“What are you doing here?” he said, rubbing his tired eyes.
“Came for more supplies. Betty needs more booze and I need more cigarettes, this reading business is thirsty work, obviously. She has got through a few bottles already! Plus, I just had a close encounter with a rapist so I think I could do with a stiff drink myself.” She laughed, despite feeling that her levity was out of place.
“Ahh, OK, let me fix you up with some then.” He got up and shuffled behind the bar to get her requests.
“I wanted to say sorry, too… for when I was last here. I was angry. I didn’t mean to be nasty,” she offered, slightly afraid one of the nearby punters might break into laughter.
“I’m sorry, too. What you do is up to you. I can’t expect you to give up like I have. You are young; eternity must seem longer to you…” he replied, not looking up at her. She sensed he was reluctant to talk to her, and she didn’t blame him; all she seemed to do was fight with him.
“Well, I’d better get back. I’ll come by again soon, fill you in on what I have learnt, you know?” she said hopefully. Danny said nothing but smiled and turned his back to do some unnecessary cleaning.
TWENTY-FIVE: A New Life
Betty was still asleep but, much to Dakota’s amusement, the clink of vodka bottles woke her more easily than thunder.
“Ohhh lovely… hair of the dog, eh?” Betty repositioned herself in her chair, putting the book down on the table to make drinking easier for her.
“Well, I might just join you for a drink, dear, but I have to press on with this. I have to get started with this whole repentance thing.” She smiled, lighting a cigarette.
“Someone’s been reading that!” exclaimed Betty, pointing at Dakota's book. Dakota looked down to see the blank pages near the end of the book were on show to her. It felt like they were mocking her, saying, ‘Wouldn’t you love to know what is written here?’
Dakota turned back to the last page with writing on it and watched as the sentences began to grow across the page.
“Perhaps it was just the wind blew the pages across,” Dakota replied, unconvinced but not wanting to think of anyone snooping around her life.
Dakota settled back into the tome that was her recently extinct life. The years that followed her escape attempt were much the same; the routine she had known for the past five years slipped back into play. Even though she found a steady boyfriend at college, Jackson continued to act as though she was his possession and he hers. Her boyfriend, Simon, was allowed to stay over at weekends, and this new part of the routine allowed Dakota three nights’ respite from the attentions of her secret lover.
It seemed the older she got the more she accepted her role in life but still allowed herself to have some other kind of life just as Jackson did. He continued to play the dutiful boyfriend to Lula, even taking her away on holiday a few times, and all the while Lula looked at Jackson as though she had only just met him, a look that was always mixed with a remote sadness that Dakota suspected was borne out of her desire to be married and have a child of her own.
But Jackson still avoided marriage as much as he avoided the possibility of a baby.
Dakota had her own life, too, in which she was a normal college girl who did college girl things: having friends, going out, getting drunk and having a boyfriend that she had no plans to marry or settle down with.
Before Simon, there was a string of bad relationships with boys of her own age. She would go out drinking with her female friends, and as she had grown older, she had become quite beautiful, and very popular. In her mind, the process of going out to the pub or a club was very much like donning a mask and putting on a show, but she became dependent on this escapism from her real life. Wherever she went, she would turn heads. Men of all ages found Dakota attractive and they all wanted to be with her. Their attentions made her feel good, but they also made her think less of the men themselves; the more they vied for her attention, the less she liked them. She gave them her best smiles and her cutest winks and always took time to talk to them but always left them high and dry as she walked away from them at the end of the night.
Every Saturday and Sunday morning she would wake up with a hangover, her clothes stinking of cigarettes and her eye make-up smudged across her face. But worse than all of this was the come-down from her previous night’s acting. She would wake up alone and feel like a bitch from playing games around men she didn’t really fancy or find interesting. She could still see the disappointment in their eyes as she dropped them at the end of the night, refusing their offers to take her home, or worse still, letting them walk her home then not inviting them in.
There were some that she would agree to date, but it was all a game to her, and when she did actually date someone, she would end up building them up and then dropping them from the height she had brought them to.
Dakota hated herself for doing it, but no matter how hard she tried to be good and have a meaningful relationship, she always ended up resenting them for worshipping her. She realised she would trade all their doting for one harsh look from Jackson.
She never brought any of these brief lovers home. She would hint at the existence of a new boyfriend but never parade them in front of Lula or Jackson, because she feared he would see through her, and laugh at her weakness for him.
Simon was the one she settled on because he was just as elusive as she was. He was mad about her, but was keen to keep it from her, and this made her like him more than any of the others.
Simon was wonderful to her and he was a great distraction from her other life, but all the time she knew that as soon as college was finished she would have to leave and go to Ireland. And when she did, she would not look back or spare a thought for Simon – because he was, after all, just as expendable as the rest – in one last attempt to have a completely ordinary life.
A life without Jackson.
Sometimes the thought of never seeing him again frightened her. She felt a deep sea of panic rising in her whenever she realised she wouldn’t see him every day – perhaps only once a year if she went to visit Lula. Yet as much as the prospect of Jackson not being in her life caused fear to lurch in her, she knew that she had to get away from him one day, before Lula ever found out.
Dakota still managed to keep Jackson a secret from her friends and everyone else. Her only sounding board was her diary where she could pour out all her feelings and know that no one was going to slap her and call her a slut. The only people who knew were her, her diary, Jackson and Mr Goldman. Goldman had kept his end of the bargain; he had left them alone and not sent any more photos in the mail.
And she had kept her end.
Even though the ghost of Michelle Taybury seemed to be there all the time, Dakota had not spoken her name out loud since the day after she was murdered. She had promised Jackson and she intended to keep that promise for the rest of her life.
Life moved on and, after two years, Lula kept her promise and allowed Dakota to go to Ireland to live with relatives. The plan was that she would go and live with her cousin in Dublin and get herself a job for a year or so, and then return and go to university.
That was Lula’s plan.
Dakota’s plan was to stay with her cousin and get a job so she could afford to rent her own flat. And she would never return to the house she grew up in, the house where she remembered her parents, the house where she had first heard they were dead, and the house where Jackson had changed her life forever.
So, one summer day, Jackson and Lula took her to the airport and said their goodbyes. Lula sobbed like a baby and said she had to call all the time and write every day.
Jackson had said his good byes the night before. In the early hours, he had crawled into her bed and held her so tight she thought she would suffocate. He whispered to her over and over how much he loved her and how he would miss her every day and that he would write to her all the time.
“You will come back to me one day, I know it,” he said in the dark
lonely hours. He pushed his own copy of Baudelaire into her bag along with the Nick Cave CD he had bought her. “Listen to this and think of me, won’t you?”
She felt sad to be leaving him, as though she was about to die and they would never see each other again. But for all her deep sadness and fear, she knew she had to go and that it was the best thing for everyone, especially Lula.
The dreams of Jackson murdering her still came in those few hours of night that she managed to sleep, and the years had taught her that it could easily happen. Perhaps by leaving him she was saving them both: saving her own life and saving Lula from the heartbreak of losing Jackson to prison.
Dakota had found a million excuses to leave but she knew that beneath every reason was Jackson, no matter how much she said it would be a great opportunity to meet new people in a new country, she knew that it would always come down to him and why she had to leave him.
Her life in Ireland began quietly. Though she lived in the city, the only friends she had were her cousins, so it took a while before she began to socialise. But once she started she didn’t stop. Every night she was out with her cousins and their friends, and soon she made new friends of her own. The freedom she felt was a new and shattering gift. She could meet new men and not stop herself by thinking: how will Jackson react? She was a free single young woman and before long, the confidence and personality that lay buried beneath years of Jackson’s authority began to surface.
She found a job in the local record store on the High Street and spent her days listening to music and seeing and talking to dozens of different new people. Her life in England seemed like ancient history, and even though she knew Jackson had tainted her, perhaps forever, she no longer let him interfere with her everyday life.
His letters arrived every few days at first, and after the first few, she stopped opening them but instead buried them at the bottom of her wardrobe, unable to understand why she could not simply put them in the bin. Perhaps she might need them one day, when loneliness or feeling unloved overtook her. She could open them all and read how much someone had wanted her once. She hoped that day would never come, but the unpredictability of life never escaped her mind and so she chose to keep the letters as a safety net.
Dakota felt as though she had spent the first eighteen years of her life in prison. Now she was living with one of her cousins who never nagged her or asked where she was going and who with. She had a job and was earning her own money without being under the watchful gaze of Jackson, and she was free to date anyone she wanted without it being a reason to annoy Jackson.
She found she was popular and liked by nearly everyone she met. In short, her life in Dublin was Heavenly to her.
After a few months of ‘seeing’ various men, she settled on one. His name was Aiden and she met him in a pub in Temple Bar one Friday night. It was halfway through the evening and she had decided to have another cigarette, only to find her lighter was no longer in her pocket, so she turned to the nearest person for a light and there he was.
With black hair and green eyes, he could have been a relative, but the second she saw him she knew she wanted him. After a few meetings in pubs they started a relationship and Dakota felt finally she was free of all Jackson’s influence. Aiden provided her with everything she needed from a man and had never really had. Though she always believed Jackson loved her, there was an oppressive nature to that love, something about it that meant pain would always be a large part of her life. With Aiden she felt different, a different kind of love that was light and uncomplicated.
The months passed and her friends told her she had placed all her eggs in one basket perhaps too soon, but her need for Aiden was almost adolescent. She found herself becoming paranoid and afraid he would leave her, calling him on his mobile phone whenever he was out with his friends just to check he was really with them.
Dakota was not ready for a relationship with anyone, and the result of this was devastating to her.
It was just over two years since she had left home when Aiden left her for another girl. It seemed to confirm everything Jackson had ever said about ‘other boys’ and she was heartbroken. The first relationship she had ever had that she had actually put her heart and soul into was over and for the first time in her life, even after everything she had been through, she felt as though she could not carry on living. She was only a month shy of her twenty-first birthday, but was afraid she wouldn’t make it that far.
She slipped easily into drunkenness every night and her friends could do nothing for her. The way Dakota saw it, she had left England to prove that a normal happy life was possible for her, and in as little as two years she had discovered that it wasn’t.
And it was on one of those lonely, rain-soaked drunken nights that she crawled to the bottom of her wardrobe and pulled out the letters that Jackson had written her.
There were literally hundreds from the first year and a half of her life in Dublin, but in the last six months after she had finally written to Lula and said she was happy and in love he had stopped writing.
Deep down, she had almost missed the sight of his handwriting on the envelope as it lay on her hallway floor, but she knew it was a good thing he had stopped writing.
She had written to Lula regularly and through the letters she felt that they had finally resumed the friendship they had shared all those years before as young girls. They shared girly gossip and spoke deeply about their feelings for their respective partners, and for the first time in years Dakota didn’t have to write in her diary in order to let her feelings out. What she had to say was suitable for public consumption, everything before Ireland was a ghastly secret that was hidden away in the pages of those diaries, their covers scuffed and worn but held together by sellotape and glue.
Dakota never read old entries in her diary and had often considered burning them, but had always held on to them finally, perhaps for the same reason she had held on to all those unopened letters from her one-time lover.
So on that deep lonesome night, she dug out the Nick Cave CD she had not played since before she left England and turned up the volume to drown out the sound of the rain and wind at her window.
All at once those dark nights in her old bedroom were alive again, and she thought that he would creep through her door at any moment to take her again, burying her in kisses and crazed love. But he did not come singing low through that door, so she ripped the envelope off the first letter and began to read.
All night long, she drank and read Jackson’s pleading words, his unread promises and tears pouring off the pages to the sound of that music he played for her when he was her Loverman.
There was page after page of stolen words – Baudelaire, Yeats, Cummings and Byron – the words he had stolen before to try and explain his love for her. And in the passages she could barely read for the pain in her heart, were words from Wuthering Heights, heady declarations of love as old as the earth and as powerful as the storms.
By the time morning came she was washed out, drunk and crying still as though she had only just lost Jackson and she was dying with the pain, as if a limb had been removed or, worse still, her heart.
She realised that reading Jackson’s words hurt more than knowing that Aiden was gone, and in this truth lay the fact that she did love Jackson and that he was right all along: she couldn’t live without him and she would come back to him one day.
That day had come.
She was going home and suddenly Lula no longer mattered. It was Jackson and her and that was all. No one mattered anymore.
Within hours she had packed her belongings and was on her way to the airport, leaving a note for her cousin to say she was going back home and didn’t know when she would be back.
It seemed that the sudden fire within her had burned off any possibility of a hangover and though she was chain-smoking until the minute she got on the plane, she felt half-calm and assured of what she was doing. After all these years she was choosing Jackson. It wasn’t about
abuse or rape anymore; it never had been. It had always been there but she had been too young and stupid to see it: Jackson was her destiny, the only man for her, and that was all she needed to understand.
TWENTY-SIX: Haunting
“Well, I finished that one, too, now,” said Betty, prodding Dakota away from her old life.
“Huh?”
“The second life you had. I finished it. Not much different to the others really! You had a dodgy affair, it all went wrong, he killed you, heheh.” Betty laughed as she clutched the cigarette between her lips, long enough to light it.
“Well there’s a surprise, let me guess, I was stabbed in a cemetery?”
“Yup, I take it that was your other nightmare?”
“Yes, which means I was having past life flashbacks and also seeing my future death. Shit, I wish I had known! I did have a hunch.” She giggled as she lit a cigarette herself.
Just as the cigarette glowed into life, a huge flash of lightning lit the shadowy library, revealing a tall figure standing only a few feet away from them between the bookcases. A split second later a second flash lit up the same area to reveal the figure was gone.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” exclaimed Dakota, and a small drama ensued as her fallen cigarette burnt a hole in her trousers.
“What is wrong with you?” Betty laughed.
“Did you see that?”
“What?
“Is this place haunted?”
Betty laughed incredulously for a moment, wondering whether she was joking. “Jesus, Dakota, you’re in Purgatory. This place is full of dead people!”
“Can you appear and disappear whenever you like?”
Betty stopped laughing when she realised Dakota was visibly shaken. “What did you see?”
“Well, I saw a fucking ghost, Betty!”
Rain began to crash into the windows again after a brief respite, and Betty stared from Dakota to the place that Dakota was staring at. Lightning lit up the shadows again but the shape was still gone.
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