by Sarah Dunant
The living room had no CD player (in the separation, he had gotten that), so she had to rely on vinyl. Even the feel of them was archaic now, clunky and clumsy compared with those silvery little spaceships of sound. But the choice was classic, a selection to match another set of TV archives dating from a world before Tom’s musical contempt had set out to persuade her that growing up was really growing away from the music of one’s youth into something more serious, more profound. She ran her fingers along yards of worn spines, each touch another summer, another late night, another affair. Easy come, easy go. How was it that what had once been so simple was now so hard? Maybe it was just practice after all. Practice and lifestyle. You don’t meet men unless you get out of the house, Elizabeth. Oh, I don’t know, she answered herself; if you spend enough time in your bedroom eventually they come to you. . . .
She went for happier times: Eddy Grant walking along a Caribbean beach but singing of Brixton. “Electric Avenue.” She’d been in her early twenties when this album came out. There was a love song on it that had made her toes curl, the rather cute lyrics saved by the lazy sex in his voice.
My heart does the tango
With every little move you make
I love you like a mango
Wish we can make it every day
Now it got her to her feet again, dancing her way into a new morning with an empty glass in her hand and the snow swirling outside.
By the time she turned the record over—how weird not to have all the tracks on the same side—she had finished the brandy bottle and was feeling considerably more mellow.
She lay down on the sofa and looked around the room. Since Tom left she hadn’t spent much time in here. There was something forlorn about the gaps where his furniture had been, and she hadn’t bothered to rearrange the leftovers. Had that chaise longue really been his? Her memory was that it had been her Barclaycard at the auction that weekend in Wales. It was a ridiculous spur-of-the-moment buy anyway. Too large to fit into the back of the car, so they’d had to travel back to London with it roped in, and the rear door open behind it. It had seemed funny at the time, the kind of thing that they were good at doing together, the kind of thing that separated them from the rest of the world. Or maybe it just meant they’d been happy then. Such a simple feeling, happiness. More like a lack of feeling really, an ordinariness, a sense of not being in pain.
But it had definitely been her money. Ah, well, not worth arguing about now. At least she still had the wooden giraffe, brought back in the hold of a charter plane from Kenya, and arriving at Heathrow with its ear broken off. They had never bothered to stick it on again. Had it been earlier in their relationship Tom would have done it for her, but by then there was a certain selfishness to their mutuality. Your giraffe, your problem. She couldn’t even remember where the ear had gone now. Maybe he’d taken it with him.
A one-eared giraffe. Did that mean the room would stay like this forever, a touch of the Miss Havishams creeping in as decay and dust settled over the years? It made her realize that she hadn’t really thought in terms of the future at all.
Who would she be in five years’ time? Would she be alone? It was probably better than the alternative. What would she do with another lover? Somebody else’s furniture would mean somebody else’s taste, somebody else’s agenda, their own game plan.
For all the pain of the breakup she wouldn’t easily give up her newfound independence; she knew that now. Better to be alone. If you liked your own company enough there was no particular reason why life shouldn’t be a catalog of occasional one-night stands. As long as the sex was safe and good enough. Maybe she should invite Malcolm back after all, give him some lessons, teach him how to make sure they both got their rocks off this time. Learning how to ask—the kind of skill all women have to master.
He probably wouldn’t mind that much. Wasn’t it every boy’s dream: a girl who knows what she wants? Sex without commitment? He didn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d be up for sharing the milk bill anyway. No danger of communal fantasies there.
She was thinking Malcolm but that was not who she was seeing. She was seeing him, seeing his wild, taut body at the end of the bed, feeling the dry rub of his skin and the jerky power of his penis as it swelled into life under her hand. She remembered how wet she had been and how the terror and the power had connected as he came inside her.
If you didn’t feel like a victim, then maybe that meant you weren’t one. Perhaps it was time she acknowledged that and owned up, to the other stuff: let herself tap back into the seam of control—was that the same as pleasure?—that their encounter had opened up in her.
For a shy girl she was playing with a lot of dangerous fantasies. It must be the booze. If she was sober she’d feel scared. When had she last been this drunk? She couldn’t remember. But she knew she didn’t want to be sober. She got off the sofa, the tension in her thoughts making it impossible to keep still anymore.
This time she couldn’t find the right music for the mood; all that seventies American rock she’d grown up with was too laid back, too forgiving. Even Springsteen’s urban nightmare had too much compassion in it. She went for the Clash. Although she’d been the right age for it, punk had never been her identity badge, too “in your face” for that. But she’d liked the knowing scream behind it, liked to think that that was who she might have been if she hadn’t been herself.
Maybe it was never too late. She could become that person now. She went in search of more booze. On top of the drinks cabinet she caught sight of a family portrait: her father and mother standing in a field, she young and pretty, laughing into the wind, he older, more serious, as always. What did they do together in bed, eh? They had spent the first ten years of their marriage trying for a child that didn’t come. That would have meant making a lot of love. Was it all David Niven politeness and Doris Day headaches, or was it more primal? Was that where her father hid the violence of his despair? Sex. Everyone’s dark secret.
At the back of the drinks cabinet she found an unopened bottle of Glenmorangie that Tom must have missed in his clear-out. He wouldn’t have approved of her pouring it into the same glass as the brandy. But, then, he wasn’t here to complain. She could do what she liked. With whom she liked.
So what was it she wanted to do? Was this about the power of powerlessness? She knew she had a talent for that. Seven years of living with Tom had been proof enough. But in the end it had been more social than sexual. What exactly would it mean if you translated it into sex? Her mind went back to the stash of porn magazines by the bed. They had acted more as aphrodisiac than example. If she had been less scared and he had been more keen, where might they not have gone? The thought of it made her scared all over again. Is this me talking? she thought. Elizabeth Skvorecky, single white female in search of a future?
You know what your problem is? You should have more to lose, more sense of a vested interest in life. Then you wouldn’t be so cocky about taking risks. But when she looked back on herself she realized she’d never had that. Even as a child she had grown up with a sense that the world had been designed for somebody else, someone more connected, and she was simply a casual visitor who’d have to make do with the edges and the margins.
Was that what he felt, too? That he belonged to a sense of not belonging? Who knows? Could be they were made for each other and she should exploit the feeling. Write him an invitation to dinner. Just know when to press the panic button, or keep an ice pick under the bed.
You could make a much greater mess with a hammer, though. What had he done to those other girls, the ones in the garden apartments and the alleyways? It didn’t take three days in the hospital to get over rape. What had they not seen fit to put in the papers? Think about it. If someone’s pain was your pleasure, then once you started hitting them why should there be any reason to stop? Are you ready for this, Elizabeth? Is this really what your life has brought you to?
The malt seemed rougher on the taste buds than the brandy
. Sometimes you get a wolf in lamb’s clothing. But you could also get it the other way around. How would it be if she discovered that all his violence was just a cover for his pain? That the sobbing was more real than the hammering?
Why was it that sex was so complicated? Why did it have to be dark to be so alive? She rubbed her hands over her eyes, then back into her hair, enjoying the stretch as it pulled back from her scalp.
Just as he had done.
There had been a time when she had first started with Tom when she couldn’t get enough of him, when she wanted every bit of him inside her, all her holes filled with his smell and his maleness. She could get aroused by watching him pull a coin out of his pocket, or the way he walked back to a restaurant table from the men’s room. She had loved that sense of being almost out of control. Clever Tom, to have smelled that in her. Clever Tom.
Clever him.
If you’re going to do this, you have to do it now, she thought. You won’t get any drunker, and there’s a danger that if you keep looking into the drop you might get vertigo.
She got up, only slightly unsteady on her feet, and, carrying the glass with her, went into the kitchen and turned on the computer.
twenty-two
“Call the desk if you need anything, anything at all. We’re here to serve you.”
The manager turned to her and said something else in Czech. She nodded and murmured back, then she gave him a small smile. The door closed quietly behind him.
It was the best suite in the place, a mix of faded precommunist history and new hopes. Its charm wouldn’t last long. Trusthouse Forte would get its hands on it and turn it into an International Hotel: the fax, the minibar, and the shower cap—credit-card culture, so suitable for business, so unsuitable for life.
But not now. Now it was still poignant enough to be the setting for this scene.
Jake watched the door close, then turned toward her. She was sitting on the bed. They had found her some other clothes, a shapeless cardigan that she had put around her shoulders over the torn, bloody dress, and a pair of shoes, a little clunky, not her style at all. They had offered to dress her finger again, but she couldn’t cope with the idea of the pain or the attention, so the grim little bandage remained, the wound soothed by further painkillers rather than antiseptics. That suited her fine, too. She didn’t want to be in her right mind. She wanted to be asleep. She also wanted to be alone.
He was staring at her. She knew that look. She had lived through nearly two years of marriage with it. It still scared her. He thinks he loves me, she thought. He thinks I am the meaning in his life and that having me is the only thing that matters. Oh God, please don’t let’s get into this again. Not now.
He came up to her and knelt down at her feet. He smelled of blood and death. His face was a mess, one eye almost closed under the bruising and his lip split and swollen. Not everybody consents to die without a fight. The cut would make kissing difficult. But it wouldn’t be the first time. You get used to it, he once told her. She had thought then she never would. Who had been right, him or her?
He reached out and took her good hand in both of his, holding it in front of him for a minute, then moving out toward the other one. She drew it back, instinctively nursing it against her stomach. He looked up at her, kept her gaze, then reached out again. “I won’t hurt you,” he said almost in a whisper.
This time she let him take it. He was careful not to go near the finger. He held the hand gently, turning it over so it lay palm up, his fingers playing with the soft skin inside, following her lifeline, caressing the creases almost to the edge of the stump. She stayed stubbornly looking down, then at last lifted her eyes to his face. He was in more pain than she was. How many times have we been here before? she thought. He lifted the hand to his mouth and softly kissed the inside of the palm.
“Oh, Christ, I thought I’d lost you,” he said, his voice fracturing under the emotion. “When I burst into that cell and saw the blood, I really thought I’d lost you.”
She closed her eyes and replayed the scene on the blank screen of her eyelids. She saw herself rushing up the stairs, into one room, then the next, with the hammering in her heart echoed by the hammering on the door behind her. Then she turned and saw the shadow in the doorway. She heard a hail of gunfire, and Jake’s voice from somewhere screaming, “Get down!”
But she was on the floor already, flinching in time to the rhythm of the bullets coming from somewhere behind her and tearing into the fleshy body, jerking it every which way, making it dance like a kinetic sculpture, alive after it was dead. And every bullet hole opened up a spray can of blood and bits. By the end there was so much blood. She was covered in it. They both were.
“Are you all right?” he had shouted as soon as he got to her.
She hadn’t needed to move her head, it was doing that for her, a kind of violent trembling she couldn’t control. He tried to help her up, but she pushed him off. “The other one,” she babbled. “Downstairs—there’s another one, I—”
“It’s all right. It’s all right, baby,” he said, holding her tightly to him, making sure the words got through. “He’s dead, too.”
She felt the knife slide in again, in and up through the lining of the stomach. She heard his groan opening up into her own mouth. “Did I . . . did I kill him?”
“No.” And this time grinned. “But I did.”
She opened her eyes onto the fading lilac wallpaper pattern. No more deserted farmhouse, no more bodies. It was over, it was over. It wouldn’t happen again.
“I’d thought I’d lost you,” he murmured again.
The memory of it brought them closer. He laid his head on her knee. She put out her good hand and stroked his hair. Her fingers came across little particles of stuff: somebody else’s brain or body fluids. She hadn’t seen what had happened in the cell downstairs, but she knew that her kidnapper must have fought back. Even with his stomach opened up and his trousers halfway down his legs.
Someone always has to win. Someone always has to be the victor. Is this the way they prove their manhood? Maybe, but they still need a woman to convince them, to welcome them home. This was the bit where he turned from man to boy, then back to man again. The head between the breasts leading to the head between the legs.
Just one more time, she thought. Just one more time then you can go to sleep. . . .
No, no, no, Elizabeth.
She leaned back from the computer, shaking her head impatiently, running the cursor over the last three paragraphs, highlighting the text.
Cross it out, she said to herself. You give Mirka the upper hand now and it won’t work. Who cares about her wisdom? It’s women’s wisdom that freaks men out. Stop her thinking. Give her a body, but no brain. Remember whom you’re writing for.
She hit the erase key. The words tumbled over into space and Mirka re-formed herself as someone else: someone more angry, more fuckable—with a little persuasion.
She opened her eyes onto the fading lilac wallpaper pattern. No more deserted farmhouse, no more bodies. It was over, it was over. It wouldn’t happen again.
“I thought I’d lost you,” he murmured again, pulling her back to the present.
“No.” She shook her head, and her voice was loose with exhaustion. “You can’t lose me, Jake. There’s nowhere I could go where you wouldn’t find me.”
Sensing the resistance under her words he glanced up at her. “That’s right. That’s absolutely right, babe.”
They sat looking at each other. It was still a contest. Always had been, always would be. This he understood. This he was good at. He got up from his knees. “D’you want a drink?”
She shook her head.
“Well, I do.”
In the corner they had an ersatz version of a minibar. The lock was stiff. He pulled at it a couple of times, then kicked it. It opened. He dug out the three miniatures of bourbon and poured them all into a tumbler. He took a slug, then turned to her.
“Are w
e gonna talk about it?”
Again she shook her head.
He looked at her for a moment. “Well, I want to talk.”
She gave a little laugh. “So now you want to talk. You don’t think it’s a little late for us to be speaking each other’s lines?”
He sighed, his anger barely in check. He used to be proud of her English, how fast she picked it up, how charming it sounded. Now all he could hear was her sarcasm and her lip. “I’m your husband, Mirka. I love you. I want to know what they did to you.”
There was a pause. She said in a cold, deliberate, matter-of-fact voice, “They cut my finger off.”
He looked at her. “Is that all?”
“Why?” she said angrily. “What else would you like them to have done, Jake?”
He frowned, then turned abruptly away from her and threw himself into a chair across from the bed. He took another slug from the tumbler, then ran his hand over his face. He wasn’t looking at her.
“You know, after you left I dreamed about you every night. Every fucking night . . . I’d close my eyes and there you’d be, standing in front of me, in that green dress of yours. Remember? The one where your nipples used to show through. I used to watch you and think about sucking those nipples, just pulling the strap off the shoulder and feeling your breast fall into my hands, heavy, warm.”
She sat completely still. This was nothing to do with her. He was talking to himself. She felt more like his confessor than his wife. But, then, that had long been a problem between them.
“You think I played hard to get, don’t you? That day we met, that day on the subway. You think I could have walked away from you? You don’t know shit, Mirka. And you never did.
“I knew you were the one from the first moment I laid eyes on you. You were in a café on Broadway, between Eighty-sixth and Eighty-seventh. I was having lunch when you came in. You sat in a window seat and ordered from the breakfast menu. You didn’t understand that it only went up till eleven A.M. The guy was nice to you. Probably wanted to fuck you. Or maybe he still remembered what it was like not to speak the language so well. You had a BLT with fries. He recommended it. Said it was very American. You said you liked it. Then you paid the check and walked ten blocks down to the museum, remember?