by David Mark
The words evaporate. She thinks of the Cheshire Cat. Feels sleepy and exhilarated and wonders whether Jude is real or just somebody she made up to explain to herself how she got home from the valley. Wonders whether, perhaps, she lies there still, wet and lonely and dying a little more with each fading tick of her pulse.
Liz jerks upwards and grabs the phone. The world tilts and whirls and for a moment it seems that she can see out of her own ear. She wonders if she has suffered a contusion. Whether she is bleeding inside her skull. Wonders what Jay will do when he walks in and finds her dead on the bed, blood pouring from eyes, ears, nose. For a moment she imagines writing a letter to the police, informing them that this thing was done to her by her partner. Pictures him in prison, silently crying, afraid to venture into the showers, growing a rind of dirt that would make him gag. She shakes the thought away. Wonders if she is any more than her illness.
‘Betsy? Betsy, are you there …?’
She looks at the phone in her hand. Unthinkingly she’s answered it. Jude’s voice, tinny and faraway.
‘Betsy? I don’t want to be some weird stalker but you went from sharing every thought in your head to just disappearing, and well, I asked a friend to go on Facebook and they saw you’d posted something about being, what was it – absolutely crushed – and I’ve been ringing, and, well …’
She raises the phone to her ear as if it were a shell and his voice the sea. Her own voice, when she speaks, is dreamy and far away. She wonders, briefly, whether she might have taken too many painkillers, and why the water on the table tasted of vodka.
‘Jude … hey, ha – that’s a song, but backwards …’
‘Betsy, are you OK – you sound really out of it.’
‘Your friend Campion sent a man to give me money. I feel sort of rich.’
A pause. ‘He did what, Betsy? Say that again …’
‘I think it’s over with Jay. I don’t think it ever really started. I’ve wasted so much of my life. I’m damaged … it’s weird you’re paying me this much attention, really … what is it you’re after, deep down?’
‘Betsy, I don’t know you well enough to know if this is normal but you sound in a bad place. Is somebody with you? I’m not far away – I can come and be with you …’
‘Be where? Be here? I don’t think that would be a good idea, Judy-Judy-Judy …’
‘Betsy …’
The corners of her vision are moving slowly in. She feels bone-tired. She doesn’t want to talk any more but words keep pouring out, half-formed, dreamy …
‘He just thinks I’m a malingerer. A sponger. A cancer. He keeps me here because it’s easy for him. Gives me pennies when he’s got all these accounts. He’s been talking to all these camgirls and he won’t even go near me …’
‘You sound all slurred,’ spits Jude, from somewhere nearby.
‘I used to think I was OK-looking, and he used to fancy me, I know he did, but I think I just disgust him now.’
‘Is somebody there, Betsy? Tell me again about the money. You said Campion sent it?’
‘Yeah … think I’ll book somewhere nice and drink until it runs out. You could come and visit. No funny business, mind.’ She attempts a comedy voice but it cracks halfway through. ‘I’m not that sort of girl …’
She hears the key in the lock. Somewhere on the edge of consciousness she remembers sending Jay’s stream of filthy messages and pictures to his mum; his ex-wife; his work. She can’t be sure why she thought it would be a good idea.
She hears him bellow her name. Hears a crash and then the heavy stamp of work shoes thudding on his perfect carpet.
She closes her eyes and drifts away. Floats off somewhere that is all blurry outlines and soft, pastel-coloured clouds.
Time passes. She’s sick, but manages to cough it up without choking. Rolls, by pure fortune, into some approximation of the recovery position. Wonders where all the noise is coming from. Why the clouds are turning to knives; the softness suddenly abrasive and needle-sharp.
She is only dimly aware of the door bursting open. Barely registers the sudden vicious hands in her hair, yanking her off the bed and on to the floor. She can’t be sure if she’s remembering or experiencing. Mum used to wake her like this when she’d had a bad day, or a bad night, or just wanted somebody to smack around until the edge had been taken off her temper.
He’s in her face, now. Crazy eyes and a vein throbbing at his temple. He’s screaming in her face. Were she able to fully form her thoughts she would remark upon how unusual it is to see him so animated. She has always longed to see what lies beneath the surface. Has poked and prodded and gone to great lengths to see what he looks like when he’s not trying so hard to be his own vision of respectability.
She realizes that she can’t breathe. There are hands at her throat. She can’t swallow. Her tongue is all swollen and there’s dampness on her jeans, and all she can see is the pure hatred in his eyes. Jay’s eyes. Eyes that threaten to pop right out of his skull.
She has been in this position so many times that muscle memory takes over. She spent great chunks of her childhood trapped beneath the great fleshy bulk of her mother, ham-hock forearm under her jawbone, spit flecking her features. She knows how to go limp. How to play dead. How to scare her attacker into realizing the enormity of what they are in the process of doing.
She becomes a dead weight. Feels her pulse slow to almost nothing. Lolls, deathly, on her side. Sees him shuffle back, hands in his hair, tears streaking his face.
He’ll stop now, she thinks. Now he sees …
Time passes. Seconds turn to minutes as he sits there, his eyes wide as coins.
When he places his hands around her throat again it is a deliberate, calculated act. He takes the time to stare at her. To look into her half-closed eyes with intensity that she has only seen at the very climax of their love-making.
Feels him close his hands like the wings of a bird.
She starts to thrash. Kick. Reaches up and claws at his hands, his face.
Doesn’t register the bang-bang-bang on the glass. Hears voices both near and far away, ice-cream vans and church bells.
Then the door is flying open and Jude is hauling Jay off her: slamming him up against the wall. Hitting him, hard. Harder. Smacking his head off the wall and kicking him below the jaw as she slithers to the carpet.
Then Jude’s arms are under her neck and her knees and he is lifting her so carefully it is as though she is made of cobwebs and snow.
She locks eyes with Jay as Jude carries her outside and into the soft black caress of the evening. He’s crying. Bleeding. Snivelling into himself like a boy who’s been beaten up in the playground in front of the girl he likes.
She feels sorry for him.
Guilty.
Disgusted with herself for making all this happen.
Then she is giving herself to the darkness, and to Jude.
FOURTEEN
Six months ago …
Betsy is beginning to enjoy waking up early. The world smells rather wonderful just before the sunrise: the air golden with ozone and honeysuckle, elderflowers and dew. She tries not to let the lingering whiff of horse shit and damp hay sour the experience. She wonders why she never noticed such olfactory wonders when she simply stayed up through the night. She fancies it may be something to do with the off-and-on-again quality of sleep; the cranial reboot, the shutting down of yesterday and the beginning afresh of today. She keeps running through half-remembered idioms about the importance of going to bed at a decent hour. Amends them for her own amusement. Early to bed, early to rise: summons a farmer between your thighs …
She has taken to falling asleep early too. She tends to drop off not long after nine and sleeps in a state of dreamless, cashmere blackness, only stirring when Jude chances to step on a creaky board during one of his night-time sojourns around the old farmhouse. He sleeps little. Reads or listens to music. Writes, should fancy take him, though his pages are routinely reduced t
o cinders by the morning. She sometimes feels as if he has set himself up as a sentry at her door: that he is up to guard her, and the house, from intruders. She doesn’t like such thoughts. The bastle’s most glorious feature is its remoteness. There are perhaps half a dozen little farmhouses strung out along this ridge of the Allen Valley so visitors to their door are rare. She’s barely spoken to anybody since Jude brought her home: an injured bird needing its wings reset and a safe place to rest. Sylvia popped by, leaving a hamper of home-baked goods and a sponsorship form for an abseiling challenge. A handsome man in a pink shirt and splendid quiff came and knocked repeatedly on the door while she cowered upstairs and waited for him to leave. And there had been the guy with the braid in his hair: a shaved head but two rat-tails dangling down from his hairline. Cargo pants, a big baggy jumper and a balaclava rolled down around his neck like a scarf. He’d had plenty to get off his chest. Jude had cut him off before he made it to the courtyard but Betsy had still heard snatches of their conversation and none of it had sounded friendly. His name was Moon. He’d been a friend of Maeve’s. An environmental activist. He wanted to know if Jude was pleased with himself: whether he felt good that he had robbed ‘them’ of their best chance for justice. Jude never lost his temper. Just kept telling him that it was none of his business and that maybe one day he’d understand. Moon had half lost his mind over that. Demanded to know whether he’d done a deal with the devil. Whether he’d turned his back on everything they’d ever stood for. He demanded Jude hand ‘it’ over, whatever the hell ‘it’ might be. And Jude had told him ‘no’. Then he’d walked back into the bastle and left him standing there, throwing insults at the great walls like rocks. Later, when Jude came up to the attic room to check on her, he didn’t mention it. And she didn’t ask.
Today, as with so many yesterdays, Betsy has woken at dawn. The birds that flutter and swoop around the bastle can be relied upon to sing her into wakefulness, though it is not the Disney melody that she would have expected. The sound is an orchestra tuning up: a raucous assault of squeaks and squawks and strangled yells. Betsy is starting to be able to identify the individual species from their songs. She can pick out the song thrush, the blackbird and the wren, but she has invented her own names for some of the less melodious performers. This morning she definitely heard the song of the Screeching Little Bastard and the One Man Band Falling Down the Stairs.
Jude is teaching her the so-called proper names, although she has no way of verifying the factual accuracy of his claims. Some of the birds he mentions sound distinctly made-up, but even when she questions the veracity of his claims she does so with glee: delighted at the very idea there could be such a thing as a chiffchaff, a long-tailed tit or a willow warbler.
She and Jude are not yet a couple. She wants him; wants him so badly that there are times it feels as though there is a heat from her neck to her ankles, but she is so certain that it will happen she is able to enjoy the agony of waiting. She knows it’s important to him that she does not give herself to him out of some sense of obligation or gratitude; that she must concentrate only on getting well, or the closest thing to it, before embarking on something as potentially damaging as a new relationship. The agreement doesn’t stop the growing tenderness between them. They often eat together, facing one another at the little kitchen table, talking about nothing and everything. Sometimes, on the sofa, she stretches out her legs and puts her feet in his lap, and he’ll stroke them like a puppy while reading his book, and she will smile, half-embarrassed, behind the pages of her own. She has been his ‘house guest’ now for seven weeks. She feels as though she has put on a stone and grown three inches, though any old acquaintance who saw her today would remark upon nothing more than the glow in her cheeks and the absence of coal-black darkness beneath her eyes. She feels as though a few years have been shaved off her age. For seven weeks her life has been entirely free of obligation, command or responsibility and so far, she hasn’t taken any steps towards spoiling it for herself by insisting she be allowed to do more. Truth be told, this is the first time in her life she has been cared for by somebody who has not made her feel guilty about it. She likes it. She won’t always like it, but for now it feels rather nice.
Her bedroom is next to Jude’s. The wall that separates them is pretty thick but she has worked out that her bed – a grand, wrought-iron affair – is pushed up against the same stretch of brickwork as Jude’s, so viewed from above, it could be seen as one giant bed separated down the middle by a brick divider. It’s a thought that comforts her. Most nights she drops off to sleep with her hand against the rough wall. As her flesh warms the brick, and she slowly drifts into a dreamlike state, the wall becomes flesh. By the time she gives herself to sleep, she knows she is touching him. Can feel him. Can breathe him in. Can picture him, on the far side of the wall, touching her in return. In such moments she wishes he was a less decent man.
Too-wheet-too-wheet …
Betsy identifies the familiar song of the Lesser Spotted Whistling Little Shite. She fancies that it’s around six a.m. She sits up. Stretches: a big Hollywood yawn. A satisfying series of clicks and pops emerge from her rested joints and muscles. She looks around her bedroom. Now the smile comes. She still hasn’t got used to this seismic shift in circumstances. She lives in a fortified farmhouse: a centuries old slab of crumbling brick and timber. She’s becoming an outdoorsy type. She feels good about the dirt beneath her fingernails and the twigs and hay in her hair. She hasn’t shaved her legs or armpits since she moved in. Still cleans her teeth twice a day, in case today is the day he kisses her, but a lot of things she considered crucial to a life well lived now seem entirely redundant.
She looks around, even happier today with the room’s layout as she was when Jude first showed her what could be hers, if she wanted it. He’d seemed oddly nervous when he’d made the proposition, gripping his hat as if it were a steering wheel, looking into her so earnestly that she’d turned away in case he was somehow able to read her secrets through her eyes. He wasn’t offering himself: that was what he wanted to make clear. Not that he wouldn’t be honoured, of course, but she was too vulnerable, too emotionally drained, to be thinking of anybody but herself until she got back on her feet. It was important to him she understood that he had no ulterior motives. He wasn’t taking advantage of somebody in a susceptible position. There was to be no payment in kind. He was offering her a place to stay until she decided how she wanted to live and there was nothing expected of her save a promise that she would start taking her pills again, and that if she started to feel the black clouds gathering in her mind, she would tell him before she chose to do anything about it. He didn’t want to find her dead, he said. He wasn’t sure he could take that. Not again.
Betsy – as she is starting to think of herself – cannot recall saying yes, or recollect very much about what the doctor advised, a little agitatedly, as she was signing herself out of the hospital, but she knows she must have said yes as she has been here ever since. She feels good. Better. Something has happened to her bad thoughts. She can’t seem to grab hold of them. Every time she considers the negative aspects of these past few weeks and months, the thought flits away from her: a greased eel. Jude is good at telling her not to worry, that they’ll deal with this, and that, and anything else that troubles her, once she’s done the most important thing and got herself well. Part of her finds it all a bit much – his attentiveness a little overbearing, his manner disconcertingly intense. But she cannot help thinking that if this were all a dream, she would have no desire to wake.
Still, Betsy has no doubt that her dark thoughts will soon find a way through. That will be a payment of one kind or another for the gentleness of these past few weeks. She cannot imagine Jay leaving things as they stand. He’d come to the hospital the day after she was admitted. Told the doctor he was her husband and received chapter and verse on her injuries. Told the shrink that the bruises at her throat were from the cord of her dressing gown and that it wa
s he who had cut her down. It had all gone into her medical files. They’d almost had her committed to a mental health facility before Carly convinced the doctor that she would be coming home with her and would be watched round-the-clock. She’d asked Liz time and again: Are you sure he attacked you? I mean, he’s not like that, is he? A prick, yeah, but not violent! I won’t be cross, just tell me. Just tell me, please …
Liz spent her four-night hospital stay trying to piece together the chain of events. Jude had been there, she knows that for certain. He’d saved her. Knocked lumps out of Jay. Driven her to hospital. But why was he not there when she woke? Where was the money she’d stuffed in her back pocket? Carly had been able to offer no answers. She’d managed to convey to the nursing staff that she didn’t want Jay anywhere near her but she’d managed to come out of the exchange looking like a hysteric, with Jay the long-suffering party. He’d refused to explain the great purple bruise on his face, though he managed to inject a quality into his silence: a suggestion that this had been done to him by a certain party who may or may not have been struggling with some inner demons.
By the time Jude turned up at the hospital, Liz had almost convinced herself that he was a figment of her imagination. She had no independent proof that he truly existed. She’d begun to wonder if perhaps he was some symptom of her madness: a projection; one of the voices in her head made flesh and blood. And then he was beside her; that earthy smell, leather and soil and engine oil. And he was looking at her like she might be just a little bit magic. He’d made his offer. Told her he had space for a house guest. Helped her dress herself, then held her hand as they took the lift to the exit and made their way to the battered 4 x 4 in the car park; Marshall waiting patiently in the passenger seat.