The Book of You

by Claire Kendal

  ‘You don’t need to be. But I think you’d be able to help yourself better if you calmed down.’ She clearly thinks I’m hysterical.

  There are four pairs of brown double doors in the Great Octagon. One pair bursts open. A middle-aged tourist blunders in, takes one look at me, and quickly backs out, shutting the doors behind him.

  ‘I am calm.’ The words come out as a squeaky croak.

  ‘I can see you made this call in good faith.’ She clearly thinks I’m a crazy time-waster.

  My face is red and hot. ‘I didn’t know who else to turn to. I thought that was what you were there for.’

  ‘You’re obviously distressed. Have you thought of going to see your GP?’ She clearly thinks I’m just plain mad.

  I press my temple against the jutting plasterwork of one of the chimney-pieces. ‘My GP isn’t going to make him leave me alone.’

  Her voice is kind, even apologetic. ‘The police cannot act unless there is evidence that a crime has been committed. From what you are telling me, there hasn’t been a crime. I’m not saying I don’t believe you, but you have no evidence. And as much as I’d like to help, you are not in mortal danger, so I can’t send anyone out to you in these circumstances.’

  George III looks off to the side. ‘Are you saying he has to hurt me before you’ll help?’

  ‘I’m saying that nothing can be done at this stage. There are specialist organisations and helplines that can advise you on how to document persistent harassment from a stalker. You’re going to need to be proactive about gathering evidence, if you want to put a stop to what he’s doing. Get in touch with them. That’s the best course of action you can take right now.’

  I press end on the call and sit for a few minutes in the middle of the scuffed wood floor. Above me is the huge crystal chandelier. I think it might just fall on my head. I get to my feet, my knees stiff and sore, and hurry from the Great Octagon, casting one last look at Queen Charlotte before they find me and throw me out.

  She was relieved to be torn from these recollections by the sight of the court building. Somehow she’d made it, despite being so distracted by bad memories she’d missed the left turning and walked on for twenty minutes before seeing she’d have to backtrack. It was only day two, but she worried that the judge might be so strict about lateness that he’d kick her off before the trial had even begun. Again she practically stumbled into the jury box.

  A ring binder lay on the desk she shared with Annie. Together, they opened it and read the charge sheets. Kidnapping. False imprisonment. Rape. Conspiracy to supply Class A drugs. Shocking, dramatic words. Words that made her wonder how she’d ended up in such a place.

  The prosecuting barrister couldn’t have been more than fifty. The lines beneath his eyes had the slant of a good-humoured man, but Mr Morden looked deadly serious as he turned to the jury box. ‘I’m going to tell you a story,’ he began. ‘A true story. And not a pretty one. It’s the story of Carlotta Lockyer, and what happened to her was no fairy tale.’

  Four of the five defendants were studiously looking down, as if trying, politely, not to eavesdrop on a conversation that had nothing to do with them.

  ‘A year and a half ago, on the last Saturday of July, Samuel Doleman took a ride with some friends.’

  Doleman’s grey eyes were military-straight before him, though his face turned pale. His red hair was cut so close Clarissa could see his scalp. It made him look vulnerable. So did his freckles.

  ‘He drove them from London to Bath in a van. They were on a hunt. Their prey was Carlotta Lockyer.’

  Clarissa remembered exactly what she was doing then. She wondered if anybody else in the courtroom, other than the defendants, could. She had just finished her fourth attempt at IVF. Twenty-eighth July was the date of the last pregnancy test she’d failed. She replayed the tense drive to London early on the Saturday morning to get to the lab for her blood draw. Perhaps she and Henry had even followed the van along the motorway as they returned to Bath that afternoon, Clarissa sobbing wretchedly after the clinic’s call to her mobile, Henry brooding and silent.

  ‘If you turn to the screens, you will see CCTV images of the defendants taken outside the entrance to Miss Lockyer’s flat.’

  Clarissa tried to shake herself back into concentration, willing her heart to slow down. She knew that flat. The building was a ten-minute walk from her own. If Rafe had caught her a few minutes later the previous morning they’d have been standing in front of it.

  Despite the jerky, grainy footage, she could see the men moving about, fidgety and circling, peering through the glass door, banging on it with their fists, shaking the handle.

  She imagined Rafe doing that to her door. Miss Norton would have something to say about it if he dared. Miss Norton was the little old lady who lived in the ground-floor flat. Only Clarissa and Miss Norton occupied the building: the first-floor flat was always empty, an investment property owned by a rich Australian who seldom used it.

  ‘Miss Lockyer, evidently, is not at home. Sadly for her, Mr Doleman and his friends don’t give up easily.’

  The same could be said of Rafe. She tasted her morning coffee, soured.

  ‘They searched for her. They found her. They stalked her. They pounced. They dragged her onto a terrifying journey from Bath to London, into the darkness of their sadistic world.’

  Yet again, she imagined going to the police to complain about him. Yet again, she saw all too clearly what would happen if she did: they’d end up thinking she’d brought it on herself.

  He’d say she liked attention. He’d say she went to his party and wanted to sleep with him. He’d say she invited him home. There was probably CCTV footage of the two of them walking up the hill that night, with his arm around her.

  She thought again of the leaflets’ warnings. If there is any doubt that you are being truthful, it may harm your case and credibility. But when it came to the truth, it was her word against his.

  She was remembering something she usually kept buried. Walking home from school with Rowena when she was fifteen. That strange girl on the seafront who’d punched her in the stomach, grabbed her bag and knocked her to the ground before running off. It had all seemed to happen at once. The only thing Clarissa could do was gasp for breath as Rowena crouched beside her, her arms around her.

  Her parents took her to the police station and made her report the incident, but the sour-faced policewoman clearly thought it was a schoolgirl argument that wasn’t worth her time and kept asking what Clarissa might have done to provoke it. Had she been showing off? Flashing valuables at a girl who was less fortunate? Arguing over a boy? Clarissa left the station with her cheeks bright red and her face burning hot, feeling like a criminal.

  A random act of violence. That was what Rowena had called it, holding her hand afterwards. But Clarissa wasn’t sure. There must have been something about her to draw that girl’s attention. And something about her to draw Rafe’s too. There was certainly nothing random about him.

  Her eyes ached; briefly, she squeezed them shut. Her shoulders were stiff. The man sitting in front of her was annoyingly tall, well over six feet; she’d had to crane her neck to see over his close-cropped brown head and keep Mr Morden’s face in view; it had been like that yesterday, too. After seven weeks of this she’d need a chiropractor.

  The man rose and gave her a small nod, waiting for her to precede him out of the courtroom. It was his stance that she noticed: standing solidly, feet a foot and a half apart and exactly parallel, weight back on his heels, arms crossed over his chest. She’d never seen anybody look so straight but so relaxed at once.

  Any expression of thanks could only be muted in the theatre of Court 12, but it seemed important to cling to small habits of courtesy in such company. She stepped ahead of him with a slight nod and almost-smile, answering his public display of good manners with her own.

  Tuesday, 3 February, 6.00 p.m.

  It doesn’t last. Of course it doesn’t last. It
is amazing enough that the lie about being sick bought me even one day of not being under your eye. It’s only been thirty-four hours, but it’s still the longest break from you I’ve had in weeks.

  You would say it’s a love letter. I call it hate mail. Whatever its name, it is propped on the shelf in an innocuous brown envelope, neatly arranged by the ever alert Miss Norton.

  No other man can do to you what I can. No other man will love you like I do.

  For once, I want your predictions to come true.

  Wednesday

  Wednesday, 4 February, 8.00 a.m.

  When I open my front door you are standing so close I breathe in the scent of your soap and shampoo. You smell fresh and clean. You smell of apples and lavender and bergamot – smells I would like if they weren’t your smells.

  ‘Are you better, Clarissa?’

  Fairness is not something you understand. It is not something you deserve. But I will be fair by talking to you one final time before refusing ever to talk to you again. This morning will be very different from Monday.

  I speak calmly to you, in a polite voice. It is far from the first time I say it. ‘I don’t want you near me. I don’t want to see you. I don’t want anything to do with you. No form of contact. No letters. No gifts. No calls. No visits. Don’t come to my house again.’

  My speech is perfect. Just as I rehearsed. I move away quickly, not looking at you, though you are clear enough in my head to provide an exact witness description.

  You are six feet tall and large boned. Your belly used to be flat, but you must be drinking more because it isn’t now. Your hips have widened, too, over the last month. Your nose is ordinary in the blur of your puffy round face, which has lost its definition.

  More than anything else, you are pale. Pale in mind. Pale in soul. Pale in body. Your skin is so pale you flush easily, going from white to ruddy in a flash. Your pale brown hair is straight and short, not at all thinning. It is unusually soft and silky for a man’s. Your brows are pale brown. Your eyes are pale, watery blue. They are small. Your lips are thin. They are pale too.

  You touch my arm and I shake you off, walking down the path to the waiting taxi.

  ‘I was coming to check on you,’ you say, as if I haven’t spoken at all. ‘Your phone’s still not on,’ you say. ‘I worry when I can’t get hold of you,’ you say.

  With you beside me it seems a long walk through the path of Miss Norton’s wintering rose bushes, but I am at the taxi and must have reached it quickly.

  I open the rear door and get in, trying to pull it closed behind me, but you catch it before I can.

  ‘Move over, Clarissa. I’ll come with you.’ You are bending over. Your head and torso are inside. I can smell your toothpaste. The mint is strong. You’ve probably used mouthwash too.

  The composure I have practised so carefully dissolves. ‘This man isn’t with me,’ I say to the driver, the same one who picked me up yesterday morning. ‘I don’t want him getting in.’

  ‘Stop bothering her. Get the fuck out of my car or I’m calling the police,’ the driver says.

  My mother has told me all of my adult life that taxi drivers see it as part of their job to be protective; they know that’s why women pay for taxis. My mother is often right, and I am lucky with this driver. In my mother’s visions of taxi drivers as heroic saviours, they are always big and burly men.

  This one is a woman, middle-aged and short, but stout and tough and fearless seeming, with beautiful cropped spiky grey hair that I am certain she would never dream of dyeing. She wears jeans and a fuzzy orange wool sweater. She does not show you the warmth and joviality that filled her car during yesterday’s brief journey. She is opening her own door, showing you she’s prepared to enforce her words.

  You withdraw your head and torso and stand just inches from the door as I slam it closed and the driver slams hers.

  You bang a fist on the roof. ‘How can you treat me like this, Clarissa?’

  The driver presses the button to lower the front passenger window, shouts threateningly at you, and moves off.

  ‘Clarissa? Clarissa! I don’t deserve this, Clarissa.’

  I still refuse to look at you. I’m trying so hard to stick to the advice, to do this right. I can see in my peripheral vision that you are running beside the taxi to the end of the street, slapping the trees and lamp posts as you pass them. I can hear you calling my name. The driver is muttering under her breath about what a fucking crazy idiot you are. She is apologising for her language and I am apologising for being so troublesome. We each tell the other that no apology is needed, though I know she is just being nice and mine is. I thank her for being so kind.

  Before I get out of the taxi I take her card: she is a potential witness against you.

  Despite the film of sweat on my back and brow even in the cold of the morning, it has been a fairly successful start to the day in terms of managing you.

  As I move in a daze through the station my new phone bleeps, announcing that I have an email. I look at the screen like a little girl daring herself to stare into a mirror in the dark, frightened that the face of a monster will appear. To my astonishment, the email is from the long-silent Rowena. She’s visiting Bath tonight, and she’s commanding my presence at a French restaurant I’ve never been to but Henry once said was gruesome. I email back, I’ll be there, and two kisses. Then I switch off my phone and step onto the train to Bristol.

  Clearly, the witness box was placed so its occupant would directly face the jury. But still the woman seemed so far away. In front of the jurors was an orchestra pit of twelve barristers in their wigs and black robes. Clarissa had to look over them all to get the witness in view.

  She was extremely thin, almost worryingly frail. High cheekbones. Small straight nose. Rosebud lips. Delicate chin. Softly arched brows. Tiny seashell ears that belonged on a fairy. Her dark blonde hair was in a short ponytail.

  But the closer Clarissa looked, the more she saw that the woman’s ethereal beauty was damaged. Her skin was too thin, too transparent. The firm set to her mouth and the lines etched around her huge green eyes were at odds with Clarissa’s guess that she was in her late twenties. Something had taken an unnatural toll on her.

  ‘She looks like you,’ Annie whispered. ‘She just needs to grow her hair longer and you’d pass for twins. But she’s the mean version. She’s hard.’

  And probably ten years younger than I am, Clarissa thought.

  The woman sipped from the glass of water that the usher poured for her, giving him a weak nod of thanks. Her skin was so drained of blood it was hardly darker than the white gauze of the top she was wearing. The top wasn’t warm enough; she probably had goose bumps. Her hands were shaking as she held the Bible. Her voice was trembling as she took the oath.

  The judge spoke. ‘You are not to infer anything about the defendants from the presence of the blue screen blocking Miss Lockyer from their view. That is a very usual sight in court, simply to make witnesses feel more comfortable. That is all it means.’

  Clarissa nodded agreement up at his high bench. She could see that the others had turned their heads to the left to do the same. She wasn’t sure she believed him, though.

  ‘This witness will need a break every forty-five minutes,’ the judge said.

  The woman nodded gratefully at him and then it really began. Carlotta Lockyer seemed to be the only person in the room. And though Mr Morden was speaking too, and asking questions, he, and everyone else, seemed to disappear. There was only Miss Lockyer’s voice.

  I started dealing for Isaac Sparkle the summer before last, to fund my habit. Within a week I’d smoked it all myself and was money down. I thought if I ignored it, tried to avoid him, it would disappear.

  On Saturday, July twenty-eighth, I was walking home. I’d gone out to shoplift, but hadn’t managed to get anything. There was a white van on my street, partly on the pavement. When I was level with it one of Sparkle’s couriers, Antony Tomlinson, got out the front
. Sparkle got out the back with one of his dealers, Thomas Godfrey.

  Sparkle said, ‘Get her in the fucking van.’ They picked me up and forced me in.

  Sally was in the back seat. She’s a working girl, another user. The van stopped after about five minutes. Godfrey said to Sally, ‘Get the fuck out.’ There weren’t no door handles in back. Sally had to climb between the front seats, over Tomlinson, then out the front passenger door. I was screaming, begging them to let me out too, but they drove up to the motorway.

  Godfrey told me to shut up. He smacked the side of my head. Then he took out one of those green disposable lighters. The flame was on high. He put it to my right earring. I could feel the hoop getting hot, really burning. I was crying. I was pleading with him to leave off.

  We stopped on the way to pick up another man. He got in the van and said, ‘You got her. Good.’ The van driver, Doleman, said, ‘Someone should fuck her up the ass. Teach her a lesson.’

  They took me to a flat in a poor part of London. No electricity. So cold. The only light was from a street lamp outside the lounge window. The boy they’d picked up played music from his phone. They were yelling, ‘Strip off and dance.’ I begged them not to make me. Godfrey punched me in the stomach. ‘Do it.’ I was crying but not proper crying – he’d knocked the wind from me.

  I took my clothes off, and I danced. I can’t describe how humiliated I felt. Like I was an animal performing for them. ‘She ain’t doin’ nothin’ for me,’ Godfrey said.

  ‘We’re gonna teach you some discipline, like my father taught me,’ Sparkle said.

  I had to stand on one leg with my arms out. I was still naked. They was cheering like they was at a football match. Look at her tits wobble. Look at her hairy cunt. I wanted to cover myself, to lean over, but if my arms drooped or I put my leg down I’d be whacked with a broom.

  I wanted my clothes so bad. To stop them looking at me. And also ’cause I’d gone longer than usual without any heroin or crack cocaine, and withdrawing makes you get even colder.