by Alice Feeney
He only lets go of my hand when we are inside the bank. I know it’s a bank because it looks like one, and because it said so on the sign out front. I spend so much time reading now that I think I’m pretty good at it. The counter is almost exactly like the one in the betting shop, with glass between us and the woman behind it. I’m not tall enough to see her, but I can hear her voice through the holes in the screen. I decide that she sounds pretty and wonder if she is.
John unzips the bag and starts taking out bundles of money, then he puts it on the counter. The woman I can’t see slides a drawer so that she can empty it, then she slides it back and they do it all over again. There is a lot of money, so it takes a long time. First there are bundles of notes tied with thick rubber bands, then he takes out lots of different-colored mini plastic bags with coins. The green ones have ten-pence and twenty-pence coins inside, yellow is for fifty-pence, and pink is for pounds. There are a lot of pink bags. When the big bag that says HEAD is empty, John thanks the woman behind the counter and asks if he can take her for a drink sometime. I guess she must look thirsty.
He holds my hand less tight on the way back to the betting shop. I walk as slowly as I can because I like being outside. I like seeing the sky and the trees again, and feeling the sun on my cheeks. I like the sound of the man standing outside the fruit-and-vegetable shop saying, “Ten plums for a pound,” and the way the little green man made of light, inside a black box, tells you when it is safe to cross the road. John says we don’t have time to wait for him on the way back, so we cross even though it is the red man’s turn to shine.
“You’ve been a good girl and I think you deserve a treat,” says John when we are almost back where we started. I don’t reply because he says the word treat just like Maggie says the word surprise, so I think it might not be a good thing after all.
John calls the little row of shops where we live a “parade.” I’m not sure why. A parade at home is colorful and loud with lots of people in costumes marching down the main road. A parade here seems very quiet. There are five shops in a row: a greengrocer (which is a person who sells fruit and vegetables, he is not actually green), a video shop, our betting shop, a place where people wash their clothes, and then a little shop on the corner, I’m not sure what it sells. From what I can see in the window, it looks like it might sell everything.
A bell rings when the door opens, and I see a woman with dark skin sitting behind a till. I have only ever seen people with dark skin on the television. She has a red dot on her forehead, and I think she is the most beautiful person I have ever seen.
“Close your mouth, Aimee, we are not a codfish,” says John, and I laugh because it’s something Mary Poppins says and it is like a little joke between him and me. Mary Poppins is a film that John recorded for me onto something called a VHS at Christmas. I like to watch it over and over again. “Hurry up and choose something, before I change my mind.”
I stand and stare at rows and rows of sweets and crisps. I’ve never seen so many and I’ve only had Tayto’s before. I don’t know what any of these are, so I don’t know what to pick.
“How about some Monster Munch? Maybe some Hula Hoops for Maggie, and a big bar of Dairy Milk for us all to share?” he says when I can’t decide.
We walk to the till and John takes some money out of his pocket to pay the beautiful lady. She gives him his change and he gives me a ten-pence coin.
“She’ll have the ten-p mix please,” he says, and lifts me up so that I can see behind the counter. There are jars and jars full of sweets in every color and shape you can imagine. “You just point to a jar, sweetheart, and the nice lady will put one of the sweets in a paper bag for you. Choose ten.”
I do as he says, pointing at the jars that look the prettiest, and when the pink-and-white-striped bag is full, she gives it to me. I want to touch her skin to see if it feels the same as mine, but she thinks I want to shake her hand, so we do that instead.
“It’s good to meet you. What’s your name?” Her voice sounds like a song, and her hand feels soft and warm.
“My name is Aimee.”
“Good girl,” says John, and I can tell that he means it, and that I said the right name.
We are happy when we leave the shop. John smiles at me and I smile too, even though I can see his gold tooth. We are almost back at the flat and I don’t want to go inside again.
“John?”
“Dad.”
“Dad, what happened to the little girl in the picture in the front room?” I don’t know what made me think of her. I guess I wondered whether John bought her sweets too.
“She disappeared.” He walks a little faster, so that I have to run again to keep up.
“Disappeared?”
“That’s right, Pipsqueak. She disappeared, but now she’s come back and she’s you.”
I’m not sure what he means. Surely only I can be me.
The high street was full of people and noise, but it’s quiet here on the parade, as though John and I are the only people out for a walk. We’re just a few steps from the betting shop when there is a loud screeching sound in the road, and a car, and lots of shouting. Everything happens too quickly, like when we press fast-forward on the VHS machine. Three men, all dressed in black, are all wearing scary-looking woolly masks that cover their whole faces, like giant black socks with holes for eyes.
“Give me the bag,” the tallest one says. I think he means my bag of sweets, so I drop it on the pavement. But he isn’t talking to me, he’s talking to John and he is pointing something at him. It looks like the gun the hunter has in Bugs Bunny, but shorter, like someone has cut the end off.
“I don’t have any money, I’m on the way back from the bank, you fuckin’ idiots.”
One of the other men punches John in the stomach and he bends over and coughs.
“Last. Fuckin’. Chance,” says the man with the gun.
I run, I want Maggie.
“Stay where you are, you little runt,” says the third man, grabbing my hair and pulling me backwards.
“Don’t hurt the girl! The bag is empty, take it, see for yourself.”
The man with the gun hits John hard in the face with it, so that he falls down onto the pavement.
Then I hear a loud bang.
When I open my eyes, I can see that it wasn’t the man with the gun who made the sound, it was Maggie. She is standing outside the betting shop with a gun of her own, and she’s got her angry face on. She looks madder than I have ever seen her.
“Let the girl go, get back in your car, and drive away now. Or I will end you all.”
The man holding me smirks, and she shoots the gun in our direction. I fall on the pavement and feel strange. Maggie is right there in front of me, I can see that her lips are moving, but at first I can’t hear what they are saying. It’s as if someone is ringing a bell inside my head. She’s looking at something behind me, and I turn to see what it is. The three bad men are back in their car, and we watch as they drive away. I don’t think she shot the one who was holding me. I think maybe she missed on purpose. She strokes my hair, and my right ear decides to start hearing things again.
“You’re okay now, Baby Girl, you’re safe.” She holds me and I hold her back for the first time, because even though she hurts me, I know she won’t let anyone else. She picks me up. I wrap my arms around her neck, and my legs around her waist, and I only start to cry when I see that all the sweets that were in my ten-p paper bag have fallen out onto the pavement.
Twenty-five
London, 2017
I wake up to the sound of someone trying to get into my bedroom.
The room is pitch-black when I open my eyes, and at first the sound is so faint that I think maybe I’m imagining it. But as I blink and adjust to the least dark shadows masquerading as light, I start to see things, things I don’t want to. My ears pinpoint the sound and my eyes focus all of their attention on the handle of my bedroom door. As it slowly starts to turn, I already k
now that something very bad is behind it.
My heart is thudding inside my ears as well as my chest, I want to scream, but I can’t seem to move or make a sound, my body rendered stationary with fear and dread.
The handle twists all the way, but the door won’t open. The bolts I had fitted on the inside see to that, and I experience a brief remission of relief before the terror returns, spreading even faster than before through my rigid body. The sound of someone repeatedly kicking the door reverberates around the room. It shudders several times, then flies open, rebounding against the wall. Before I have time to reach for something to protect myself with, he’s on me.
It’s dark, but I can see who it is.
I can’t move, I don’t even try to.
His hands are around my neck, he’s squeezing, too tight.
“They’ll see the bruises,” I try to whisper. My croaky words are heard and acknowledged. He loosens his grip, then he starts to hurt me on the inside instead, where the bruises can’t be seen.
I let him do what he wants to me. I don’t react, I don’t make a sound. I’ve tried to fight him off before, and it never ends well. This is not the first time, but it’s already the worst. I know he planned it; he’s only this hard and it only lasts this long when he takes a little blue pill. He stops. I hear him remove his condom and drop it to the floor; he doesn’t need it for what comes next; nobody ever got pregnant from doing it that way.
He flips me over, as though I were a doll, so that I am facedown. I close my eyes, vacate my body, and wonder whether the rest of the world would still call it rape if they knew it was my husband who did it to me.
He’s always sorry afterwards.
I know why he hurts me like this, but I don’t know how to make him stop. He thinks I don’t love him anymore, but I do. It’s as though he is trying to prove that he still owns me. But he doesn’t. He never did. Only I own me.
He climbs off. I hear him walk to the bathroom and flush the used condom down the toilet. I think it is over, but then I hear him come back to the bed, take the belt from his discarded trousers, and I understand that it is going to be one of those nights. I lie perfectly still, facedown, exactly how he left me, used and discarded. He starts to hit me with the belt, in the places he knows that nobody else will see. My husband has always insisted on reading my scripts, not because he cares, but because with each new role I play, he wants to know which pieces of me the world will get to see, and which parts of me will stay only his. He hits me again and I try not to give him the satisfaction of crying, no matter how much it hurts.
Twenty-six
London, 2017
I’m woken by a sound I can’t translate.
I sit up in the bed, coated in my own sweat. I’m panting and shaking and crying because I know that what I have just experienced was a dream of a memory, rather than a memory of a dream. I remember how badly Ben hurt me the last time I saw him. I remember how he followed me back from the restaurant after I said I wanted a divorce, kicked the bedroom door open, and did what he did.
I didn’t even ask him to stop.
I think on some level, I thought I deserved it.
We marry our own reflections; someone who is the opposite of ourselves, but who we see as the same. If he is a monster, then what does that make me?
It wasn’t the first time, but I promised myself that night that it would be the last, and that I would never let him hurt me like that again. I always keep my promises, especially the ones I make to myself.
What if I did do something to him that I can’t remember?
I didn’t. I’m sure of it. Almost completely.
An uncharted corner of my consciousness uncurls like a treasure map, and I start to think there might be buried memories inside my head after all. Maybe when you’ve seen men do things they shouldn’t as a child, it can be harder as an adult to fully comprehend how wrong those things are. We are all conditioned and fine-tuned to our own unique brand of normal; we wear it like a fingerprint. We’re taught to fit in with others and learn what is expected of us from the moment we are born. Everything we ever do is an act.
I was foolish to marry someone so quickly, without really knowing who he was. I thought I knew, but I was wrong. I was seduced by our whirlwind romance, and I thought I might lose him if I said no. I thought we were the same. I thought he was my mirror, until I looked properly and realized too late that I needed to run from what I saw. I spent month after month dipping into my savings of happier memories, until the account was empty. I thought I could change him. If we had had a child, I think things might have been different, but he wouldn’t give me what I wanted, so in revenge I took away what he desired most: me. I withheld my affection, my love, my body, thinking he would change his mind. I didn’t realize he was the sort of man who would take what he wanted anyway, regardless of whether it was given to him.
I hear something again, footsteps in the distance, the sound pulling me back into the present. I try to sit up, but the pain in my head disables me. I open my eyes a fraction, just enough to establish where and when I am, but the light is too bright, so I close them again.
I do not feel good.
I remember being in the bar at Pinewood with Jack. I remember Alicia White joining us. I vaguely remember a third bottle of wine and then my memory of the evening stops.
Where am I?
I force my eyes to open and relax a little when I see the familiar sight of my own bedroom. So, I made it home, that’s something at least. My throat hurts and I notice the foul taste inside my mouth; I’ve been sick. I’m such an idiot, I know I can’t drink that much on an empty stomach. I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess I wasn’t. I hope I didn’t embarrass myself before I left, and I hope I got a taxi, there’s no way I would have been able to drive.
I can’t remember what happened.
I try so hard to fill in the gaps, but there’s nothing there. The detective’s suggestion—that I have a condition which makes me forget traumatic experiences—comes back to haunt me. If I can’t remember last night, what if I can’t remember what really happened to Ben too? But I dismiss that thought; this has nothing to do with amnesia, just alcohol.
How did I get home?
I hear something again, and this time I pay attention.
There is someone downstairs.
My first instinct is that it must be Ben, but then the rest of my memories start to slot into place and I remember what has happened. I remember the photo Detective Croft showed me yesterday of Ben’s face bloodied and bruised, and I remember that she accused me of being responsible.
I hear another sound down below. Quiet footsteps.
Either my missing husband has returned, or someone else is creeping around downstairs, someone who shouldn’t be.
The penny doesn’t just drop, it nose-dives, and I’m convinced it’s her, the stalker.
Having a stalker is neither glamorous nor exciting; it can be horrific.
When the postcards started being hand-delivered to our home, that fear became a living thing that followed me around during the day, and when Ben said he started seeing a woman hanging around outside the house, I stopped being able to sleep during the night. When I saw her myself, I thought I’d seen a ghost.
I know who you are.
The message was always the same, and so was the signature: Maggie.
Ben and I hadn’t been together long when it started. A few profile pieces about me had appeared in the papers for the first time, with my picture, and previews about the film I had been cast in, so I guess you could describe her as a fan. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. The police didn’t take it seriously, but I did. When Ben called me in L.A. to say someone had broken into our old home, I knew it was her and decided to do something about it.
I agreed to move to a house I had never seen, and I bought a gun.
Guns don’t frighten me, people do.
I didn’t tell Ben about it because I know his opinions on fire
arms, but Ben and I had very different lives growing up. He thinks he knows the world, but he hasn’t seen what I’ve seen. I know what bad people are capable of. Besides, I’m good at shooting, I enjoy it, it’s something I’ve done for years to help me relax. I was still a child when I held my first gun. There’s nothing illegal about it: I have a license and I belong to a club in the countryside. Not that I get much time to practice now.
I feel beneath the bed, where I normally keep it.
It isn’t there.
The thoughts and fears colliding inside my throbbing head stop when I hear the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs towards the bedroom. I reach down again, my fingers desperately feeling beneath the wooden bed frame for my gun, but it’s gone.
Someone is right outside the door.
I try to scream, but when I open my mouth, no sound comes out.
I see the door handle start to slowly twist and experience a sickening sense of déjà vu.
I could hide, but I’m too scared to move.
The door opens and I’m completely shocked by what I see.
Twenty-seven
Essex, 1988
I’ve tried to go to sleep, like Maggie told me to, but every time I close my eyes I can see the three bad men with woolly masks and shouty voices outside the shop.
I didn’t know Maggie had a gun.
I thought only bad people had things like that.
My ears still feel funny, as though tiny bell ringers have moved inside my head. I’ve thought about it, a lot, and I’m sure she missed the bad man on purpose, that she just wanted to warn him or something. I pull the duvet up over my head; it feels safer under here. It’s warm too, but I still can’t stop shivering.
Maggie and John have been arguing a lot tonight, even more than normal. They are still at it now, but they’re doing the quiet kind of shouting that they think I can’t hear, their words hissing like snakes. I need the toilet, but I’m too scared to walk past their bedroom to get there. I’m also scared of wetting the bed if I don’t go. I get up and creep over to my bedroom door, the pink carpet soft beneath my toes. I put my ear right up against the bare wood, to see if I can hear what they are saying.