The Venus Trap

by Voss, Louise

  As we lay there afterwards, kissing and giggling and feeding croissants to each other, I’d congratulate myself on having done the right thing. I’d had the courage to release Richard, so he could be with someone who made him feel the way Sean made me feel, and I’d freed myself to be able to make love with Sean for the rest of my life. I really couldn’t imagine ever wanting to sleep with anybody else again. Actually, I still can’t. I wish I could.

  I’m going to try not to let Claudio’s presence sully that memory, but I think it’s too late.

  ‘So, were you and Richard in touch after you left school?’

  Claudio forces my thoughts back to Richard, and I feel disloyal and grubby—mentally as well as physically—for misrepresenting the facts of the collapse of our marriage. Richard deserved so much better, in all ways, than what he got from me. All he’d done for his entire adult life was love me wholeheartedly, and that was how I repaid him?

  Claudio would probably argue that this was all he’d done, too. I suppose there’s a fine line between stalking and wooing. Richard definitely wooed me, though.

  I nod, smiling faintly at the memory. ‘We became friends. I had a summer job in Boots during the uni holidays—’

  ‘I remember,’ Claudio interrupts, and I have a bizarre mental image of the pair of them hanging round outside Boots’ sliding doors, waiting for me to come out and pick one. I wonder if Richard was aware that he had a competitor—not that I’d ever, in a million years, have picked Claudio over Richard anyway.

  ‘He used to come in a lot. The first time he didn’t realise I was working there. He’d just had his wisdom teeth out, the first summer after A levels, and he was really embarrassed to see me. Then it turned out my stepdad-to-be was his driving instructor as well as mine, so that was something else we had in common.’

  I suppress a smile. Richard used to talk me to sleep when I woke up in the night, and I remember him telling me about driving lessons with Brian. He had a knack of recounting stories that just very slightly took the piss out of the person concerned, but never in a mean way.

  I loved those stories. They were another layer of how he let me know how much he’d loved me and for how long, a deeper layer than the compilation tapes and quirky little cards that he plied me with during the months before our friendship turned into a romance.

  Ignoring Claudio, I close my eyes and try to transport myself back to a long-ago night in another bedroom, a clean, freshly laundered room smelling of The White Company room scent, moonlight filtering in through the curtains, Richard’s voice murmuring in my ear, his minty breath cool on my face, my big toe touching the soft hairs on his shin . . . .

  ‘The day I failed my test,’ Richard said, ‘was a lovely spring day—I was leaving tyre tracks through pink cherry blossom, it was scattered like confetti over the sodding corner, the one I was supposed to reverse around but went up on the pavement instead. But honestly, all I thought when the examiner said I hadn’t passed was “Great, I’ll book another lesson for next week, and ask Brian if we can go and practise hill starts at the end of Jo’s road.” ’

  Claudio refuses to be ignored, though, so my reverie doesn’t last long.

  Perhaps he clocked the fond expression on my face when I was thinking about Richard, but he’s picking at me like a scab. ‘So he had driving lessons with your mum’s bloke just to get closer to you? That’s pretty tragic. Bet he failed on purpose.’

  Not as tragic as locking me up and giving me seven days to love you, I think but wisely don’t say. I don’t rise to the bait.

  ‘He did fail, but I don’t think it was on purpose. He said he was gutted not to have passed the first time, but that part of him was glad too because Brian was his best link to me—this was before we became friends. Even though Brian’s a bit of an old bore. Lovely guy, but obsessed with the Sixties. Richard said he used to have to keep changing the subject off Sandie Shaw and Lulu and all these other Sixties icons who had allegedly wanted to have his babies.’

  ‘Changing the subject back to you?’

  I nod. ‘Apparently. Richard confessed that he found out all sorts of stuff about me and Mum by talking to Brian.’

  ‘Like what?’ Claudio looks almost as though he wishes he’d thought of that as a strategy. What is with these blokes, I wonder? I genuinely don’t understand what they saw in me. It’s not like I was some Kate Moss babe. I was plump and my boobs were massive and I had crooked teeth like Dracula. It must be because I only had eyes for John. It seems that playing hard to get really does work. Even when you don’t want to be got.

  ‘Oh I don’t know. Stuff like, we did our grocery shopping on a Thursday. That Mum worked part-time at the Trade Union office as a secretary. That I wanted to learn the sax but Mum couldn’t afford to buy me one.’

  ‘Were you still at school then?’

  ‘Yeah. Upper Sixth.’

  ‘So you were with John. Why didn’t Brian tell him you had a boyfriend? He must have known he was just fishing for information about you.’

  I make a sound through my nose, half laugh, half huff. ‘He did, in the end. After Richard failed his test. I remember Richard telling me about it. He’d been wondering, in the car, if I’d be at the joint area school disco that Friday night, and that was when Brian told him about John.’

  ‘I’m surprised that he didn’t already know you had a boyfriend if he spent so much energy following you around.’

  ‘He didn’t follow me around.’

  Although he had. He’d followed me home the night of the attack.

  ‘He just wanted to go out with me. Apparently Brian told him there were “plenty more fish in the sea” and Richard wanted to punch him.’

  ‘Well, I suppose we have that much in common, then.’ Claudio leans back in the little chair to stretch, and it creaks and cracks but doesn’t give way.

  I remember the night Richard confided in me about pumping Brian for information. We were married by then, and of course I knew he’d liked me for a really long time; he’d already told me that. He’d proved it too, by not giving up when I gave him the cold shoulder all those months after he told me he’d saved me in the alley. But there was something so raw about the way he spoke about the chat with Brian, how devastated he’d been to find out I was in love with someone else, how ridiculous the notion was of other fish in the sea. I knew how it felt, of course I did, because hadn’t I felt exactly the same about John? I cuddled Richard close that night, wrapping him in my arms with gratitude and awe that someone could love me that much, for that long.

  Not so different from how Claudio feels about me, I suppose, in his mind, at least. Not mine.

  ‘Think I’ll have an early night tonight,’ he says eventually. ‘This day feels like a bit of a write-off.’

  I nod. It does. It feels like stalemate. I’m no nearer to being able to convince him I love him and I can’t imagine that tomorrow will be any different.

  But tomorrow, if my calculations are correct, is Day Five. Do I really only have two days left? I am thinking so hard about this as Claudio locks me in that it takes me a few moments to realise the momentous thing that has just happened and suddenly everything changes in me in a flash, as though I’ve been shot through with a massive charge of electricity. I lie frozen and still, heart pounding, waiting to see if he realises his mistake, but he doesn’t come back. After ten minutes, when I hear the toilet flush and the door to the spare bedroom close, I bite my lip with excitement.

  He left the chair behind!

  Maybe this is where my luck changes!

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Day 5

  I pretend to be asleep when Claudio brings in my breakfast. I listen to him listening to me, trying to establish whether I’m really asleep or not. His presence in my room feels like a giant vampire bat, hovering over me with its massive rubbery wings outstretched, and I have to make a huge effor
t not to shudder. But I am even more excited this morning, so excited I can barely breathe. Claudio’s slipped up. He still hasn’t spotted that he left the chair in here. I got up in the night and threw some clothes over it in the hope of disguising it, or at least making it less obvious that it’s still here.

  To my joy, when he leaves, he doesn’t just leave the room, but the flat. ‘I’m just popping out to the chemist,’ he says as he closes the door behind him. ‘I’ve got an awful headache and you finished the Nurofen.’ I hear the locks clunking and the bolt shooting. His voice sounds strained and unhappy.

  As soon as I hear the front door close and lock, I leap out of bed and switch on the light.

  I dash over to my chest of drawers and lean against it, trying with all my strength to push it along the wall until it is positioned directly beneath the loft hatch. But it’s too heavy. I can’t move it. I drag out the bottom drawer, the biggest one, and try again. It budges a couple of inches, sticking reluctantly on the carpet. This won’t do.

  I take out the third drawer and throw it on top of the other one, then the top drawer, so I can reach my arm inside and push as well as pulling. It works! The chest begins to judder reluctantly across the carpet. I’m sweating buckets by the time I manage to manoeuvre it underneath the hatch.

  Then I lift the chair up and plonk it on the chest’s smooth dark oak top, unable to suppress the thought that my mum would kill me if I got it all scratched up. It’s an antique, this chest; it belonged to my granny.

  I feel my grandmother cheering me on from some other world as I climb gingerly up the handy ladder made by the drawers’ casings until the chair and I are both perched awkwardly on top, like two large and very out-of-place ornaments. Now comes the hard part.

  I grasp the flimsy little chair and put one knee on each side of the frame—no way can I put my feet on its wicker seat: they’d go straight through. The wicker is already fraying at the edges—I’m amazed that it coped with Claudio’s big arse on it last night. Gingerly, I switch from knees to feet until I’m balancing on the chair seat’s frame. Standing like that reminds me briefly of those awful footpad toilets you get in parts of Europe, which you have to straddle to use.

  I struggle to stop myself wobbling too much—fatigue, hunger, and adrenaline are making it difficult to keep my legs steady. But I’m now easily able to push aside the loft hatch. Cool musty air hits me, a welcome change in microclimate. I have to keep my rising excitement in check, as one wobble too far and I’ll fall off the chair, off the chest, and onto the floor. It’s a good seven-foot drop.

  Very carefully, I finish pushing across the hatch and pull myself up into the loft, making sure I don’t kick over the chair in the process. It’s not too hard—the loft opening is at chest height from the chair, so I don’t need to employ too much upper body strength to get in.

  It’s amazing to be in a different space without Claudio’s oppressive presence. I pull my legs up behind me, briefly tempted to frolic like a lamb in the yellow loft insulation even though I can’t stand up straight. If only this was one of those houses whose roof spaces all run into one another! I could merely pop across and down into someone else’s flat to raise the alarm. But this one is bricked up, and the floor isn’t boarded so I have to use the wooden struts of my bedroom ceiling as stepping stones to cross the sea of lagging.

  Various items are marooned on top of the lagging—Megan’s car seat, a broken stereo and—there they are! hallelujah!—the things I’d hoped against hope to find: Richard’s old golf clubs. The removal men had mistakenly brought them to my flat even though my stuff had red stickers on it and Richard’s had yellow. I suspect that Megan may have switched some of the stickers, intentionally or otherwise, as I ended up with a few of Richard’s things and he mine. For some reason I had just bunged the golf-clubs in the loft—it had been a short-lived hobby of his some years earlier before he decided it was too middle-class for words and gave up, and we had both forgotten that I had them.

  But then disaster strikes. I am so dizzy with euphoria that I miss my footing on the narrow wooden struts and stumble, dislodging the golf bag, which topples over, clubs sliding out of it and through the loft hatch, bouncing off the chest of drawers, knocking the chair off as they go. They all land on my bedroom floor, banging together like a drawerful of giant’s cutlery falling, and I rush over to the hatch.

  Lucky Claudio’s gone ou . . .—Wait, what’s that noise?

  I pause, thinking that it’s just my ears ringing from the clatter but no—to my horror, there really is a noise outside the door, the fumbling of a bunch of keys. Shit! Claudio either only pretended to go out, or I’ve been extremely unlucky and he forgot his wallet or something. I hear the key in the door and realise I only have a few precious seconds. I grip each side of the hatch and launch myself feet-first through it, using the chest of drawers like some kind of unyielding trampoline onto the floor. I’m fortunate I don’t break my leg, but by some miracle I’m unhurt, although I fall sideways as I hit the floor, and have to right myself, panting as the wind is knocked out of my lungs.

  As the outside bolt on the bedroom door starts shooting open, I just about manage to lunge for one of the clubs, a putter, and shove it under my duvet out of sight, but I can’t do anything else to hide what I’ve been up to.

  The door bursts open and he’s standing there looking flabbergasted, hurt, furious—and ill. He’s as white as a sheet. Perhaps that’s why he came back.

  ‘What’s all this? What are you doing?’ he asks in a dangerously calm voice. The handcuffs are dangling from his right hand—he must keep them right outside my bedroom door for easy access.

  ‘Trying to escape, of course. What do you think I’m bloody doing?’

  Exhaustion and disappointment make me sarcastic, despite my terror. ‘This has gone far enough, Claudio: you have to let me go, now. Right now. My daughter is only seven. She and her dad will be back tomorrow. Everyone will be worried. You’ll be in terrible trouble with the police. My friends will have called the police, you know. There’ll be a trial, and you’ll get sent to prison. Is that what you really want? Let me go now, this is enough. Enough. Let me go!’

  My voice is rising with rapidly accelerating hysteria and for the first time in days the sobs come. ‘LET ME GO, LET ME GO! CLAUDIO, PLEASE LET ME GO!’ I launch myself at him, swinging punches and slaps, trying to kick and hurt and kill him. I swear I would have killed him if I’d had a knife in my hand. I go to grab one of the golf clubs but he disarms me as if the heavy club is nothing sturdier than a drinking straw. I notice, though, that the effort makes sweat pop out on his forehead and he’s a nasty greenish colour.

  He laughs meanly. ‘Nice try, Jo. They aren’t back tomorrow. You already told me that they were on holiday for ten days. There’s another four to go. One day left for you to tell me you love me. We have plenty of time—well, I do. Yours is running out, and fast.’

  I no longer care about my own safety, and, in fact, deep down I realise that this is what he’s been waiting for: a reaction. We got sucked into this vortex in the spur of the moment and he’s just been waiting for me to make a move of some kind. He must know that I could never love him now. His face even shows a flicker of relief as he fends off my flailing attack.

  He grabs my wrists, pushing me away so that my kicks don’t reach him either, and easily throws me on my back on the bed while he deftly handcuffs me to the bedpost. Then he gathers up the spilled golf clubs, wincing with pain each time he bends down, takes them out of the room with the chair so I can’t get back into the loft again. He comes back in, re-locks the door, drops the keys deep into his jeans pocket, and just stands over me, glaring at me. The expression on his face is like no other I’ve ever seen, far worse than when I went for him with the saucepan. I can’t read it, but now I am beyond scared. This is it, then. This time I’m definitely going to be raped and possibly killed. My instincts are to fight
—but hey, when have my instincts ever done me any favours? Besides, if you’re going to be raped, isn’t it meant to be better to be passive and still and let them get it over with as soon as possible? My only hope is that he won’t be able to get an erection again, like last time.

  I wait to feel his weight on top of me, and him fumbling with my clothes—but instead he turns even whiter and visibly wobbles, clutching his head. Hope and joy gush in dual torrents into my chest, flooding my veins and arteries like an amphetamine. He really is ill.

  I sit up. ‘Are you OK, Claudio?’

  ‘Shut up,’ he says, grimacing with pain. It must be a migraine or something—excellent. He half-lies, half-flops down next to me, pulling me onto my side, so that we are facing one another. His breath stinks. I feel the hidden golf club knock against my ankle and discreetly work it further down the bed, away from Claudio’s feet.

  ‘I have something to say to you,’ he begins, his eyes closed. ‘Just let me lie here for a minute.’

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Day 5

  Claudio lies down very close—too close—to me. For a few minutes he’s completely still and I long to lunge for the golf club, but I can’t, not while I’m handcuffed to the bedpost. I need him to fall asleep. Then he rolls over and grips my already-restrained wrist.