab that acted as a step and pushed the gate, glancing at me and giving me the kind of look that said he was buggered if he knew what to say should someone be on the other side.

There was no one, just a miniscule courtyard, barely big enough for a table and chair.

Victor shut the gate behind us. It had a rusty bolt, and he slid it home, sealing us within the high walls.

“Maybe they’re at the market,” I said, apprehension coiling my stomach into a knot of nerves. I did my best to ignore the bitter taste of fear and disgust that seared into my mouth, instead moving to one of the windows. Even though it was shuttered I could make out the inside through a broken slat.

The place was indeed empty and appeared as though it had been that way for years. There was no furniture, and a thick layer of dust had gathered on the inside sill. The owners of this place were much further away than just the market.

“Try the handle,” I said, jerking my head at the
door. “No one’s at home.”

He turned it, but the door was locked. “Damn,” he said with a frown, then, “Hey, what’s that there?”

There was a small, dark lean-to against the house hiding behind a jungle of ivy. From between cracked pavers, scrubby grass grew to halfway up the door, which hung drunkenly on its hinges and hid God knew what inside. It was smaller than the original shed, but if it were empty, we could fit inside.

Victor turned to look at me. He didn’t need to say a thing—I knew what he was thinking.

“Yes,” I said. “This will do nicely.”

“Christ, Zara. Really? It’s bound to be filthy and—”

“Even better,” I said.

“Seriously?”

Even through the fading light I could see he looked aghast.

“Yes, seriously. You don’t think the shed I was taken to was brand new, do you? That it had been put up just so they could
store me in it?”

“No, I didn’t. I don’t know what I thought.”

“It was like this, only bigger, and filled with junk.” A swift memory hit me. “There was a mannequin in the corner.” Oh, God, how I’d vowed to forget that. How it had tormented me in the dark, posing as one of
them
, as though it were real, always on guard, watching so I didn’t try to leave. “And a bird cage that still had pellets of shit in the bottom.”

“Bloody hell. It sounds more like it was used as an attic.” He pursed his lips for a second or two. “If this one’s filled with junk, we’re not going to be able to fit inside it.”

“Then we’ll take the stuff out,” I said, striding forward then yanking the long strands of grass out of the way. It took a few moments for me to rip enough of them out of the ground to enable me to move the door, but I only managed to shift it a few inches. “Would you?” I glanced at Victor over my shoulder.

He
came to my side, taking hold of the door and opening it with one hard tug. In normal circumstances I would have quipped that he’d been manly, was my hero, and swanned inside as though I owned the damn place, but not this time. The stench hit me—mould, old dust, damp—and images seemed to all burst out of their hidey holes at once, filling my mind until they tangled, became a jumbled mass that I couldn’t control or sift through to put them in any order.

My head lightened, and I fought with nausea that joined the horrendous party that had started in my body. My legs weakened, but I told myself that it was just smells, that the past wasn’t really here, just replica scents. But wasn’t this what I’d wanted? A scene as close to that time in my life as I could get? I closed my eyes, felt Victor’s hand clasp my elbow, his breath on the top of my head.

“Zara, this really isn’t a good idea.”

“No,” I said, a steely determination swamping everything else inside me, erasing it and those terrible memories. “No, this is an excellent idea.”

I had to believe my own words.

I opened my eyes and looked inside the lean-to. It was empty save for a broom propped in the rear right-hand corner, a scrunched up, sepia-coloured newspaper, and a rusty rake. I jerked my elbow to get his hand off then stepped forward, resting my hands either side of the door and leaning inside. I breathed deeply, letting the aromas fill me, take me back in time.

Suddenly I was there. And so were they.

I walked in, knelt, disregarding the filth on the floor, and was almost pleased that the moistness seeped through my
jeans and onto my skin.

“Do it,” I called to Victor. “Do everything I said.”

I heard him enter behind me. “Do you want me to be him now? Straight away?”

“Yes, now. And don’t forget the door needs to stay open.”

I’d thought, when I’d been through this the first time, that I could escape, get away and never have to see them again, but oddly I’d remained, doing everything they’d instructed. My chance to leave had come and gone, and I’d been locked up again, left for hours with no food or water, waiting for their return, for them to make me do something hideous. And that damned mannequin had watched over me. Had seen my tears and heard my sobs.

“Don’t hold back,” I said. “It has to seem real. I have to go back there.”

I hung my head, put my hands on my thighs, and stared at a clump of mud that had dried-up sprouts of grass coming out of it. My heart was beating way too fast, and I couldn’t work out whether it was due to me facing what was to come or if the terror of back then was on its way to tip me over the edge once and for all.

“What have you been doing since we were last here, you fucking little bitch?” Victor asked.

He didn’t sound like them. Oh, he’d injected malevolence into his tone like I’d asked him to, but I knew it was him.

“Nastier,” I said. “Crueller.”

“Shit,” he whispered, then, “Don’t ignore me. Answer me!”

Oh,
yeah, that sounded nasty all right…

“Nothing,” I said. “I haven’t been doing anything.”

“That’s right,” Victor said. “You can’t do anything until we’re here, and then, when we are, you’ll have plenty of stuff to do. Like now.”

I waited.

“We’ve been thinking,” Victor said. “Thinking really hard about what you’re here for, and we came up with some brilliant shit.”