The Venus Trap (10 page)

I remember when Richard told me. We’d been spending time together for a few weeks, having reconnected when I was working, temporarily, in the pharmacy at Boots. Richard had come in one day, all swollen and yellow from having his wisdom teeth out, and I think the state of him, looking so vulnerable and hideous, had made me let down my guard enough to agree to go out for a drink with him. It became a regular event. I was still hurting from losing John, even almost five years on, so Richard and I hadn’t kissed or anything—I hadn’t had any sort of romance at university, either, having rebuffed all advances. Yet I found myself warming to
Richard
, starting to gradually trust him a tiny bit, because he was generous and funny and kind.

He’d been walking me back to Mum’s from the pub, and we passed the alley. Its dark maw gaped at me as we passed and even then, several years after the event, I couldn’t prevent a shudder.

‘It still scares you, doesn’t it?’ he said softly, once we were
safely past.

I stopped. ‘What?’

He put his hands on my upper arms and gripped me gently, his hazel eyes dark under a dim streetlight. ‘Didn’t you know?’

‘
What?
’

For a moment I thought he was going to say that my attacker was his dad, or something ridiculous like that. I started to shake.

‘I was there that night. I was the one who saw what was happening to you and ran in.’

I stared at him. Of course it was! I couldn’t think how I hadn’t realised before. I’d just tried so hard to block the whole thing out of my mind. I opened my mouth to speak, to say thank you—
but what
came out instead was a furious screech of ingratitude: ‘
And you never told me before?’

Then I actually ran away, leaving him standing there looking hurt and stricken. I ran home, just as I had done on the night of the attack, so excruciatingly embarrassed that he had seen me
like that
, with a stranger groping me, that I refused to speak to him for three months. To my shame, I ignored his calls and his letters and
the gorgeous
love tokens he left on the doorstep for me—a book of romantic poetry, compilation tapes, a moonstone necklace that I still wear.

He later admitted that he’d been following me home that night, that he had quite often done so when he saw me out and about
in town
, even when I was with John. It made me feel for the first time that odd, confusing frisson of gratitude and discomfort
that come
s of being loved from afar.

I hate to admit it, but I feel flashes of it now with Claudio too. Just flashes—obviously I’d rather be anywhere else than here with him—but a tiny, tiny part of me thinks, ‘Wow, he really loves me . . .’ and down in the insecure depths of me, I’m impressed.

How sad is that?

Claudio looks around for a knife to slit open the plastic packaging of the chapattis he’s bought, then remembers that he’s hidden or disposed of the knife block and its inhabitants. I have to suppress a smile as he tries and fails to rip open the packet by hand, then with a normal knife, and eventually by stabbing the tines of a fork into the plastic. He must have wrestled with it for a full three or four minutes. Serves him right, the dysfunctional idiot. All the time his trousers are getting more and more bunched up around his arse as he gets increasingly flustered.

Finally he manages to extract the chapattis, which he shoves in the oven for a few minutes while he dishes up the curry on my two Pyrex plates—at least I’m spared the plastic flowery picnic plates. He puts one in front of me with a flourish.

‘Yum,’ I say, more enthusiastically than I feel. Although I had been starting to feel hungry, the sight of the yellow curry is now conjuring up comparisons with vomit and other such unpleasantness, and my stomach rebels. I pick at a piece of chicken with my plastic fork. ‘It’s really nice. Thank you, Claudio.’

He looks smug as he tucks into his own plate.

‘It’s so important, I think, for a man to be able to cook well,’ he says, echoing my own thoughts from earlier. I bite my tongue to stop myself adding, ‘It depends on the man.’

‘Did your mother teach you?’

His face immediately changes, as if shutters have clanged down over him, and he actually turns red. I’m aware I’ve committed another faux pas but feel disinclined to explore it further. I suppose it’s because his mum’s so ill. ‘Sorry.’

‘Have a chapatti while they’re still warm,’ is all he says. ‘What did you think of the food in that Greek place the other night?’

I think he’s fishing, hinting so that I’ll tell him this is in a different league or whatever, but again I feel disinclined to indulge him.

‘It was good,’ I said. ‘Greek food can be quite bland, but it
was tasty.’

‘It was such a fantastic evening, wasn’t it?’ He’s happy again, shutters raised.

I’m puzzled. He must be rubbish at reading signals. I’d been so emotionally distant that night that I was practically on the moon, whereas he seemed to have been
over
the moon.

‘Do you remember,’ he says nostalgically, as though reminiscing about a twenty-year relationship, ‘we almost kissed?’

‘No,’ I reply bluntly. ‘We didn’t.’

He frowns. ‘Yes! We held hands when we came out of the pub, and you had such a tender look in your eyes. I wanted to kiss you then but I thought I would wait until next time, build up the tension a little more. We sort of kissed goodnight, though, didn’t we?’

Well, you’ve certainly succeeded in building up the tension, I think to myself.

‘That was the time before. The second date, when we came out of the restaurant.’
Not the third date, when you drugged and
kidnapped
me.

He’s right, though. We did hold hands then, and I had hoped he’d kiss me. What a crap judge of character I am.

‘Claudio, listen. Things could definitely work out between us, but only if you let me out of here. Do you honestly think that I’m going to love you if you keep me a prisoner? Megan will be home in a few days. I’ve got a cleaner who comes once a week. My friend Steph will be expecting to meet me for lunch tomorrow.’ (She’s not, but he doesn’t need to know that. In fact, I think she said she was going up to Birmingham to interview a footballer.) ‘I talk to Donna a few times a week. She’ll be worried if she doesn’t hear from me.’

‘I’ve cancelled your cleaner.’

‘What? I don’t believe you. You don’t even know what
she’s called.’

Claudio looks smug again. ‘She’s called Ania. I saw the note you left for her last week, about dusting Megan’s room. Then I texted her from your phone and told her that she is no longer required.’

I’m furious. ‘How did you get into my
phone
? It’s locked!’ I want to throttle him, to inflict severe pain on him, to make him suffer the way he’s making me suffer.

He shrugs and shovels in a huge mouthful of curry and rice. ‘Easy. Saw the code you use when you texted Megan the other night in the restaurant: 8459.’

Does that mean he’s gone through everything? Texts, emails, photographs? He’s bound to have. I didn’t think it was possible for my heart to sink further still, but it does.

‘It’s private, Claudio. My phone is private.’
Like everything else you’ve pawed over with your greasy mitt
s, I think. My cards, my finances, my clothes, my toiletries . . . I want to cry. At least my confiscated laptop has a passcode he won’t have seen and won’t be able to figure out—it’s my granddad’s name.

He smiles and I have to sit on my hands not to launch myself at him. If only I had long, hard fingernails! I think longingly of the damage I could do.

‘Do I have any texts from Megan?’ I ask through gritted teeth.

‘I don’t know,’ he replies shortly. ‘I switched it off again.’

‘Can I have it?’ I know the answer to this already, and Claudio confirms it.

‘No. I know you’ll only use it to try to call for help, but let me tell you this: in the extremely unlikely event that you do somehow manage to leave before you’ve proved you love me,’ he says, with the steely calm that frightens me to my core, ‘I will take the wood off the windows and the locks off the doors and then fill the holes. I will put my pyjamas under your pillows and my clothes in your wardrobe. Everyone will think you invited me to stay over while Megan is away. I will tell the police we had an argument and you are trying to get me into trouble, that you’re prone to making things up but I love you anyway in spite of your being a fantasist. They won’t believe you. No-one will. I will deny everything. Then, I will track you down and kill you. That’s a promise.’

Chapter Fourteen
Day 2

I
remember, before our first date, trying to picture Claudio as somebody with whom I might have a future. It was hard, because I never really hit it off with him when we were younger, but I kept telling myself to give him the benefit of the doubt. He seemed really keen, and he wasn’t all that bad-looking, from what I could
remember
of him the night that Gerald screamed
at m
e.
Unfortunately
I kept getting flashbacks of how he looked at
eighteen
—spotty, gauche, too lanky, bad clothes—and that image kept superseding the picture of him coming over to me in Pizza Express twenty-five
years later.

Although it makes me feel nauseated now, two weeks ago I was thinking about what it would feel like to get close to him, to feel the texture of his hair—he has good hair, thick and soft-looking. I suppose what I was really after was a combination of the best bits of Richard and the best bits of Sean together. Then I’d have the perfect man—especially if the combined person
resembled
John, too.

It almost makes me laugh to think how catastrophically wrong I got it.

I feel as if, before the third date with Claudio, I was a woman in layers. The top layer was the fun-loving, dating woman, up for a laugh and meeting new people, accepting compliments as her due, flirting as if to the manner born; the woman I’d described in my on-line profile. The layer next to that knew that she could, in certain circumstances, look quite pretty. Had even been described as being gorgeous, although she couldn’t think how. The next layer still wore her wedding ring, on the wrong hand, because it was comforting to her. One more thin layer in was a woman who thought she looked hideous in—or out of—all her clothes, who couldn’t bear to look in a mirror, who didn’t believe anybody could seriously be interested in her.

As for the inmost layer—well, nobody except Richard or Sean has ever got down that far. That’s the girl being assaulted in an alley, the girl crying over her dad’s grave, the girl whose heart was broken by an amber-eyed sixth-former, the girl throwing up in the toilet.

I don’t like that girl. I’ve hidden that secret heart in my
layers
, grown them around her, swaddling her with hard-earned maturity and experiences—but it seems that somehow she has fought free and lashed out at me again, worse than ever. But now it’s as if
Claudio
has taken a giant machete and sliced me—her—into
violent
, irreparable halves.

My first date with Claudio was in town, at a bar close to the
Millennium
Wheel. I fancied a day out ‘up London’, as Sean would have said. Richard was picking Megan up from school for the weekend, and I had decided to go and see the Robert Crumb exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery. I visualised a day full of mental stimulation, good cappuccinos, and mouth-watering
pain au chocolat
in street cafes full of attractive and funkily dressed people. Then, to top it all off, a date with a reasonably good-looking man.

I’d met him before, obviously, so I knew what to expect. It wasn’t like an internet date. Although what I didn’t know was whether or not we’d hit it off. But I decided to myself that if it was really dire, I could just feign an emergency at home and make my excuses. It crossed my mind that perhaps I ought to tell someone where I was going, but then I thought no, it would be fine, we’d be in a public place at all times, I’d known him since I was sixteen—even though I hadn’t seen him for two decades in between.

I was quite tired by the end of my day out. The Underground was sweltering in the June heat. Londoners were weary and dusty at the end of another week, and the streets were full of people fighting their way home, or to pubs for an after-work drink. I wished I’d arranged the date for another day, but it was too late by then.

Coming out of the Tube at Waterloo, jostled from all sides, I suddenly had a moment of thinking that I wasn’t sure if I could face it: the small-talk, the explanations, the twenty years of catching up, and of course the tentative enquiry as to who had ended the marriage. On internet dates, this usually comes with the second drink and is always asked casually, but with great trepidation. I’m never sure what the correct reply is—if I lie and say that my husband left me, does that portray me as a victim, or a nightmare harridan who was so unbearable to live with that her poor long-suffering husband walked out? And when I tell the truth, that it was my decision, there’s a moment’s hesitation, what screenwriters call a ‘beat’, and I can see my date thinking, ‘Hmm, OK, so she left him, therefore she’s probably unreliable, lacking in moral fibre, if she’s prepared to break her marriage vows.’ I don’t know if men these days ever use the word ‘
flibbertigibbet
’—I’m
guessing
not—but if they did, that’s probably what they were thinking of me.

I told myself not to be so paranoid as I headed towards the Millennium Wheel, having made a quick pit-stop in the ladies’ loo at Waterloo station to comb my hair and put on fresh
make-up.
Everybody knows that marriages break up all the time. Eileen’s always saying that you can never tell what’s going on in anyone else’s marriage, even the apparently rock-solid ones. If a man I dated was prepared to judge me for being divorced, whether or not at my own instigation, then he clearly wasn’t going to be a man I wanted to spend more than five minutes with.

My hands were clammy with nerves as I pushed open the heavy plate glass doors of the bar. I’d changed my mind about not wanting to do this. Now I really wanted it to work, I really wanted him to have changed since we were at school. Claudio was no oil painting but he was better-looking than any of the other men I’d been on dates with, and he seemed so keen on me.

I walked up to the bar, glancing around me, trying not to look too desperate. For a brief second I imagined that I was here to meet Richard after work, back in the days when he was a graphic designer in an office near Waterloo, and I was working at IPC Magazines as a staff writer on several of their women’s titles. We’d meet in a bar like this one, sinking a couple of cold beers, chatting amiably and non-stop about not much—the new band he’d heard on the radio and whose CD he’d bought, which one of my colleagues was having an affair, where we’d go on holiday that summer.

I spotted Claudio straight away, sitting at one of the tables reading a menu in a manner suggesting that he needed something to do with his hands. He looked up, and I waved tentatively. His face broke into a huge but nervous beam, and he leapt to his feet,
kissing
me on each cheek when I approached. That night, he smelled pretty good, if slightly as if he’d been in an explosion in an
aftershave
factory
. Underneath that was a faint note of that sour smell clothes get when they aren’t adequately dried, but this was mostly masked by the aftershave.

‘Jo! Hi! It’s so great to see you at last. You look beautiful. Sit down, sit down. What would you like to drink?’

That’s a good start, I thought, telling him I’d love a glass of Rioja. Teenage Claudio, as far as I could recall, would never have had the style to tell a girl she looked beautiful. He rushed off to the bar to get my wine, and I watched him go, dodging elegantly between the post-work drinkers. Even then I wouldn’t have called him gorgeous, but he was attractive all right, by anyone’s standards. And
way
more eligible than I’d have thought he’d turn out to be, based on his appearance as a sixteen-year-old.

I had a good feeling about it.

Four glasses of wine later, the feeling was even better. He was noticeably more relaxed and gazing into my eyes, asking me question after question about myself and what I’d been up to since we’d left our respective schools. Before I knew it, I’d told him all about Megan, and Lester the cat, and even a bit about Richard, and how long we were together. He didn’t ask whose decision it was to end the marriage, just smiled sympathetically and said, ‘You know, when the marriage vows were first thought of, hundreds of years ago, people didn’t live for much longer than forty years at the most, so being married for life wasn’t likely to be for more than fifteen or twenty, until death did them part. These days couples might be together for fifty or sixty years. It’s an unrealistically long time to be with the same person, don’t you think?’

Actually I didn’t. A promise was a promise, especially before God—and I’d broken mine—but it was kind of him to say so.

Claudio told me about himself too, but only in reply to my own enquiries. He was working in IT for an pharmaceutical company in Feltham, had been there for four years but hoped to leave soon and set up his own IT business. He lived in Twickenham but had been spending all his weekends in Brockhurst lately, with his mum. Then he quickly changed the subject and asked me instead about my parents, where they lived, if we were close.

‘My dad died when I was sixteen,’ I said in a rush—it was still hard to say out loud, even after all these years. ‘My mother remarried three years later. She and my step-dad live in Scotland, where he comes from. I don’t see them all that often. But she’s very happy.’

‘Oh yes. I remember now that your father died. And you don’t have brothers or sisters, do you?’

I shook my head ruefully. I wish I did. I wish I had a big strong brother up the road, to call me ‘sis’ and take me out for curries when I was particularly depressed. Someone like Richard’s little brother, Ben. He’s twenty-eight now, which is bizarre to think of—I first met him when he was about five or six. Not at all little any more, either; he’s six foot four, and gorgeous.

‘What about you? Where do you live? Do you have a big
family
?’ I asked.

I couldn’t remember anything about Claudio’s family circumstances, only that he told me in Pizza Express that his mother had cancer. I was hoping that he was from an enormous extended
Italian
family. It would be handy if half of them lived in Brockhurst and half still in Italy. I loved the idea of Sunday lunch around a huge table with a large, noisy bunch of siblings and cousins and nieces and nephews running around. I so wished I came from a big family.

‘Oh,’ he said, rather distantly. ‘No, just my mother. I think I told you she is not too well.’

Odd, I think, for an Italian to be an only child. Perhaps his father died when Claudio was a baby, and his mother never remarried? But I didn’t like to pry. I didn’t need to know everything on the first date. All the same, I was a little disappointed that he wouldn’t be the one to fulfil my familial daydream.
Never mind
, I remember thinking,
he seems pretty good in all other ways
, and I liked him considerably more as an adult than I had as a teenager.

‘I can’t believe you’ve never been married!’ I said flirtatiously. I didn’t mean it as an accusation, more as a compliment, but an odd, almost angry expression crossed his face.

‘Sorry,’ I backtracked hastily. ‘I mean, all the other Italians I know are really into family. I would have imagined that you would have a load of kids by now.’ He looked away and I realised I’d put my foot in it again.

‘I nearly got married once, about ten years ago. She . . .’

For an awful moment I thought he was going to say she died. I arranged my features into a sympathetic expression.

‘. . . she left me at the altar.’

Bad, but not as bad as her dying. It wasn’t difficult to maintain the sympathy, though—it must have been horrendous for him.

At least that’s what I thought then. Now, obviously, I’m silently applauding the woman. She got out just in time.

‘Oh, Claudio, that’s awful, I’m so sorry.’ A million questions ran through my head: Had he any inkling? Why? Who was she? How did they meet? Had they been together long?

I waited for him to say something and eventually, fiddling with the cocktail sticks piled next to the olives we’d ordered, he blurted, ‘My mother never liked her anyway.’

‘Oh dear. That’s never easy.’ I said that as though I knew what he meant, but I didn’t. My mum loved Richard, and Richard’s mum, until her death, loved me. I still miss her.

‘Do you remember my mother? She remembers you.’

‘Does she?’ I pictured again the thin, hunched lady
chewing
slowly, but nothing came back to me from the past. ‘Perhaps if you showed me a photo of her from when we were teenagers I would.’

‘She always said you had the face of an angel. I think she was as disappointed as I was when you married Richard.’

I blinked. That was a bit dramatic. ‘Oh! Does she know we’re out on a date tonight?’

He nodded enthusiastically. ‘I rang her up to tell her. She was thrilled! As soon as she’s feeling a bit better she said we should all go out for a pub lunch.’

‘Lovely,’ I said, sort of meaning it.

The rest of the date proceeded without incident. It was only later that I realised he had successfully deflected any further
mention
of the ex-fiancée without me finding out anything at all about her. Perhaps she’s actually buried under his patio.