Authors: Louise Voss
I blurted out, ‘Oh, just
Caravan of Love.
I must be the last person in the country to buy it . . .’ and to my abject horror John yanks the bag off my arm and peers inside. I felt sooo humiliated, like he’d pulled down my pants or something—in fact, the way he did it made me imagine him undressing Gill. But it still gave me a shiver of something unexpected.
Deep inside my needlecord folds
.
He cackled with laughter when the record was revealed instead to be Europe,
The Final Countdown
, and I hoped desperately that he wouldn’t tell all his mates.
‘The Housemartins? Yeah, right, pull the other one!’
Then of course I made things worse by stammering, ‘Oh, um, silly me—that’s for my cousin’s Christmas present. She loves that song. I actually meant to buy
Caravan of Love
but they’d sold out . . . .’
John looked at me, his tawny eyes with their spiky black fringes blinking dangerously. Then his gaze slid down across my massive, horrible chest.
‘Hmm,’ was all he said. ‘That’s a very—flowery dress.’
I cringed and wished I’d done up the toggles on my duffel coat again after undoing them in WHSmiths, where the
fevered muggy breath
of the Christmas shoppers made me too warm.
‘I know. I really really hate it, only my jeans are in the wash.’
I felt like I was being disloyal to Dad, by saying I hated the dress. But this was John. Dad would understand, I’m sure.
Then bloody Claudio turned up. He’s such a weasel. I don’t know why John likes him so much. He once pinched my bum and offered me a fag in the park. I hated him even more than ever, for interrupting my precious time with John. John’s voice went all rough when he talked
to Claudio:
‘All right, Cloud? Give us a fag, I’m gagging.’
Wonder what John’s parents would think if they heard him talking like that? They’re seriously posh. They hate that Donna won’t answer to her real name, Donatella—they think that Donna is very infra-dig. But she’s insisted on it since she was seven.
Then John and Claudio just started walking off! John did look back, though, so I opened my mouth to say ‘Bye,’ and ‘Send Donna my love,’ but he’d gone before I could get the words out.
I watched him go. He always wears this really thin burgundy leather bomber jacket and he was pulling it closer to him, his cloudy winter breath huffing out around him. I half-expected him to blow smoke rings into the air, the way he had when I watched him smoking in the park. I wonder what it would feel like to have those beautiful curved lips pressed against mine?
On the phone later I tried to tell Donna that I thought John was sexy, but she just snorted.
‘His feet smell worse than anything you could ever imagine,’ she said. ‘And he’s got mossy teeth.’
I don’t care. I still love him.
‘So?’ Claudio asks eventually. ‘What’s it about?’
It gave me a shock, seeing his name on the page. He must have known, he must have read it already.
I grit my teeth. ‘It’s about my crush on John. A dress I didn’t like but kept wearing because my dad bought it for me. My mum, missing my dad. He’d only died a few months before then.’
Claudio doesn’t express any sort of sympathy. There was clearly only one point of interest for him, and he’s probably pissed off that I didn’t mention that he featured. ‘You were mad about John, weren’t you?’ he says, sulkily.
‘Yeah.’ No point in denying it.
He sighs, long, heavy and bitter. ‘John always got the girls.’
Then he stands up, picks up the tray, and walks to the door, unlocking it and backing out.
‘I’m tired. I’m going to watch TV in bed.’
Thank God he’s not planning to sleep in my room, or Megan’s. I would rip his throat out if he slept in Megan’s room. I grit my teeth as I imagine his malodorous body sullying the purity and softness of her floral cotton sheets. But he is far too tall to fit into her three-quarter-size cabin bed that you have to climb a ladder to get to, even if he wanted to. His fat arse would never fit down the attached slide. And the thought of his head on her pillow, seeing what she sees before she goes to sleep—the whirling lions and zebras on her magic lantern, the butterfly stickers on her wall—makes me feel murderous. I’d almost rather he slept with me.
I feel heady with relief that he’s finally going. The air in my room stinks of him. I don’t tell him that the TV in the spare room doesn’t work—he’s probably got an iPad anyway. I suppose I’d
better
give him the wifi code if he asks; otherwise he might come back in here to watch whatever it is he wants to watch . . .
‘But I’m going to leave you with a clearer answer to your question from earlier: it’s
incentivisation.
’
‘What do you mean?’ A new trickle of fear snakes its way up inside me. I’m not even sure if incentivisation is a word—but it’s not the semantics that are scaring me.
‘It’s just over a week until your daughter comes back. So you have seven days to tell me you love me, in a way that I believe you really mean it. No bullshitting.’
I shake my head incredulously. He’s crazy.
‘How do I do that?’
He shrugs. ‘You can do it. Tell me your memories of all the other men you’ve known, then cleanse yourself of them. Photos, reminders, gifts. Help me plan our future. It can happen, if you let it. I have a lot to offer you—you’ll see. We could be great together. But you have to let me in.’
Never.
‘And if you don’t,’ he says almost casually, leaving the room but not quite closing the door behind him so that there is just a crack through which he speaks, like Jack Nicholson in
The Shining
. ‘If you don’t convince me that you love me within seven days, I will kill you.’
Chapter Six
Day 2
W
hen I wake up at five in the morning, my head feels less muzzy and painful, but panic immediately surfaces,
spurting
in like water through the walls of a cracked viaduct: when will
people
start looking for me? Who knows what will have
happened
by the time anyone realises I’m missing? Perhaps nobody will realise, not until Richard gets back. I’m a freelance medical writer, no office to go into, no colleagues to miss me—I used to share an office with my journalist friend Steph but we gave it up just last week, because of the cost. I’m not due to see Steph or Donna and I don’t speak to them that often on the phone these days. There’s no reason for them to call me. Mum only rings me once a month from Scotland. Megan is unlikely to call me—she rarely does when she’s on holiday with Richard, and that’s fine with me because I know that it means she’s having a good time.
Usually
fine with me, I should say. Right now I’m wishing they called me religiously once a day because surely, after a day or two of my phone being switched off or unanswered, Richard would start getting worried? I never turn off my phone. I’m having a repeated fantasy in which he rings Donna and asks her to get hold of me, and then she can’t, and she calls the police, and I’m
rescued . . . but it’s just a fantasy.
Fear rises in my stomach like a twister, ripping my insides apart like roofs being torn off barns.
Slow down.
Calm down.
Breathe.
I’m amazed I got any sleep at all last night. As it was, I lay awake for hours, turning Claudio’s parting words over and over in my head. He wouldn’t . . . He said he wouldn’t hurt me . . . Would he . . . ? Surely he couldn’t actually
kill
me! How would he do it?
How could I ever fool him into believing I love him when I don’t? I’ve always been a useless liar: he’d see through me in a second—although, if he wanted to believe it badly enough, perhaps he might overlook my body language. Or could I rehearse a scenario in which I managed to convince him by practising declarations of adoration, lingering eye contact, little touches, all the things that besotted lovers do?
I doubt it.
Panic fluttered in my throat like a trapped bird all night and now exhaustion is giving me double vision. I switch on the radio and listen to low breakfast voices but they don’t soothe me. How could they, when someone threatened to kill me last night?
All is quiet outside my room for some time. Then I hear the spare room door open and hear Claudio’s ponderous footsteps past my room into the kitchen. Nausea rises inside me and I brace myself, wondering which Claudio I’ll get today—the aggressive, snide one or the other one, the one who strikes me as someone who’s bitten off more than he can chew.
It’s the latter. When he brings me in some toast for breakfast he has the same expression as the cat has when it tries to stuff a live pigeon through the cat-flap or swallow a still-wriggling mouse. I wonder if he’s regretting it already, realising that you can’t possibly force someone to love you if they don’t. Particularly if you’ve already drugged and imprisoned them . . .
‘Good morning, beautiful.’ He hands me the toast, a diffident smile on his face. To my utter revulsion, he’s still in his pyjamas, brown old-man PJs with more than a hint of nylon in their composition. The thought of all his skin so perilously close to the surface, just a thin layer of man-made fabric between us . . . I swallow hard.
‘Did you sleep well?’
‘No.’
There is an awkward silence.
‘OK. I’m going to go and get dressed. I suggest you do the same. Then I’m coming back, and we’ll talk again. I want to hear about your divorce.’
It sounds so blunt. I have to bite my tongue not to say, ‘Mind your own bloody business.’ I don’t talk to anyone about my divorce, except my counsellor and my friends—not all of them, just my best friends. Just Donna and Stephanie.
‘Why?’
He gives me a pitying look and I notice that stubble has sprung up all over his jaw, neck, and cheeks overnight. He must be one of those men who need to shave every day without fail. I hope he doesn’t shave into the basin in my guest bathroom; imagining all those bits of black hair sticking to the porcelain makes me shudder. I don’t like hairy men.
‘I told you. I want to know everything about you. We have a lot of catching up to do.’
‘Can I have my diary back, then, to help me remember stuff?’
He sticks out his fat lower lip and it glistens like an organ, like something private and internal that oughtn’t ever be on show.
It strikes me afresh that if I hadn’t been so desperate for a relationship, I wouldn’t ever have given Claudio a second look. Why did I want a new partner badly enough to endure terrible dates with awful men like Gerald and Claudio? I should be able to be happy on my own. But I’m not, and now I’ve ended up here, aged forty-three, locked in my own bedroom by a deranged but apparently functional lunatic.
‘Your diary’s from eighty-six. You weren’t married then, let alone divorced.’
‘I know. But it’s got . . . relevant information in it.’
I suppose it did have. Eighty-six was the year I first met
Richard
, the year he first fell for me.
He sighs heavily, as though I have made a great imposition, and moves to leave. ‘Very well. I’ll get it for you.’
‘Thank you, Claudio,’ I say meekly as he leaves the room.
What I don’t understand is how I could have believed that this, any of this, would be better than being married to Richard.
Especially
up until last year, when I thought I was happily married. I had security, mutual trust, affection, validation. Yet I divorced the man whom I loved more deeply than I’ve ever loved anybody else, and he wasn’t having an affair. He didn’t beat me, or roll his eyes if I said something inane. He wouldn’t dream of kidnapping a woman and attempt to make her love him.
I can’t stop thinking about him. We told each other ‘I love you’ every day.
When Megan was a baby, Richard didn’t wrinkle his nose at the mere suggestion of changing a nappy, nor did he feign sleep when she cried, leaving me to get up and give her a bottle. He’d get up and feed her himself, and I’d hear him singing to her. That song that goes
It’s all about you,
it’s all about you, baby . . .
was a particular favourite. Every time I hear it, I think of him.
He bought me clothes and jewellery that, nine times out of ten, were things I would actually have chosen for myself. He did DIY around the house, expertly and without being asked. And he could cook—boy, could he cook. He cooked for me every single night, even though he didn’t get in from work until eight thirty most evenings. Pale and hollow-eyed with exhaustion, he would pour us both a glass of wine, wrap the navy and white striped apron around himself, and set to in the kitchen, knocking up something delicious and often unexpected—tuna steak with chilli and water chestnuts, or a quick Thai curry with fresh lemongrass—‘Ricky meals,’ he called them, although he hated being called Ricky by anybody else.
To top all that, he’d been in love with me, and only me, since he was sixteen years old, apart from a brief relationship with a skinny girl called Chrissie when he was eighteen. He says he never loved her, though. She picked her nose in her sleep, allegedly.
It took me a lot longer than that to come round to his way of thinking, but that only serves to give him more credit for persistence and patience.
Well, that’s one way of looking at it. The other way is to say that I should have trusted my instincts. I should never have allowed him to talk me into falling in love with him. But when you’re twenty-one, and insecure, and your instincts have let you down so many times that you can only regard them with the deepest of suspicion, it’s easy to accept that perhaps someone else knows what’s best for you.
Perhaps by this reckoning, Claudio
is
the man of my dreams . . . After all, you could say there are similarities between his behaviour and Richard’s. They both decided that I was the only one for them, and I didn’t fancy either of them when I first met them.
This thought makes me feel sullied. I can’t believe I even thought the words ‘Claudio is the man of my dreams.’ He’s the stuff of nightmares.
I don’t understand it.
I
wouldn’t fancy me, if I was a bloke. They probably only fancied me when I was a teenager because I had massive boobs, and I don’t even have those any more. It occurs to me that I seem to attract these needy, persistent men—but then I feel guilty for bracketing Richard with Claudio.
Richard was—is—a lovely man. He looked after me. He rescued me from myself. He gave me a home, stability, self-respect. We loved each other. So how could I have let it go all the way to separate houses and solicitors and signed divorce papers? His new girlfriend must be helping him regain his happiness, because he’s putting back some of the weight that fell off him after my shock desertion. The stress-induced psoriasis that cracked the skin between his fingers is healing, and he’s laughing again—or so I hear, via Megan.
I have a whole new file in my filing cabinet, with a plastic tab containing a little slip of card with the word DIVORCE written on it, splodged with my tears. And the answer to my question is: I’m not sure that I even know.
I thought I didn’t love him any more; I really believed that I didn’t. Funny, isn’t it, how the mind plays tricks. What I’d like to attempt to get to the bottom of is this: was my mind tricking me into believing I didn’t love him then, or is it tricking me now, by telling me that actually I did love him all along? Did I do the right thing by letting him go, or not? Which history am I
rewriting?
Another of my sneaking suspicions about the whole thing is that perhaps it was just a manifestation of my seemingly bottomless capacity for self-destruction. Lots of people apparently have this. Maybe it’s a defective gene.
There is a certain irony to the fact that we stuck together through the ten long years of pain and grief at not being able to conceive. The expense and heartbreak of two failed IVF cycles. The hours of discussions about adoption, fostering, surrogacy. The eventual and earth-shatteringly joyful revelation that we had conceived naturally, and our elation when Megan was born.
We went through all that—and then I left him. Either I’m mad, or I definitely do have that self-destruct button somewhere.