To Dare

by Jemma Wayne

  Exhaustion comes in waves, shifting the sands, lapping her eyelids open and shut, and Simone finds herself jolting awake at least three times before she manages to pull herself up to sitting. She doesn’t know what time their friends finally left that morning, but it feels as though she can’t have been asleep for more than a few hours. Luckily, she set her alarm. It is only her second day at the gym and she wants to make a good impression, but it was necessary for Terry to blow off steam. He’d needed it. For weeks now, she has seen the street creeping like poison under his skin. Not that he’s actually envious. He genuinely finds four-pound kale juices, and jobs that keep people locked away in offices either side of daylight, a stupid undertaking. But if he ever did want those ‘ridiculous’ things, or that ‘mindless’ corporate job, like his father, he wouldn’t know where to begin. And that’s the crux of it, the winning blow, the thing the rugby neighbour was able to knock Terry down with without even touching him: Terry has no choice, no power, not really, and the fact of this taunts him on this street, with every perfect piece of paving. Simone does not, however, suggest that they leave the flat in Primrose Hill. She doesn’t consider it for even a minute.

  Jasmine is asleep. A dirty plate from the dinner Dominic smuggled in to her lays on the floor next to her cot, and so does Dominic. Curled around the little girl, their fingers intertwined. Simone notices at once that Dominic’s hand is bandaged and she wonders how he managed that on his own, worrying immediately where he got the wrapping from and if he told anybody why she wasn’t seeing to it. Only after this thought does she wonder if he’s in pain, or if his finger is damaged badly, and in the next breath, guilt about the order of these thoughts sends her into a spiral of self-accusation. Terry is right, she’s a bad mother. She misses things on her own, she always misses things, she doesn’t see what’s in front of her. Simone bends down and fondles Dominic’s hair, gently brushing it off his face. She feels him waking beneath her touch, but for a full minute he doesn’t open his eyes. He pretends sleep, and she pretends not to notice, and continues to softly stroke his head.

  “Dom,” she whispers finally.

  He opens his eyes. They are red around the edges, either from tears or tiredness.

  “Dom, I’ve got to go to work. Can you see to Jas?”

  He nods groggily and sits up. “What’s the time?”

  “Eight-thirty.”

  “Oh. I’ve got to get to school.”

  “Just see to her quickly will you, sweetheart? Then give her to Terry before you go.”

  He looks at her sceptically. They both know the farce that this is, the great nonsense of such easiness. But he nods anyway. “Is the job going well?” he asks her.

  “It was good yesterday,” she says. “I did well. They like me. But it’s only Day Two.”

  “I’m glad,” he tells her, and waits a moment, perhaps for her to reciprocate with some nicety, or to kiss him, or to squeeze his arm, but she’ll be late soon.

  The cold snap is over. The night before was cool, the air tinged with deceptive chill, but this morning there is a humidity already creeping back to wrap itself around her. Today she wears black leggings that hang too loosely from her legs, a vest top, and a baggy grey sweatshirt that used to belong to Noah. The gym provided her with two turquoise logoed t-shirts, but she left them behind reception to change into on arrival. She doesn’t want to flaunt her aspirations before Terry, or to hear him confirm her own nagging suspicion that they are, after all, ridiculous.

  Simone dips down next to the fancy restaurant on the corner and walks under the bridge next to the canal. She knows a bizarre and useless amount of information about this canal. It was a pet fixation of her historian father, and there was more than one occasion as a young child when he brought her here to walk with him as far as they could by the water’s edge. Even now she remembers detailed descriptions of the workings of the hydro-pneumatic lock, and her father’s ponderings about the great Nash arches.

  It was a long time before she let her father meet Terry. She’d kept him out of sight at first, when her father turned up on a Friday – a routine that had begun after Noah’s death and developed more easily than she would have imagined possible after all that had happened. Sometimes her mother was with him, peering out from the car, but usually it was to her father that she spoke – he who for so many years had kept his thoughts private and hidden. She would always have Dominic ready. Wearing his best clothes, he’d have a rucksack with enough outfit changes for the weekend, his toothbrush, a hairbrush, and also a few coins in case he wanted to buy them all an ice cream. As a child herself, whenever Simone had been sent to people’s houses, it was always with a few coins in a small purse, and the instruction by her mother that if she was taken out, she must make sure to offer ice cream. Although Simone didn’t like to admit it, she hoped her mother would notice that she had remembered this nicety. In fact, she hoped that both of her parents would notice Dominic’s carefully packed bag, and his brushed hair, and induce from it that she’d done something right.

  They never did notice that though. They noticed that Dominic was too thin, and that he ate as though he was never fed at home – was he fed at home, they asked her. They noticed that he had coughs constantly, and glue ear twice the same winter, and that he seemed smart enough, but not able to concentrate, not the way a child his age should. They noticed that he often seemed anxious when they first got him home. That he cried a lot in his sleep. That sometimes it seemed as though he couldn’t tell the difference between the bedtime stories they read to him, and the real world, and they weren’t sure if that was because of some blurred lines in his cognition, or simply because he was trying to escape reality. They asked her, weekly, if she’d thought again about letting Dominic live with them.

  Simone always made sure to hurry Dominic away before they could trudge too deeply into this conversation. She despised the way that he looked forward to Fridays. She despised the way he talked about her parents with such awe, telling her about a game of chess with her father, or a rainy afternoon baking with her mother, or his latest acquisitions from the book-laden office she had never been allowed to enter. She despised the way he returned as if infused with new life. And she despised him, her son, for the opening he seemed to have so easily forged into hearts that had always been closed fast to her.

  Even more than she despised Dominic, however, Simone hated her parents. Hated them, with a consuming, sucking, ravaging force. She hated them for noticing things about her child that she didn’t. For having failed, when she was young, to notice anything about Simone herself. For even now seeing only her flaws. Or worse, not seeing her at all. For never inviting her to spend the weekend with them. Never asking her what she did those days when she was alone. Never wondering why she was thin, why she couldn’t concentrate, why she needed to escape from reality too.

  It was no wonder really. How could they understand her reality when they had no comprehension of it? They’d thought – when she was seventeen, when she’d started drinking, when she’d met Noah, when she’d gone off the rails – that that was when she’d sunk from the dizzying heights of civility. But it hadn’t been like that at all. Noah was normal. His family were normal. The people who lived in his building were normal. Same as them. There was nothing, in the end, that was so foreign or alien or exotic about these people who lived on the other side of towering walls, other than the walls themselves. The realisation of this had been a little disappointing to Simone at the beginning. Wrapped up in Noah’s family, she had at last the feeling of connection for which she’d been yearning; but in the months that followed, after the first grand gesture of her pregnancy and departure from home, she hadn’t felt as though she was doing anything so desperately wild anymore, anything that would really stick it to her parents. She had swapped a clean, private flat for one in disrepair, ease for urgency; but she had good people, she had support, she couldn’t blame the estate for the pain she continued to feel.

  Perhaps that
was why she had let herself sink lower. Perhaps it was intentional. A way to shock them. A way to shock herself. A way to attach her hurt to something tangible.

  Terry was tangible. Terry was at last the archetypal estate boy her parents imagined. And there when she was at her lowest. Seeming to need her. Seeming to understand what she needed. Seeming able to sweep everything else away.

  Simone rubs her head. It feels groggy. She has not eaten and in the growing heat, with the lack of sleep, and the after-effects of alcohol, her legs feel like jelly. Pungency wafts from the canal into her nostrils, but at least there is shade down here, and the cyclists whizzing past her fan sharp bursts of welcome air into her face. A number of pedestrians overtake her. Her father used to walk quickly too, his legs, or sense of purpose, sturdier than hers alone. Still, if she sticks to her pace, she will not be late, and she continues on, wondering if Dominic has managed to change Jasmine’s nappy and give her some cereal; and wake Terry.

  She does not hear him behind her. Not even a second early. She does not see his arms reaching. She has no idea he is there until her body is yanked forcefully around the side of a stone, Nash archway, and her throat is gripped within his hands.

  This is not the first time she has been pinned against a Camden wall, staring into blistering blue.

  It was overcast, the first time, the sky seeped in grey, like a pencil smudge somebody hasn’t bothered to properly erase. But Terry’s eyes had been bright, and mad, and piercing. Twenty minutes earlier, they had set off for the courthouse together, chatting jovially. By then, he’d been sleeping on her couch for three weeks, and they’d been flirting a little, staying up late to chat, or party. He hadn’t asked her for the alibi, she’d volunteered it, casually over a pint; but she’d liked the way that he seemed surprised by the suggestion, like a child who’s given a present unexpectedly, and it made her want to give herself to him more, again and again. If she took his word for it, he’d been set up anyway; but even if that wasn’t the case, who cared really if he had robbed somebody at knifepoint? He hadn’t hurt them. And everybody did things sometimes that they didn’t mean, didn’t intend, didn’t imagine they’d ever stoop to. The forces that drove people couldn’t be explained the way her parents imagined, in black and white, in scrawls made in ink against paper. Terry’s hand had squeezed at her throat as though he were extracting the juice from an orange. “You’re not gonna make a mug of me in there, are you?”

  Simone had never been manhandled like this before. Even amid everything she’d done for men, for money, there hadn’t been violence to it, not like this. There had been choice still, not a great choice – not with a lease and a son and the need for a fix, and no Noah to help her – but choice nonetheless; she could always have walked away. Pressed hard against stone, hypnotised by the intensity of Terry’s eyes, she understood now that she couldn’t. She felt the coldness of the wall against her bare shoulders, she felt the roughness of the stone, she felt each distinct finger of Terry’s hand driving into her flesh.

  “I’ll kill you,” he warned, pushing his face close against hers. “I’ll kill you if you don’t keep your word, and I’ll kill your son, I promise you that.”

  She shook her head as best as she could within his grasp, feeling her throat throbbing and constricting. He looked her in the eye a moment more, then loosened his grip.

  “I know you’d never do that though, would you, Simone? You’re a good one. Sweet. Clever. And you’ve got a good heart. You look after me, and I’ll look after you, won’t I?”

  He let go of her throat and Simone nodded. Never in her life had she felt so powerless, so controlled, so removed from choices. There was something liberating about that.

  Simone closes her eyes now and feels the cold of the stone behind her. Her head lolls against the Nash arch. The familiar grip of Terry’s fingers encloses her throat. If she remains very still, it will be easier to grasp at the tail ends of breath. But he won’t start speaking until she opens her eyes, until she looks at him, until she gives him that respect. She forces her eyelids open.

  “Where are you scurrying off to then?”

  Loosening his grip enough for her to talk, he leans in close, and she speaks quickly, with scratching breath. “I’ve got work, Tel. At the gym. I didn’t want to disturb you.”

  “You’re gonna leave me, aren’t you?”

  “What?”

  Simone shakes her head and tries to look convincingly into the intense blue. Rimmed in red, his eyes are darting across her face, a fusion now of menace but also panic. This happens sometimes. At the very height of his dominion over her, of his power, he reveals his own utter vulnerability. He thinks she wants to leave him.

  Simone’s mind scrambles, tripping over itself. Despite the hand still around her neck, this raw display of weakness does something to Simone. It always does. It makes her want to comfort Terry. To make up for the damage his family has done. But at the same time, she is scared. Terry thinks she’s plotting against him. Cornered creatures are dangerous.

  “I’m not gonna leave you, Tel,” she manages to say. “I don’t want to leave you.”

  She has told him this same thing many times over the years, she has promised it and she has meant it. Today, however, as the words slip in habit from her tongue, she notices that they taste different. There is an unfamiliar, sour edge to them. She no longer feels liberated.

  “What’s the job for then?” he spits at her. “Why d’you need a job all of a sudden? Do you want me to buy you something? Is that it? Or what are you hiding?”

  “It’s not about the money, or not only, I haven’t even got my first paycheck, Tel,” Simone soothes, daring to touch Terry’s grasping hand. It is a mistake. She had hoped to coax his hand away from her throat, but it makes him grip harder. “Tel, Tel, please let go,” she gasps.

  There are footsteps on the other side of the arch and, still gripping, Terry manoeuvres his body in front of hers so that to anybody passing they look like an ordinary couple locked in close conversation. Even in public he can control her; he wants her to know this. Breath evades her. She could kick him, but he’d punch her for sure. She could flail her arms and legs and try to at least grab somebody’s attention, but what stranger would stop to save her?

  “Plead again,” Terry whispers.

  Obediently Simone mouths the words, but no sound comes out.

  Finally, when the pedestrian has passed, Terry loosens his grasp. Simone splutters and he stands there watching her struggle. Watching. Watching. His face is full of disgust, and maybe pleasure.

  “Don’t whimper,” he spits. “It’s ugly.”

  Simone attempts to struggle more quietly. When at last she catches her breath, she says softly: “I wouldn’t leave you. I just want to do something for myself, Tel. I just wanna try the job.”

  For a moment, relief washes over Terry’s face. She sees it coming, growing. For a moment he believes her. But only for a moment. The next second his jaw is clenched again, his eyes locked. He speaks slowly. Smoothly through his fury. “I know you wouldn’t leave me, cos I’d kill you if you did. I’d kill you and your fucking son. And Jasmine. I’d kill all of you.”

  If somebody threatens you enough times, you believe it.

  Simone nods.

  “I’d kill you,” he repeats.

  Simone nods again.

  He lets go of her and she reaches tentatively for her neck, stroking the angry skin.

  Then, “I love you,” he says suddenly, as fiercely as his threat of death. “You know that.”

  Simone nods once more. “I know, Tel. I love you too.”

  It’s true, but the sour taste comes again.

  Terry doesn’t seem to notice. Gently, he touches her on her shoulder, and for a moment she thinks he is going to hug her, but he is only reaching for the strap of her handbag and then lifting it away. Opening the zip, he pulls out her wallet and removes her bankcard and the thirty pounds of cash, then grinning with bizarrely abrupt merriment,
he thrusts the emptied wallet back at her. “Go on then, scurry off to your job.”

  A switch has been flicked.

  His anger gone.

  On. Off. On. Off.

  Simone knows that she shouldn’t say anything, but a snaking thought creeps through her mind and she cannot help herself. “What do you need the cash for, Tel?”

  On again. His face leers, centimetres from her own. “None of your fucking business.”

  “But Tel, you’re going home to Jasmine aren’t you? Who’s got Jasmine?”

  Terry looks at her again. His eyes are dancing dangerously now and he holds her gaze for a long time. When finally he answers, he doesn’t answer at all. “Go on, job to do,” he taunts, and waves her away.

  She can’t move. Not in either direction. The canal path feels precarious, as though with just a misplaced foot she could slip and drown. A goat on a cliff edge. Jasmine sits frozen before her eyes. Terry watches her amusedly, enjoying her terror. The moment flows on and on, slowly, like the canal. Eventually she gathers herself enough to respond, but even as she does so she feels the smile she has fixed onto her face faltering at the edges. Terry laughs even before she has started speaking. “You know what,” she coughs anyway, with absurd levity. “Maybe I will miss work today after all. I’ll come home with you. See Jas.”

  “No no.” Terry turns her shoulders back towards the canal, grinning at her wildly, eyes dazzling blue. “No no. Go on, you don’t want to be late. Your grand job’s awaiting.”

  Veronica

  Somehow, Veronica slept. Not at first. It was past four in the morning when she pulled herself out of bed, legs itching incessantly, to email the school with excuses of illness. A little before six she was still awake enough to notice George showering and dressing and creeping out of the house. But sometime after that, she had successfully slipped into oblivion. When she woke, it was almost midday. Long bands of light had nudged their way through the bedroom curtains, pumping like bold veins across the room, mocking her cowardice. It had become too warm under the duvet and in her sleep she had thrown it off, but she lay nevertheless in a narrow, contained strip right on the edge of the mattress. Even in slumber she seemed to be curling inwards, making herself small.