Transgressions

by Sarah Dunant

  “Sorry?”

  “I said, if it is, it’ll be the first in twenty-six years.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. And there wasn’t nearly as much snow as this then.”

  She glanced across at her. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-six herself, probably hadn’t even been born then. “How do you know?”

  “Research. I had to do it for a program idea I was working on.”

  Having started talking, she didn’t want to stop. It turned out she was a receptionist for a small independent television company working out of Docklands. It was only her second job, but she was determined to make it into production, so she was doing extra work on the side. The company was just starting out and there was hardly any work around but they were very democratic, and the boss was really encouraging. He’d promised to put forward any ideas she had. He’d also promised to take her with him to a couple of TV festivals so she could meet the people, because in this business it wasn’t so much what you knew as who you knew. Mind you, it took a long time to make all the contacts. Not like the little town she came from in Devon. You could put all the movers and shakers together in the back room of one of the pubs in Axminster and still have room to spare. Still, London was much more exciting. Of course it would be better with a car; she wouldn’t have got stuck like she did tonight if she had her own transport, but on her salary . . . well, she’d just have to wait till she got her first idea accepted. It was, she seemed to suggest, only a matter of time. “So”—she paused briefly for breath—“and what job is it that you do?”

  The traffic lights before Manor House were coming up. She extemporized something about translating for a publishing company, then steered the conversation gently back to the bus stop.

  “Yeah, he gave me quite a fright actually. I didn’t see him there at all. He told me I’d already missed the last bus and that it would probably be at least an hour before the night one came.”

  “Was that what he was waiting for?”

  “I dunno. S’pose so. I thought he was going to offer to share a taxi home. But he didn’t.”

  “Would you have taken it if he had?”

  She looked at her with scorn. “I’m not that stupid. There was something weird about him. That’s what decided me; I mean, when you said you thought he was following me.”

  She had a sudden flash of a litter-strewn alleyway, and a young woman pinned up against a wall. The jeans wouldn’t be easy to pull off—a tough enough job when you wanted to get naked let alone when you didn’t. Maybe he wouldn’t bother with the zipper and studs. Just use a knife. How would he keep her quiet? He would need both hands to hold her down while he got the clothes off her. Would he gag her? They hadn’t mentioned that in the papers. But, then, it hardly mattered. In this weather there would be no one listening. She shivered. She was going to ask her if she would recognize him again, but she never got around to it.

  “It’s just here.”

  “What?”

  “You can drop me just here.”

  They were still on the main road. She came to a halt. “You sure?”

  “Yeah. I only live three or four doors along that side street. It’s fine, really. Thanks a lot.”

  Was it something she’d said? Maybe not. Maybe it was only common sense not to show a stranger exactly where you lived. She decided not to argue. There was no way he could have followed them here, and the chances of there being two rapists operating in the same five-mile radius of London on a night like tonight seemed slim. Even in hell there have to be some statistical rules.

  She sat in the car and watched until she saw her walk down the road and turn in through one particular front gate. Then she locked the car doors from the inside and drove slowly home.

  It stopped snowing somewhere on the journey back and the wind died down. With so little traffic the streets were eerily beautiful. Even Holloway Road had a kind of majesty to it. When she got out of the car outside her house the silence was almost religious, the slam of the car door like thunder in the night.

  She looked around. The road was shining with frost crystals, the parked cars like stranded sheep, coated in thick white fur four or five inches deep. Within a few hours there would be glove tracks all over them as the local kids scooped up an armory of snowballs. Not now though, now it was pure magic, the glow of the streetlights throwing pale shadows on the unspoiled surfaces.

  She looked up into the night sky. No stars. It felt heavy up there, as if there were more to come. At the top window of the house next door she caught sight of a face, like a small white moon, pressed against the glass. Her neighbors had a six-year-old son whom she occasionally saw on his way to or from school. Sweet kid. A little overprotected for his age, she sometimes thought, but, then, what did she know? Not only would this be his first white Christmas but he would never in his whole life have seen so much snow. No wonder it was too exciting for sleep.

  She waved up to him. He waved back, then ducked shyly out of sight. She tried to remember what that feeling was like, when your heart was ready to burst from the wonder of it all. Then you grew up and what did you get in its place? A little hard-won wisdom? If you were lucky the occasional stretch of peace? It wasn’t enough. I want the wonder back, she thought fiercely. I want to feel that intense again.

  What was it her mother used to say to her? Be careful what you wish for. You might find you get what you want, only to discover that it isn’t what you bargained for.

  The second she turned the key in the lock she knew something was wrong. But she had no idea what it was. She stood in the hall and listened. Nothing. Not a sound. She snapped on the light and went to the bottom of the stairs. From where she was standing she could see right up to the top of the house. Still nothing. Was he in here somewhere? Was that what she could feel? No. It wasn’t possible. How could he possibly have got in?

  Then she saw the answering machine on the hall table, its message light blinking the number 1. There had been nothing on it before she went out, she was sure of that, because she had erased the previous messages sometime yesterday afternoon. Keeping her eyes all around her she reached out a hand and pressed the rewind button. The machine buzzed into life. The tape whirled back, stopped, then started again.

  She hadn’t heard his voice since that night, but there was no mistaking it: flat, sibilant, bleached of emotion, as if he had thought of what he was going to say then practiced too much. Funny how it didn’t quite fit with the tension of his body.

  “Hello, I723LPD.” It took her a second to realize what the number referred to. “Women drivers. They’re all the same. Don’t have a clue about whose right of way it is. Well, I just want you to know that if you ever cut me up again, I’ll do the same back to you.” There was a brief silence. “Or is that what you were after?” The words made her shiver. They made him laugh. “Snowing cats and dogs, wouldn’t you say? Sleep well.”

  The machine clicked off. She grabbed the phone and punched in 1471: British Telecom’s answer to heavy breathers. The female computer voice told her that she had received one call at 12:45 A.M., then quoted a local number. She scribbled it down and before she let herself think further dialed it back. The same disjointed tranquilized tones cooed into her ear: “Sorry. This number does not receive incoming calls.” Phone booths. You find them on a million street corners.

  She went back to the tape and replayed it, pondering every word. “I just want you to know that if you ever cut me up again, I’ll do the same to you.” If she played that to someone else now they wouldn’t know what he was talking about. Of course not. That was the whole point. But what about the last bit, “snowing cats and dogs”? What the hell did that mean? She thought about it. Then she raced down to the kitchen.

  The door was locked, and when she got inside, the room was dark and empty, the sheet drawn across the French windows exactly as she had left it. She rushed to the lights and switched on the patio light.

  The first half of the garden jumped into g
hostly focus: a frosted landscape, petrified, awesomely lovely. Except for one small flaw. That perfect snow was no longer virgin.

  Across the center of the lawn was a set of deep little prints: delicate, precise, pawlike indentations. And running between each of them a splattered trail of dark stains.

  She knew without looking any harder that it was blood.

  twenty-one

  The tracks petered out at the edge of the flower bed, as if the animal hadn’t had the stamina to make it to the cat flap.

  She crept in low through the undergrowth, aware of the huge expanse of open garden behind her, feet and knees sinking into fresh snow. Somewhere here was Millie’s favorite spot, deep under the ceanothus bush and the holly, a place where in the hottest summer a cat could find shade. Now it offered total darkness, too dense even for the snow to penetrate. Darkness and cold.

  “Millie . . .” she called softly. “Millie.”

  The flashlight beam found the body first. She was sure the cat was dead from the way it was lying—not curled up to protect its own warmth but sprawled on its side, one leg stuck awkwardly out in front. It looked like the paw was hanging half off, one ear was badly mangled, and there was a sticky, matted quality to the fur behind the neck. But when she put out a hand to touch the body, it was warm, and the head jerked upward, as if in reflex to pain. “Oh, God, Millie. What happened to you?” The cat opened its mouth to tell her, but all that came out was a harsh, rattling breath, as if there were something in her lungs constricting the air supply.

  She scooped up the limp body as gently as she could and maneuvered her way back onto the lawn.

  The frost and the silence clung to them both. At the end of the garden she heard a sharp rustle. She whirled around, heart half out of her mouth with terror. The black tom flew toward the back wall, a streak of sable against the glowing white of the snow. In her arms Millie reared up, shaking and snarling, caught between pain and attack as the best form of defense. She held her tighter, waiting for the little body to collapse back into her arms.

  Inside, she brought a towel from the linen closet and wrapped the animal carefully in its warm folds while she dialed an emergency number. A bleary voice answered: Mr. Vet, snug as a bug next to Mrs. Vet, a litter of roly-poly puppies asleep at the foot of their bed, no doubt.

  She told it well: simple, clear, no cat lover’s hysteria or exaggeration. He started to take her more seriously when she described the rattle in the lungs.

  “You’d better bring her in,” he said slightly breathlessly, as if he were already out of bed, pulling on his clothes with the phone to one ear. “Keep her warm, and don’t give her anything to drink. Just in case.”

  He was waiting at the surgery door, the snow still on his boots. It felt like they were the only two people awake in the world. He let her in, then locked up again behind her. The place was freezing. The heating would take a while to catch up.

  They went together into the consulting room. He laid the little body out on the table and examined her carefully. As he lifted the damaged leg, Millie let out a fierce yowl, flinching away from him. “Sorry, girl, sorry, take it easy. I’ll try not to hurt you again.” He used his right hand to hold her down while his left gently examined the fur behind her neck.

  She studied his face; there was a crust of sleep at the corner of one eye. Did loving animals make you better with human beings? Probably not.

  “Can you help keep her down while I listen to her lungs?” he said, pulling out a stethoscope. She held her gingerly, trying to judge which parts would hurt least, but on the table Millie wasn’t struggling anymore. “Does she get into a lot of fights?” He was frowning.

  “Er . . . I don’t know. There’s a black tom who’s always around. They’ve had a couple of scraps. But—” She stopped.

  “But what?”

  She shook her head. His concentration went back to the cat. He listened to her chest, then put the stethoscope down and went again to the leg.

  “Well, I can’t say for sure, but I think she may have been caught in some kind of trap. These wounds ’round the ear and the neck are pretty certainly fight wounds. But this paw has been half severed. It looks to me as if some sort of metal clamp has been on it.”

  Metal clamp . . . She swallowed. “I . . . I’ve got this neighbor. . . . He . . . well, in the past he’s threatened her . . . says he doesn’t like cats in his garden.”

  “And you think he could have done this?”

  “I don’t know. Yes . . . maybe.”

  He let out an angry breath. “Well, I suggest you get on to the RSPCA about him first thing tomorrow morning.”

  Why not? Could be they’d do a better job than the police, she thought bitterly. Just as long as they didn’t send a woman officer.

  “Is she . . . is she going to be all right?”

  “Well, the leg is going to be a mess for a while, but I can’t detect any internal damage. I don’t think she’s punctured the lung. I suspect what happened is she got scared, had a vomit reaction, then swallowed it back the wrong way. I’m pretty certain that’s the constriction you could hear. Whatever attacked her she managed to fight off. I’ll give her a sedative and sew up that leg, then keep her in tonight for observation and do a couple more X-rays in the morning. Can you phone in tomorrow afternoon to check?”

  “Of course.”

  He put out a hand and massaged the cat gently under her chin. I bet he does that to all the ladies, she thought. “You’re a lucky girl,” he said softly. “You’re going to be fine.”

  That makes two of us, she thought.

  The house felt deathly quiet without Millie. From the cellar she got out her hammer, some nails, and the wooden back of an old picture frame. The noise probably woke half the neighborhood—it was only just after five—and it wasn’t exactly a professional job, but it worked. Nothing else was going to get through the cat flap till Millie came home.

  She stared out at the lawn. The snow was a mess now, a blood trail, a deep set of cat prints and her own, clumsier ones. But not, as far as she could tell, anyone else’s. Whatever had been done to Millie, it hadn’t been done in her garden.

  A trap. It was such a viciously corny piece of revenge, more befitting a bad movie than real life. Hit the family where it hurts. Boil the rabbit. But for all its melodrama it had worked. Millie was her family. She was all she had, and the idea of her with a foot half chewed off by steel jaws was exactly the kind of image she couldn’t handle: a combination of helplessness and pain, of being trapped in someone else’s fantasy of power.

  First he steals my music, then he tries to rape me, then he mutilates my cat. That’s what you call attention, she thought. Or obsession. He loves me, he loves me not. . . . It reminded her of a joke about a woman being sexually assaulted by a gorilla. “I wouldn’t mind,” she says as she wakes up in a hospital bed, “only he doesn’t phone, doesn’t send flowers. . . .” She had laughed at the time. If only women did get off on rape. Then they really would have the boys by the short and curlies.

  She locked the kitchen door and took the portable phone with her into the living room. She lit some candles and a fire and poured herself a large brandy. Stop thinking about him, she thought to herself, he wants you to be obsessed, too. That’s part of the pleasure, part of the power. So play him at his own game and forget him.

  She picked up the TV remote and started zapping channels. Two were blank, one was a sports quiz, and the fourth was an archive collection of rock bands from the sixties, a decade when the world was black and white and there was revolution in the air. Or so the lyrics claimed. Hard to believe it now. She was too young to remember most of the bands the first time around, but those Carnaby Street–style suits and mop-tops were laughably reassuring. How could anyone have been threatened by those haircuts? Look at it all. Everything about the sixties was too close to the Formica fifties to have ever been taken seriously.

  Or could it be that that was the secret of the past, that in retrospect it
always seems more innocent than the present? She tried to imagine the England of the Black Death, of armies of flagellants, crusades, wars, and public disemboweling. How many women got raped and beaten then? It was probably a national pastime. Would the women have thought about it differently? Presumably something so prevalent can’t have been that traumatic? An unwanted prick would almost certainly have been less painful than a tooth abscess. And considerably less fatal. As a race we have gone soft on pain. When people’s lives were full of it, they must have learned to cope better. Anyway, the more suffering you notched up in this world the greater your chances were in the next. Lie back and think of heaven. More satisfying than England. Though might it not be even more satisfying to ram a red-hot poker up your assailant’s ass? In a world so familiar with pain they would have known a thing or two about punishment and revenge.

  There you are again, she thought, back to him, giving him the pleasure of your obsession. Stop it. Stop it. She drained her glass and poured another. She took a long swig. The liquid warmed her more effectively than the central heating, but, then, the chill was more inside than out.

  On the screen some pretty faces (there seemed to have been so many of them around at that time—interesting how their bodies look too skinny now, too boylike) gave way to cringingly youthful footage of the Rolling Stones. Jagger’s mouth yawned wide into the camera, a cheeky reminder of his posturing, fuck-you lust. They were playing a track she knew from a CD compilation, one of the early hits where their homage to R&B was so naked and so jubilant. “Under My Thumb”: an old-fashioned tale of boys behaving badly and assuming that the women got off on it. Maybe she should turn up the volume and let him hear it over the garden walls.

  The sixties turned into a series of commercials for shampoo and new cars, then a rerun talk show on substance abuse. She snapped off the remote and, pouring herself more brandy, went for her own music instead.