by Cathy Kelly
The words, It was ready at seven o’clock when you were supposed to come home, died on her lips. She knew that this would not be the correct thing to say. Faded memories of fear surfaced.
Danae moved carefully off the couch, sliding away from him, as if the slightest touch might somehow inflame him. Afterward, she never knew where the instinct came from, the awareness that there was danger here.
“I’ll get it ready for you, darling,” she said.
She wished she’d bought a bottle of wine herself. Perhaps that might have calmed him. But judging by the smell of alcohol on his breath, he’d been drinking already. Maybe more would make him worse; she didn’t know.
She set the dish on the table. The edges were burned. Carefully, she served it up, her hands shaking.
He hadn’t moved from the couch. He stood staring at her, following her every move.
“There,” she said, putting down a simple tomato salad drizzled with olive oil, the way his mother made it. “I hope you like it.”
The matches were on the table and she tried to light the candles, but her hand was shaking so much that she couldn’t quite do it.
“Can’t you do anything right?” he snapped.
And then Danae was frightened, a pure cold fear that started deep in her belly, turning her bowels to water, making her stomach clench, creeping up her chest so that every muscle in her tightened, every part of her was coiled, ready to escape.
“Maybe you could do it, darling,” she said, turning to him.
“Don’t look at me,” he hissed.
He moved so quickly that he was beside her in an instant. The first blow went to the side of her head, and the pain that immediately followed was mingled with the strangest ringing in her ear.
She couldn’t compute, her mind couldn’t make sense of this.
She’d been hit, but how? Not by Antonio, not the man who loved her, he couldn’t have done this. She must be wrong, this must be a nightmare and any minute she would wake up.
The second blow went to her stomach, felling her. He was taller than she and much more powerful. His fist in her stomach sent her flying backward, against the cooker. As she fell to the floor, her head bashed against the oven. Collapsed on the floor, one leg straight, one leg bent beneath her, her stomach spasmed with pain. Her head was ringing with the strength of his blows. She still couldn’t make sense of what had happened. Then she looked up at him again and he started kicking her.
When she came to, she had no idea what time it was, although the moon was shining in the windows and the oven was humming away on low. She tried to lift herself off the floor, but it was impossible. Every part of her body felt sore. As if someone had stood on her, tried to squash her flat like an ant. Nausea overwhelmed her, greater than the headache pounding through her head. Summoning all her strength, she pulled herself up. One eye couldn’t seem to focus properly and she kept blinking. The rooms were dark, the only light came from the moon outside, but she knew she wasn’t alone in the apartment—she felt his presence.
When she had managed to drag herself to her feet she stumbled to the kitchen sink and splashed cold water on her face, hoping to revive herself, hoping that the coolness would make the pain go away.
She couldn’t move her left ankle properly and she didn’t know why until she realized it was swollen and there was a boot mark across it. Moving slowly so as not to wake him, she made it out of the kitchen and down the corridor into the tiny bathroom. Staring at her from the bathroom mirror was a horror story. Her face swollen on one side, lip split from something he must have done after she passed out. Gingerly she pulled up her blouse to see the beginnings of a huge bruise around her stomach, bruises on her arms, and in the bathroom light she could now see the marks on her legs too. Her ankles were swollen beyond belief.
Even with the bathroom door closed, she could hear Antonio snoring. It had always been a joke between them, how much he snored.
At the dinner to celebrate their engagement, his mother had announced: “My Antonio, always he snore! He wake us all up. Now he can wake you up.”
The family had laughed. It seemed like a million years ago. As if it had all been a dream. Or maybe this was the dream? But Danae knew this was no dream; this was her new, horrible reality and the fear possessed her, the fear of what would happen when he woke up. The fear of telling anyone.
And if she did tell, who would believe her? Antonio was the epitome of a hail fellow well met, a charmer. Everyone loved him. Nobody would believe he could do a thing like this. She could hardly believe it herself.
Wincing with the pain, she took a towel and a facecloth and tried to cool down her bruises and wipe the blood off her face. Apart from her face, he hadn’t hit her anywhere that would show. Shaking, she found the jar of aspirin she used when she had her monthlies and took two, fearful that she’d drop the glass of water, her hands were shaking so much.
Carrying the towels into the living room, she used them to make up a bed on the couch and laid herself down there, as comfortably as she could in her pain. Tomorrow, it would have to be different. Wouldn’t it?
In Avalon, Mara sat outside with the hens at her feet and Lady leaning against her, and struggled to make out the words through the tears in her eyes. Danae’s diary was the saddest thing she’d read in all her life.
The psychiatrist wanted me to write this. I don’t trust psychiatrists that much. I used to. They were doctors and doctors were gods.
Like I used to think anyone with a degree was brighter than me. I hadn’t been to university. I’d barely been to school, what with the way we moved when I was a child. My mother didn’t have much faith in education.
“Life is the best university,” she’d say, tapping the side of her nose.
The first psychiatrist was very young.
The last one was older, a man, kind and gentle, brains bursting out of him. He even had one of those big foreheads where it looked as though the brains needed more room than most people’s did. And yet, he didn’t really know. He said things to me, but I could tell from his eyes that he knew I was clever and that there were no absolutes. He said that once. Those exact words. “There are no absolutes.”
That was when I realized that nobody knew anything for sure. It was all guesswork. Guesswork made up of history and science, past cases and studies, but guesswork all the same.
Nobody knew what had been going on in my head or in Antonio’s head. They could postulate till the cows came home, but nobody knew for sure. That was when I began to realize that we were all clinging to the rock, hoping. Everyone was the same. Some people had better rocks and a better foothold, but it was all a matter of clinging on. Once I understood that, I began to get better, although I didn’t know it at the time.
I have nobody to visit. There’s only one person I’d like to come, my brother, but I told him not to. I don’t want him to see this place or me in it. The lack of dignity would shock him.
Sleeping in a ward with other women, no privacy, wearing a ragtag collection of clothes because someone’s always stealing yours. At one time, I’d have thought there was no dignity in living like that, but it isn’t a worry to me now. I know none of that has anything to do with dignity.
The people here are trying to help us. They are tough but nice. Nobody hits you. Nobody on the staff shouts at you. They’re trying to give you back your actual dignity, which means giving you back your mind and your soul.
That’s dignity. All the rest, like peeing with the toilet door open, is immaterial. Did you know that when your mind goes, so does your soul? Like a dandelion blown in the wind, it floats away.
I had a visitor from the shelter today. Mary. She wears red a lot, that’s what I remember most: huge red cardigans wrapped around her and red necklaces. Her hair is yellow from a home-dye kit, something my mother would be scornful of. Mary is the kindest woman I have ever met. She hugs me and I try to let her. I don’t think I deserve hugs. I am stiff in her embrace and I know it. I try, rea
lly I do, but this kindness almost hurts. It’s wrong. I cannot have it.
When I cry, she has tissues in her pockets. She’s always had a never-ending supply for the never-ending tears.
“You deserve to be loved,” she says to me. It’s exactly what the older psychiatrist has been saying.
Mary has no education except for running the shelter, but she knows as much as he does.
When Mary goes, I sleep. They’re trying to get my medication right and that means lots of changing doses. This week, the drugs are making me even more tired than usual. I have to nap all the time. I lie on my bed with my eyes closed. I can blot out the noises around me. It’s safe here. Even though that banging-head woman is wandering around, the only one she wants to hurt is herself. Another girl came in today, half-crazed with pain. She’s in a room they have under camera surveillance all the time in case she tries anything. So I am safe. Safe in the nuthouse. If I could laugh, I would.
In the shelter, where I felt safe for the first time in years, we talked about our lives and our men. I said I’d never got used to being hit. Used to the idea, sure, but the pain and the fear was as bad every time. Except I knew I deserved it. He said I did. He said I couldn’t spend any money. He kept the housekeeping money and it was doled out every week. None to spare, none to let me buy a lipstick: “What do you want with lipstick? You think another man would look more than once at you? I’ll make sure no man looks at you, bitch.”
One woman had lived with her husband for twenty-seven years before she ran away to the shelter. Her son wouldn’t take her in. He blamed her for not leaving his da years before, blamed her for putting him through the fear of growing up in their house.
“I couldn’t tell him how trapped I felt,” she said, crying.
We all comforted her and we all understood.
You’re trapped, like the mouse that a cat’s playing with. Paralyzed with fear. You believe all the things he says to you.
You believe you’re worthless. Eventually, you reach the point where he doesn’t have to be there for you to believe it. A little voice in your head tells you nonstop: “You are a worthless piece of shit. You deserve this. You drive him to this. It’s all your fault.”
One woman lost two babies to her husband’s boot. She’d had six kids by then, it was all she could do to cope, and she didn’t know how she’d manage with seven. She told herself it was God’s way of making sure she didn’t have to cope with rearing another child.
I never had to cope with rearing my own baby. The first one I lost, I thought he’d be a boy. I felt it. Nobody did the trick with the ring on a piece of thread over my belly or said I was carrying low or high and that meant a boy or a girl. I didn’t have women friends to say or do these things. Antonio didn’t like me having friends. Friends got in the way.
It was all about control, I began to understand.
Control and fear was how they kept us under their boots and their fists. The beatings were just a way of reinforcing their control.
We’d been married six years when I lost the baby. He wanted sex off me and I was so tired, bone weary. I guessed I was somewhere near three months along. That’s when you’re tiredest, the books from the library said. I hadn’t been to the doctor about the baby. Our doctor said he hated treating me, seeing the bruises and the scars, when I would do nothing.
“But my husband’s a good man, Doctor,” I’d say. I didn’t add that it was me who made him do it and I had to stay with him, to take care of him.
I’d never refused Antonio sex before, never dreamed of it. Who knew what he’d do? I didn’t refuse him that night either. But I couldn’t pretend the way he liked, and he began to slap me.
The slaps could be the worst. He wouldn’t stop slapping. He didn’t even have a drink in him. Stone-cold sober, he was.
“It’s that fucking brat inside you, isn’t it?” he roared.
The fear that night was the worst. It wasn’t just me anymore, it was my baby. Did you know that, even at three months, your hands aren’t big enough to protect your belly?
I must have passed out with the kicks. When I woke up, he was gone and I was lying in the bed, with the pain of losing my little boy deep in my belly.
The second baby was at the end. I didn’t know I could still get pregnant then. He punched me in the belly and I lost it.
That was the night something in me changed. Like a light switch going on.
The taxi driver said he wouldn’t charge for driving me to the shelter.
“No, love,” he said as he helped me in, then went back to get the few bits I’d taken from the flat. “It’s on me. He ought to be locked up, your fella. Locked up.”
Mary in the shelter was the first one I saw, and she got me straight to the hospital. She held my hand all the while, and when I woke up, when they’d scraped what was left of my second baby out of me, she was still there.
Mary didn’t say: If you’d left him, you could have saved your baby. But I was thinking it, and I was saying sorry to the baby.
The police went looking for him, but Antonio was always clever. Someone tipped him off and they couldn’t find him.
I knew he’d come after me, but Mary said I was safe. We used to sit on the fire escape looking out over the city, and she’d say he couldn’t touch me anymore.
I believed her. I believed them all.
And then he found me.
Afterward, the police wanted to know how he’d managed to locate the shelter, because not that many knew where it was, but when he was in a rage, Antonio was capable of anything.
It was nighttime when he came. It was cold and I was sitting up with another girl in the big room with the fire. All of a sudden I heard him screaming my name, and I thought I must be going mad.
“Danae, you bitch, where are you?”
Then he was there, and the other girl ran to get help, and I was on the floor with him on top of me, choking me.
“I’m going to kill you, bitch,” he said. For a moment, I thought: let him. And then I remembered the baby coming out of me and I reached for the coal shovel.
I kept hitting him until his hands fell away from me.
Mary came running into the room with a baseball bat, but she didn’t need it. Whatever I’d done to Antonio was well done by then.
Mara was waiting for the sound of Danae’s car on the drive. It was evening when she finally arrived. She approached the door uncertainly, looking at Mara with anxiety in her eyes.
Mara threw herself at her aunt and enveloped her in a hug.
“Oh, Danae,” she said, “I wish I’d known. How awful it must have been to live with this for so long.”
“I shouldn’t have tried to defend myself,” Danae said, closing her eyes with relief. Mara didn’t hate her after all. “The police would have come, he’d have been put in jail.”
“Only to get out again and hurt you again,” said Mara angrily. She couldn’t bring herself to say Antonio’s name. “You did the only thing you could have done. And that’s why you’ve been punishing yourself all these years, isn’t it? Living alone, keeping away from people . . .”
Danae nodded. “The guilt kills me. Guilt over not having left him sooner, so my babies would have stood a chance. Guilt over what I did to Antonio. No matter what he did to me, I was alive and he was as good as dead. I couldn’t live with that.”
“Have you never considered counseling?”
“Apart from six weeks in a psychiatric hospital because I went into a numb state—catatonic, they called it—no,” Danae said. “They were kind to me in there, but nobody could understand. I had as good as taken Antonio’s life away. His family never forgave me. Never. It was all my fault, they said. Your father and mother have always been wonderful. They understood my need to be left alone.”
Mara hugged her aunt even tighter. “You poor darling, Danae. You’ve got me now, I’ll do my best to help you from now on. You shouldn’t have to cope with all this pain on your own.”
1
7
There was no protocol for meeting your husband’s newly pregnant girlfriend. No book of handy hints. Tess had thought of doing a little Internet surfing before the meeting, but what keywords would she type into the search engine?
Forty-something bitterness versus twenty-something nubile happiness?
What to wear rather than how to behave would have been on her sister Suki’s list for sure.
But then Suki always knew how to dress for the occasion.
Tess was the opposite. When in doubt, she inevitably wore the wrong thing.
And so it was that Sunday afternoon. Tess found herself wearing old fawn corduroy trousers and a dark brown turtle-neck sweater that somehow leached all the color from her face, apart from the two spots of high color on her cheeks. She took down her hair, realized she hadn’t washed it that morning and her roots were greasy, so she clipped it back. What was the point in looking good? Kevin and Claire were a done deal.
But Tess had recently wondered if it was time to make an effort. She had a few gray hairs in the blonde now, and stress had given her purple shadows under her eyes.
Downstairs, she caught sight of herself in the hall mirror. In this ensemble and with clipped-back hair, she felt like the picture of a dried-up old prune who’d let her husband out of her sight and then watched him run away to sunnier, more youthful climes. Was there a fairy tale about that? The Stupid Older Woman? All older women were stupid or evil in fairy tales. Only the young and pretty females were treated kindly. Tess was theorizing whether this could be an idea for Suki in her new book when Kitty appeared with her woolen winter coat on, a purple furry handbag in one hand and an excited expression on her small face.
“We’re having marshmallows, aren’t we?” Kitty asked for at least the fifth time that day. The marshmallows were very important. Kitty liked to try to melt them into the hot chocolate on her teaspoon, drowning each one until it was a puddle of pinky-brown sludge and then sucking it up.
“Yes, with marshmallows,” said Tess cheerily, because no matter how many deranged thoughts were going through her mind, she wouldn’t expose her children to them.