by Sarah Till
I wasn’t quite sure what I would find. Maybe it would be photographs of them together, hand in hand, smiling? Perhaps it would be a diary, or more receipts, from the nights and sometimes weeks he had spent away? Would there be a gift for her, tucked away in the drawer, waiting for her birthday? He hadn’t remembered my birthday for years. No one had. My eyes fill up a bit as I think about how hard I tried to please him, to love him, but there’s always been some distraction. At times it’s been difficult to see why he’s stayed here with me. As Sarah said, if he really was in love with someone else, and he’d been seeing her for as long as I said he had, why hadn’t he left to be with her?
There was no big rush. I stare at the door of the workshop, my pale face reflecting in the glass. I see Sarah in her garden, reaching for the sun, the moon dipping behind her like a huge slit in the still dark sky, where you could peep through to another universe. I hear Vera’s car door slam and I suddenly want to speak to her. Tell her I’ll help her search for Jimmy. All these years of watching her, and I’ve never had the courage to open the door and offer her a word of comfort. I can see her though the window, looking for Gabriel, and in a second, he brushes past me, waving and smiling. I wait for a moment, wondering if I have time to get dressed and go with them, then I remember my task for today. Wandering outside, I see them disappear over the wall and slide down the dewy grass.
Unless you’ve spent time on heathland, you could never know the hidden beauty. Driving through the A roads that part the heather, the environment looks bleak and uninviting, a vast blur of neutral colours with no texture, surrounded by imposing grey hills. I cross the road in my bare feet, holding my coffee cup. How could anyone find this landscape bleak?
If you look closely, you can see miracles everywhere. On the tree at the side of the road, more than a hundred snails cling to the bark, their shells changing the colour of the grey trunk into a terracotta wonder. The moor is steaming as the sun burns off the wetness of the morning, and every now and then, a butterfly bounces from the misty heather. A buzzard hovers above and swoops for its prey, and as it makes contact a cacophony of squawks and cries go up, and a blackbird flies towards me and settles in the tree, starting a shrill song.
At this time of year the heather is bright purple nearby. As the land stretches out, it gives the heath and the hills a colourful hue, mingled with the greyness of the rocks and the occasional tree and shrub. It’s the general view, the bit that our brains fill in between what we see and what we know about moorland. But like most things, close up, heather is very beautiful. It’s made up of a uniform pattern on tiny, bell shaped flowers, a kind of mini-shrub with a hardy trunk.
Near to the eye, the colour of heather is bright and vibrant and not what it seems from a distance. It’s food and sustenance to bees, butterflies and insects, as well as home to many birds and creatures such as snakes and spiders. The moor is alive. The thought shocks me as, until now, I’ve associated it with death.
Close up, at the road beside my house, and for the first time today in the sunshine, I can see how alive it is. Tiny ants clinging to the heather, carrying bits home, and birds picking at the ground. I spot a grouse, and look towards my barn, where the nesting boxes are, wondering and planning for the first time in months, maybe years, making plans for my work.
The dirt is warm beneath my toes and I get a burst of freedom. A knowledge of what could be as I see Vera and Gabriel appear out of a steep dip and begin to climb the slope onto the moor proper, their shadows long in the morning sun. Going back inside, I look at the workshop door again and my hackles rise.
There’s a sense of unfairness about it, about why I can’t just end my relationship with David, why I can’t ask him to leave like other people would do in such a horrible situation. Why he’s threatening me. Of course, I’ve known about his cruelty and control all along, but I’ve been here on my own, in this big house, at his mercy. I guess he had me where he wanted me. But not anymore.
I go and slip on some clothes and stand in front of the door of the workshop, my eyes on the handle. Obviously it’s locked, and I’m going to have to find some way of breaking in. Then I realise. It’s my house and I don’t need to break in. I get the big wooden steak hammer from the kitchen counter and wrap it in a pot towel and bash it against the glass. It takes a couple of attempts, and I’m shaking as the glass shatters and falls on the other side of the door. There’s no going back now, no way I can pretend everything is all right, and the fear strikes me. I push the remaining glass and climb through the door, my feet crunching the fragments lying around.
The next challenge is the deep desk drawer. The room has a large selection of tools all hanging neatly on hooks on the wall, and I choose a chisel. The drawer is easy to prise open; the lock just clicks away from the cheap woodchip. I sigh. How has it come to this? I’ve seen David opening and shutting this drawer, and there’s nowhere else in here that’s lockable. Before I look inside I check the wooden chests that hold instruments and boxes containing screws and nails, some lined with left over wallpaper from our bedroom. It makes me feel uncomfortable, like I’ve gone too far, and I suddenly think about David accusing me of being mad, of imagining it all. Had I? Was this just and extension of it? I stare at the glass in the floor and a tiny drop of blood drips from my finger where a sliver must have pierced my skin. I suck up the blood and look into the drawer.
There’s a jewellery box, a pink and white fancy box with faux icing piped around it. It strikes me as a weird thing to have hidden away in a drawer, and I wind it up. It plays ‘Love Story’ very fast, almost in double time, and the ballerina spins around in a cloud of whirling dust and silver glitter. I pull out some photographs of the back of the house, looking outwards away from the road and put them to one side. There’s couple of ordnance survey maps, which I take out and put on the floor. At the bottom of the drawer there’s a small square box and a brown envelope, thick with documents. I take out the box and open it slowly. Inside there are two pairs of earrings, small studs, kind of retainer earrings rather than decorative. And a bracelet.
I don’t know what I really expected to find in here. But, to me, this was proof. I pick up the bracelet and hold it next to my own, identical bands. When I was a teenager and well before I met David or went wild, the women in my family would have days out and lunches. My mum and her sister Jean would bring me and my younger cousin, Leanne, to a beautiful restaurant just outside town where we would have cream teas and laugh loudly near sweet smelling magnolia bushes. On one of these long, lazy afternoons, in the summer when we were all dressed in our best summer clothes, my mother produced four silver bands. They were adjustable and embellished with tiny flowers and vines, and quite heavy for Leanne and myself to wear. But we loved them. It was a bond between the four of us, me, Jean, Mum and Leanne, one that lasted until my mother died.
When I left home I lost touch with my parents, and now I hold the bracelet and I toy with the idea that if my parents hadn’t died, things would have been different. There had been a time, early on in our relationship, where I had previously doubted David. Shortly after we’d moved to my parent’s house, he started to go out every other night, claiming to be smoothing things over between my aunt and us. He told me that he was spending time at their home, getting to know my family. He constantly asked me what was wrong with that? Why did I mind so much? Was I so insecure that I couldn’t be alone for even an evening? He made it my fault.
It was those unspoken words, the words that buzz between the lines, in meaning that is conveyed in ways we don’t hear, that actually contain our character. I’d known this since I was young, because I’d had the perfect Enid Blyton story book upbringing, countryside, pond, fish, pony, everything a little girl could want. We were affluent, but it was never spoken about. We just knew we were.
When I was older, the mood around the club where I worked was dangerous and seedy. We were all normal people, boys and girls, whose lives had converged in a tumbled heap of writhing
bodies. We sat around and smoked and drank, and, to ease the pain, occasionally took drugs. We never spoke about our lives. We just were what we were. It was a life without a label, with an undercurrent of dirty, swirling mediocrity. David’s character, in fact, his soul, was cruel and accusing. Despite his Clark Kent appearance, he’s dangerous, unpredictable.
As I sit here and look through the window, something is struggling to join together in my mind. Psychologists say that we have packets of information that just lie around in our memory, waiting for us to activate them. Trigger them with something similar, so they are dragged back into the now as current concepts and linked with meaning. I’m remembering a night when I drove over to my aunt’s house and as I pulled up outside I thought I saw the bedroom light go off and two figures run downstairs through the crumpled glass of the front door. I thought nothing of it and knocked at the door. David opened it and his face was red. My immediate thought was that he’d been running, until I realised he was at my aunties house and he was on a social visit. It had been uncomfortable as I insisted we go in and we sat there with Leanne, my teenage cousin, who insisted that Aunty Jean had just popped out to the shops that minute. Through the back doors.
Of course, I had questioned him about it. In the car, he had acted all affronted, like I was accusing him of something he would never dream of. Didn’t I know he was a qualified music teacher? What did I take him for? I remember, now, that this was the first time he ever hurt me. He’d bent my fingers back until they nearly broke, and I’d screamed in pain. He didn’t speak to me for days afterwards, until I apologised profusely. A week later, I had phoned Aunty Jean and casually asked her if she’s like to come to dinner. Now that David had laid the ground for reconciliation, it would be nice if we could all meet. There had been a long silence, which until now I had taken as a continuation of her disgust about me and my reappearance.
‘David? I haven’t seen him in weeks. I don’t think dinner is appropriate at the moment, Patricia. We’re all still grieving, you know.’
For months afterwards I had accused him of sleeping with Aunty Jean. I even told him to admit it, if it was a one off, I would forgive him. In my own mind, I could hardly hold it against him, could I? Not after what I had done? Even if the sex had stopped when I met David? He denied it, telling me I should go and see a counsellor. I did, but I was hooked on the idea that he was unfaithful by then, and it wasn’t long until I was searching his pockets for clues. That’s was how I found out about Sam.
I’d never seen Aunty Jean again. David made sure that there was animosity, some kind of relaying of words between me and Jean, with him as supposed mediator, until I just gave up. I’d moved into a different world by then, one where I was the aetiologist and David was the teacher. The feel of my life had changed, and my soul was less in tune with my own desires and more in tune with the routines of nature.
As my verbal contact with David grew infrequent, I relied on the moor and the heather to provide me with a purpose, a way to live, and a reason to get up in the morning. My rising at dawn was credited to them, as I needed to see what time the hive rose. They couldn’t speak to me, but I could read them, just as I could read the day by Sarah’s rituals and Vera’s arrival and departure. Weekends crept up on me, as the main difference was that instead of going to work, David would go out later, or stay in his workshop. In this closed in world I had simply forgotten about Jean and Leanne and the bracelets.
I stare at it now, and I don’t even have to look at the tiny inscription on the inside. I know it’s Aunty Jean’s and I know he’s been sleeping with her. She must have given up on family, given up on me. She had abandoned the bond to David and here it is, large as life, in my hand. I have two bracelets already, my own and my mother’s, and I slip Jean’s onto my arm. I pick up the brown folder and pull out a folded white envelope from inside. Opening it, I see it’s the second part of Vera’s story. Gabriel must have left it lying around and he’d found it and hidden it. But why? What could he want with Vera’s story? I fold it and push it inside my jeans.
I sort through the documents, my hands working on the receipts and hotel cards. There’s another envelope at the bottom of the pile, one with ‘NHS’ in big blue letters on the front. Oh God, had he been ill? He’d never mentioned anything. I get a sudden feeling that maybe I’d totally misjudged the situation, that his behaviour was down to some illness that he’s kept to himself. I’d smashed up his workshop and he was ill. My eyes scanned the papers, admission forms and blood tests, finally a letter from his clinician. The truth dawned on me as I confirmed the date on the letter. He’d had a vasectomy four years ago. Just after I’d found out I was pregnant for the final time.
It was the ultimate cruelty. I’d expected to find some evidence of him shagging someone else, after all, he clearly had been almost since we met. Aunty Jean had stung me, but somewhere in the back of my mind I had known, and it had been bundled together with the pain of my parents and hidden. I was never sure and I couldn’t prove it, so I gave up. I gave up on everything. Except having a child. That was the glue keeping me here, keeping us together, as if somehow that would make us all right. I stare at the floor and feel sick. I’ve got bile in my throat and my body starts to shake. The ballerina was turning more slowly now and ‘Love Story’ slurred. Suddenly I hear a car door slam and he’s standing at the back door, scowling at me.
‘What’s all this? What the hell have you been up to? Why are you sneaking about in my house? All that shit about birds and heather, telling me you were researching them, when really you were snooping on people.’
He steps over the shattered door and pushes past me. Instead of cowering and stepping backward, I stand up and face him.
‘Our house, David. In fact, my house, if you want to be pedantic. And don’t worry, I’ve found everything I need.’
‘So you’ve found something else you think you can pin on me, have you? It wasn’t the checking my phone or the mad woman’s story I was worried about. Although I have been a little bit concerned that you had joined some crazy moorland stalking club. No. It’s this.’ He holds up the music box ‘What the fucking hell is this?’
I’m puzzled.
‘You fucking tell me, David. Don’t even try to tell me I’m going mad. Don’t even try it. It’s not going to wash. And don’t touch me. If you hurt me, I’ve left a letter with Gabriel’
He laughs.
‘Gabriel? Fucking hell. I’ve seen the way you’ve been hanging around him. I’ve seen you eyeing him up, you and that stupid cow practically scratching each other’s eyes out over him. No mystery at all. It’s quite clear what you’ve been up to, Pat. And all that porn on your laptop. What the hell is that about?’
‘Porn? What do you mean, porn?’
‘All that stuff about animals mating and that. You’re obsessed.’
‘It’s my job, David. My job. I have to know about it for my job. And What about Gabriel? What? What do you think I’ve been up to? Talking to Gabriel? Laughing, joking? Hardly against the law, is it?’
He snorts and moves closer.
‘No. Not against the law. But you’ve been unfaithful. Up here.’ He points to his head and a David I’ve met many times before appears in front of me. He’s still smirking and he walks over to the window. His face is mean and thin and pale and I’m scared. ‘That’s if you haven’t shagged him already, you fucking dirty cow. Well? Well?’ He’s shouting now, and I cower. ‘I’ve seen you, prowling around, dressed up, waiting for someone to come along who shows you a little bit of interest. In between, talking to that silly bitch across the moor, watching filth. I know what’s in here, you know.’ He points to my forehead, his finger not quite making contact. ‘Disgusting things. All the sort of things that go on in your dirty mind. You’re a disgusting whore. Disgusting.’
‘I’m not. I am allowed to think about sex, you know. It’s what all women think about. Men haven’t got the monopoly on sex, you know. You certainly haven’t. It’s perfectly
normal.’ I sit down again. ‘Who are you, David, Queen Victoria, telling us all that women are pure and virginal? Oh yes, we’re all sitting here waiting for you to come home, so we can make your tea, with our little white frocks on. Unfortunately, David, life isn’t like that.’
‘So you admit it then? You’ve been mentally unfaithful? You’re mad as a fucking hatter. I’ve told you before, you need to see someone. First you’re stalking me, then you’re accusing me of having an affair, when all the time you’re playing it out in your head, thinking about all kinds of sick goings on.’
‘I haven’t. I’ve never been unfaithful to you. You’re just saying that to try to make me ashamed. But I’m not ashamed of my own body, David. You liked it in the beginning, didn’t you?’
He looks at me and his eyes are glassy. He’s furious.
‘Yeah. Yeah I did. But that was a long time ago, wasn’t it? And you lied then, too. I always knew what you were up to, all those late-night jobs and the dancing. But I liked it. It made me happy that I’d won you, I’d got you to keep safe. But once a whore, always a whore, eh? All the education and nice clothes, big house, parents’ money. None of it can clean out your dirty little mind, can it? You’re soiled, dirty.’ His face juts towards me and I can feel his spit. ‘You’re just a slut, Patti, a dirty slut.’