The Venus Trap (9 page)

‘Let me look in the fridge?’

He hesitates again.

‘No,’ he says eventually. ‘I told you, I went out earlier and got some stuff for a curry.
I’m
going to cook us dinner. You need to rest. You’re still not well. And I want us to talk more tonight, about the old days, when we were still at school.’

‘You will let me have my diary again, then? I’ve got such an awful memory; I’ll need it to remind myself of what was going on.’

He narrows his eyes at me, but he does go and get it, which gets him off my bed. That at least is a huge relief. When he brings it back to me and leaves again and I hear the bolt shooting home behind him, I leap off the bed, switch off the movie, and sit cross-legged in the middle of my mattress. He’s left his stink behind, a miasma of BO that I can’t get rid of. I don’t even have any perfume to spray around the place.

Time to regroup. Why didn’t I go for him? Throw the TV at him, take him by surprise by jabbing my fingers in his eyes? I had so many opportunities.

Because I’m scared of what he’ll do to me in retaliation. I have a horrible realisation: that my excuse about faulty instincts is merely a way of kidding myself that I’m brave, when all along the truth is that I’m an absolute coward.

I can’t help wondering what sort of a cook Claudio is. Under these circumstances, anything he cooks for me will taste like ashes in my mouth, so it’s not like I care or anything, unless it involves anything I can use as a weapon. I wonder if he’ll serve it up on Megan’s plastic plates. I’ve got some wasabi paste in the fridge—if I can distract him long enough to get it, perhaps I could rub it into his eyes.

I’m just relieved he’s left me in peace, and that I have my diary back, even if only temporarily. Every cloud.

Thinking those words makes me shudder. That’s what John used to call Claudio—Cloud. One cloud is quite enough.

I do think it’s important that a man is a good cook. It’s such an attractive trait—apart from in psycho kidnappers, obviously. Longingly, I make a mental list of some of Richard’s past repertoire of dinners, until my mouth actually starts to water:

–
Skate wing on a bed of puy lentils

–
Tuna steak with water chestnut and chilli sauce

–
Garlic-stuffed lamb with celeriac mash

–
Grilled halloumi cheese with fresh mint and baked
sweet potatoes

–
Roasted duck with a pomegranate salad and toasted
garlic croutons.

Sean, on the other hand, was a rubbish cook. His idea of a good lunch was a packet of Nice ‘n’ Spicy Monster Munch with a warm Greggs sausage roll. I amuse myself briefly by compiling another list, of
his
top meals:

–
Delivery pizza the size of a dustbin lid (regular toppings, unless being particularly adventurous, in which case, shredded chicken and BBQ sauce)

– Chicken in Quick Sauce, if trying to impress

– Large fry-up

– If in a restaurant: chicken, in any form

– No fish whatsoever, unless battered and from a chip shop

– Kebab

– McDonald’s or Burger King burger.

I wonder how I’m even able to amuse myself in this situation. I’d have thought I would still be panicking. But what would be the point of that? I’ve tried to pull the wood off the windows but there’s no way of extracting those screws without tools. I’ve tried screaming. I have no other way of contacting anybody.

It does help being in my own room, with Lester, and I know Megan is safe. I am also optimistically assuming that I won’t be in here for longer than another day or two. I’m sure I can talk sense into Claudio. I’m going to do it at dinner tonight.

I don’t want to think about Claudio, Sean, or Richard any more. I pick up the diary instead.

Chapter Twelve
Day 2

20th
December 1986

I
didn’t get out of bed all day. Mum let me pretend I was ill. She even made me a sandwich with boiled egg chopped up and mixed with Bovril, my favourite. But I couldn’t eat it. I was too embarrassed. I decided I was never going to get up again, ever. It was because the police had come over—Mum had insisted on calling them.

‘I wish to report an assault on my daughter.’ She sounded so haughty, and I knew it was because she was as embarrassed as I was.

Shortly afterwards two officers, a woman and a man, turned up at our house and sat like stereotypes drinking tea in the sitting room, their black uniforms taking up too much space and making me feel claustrophobic.

‘Just tell us what happened in your own words, if you can, love,’ said the woman PC, the hand holding her mug hovering indecisively over the coffee table, as she tried to think where she could put it without damaging the table’s polished surface. I picked one of my English books off the floor—
To Kill A Mockingbird
—and gestured for the WPC to leave her tea on it in lieu of a coaster.

The hairy-eyebrowed constable pulled a small spiral-bound notepad out of his breast pocket. ‘Wouldn’t you like your dad to be here too?’ he asked me kindly, glancing round the room as if Dad was hiding under the sofa or behind the TV, waiting for an invitation to join us. I didn’t mean to make anyone feel even more uncomfortable but I couldn’t help it. I said, ‘Yes. But he’s dead.’

The constable and Mum both looked pained.

‘Oh, you poor thing.’ The WPC patted my knee and glared at her colleague. ‘Rightyho, let’s crack on, if you feel up to it.’

I relayed the story, about the man’s cold pouncing hands, balaclava, and cheap jacket, but when I got to the part where he touched me, I was stumped. What was the right way to say where he touched me? ‘Bottom’ was too far west. ‘Front bottom’ too embarrassing for words. Surely not ‘on my vagina’, even though that was anatomically correct. But other than ‘vagina’ I could only think of ‘pussy’, and one could never say that to a police officer. It was so humiliating.

‘
—on my . . . in my . . . he touched my . . .’ I bloody struggled with the words every bit as hard as I struggled last night until, after what seemed like hours, the WPC came to my rescue. ‘In between your legs?’ she supplied.

Why hadn’t I thought of that? Discreet, accurate, painless . . . Mum was scrutinising her fingernails with great interest, but I saw the tear roll down her face when I said yes.

When I got to the bit about Mac Boy coming to my rescue, I realised for the first time that I hadn’t stopped to thank him.

‘And what did he look like, this young man?’

The WPC sounded impressed and slightly wistful, as though she was wishing that a nice young man would swoop in and rescue her from something too.

‘Um . . . he was short, about five foot four I think,’ —at this point the WPC seemed to lose interest again—
‘
Brown straight hair, a macintoshy-type coat, you know, one of those beige ones with a checked lining. I think he goes to St Edmund’s actually. He looked sort of familiar.’

‘We’ll need to speak to him. We’ll have a word at the school, ask him to come forward.’

The thought of a headmaster standing up in assembly at the boys’ school and booming, ‘Will the boy who stopped someone from sexually assaulting Jo Singer in an alley please come forward now?’ is too horrific to contemplate. It must have shown on my face because she added, ‘Discreetly, of course, and mentioning no names.’ Thank God for that.

The PC snapped shut his notepad and tried to slide it back into his breast pocket, but its spirals snagged in the thick black serge, and he ended up jabbing it in, creasing the cardboard cover. ‘Thank you very much, Miss Singer. It’s very brave of you to come forward. And brave of the lad who chased him off too. We don’t recommend the public getting involved as a rule, but in this case, it seemed to do the trick. You’re a lucky lass. We’ll see ourselves out.’

I don’t feel particularly lucky. I feel completely drained, as if someone’s pulled out a plug in my heel. I miss Dad so much, more than ever, even worse than at the funeral. It is intolerable that he isn’t here to make it all better.

The WPC stood up and congratulated me, like I’d just won something. ‘Well done,’ she said as she put her hat on and smoothed her black skirt over her thighs. That was when the doorbell went. I guessed it was probably Donna, wondering why I hadn’t gone to training that night.

For one brief second I had this fantasy that it would be Dad standing there, his arms open wide to comfort me. But of course it was Donna on the doorstep, shivering but pink-cheeked, her sports bag in one hand and a Smiths carrier bag in the other. Her short wet hair had clumped into frosty spikes above the collar of her Barbour, and I could smell the chlorine on her from the hallway.

‘Crikey, Jo, let me in, it’s freezing out here. Where were you, you skiver? Loads of people didn’t turn up tonight, and Slug had a right nark about it. You’re down for the fifty-yard backstroke in the B team on Saturday . . . Hey, look what I found in the alley! I don’t want it, of course, but it’s the sort of crap that you probably like.’

She thrust the
Final Countdown
single at me, and then noticed the big scrapes down the side of my face, and my swollen lip. ‘Oh my God, Jo, what happened? Did you fall off your bike?’

‘I don’t want it,’ I said, handing the Smiths bag back to Donna again. ‘Get rid of it. Please.’

Donna took it and put it in her sports bag. ‘Come on, Jo,’ she said uncertainly. ‘It’s only Europe. It’s a good song! Well, not bad, for an American hair band. Hairband! That’s funny. They all look like they need hairbands.’

I feel bad for what happened next. It wasn’t her fault. But I sort of screamed at her, something about why she always had to make a joke out of everything. Then I ran upstairs and slammed the bedroom door so hard that a crack appeared down the middle of it.

I suppose I’ll have to apologise soon. I don’t even know if Mum told her or not. She hasn’t rung me.

Some things just aren’t funny, though.

Chapter Thirteen
Day 2

I
can’t read any more; it’s really not helping. Don’t I have any diaries from happier years? Perhaps I gave up keeping them
after 1987
, with some kind of prescience that my future self wouldn’t want to revisit the girl I was then.

I have a sudden random flash of inspiration and dash into the bathroom. Somewhere I have a packet of Diazepam the doctor gave me when I sprained my knee doing aerobics. I could crush them up and slip them into Claudio’s drink, return the favour. I don’t remember seeing them in the pile of banned contraband that he unearthed yesterday. I haven’t got around to tidying up the bathroom yet—but sifting through the packets and toiletries on the floor doesn’t yield anything more potent than Lemsips and Bisodol. Damn. Where are they?

It’s 7.00 p.m. and I’m scared, hot, bored, and fed up. It’s suddenly got really stuffy in here even with the desk fan on all the time. The ribbons of cool air on my face feel like the only good thing in the world. Claudio is still cooking.

My room is almost completely tidy again, and I’ve put back all the contents of my bedside drawers apart from a load of paperwork I’m now aimlessly sifting through whilst sitting cross-legged on the carpet in front of the fan, listening glazed-eyed to the radio. People chatting about films I haven’t seen and probably won’t ever. I’d forgotten I had this radio until Claudio dumped it on the floor with the rest of my stuff.

My throat is raw from screaming earlier.

I want to have a shower but I’m worried that Claudio will come in, having decided he’s been ‘patient for long enough’, or whatever fresh hell is going on in his head. There’s no lock on the bathroom door. The thought of him seeing me naked makes me feel so vulnerable that I imagine myself shrinking to the size of a drinking straw and slipping down the bath plughole. Right now I’d take my chances with drains and rats and claggy wads of hair.

I’m fretting continuously about whether he’s serious in his insane proclamation, until dread has blunted and exhausted me.

I hear my bedroom door being unlocked and all my muscles immediately tense into fight-or-flight mode. Either would be good, I think grimly, but I’m too scared to do the former—Claudio is a big guy—and the second isn’t an option. Not yet.

‘Dinner’s ready, darling!’ He comes in, smiling, holding one of Megan’s flowery plastic beakers.

‘Little pre-dinner drinkypoos?’ he chirps, and hands it to me. I take it wordlessly. ‘I’ll give you five minutes to get a tiny bit dressed up. Just knock when you’re ready and I will escort my lady to the table!’ He laughs like the maniac he so obviously is, and exits.

Oh shit. He really is insane.

I grab a brown spotty silk dress from the pile on my closet floor and put it on. It used to be a struggle to do it up—the top of the zip would sometimes snag the skin under my armpit—but I notice that it’s already much looser on me. Shame, because I know I will never wear it again once I get out of here. I’ll burn it, and everything else that I associate with Claudio.

Then I comb my hair with my fingers, slick some lip gloss on my lips, and powder my nose. When I see myself in the mirror I almost get a fright at the sight of the black circles under my eyes and the pinched expression on my white face. Overnight, several grey hairs have appeared on either side of my parting, and fine wrinkles that have nothing to do with laughter lines now decorate my cheeks. If I’m still here in a week, God forbid, I’ll look about eighty.

Claudio comes back to escort me to dinner, which involves him tying my hands behind my back with one of my confiscated silk scarves. I submit meekly. I’m going to do things his way tonight. He shows me into the kitchen and pulls out a chair from the table. Or rather, I should say he shows me into my own kitchen and pulls out one of
my
chairs, from
my
table. He didn’t untie my hands first so it isn’t possible to sit naturally. I perch, leaning forward like I’m about to be executed.

Yet I feel heady with relief at getting out of my room into the familiarity of the rest of the flat, Lester weaving round Claudio’s ankles. A new chair to sit in, different walls to look at, fragrant scents of ginger and coconut coming from the hob and, best of all, a summer evening outside a window I can actually see out of. Not a great deal to see as my kitchen window only looks out at the blank second-floor wall of the house next door, but at least it’s real, actual light. I wonder why he hasn’t boarded up the kitchen window too, but I suppose he’s realised that even if by some miracle I managed to smash the double-glazing I wouldn’t be able to do much else.

At least he hasn’t harmed Lester, who actually seems to have taken to him. Furry traitor. If this was a horror movie Lester would be in deep trouble. I refuse to think that he might be.

Claudio pours me another plastic beaker of white wine, out of a wine box on the counter, and puts it on the table in front of me, where of course I can’t touch it because my hands are tied. The first beaker is still in my room. I downed it in four gulps as I got dressed. I have to be careful not to drink too much, though.

He seems to have thought of everything, down to a wine box instead of a bottle.

‘You look beautiful, Jo,’ he says. ‘I love your dress.’

He looks odd—defensive and simultaneously slightly thrilled, as if we were on a hot date. He’s dressed up, too, in a cream linen suit over an open-necked blue linen shirt, so I presume he believes we
are
on a date. He must have gone home at some stage and brought back clothes, unless he’d packed a suitcase in advance and put it in the boot of his car . . . no, wait . . .

‘How did we get back here from your place? Where’s my car?’

‘It’s here. I drove it back the other night because you were . . . unwell.’

Unconscious, rather. Still, it was faintly reassuring to know that my car was outside.

‘You have a change of clothes with you here?’

Claudio nods matter-of-factly. ‘I suspected you might need looking after for a while, so I brought a few essentials.’

I resist the temptation to reel off a list: ‘power tools, sheets of MDF, locks for every door . . .’ Instead I look him straight i
n t
he eyes, those big brown eyes that I found so appealing up until t
he oth
er night, and nod towards my full wine beaker.

‘Claudio, how am I supposed to drink that with my hands tied? Or eat dinner? If you’re planning to spoon-feed me, you can forget that shit right now.’

He hesitates, rubs his top lip with a finger. ‘Of course I’m going to untie you. Just a moment.’

He walks over to the kitchen door, and I see that he’s even fitted a lock to that too. It’s shiny and new. He turns the key and drops it deep into the front pocket of his suit trousers.

‘Oh for God’s sake, Claudio, this is ridiculous! How long do you think you can keep this up?’

When he comes back across to me to untie the scarf I contemplate my options: the elbow in his balls, the fingers in his eyeballs, the frying pan across the side of his head—but then what? The key is still in his pocket so unless I knocked him out altogether, I still wouldn’t be able to get out of the kitchen, and the front door was bound to be Chubb-locked too.

‘I’ve made us a fresh chicken curry,’ he says, avoiding my
question
. ‘I’ve been really looking forward to our dinner together.’

OK. I decide to change tack, indulge him.

‘I’m looking forward to the curry. It smells amazing.’ I manage to smile at him.

He smiles back and all my internal organs shiver with disgust, but I think I manage to hide it.

‘Thanks for dressing for dinner too,’ he says, that horrible faux shy tone in his voice again.

‘Nice to have an excuse to dress up,’ I say through gritted teeth, even though it actually kind of was. Anything for a change from my bedroom prison. I had put on my smart kitten heels—not the suede stiletto ones, which he confiscated—and I had make-up on for the first time in three days.

I will try to get inside his head. I just pray he won’t take it as encouragement and try to get inside me. The thought that only a week ago this would have been welcome makes me want to rip my skin off. I don’t ever want to have sex again.

There’s some music—just acoustic guitar and a voice—on in the background and I can’t work out where it’s coming from at first until I see an iPad on the kitchen counter by the toaster. I make a mental note of it as the only link to help from the
outside
world that I’ve yet seen. If I did manage to incapacitate him, I could send a Facebook message to Donna or Steph. I’m not a very active Facebooker, although I know that Steph is. She’d see it
immediately
.

‘What are we listening to?’ I ask.

He looks surprised. ‘You’re joking, right?’

‘Er . . . no, why would I be?’

He stirs the curry and something about the set of his shoulders makes me realise I’ve upset him somehow. He has an odd way of standing and walking, buttocks permanently clenched as though he has something stuck up his backside. He’s doing it now, and the fabric of his suit is trapped between his bum cheeks.

‘I don’t recognise this song,’ I repeat, uncertainly.

Claudio lays down the wooden spoon—
my
wooden spoon—on my kitchen counter and turns to face me. He looks deeply
disappointed
.

‘What’s the matter, Claudio?’

‘You really don’t remember?’

I take a slug of wine—mustn’t guzzle it; I need my wits about me—and shake my head.

‘There’s gratitude for you,’ he whinges, in a high querulous tone like an old lady. His voice sounds like nails down a blackboard. He’s trying to be jokey but I can tell I’ve mortally offended him.

‘I’m sorry . . . what is it?’

He pours himself a good half-pint of wine, in the plastic cup that used to have a base with small LED lights that flashed red, green, and blue. Richard brought it back for Megan from some work trip to Vegas. The lights stopped working long ago but we kept the cup.

‘Listen carefully. I’m sure you will remember it soon. I suppose it
was
a very long time ago.’

I listen. The song is OK, nothing special, some wishy-washy lyrics about loss and heaven, in which the singer claimed to be
always looking out for you.

‘It’s nice,’ I comment. ‘Who sang it?’

He beams suddenly, and then his face droops again as he realises I really don’t remember.

‘I did. It’s the song I wrote for you when your father died.’

I’m momentarily speechless. What song? I have no recollection of this whatsoever. There’s no mention of it in any of the diary entries for that year I’ve so far read. In fact there are only a few mentions in passing of Claudio himself, just as one of John’s gang.

‘You wrote me a song?’

He tips his head to one side and closes his eyes, transported by his music.

‘I think it’s the best one I ever wrote.’

‘Claudio, that was a lovely thing to do. I’m really touched. I’m sorry I don’t remember. That year was such a blur, with everything else that was going on. When did you give it to me?’

He gazes at me, still disappointed. ‘I put a cassette through your door. It must have been just before you started going out with John. I was so jealous when I found out.’

‘Maybe I never got it?’ I venture. ‘I didn’t even know you knew my address. Are you sure you got the right house?’

He jumps up again and busies himself at the hob, stirring rice and turning the gas off under the curry. ‘Yes, I am,’ he says curtly. ‘You thanked me the next time you saw me in the New Inn. I thought you might have rung me up or something—I put my number on the tape—but you didn’t. Then you and John got together.’

Wow. I’m surprised I didn’t remember, not least because the act of writing me a song would have revealed Claudio’s crush, and I had always been so flattered to learn that someone fancied me. But I have absolutely no recollection of any of it—the song, thanking him in the pub. I don’t even remember ever having a single conversation with him, him liking me, none of it. He had just been someone who hung around with our crowd. It’s so strange. My memory is bad, but it’s not that bad. And I’ve not yet spotted anything in my diary about him other than a mention in passing. Perhaps it’s him who’s misremembering, or who has rewritten history. After all, he’s clearly mentally ill.

‘It was a very long time ago, Claudio. Over twenty-five years. And my memory has always been terrible.’ I hesitate, not sure if what I’m going to say next is a good idea or not: ‘I didn’t know you liked me then. But I was so crazy about John that I suppose I didn’t notice anyone else. He was the love of my life. Richard—my ex-husband—he liked me too, apparently, but I didn’t know that either.’

‘I remember Richard,’ Claudio says, his lip curled. ‘He used to hang around you like a pathetic little puppy.’

‘
Did
he?’

‘You must have noticed, surely.’

I shake my head. ‘Everything from that time is such a blur. I suppose I was in a state about my dad, and I was obsessed with John. I was in my own little world.’

‘When did you and
Richard
get together, then?’ He says
Richard’s
name as though it is the most abhorrent word in the
English
language.

‘A lot later. After university. We started hanging out back in Brockhurst, just as friends, and things just sort of developed from there.’

I don’t want to tell Claudio how it really was. How, shortly after the first few times Richard and I hung out, he confessed it had been he who had saved me in that alley, my little ‘knight in shining mac’, as I put it in my diary.