The Book of You

by Claire Kendal

  ‘One time,’ he was saying, ‘not on my watch, a woman was crying outside the house, “My babies, my babies, somebody save my babies”. I told you we always go in in pairs, didn’t I?’

  She nodded, wondering how she could be fooling him into thinking she was normal.

  ‘Two firefighters went in for her babies,’ he said. ‘Both men died.’

  ‘And her babies?’

  ‘Turned out her babies were budgies.’

  Clarissa shook her head. ‘You wouldn’t ever go back in, Robert, would you?’

  ‘I don’t take unnecessary risks.’ He took a bite of the lemon cake he’d bought himself, looking like a young boy who’d stolen a forbidden treat, chewing and swallowing with exaggerated pleasure, sighing out his appreciation. He pushed the plate towards her. ‘Except when it comes to dessert.’ There was one fork. ‘Share with me?’

  She felt herself smiling so much it made her jaw ache. She picked up the fork and scooped up some buttercream sprinkled with citrus zest, though she barely tasted it.

  ‘Don’t think I didn’t notice that you only ate the frosting.’

  ‘I always do that. Now you really have discovered my darkest secret.’

  ‘And you know mine,’ he said. ‘I never talk about the work stuff. My wife, she never wants – never wanted – to hear it. I worry that it’s boring.’

  ‘Nobody could think it’s boring.’ She knew she was flattering him with interest and attention and admiration, and that it was working, but she meant it, too, all of it.

  Was her infatuation with Robert as dangerous as Rafe’s was with her? Of course not, she told herself. They weren’t comparable at all. She tried not to think of the eviscerated underwear in her bag.

  She lifted a hand, stretched it towards him, let it hover. He squinted at her, encouraging but quizzical, until she reached the rest of the way to brush a yellow crumb from his chin, making them both freeze for a few seconds, afterwards.

  She was startled by a memory of Henry, wiping a smear of chocolate from her lips with his finger, then kissing her.

  She shook her head, shaking Henry away at the same time, and spoke lightly. ‘Are all firemen like you?’

  ‘Yep. Simple needs. Plenty of meat and potatoes and we’re happy. We’re all the same.’

  ‘I don’t believe that.’

  He laughed. ‘I think you haven’t met many firemen …’

  She laughed too. ‘You’re definitely my first.’

  ‘… or many people.’

  ‘I fear you’re right. I’ll have to enlarge my lists of acquaintances by asking Grant to join me for coffee tomorrow. And you must ask Sophie.’ Grant and Sophie were their least favourite jurors.

  ‘There’s one thing I’m certain about,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I will not be inviting Sophie to join me here.’

  ‘Well, I’ll still be asking Grant,’ she said.

  Tuesday, 24 February, 7.00 p.m.

  This time, there is only my name on the brown envelope. My full name. Typed. No note. No message. Just the photograph. Just the one.

  In my own room, almost naked, limbs pulled taut so my body is like an X, my wrists and ankles bound to the bedstead, a black blindfold over my eyes and a black scarf tied over my mouth. I am still wearing the underwear, but you have cut out the crotch. The stockings and bra have not been moved, but now there’s a pair of scissors next to them. You’ve also added a whip, coiled beside me on the bed.

  All of your deluded talk of love. But the real truth is here in this photo. How you’ve always seen me, how you’ve imagined me from the beginning, what you’ve always wanted to do. Trapping and controlling and hurting. It’s what you are doing to me every day, literalised. It’s how you want me. A blow-up doll who can’t speak or move, whose face is barely visible, who isn’t even conscious – you can do whatever you want with her.

  She can’t possibly say no. As much as you love to hear the word yes, you don’t need to. It makes no difference. You’ll do as you please with or without yes, if you can get away with it.

  I see also that you might have covered my face so you can use the photo. I think of the section of one of my sewing magazines where readers send in snapshots of what they’ve been making. These are accompanied by stories about the occasion the garment was made for, how they went about sewing it, the specialist tools they’ve used or the ordinary household things they’ve improvised with or adapted. Your magazine must have a readers’ section akin to this.

  Maybe that photo was your contribution to your own special community of freaks, with a narrative of all the things you did to me. Should I actually be glad that I can’t easily be recognised?

  I try to tell myself that that thing on the bed is not me, that it’s only my shell, but it doesn’t work.

  I think again of the passage you underlined in ‘The Robber Bridegroom’. The glasses of wine and the burst heart, the display of the woman’s naked body, the salt in the wounds. That is what you did to me. What you are still doing.

  How long did you spend posing me and taking your pictures? I remember your overstuffed briefcase with its locked catch. Now I know exactly what props you carried with you that night. I know where the marks on my body came from.

  I never doubted we had intercourse. The pain between my legs the next morning, and the bladder infection, made that clear. I know now that I must have been tied up when it happened. I only just make it to the bathroom sink to vomit.

  You had the photo all this time, and I never knew, never remembered such a violation. How can I not have remembered? There is only one explanation: there is no longer even the tiniest sliver of doubt in my mind that you drugged the wine.

  I splash my face with cold water and brush my teeth. I shove your disgusting trophy into the bottom of my wardrobe. Not in the cupboard with the rest of the evidence. I know better than to destroy it, but you’re shrewd enough to know that I could never bear to let anyone else see it. Your other photo seems harmless by comparison.

  I turn on my laptop and order a new mattress and bed. I’d been meaning to but now I must. It helps, doing something. The headboard and footboard are solid. No slats. No posts. I pay extra for them to take away the old one. I will continue to sleep on the sofa until my new bed arrives in four weeks.

  Each morning I will pile up the blankets and pillows and put them in the old cedar trunk that had been one of my parents’ wedding presents. Doing this will remind me that the arrangement is temporary, and for night time only. My bedroom will be my bedroom again. But I can never again sleep in my old bed, where you did those things to me, that place of nightmares you won’t let me forget.

  Wednesday

  Wednesday, 25 February, 8.07 a.m.

  You are not at my house so I know you’ll be at the station. It will be too much of a treat for you, seeing my reaction to your latest gift. You won’t be able to resist that. You won’t be able to wait for that.

  I am right. As soon as I get out of the taxi you’re walking next to me. I wish I weren’t right. I wish I didn’t know you as well as I do.

  ‘Do you like the mementos of our night together, Clarissa?’

  I do not look at you or speak. You know I will not. We don’t surprise each other any more.

  ‘We can get more elaborate later, Clarissa. Like the magazine. So much inspiration in that, don’t you think?’

  I make the mistake of glancing at you, briefly. Your lips may be thin and pale but they are clearly glistening, as if you have just licked them.

  You are wearing the leather gloves you wore in the park. I see now that they are like the glove on the cover of your magazine. The skin on my right wrist bristles, remembering the twist of your Indian burn, though the marks and tenderness went over a week ago.

  You lean towards me. ‘You loved it, being tied up like that. I had to gag you, to stop your neighbours hearing. The gag made you even crazier. And the blindfold.’

  I shove my elbow into your
side, hard, satisfied by your grimace of shock and pain. ‘Get away from me.’ The words escape as if I have been holding my breath for too long and cannot stop myself.

  ‘There are other photos, Clarissa. There was a lot of foreplay. I’m considerate that way. Would you like to see them? Do you think the fireman would like them? I know where he lives.’

  I push through the turnstile, not looking back, expecting you to follow. You don’t, but I can hear you, calling out from the other side of the barrier as I turn to walk through the tunnel. ‘I’m only teasing, Clarissa. I’ll keep my souvenirs to myself. You know I’ll never share you.’ You are laughing. It is a rare thing, to hear you laugh, though your laugh is bitter and full of hate and I think you are cursing me with it.

  Clarissa squeezed her eyes shut, but couldn’t stop seeing herself, a nightmare creature from the pages of his magazine or a gruesome S&M film. She forced herself to concentrate and tried to resist stabbing herself any more with the pencil. She wondered if the police looked at magazines like his to try to find criminals and victims, to try to solve crimes.

  She wrote in her index: Betty Lawrence, Forensic Scientist, 146. Annie tapped the paper and shook her head in mock despair at the number of pages Clarissa’s notes were running to. Robert sometimes teased her too; he’d filled a handful of pages at most.

  Mrs Lawrence was explaining DNA profiling. Clarissa imagined crime scene investigators around her bed, taking swabs, snapping more photographs of her. He had turned her into a spectacle, into something grotesque. Somehow, she had to resist letting that overwrite the way she saw herself.

  ‘I examined items of clothing belonging to Carlotta Lockyer,’ Mrs Lawrence was saying.

  Clarissa tried to sit straighter and close down the image of herself. She tried not to imagine the revulsion Robert would feel towards her if he ever saw it. She imagined it displayed to a jury on a screen like the one to her right, and prayed it never would be.

  ‘These included a pair of pink bikini underwear found behind a cupboard in the bathroom of the flat where Miss Lockyer alleges she was held. There was a significant amount of blood staining on the underwear. The blood was Miss Lockyer’s.’

  She imagined her own shredded underwear: their shell as one numbered exhibit, found in her flat; the crotch as another exhibit, retrieved from his house – perhaps discovered in a display case. What would a forensic scientist uncover on his souvenir? She tried to quell her humiliation at the idea of somebody studying the stains on it. His semen on a slide. Her fluids under a microscope.

  Wednesday, 25 February, 1.15 p.m.

  I want to resist hiding. I hate that you make me hide. I am queuing in an over-lit mini market to buy a pot of yogurt.

  I am absurd to think I can do something as ordinary as going to a nearby shop. I am stupid in my desperation to breathe fresh air, just for a few minutes, to walk there and back. I am foolish in my refusal to give up on normal acts. I am feeling very, very sorry for myself, and I know I absolutely have to stop this.

  I hear you before I see you. Your voice is so low it is only for me. Your warm breath is in my ear. ‘I didn’t actually get to use the whip on you, Clarissa. Not properly, anyway, though you did enjoy the beginnings of our experiments with it. Next time.’

  Escalation. That’s what the checklists in the stalker leaflets all warn of. That’s what they all say will happen. When I first read that word I didn’t let myself properly imagine what escalation might feel like, what escalation might mean in real life, the particulars of what you might do to escalate things. I didn’t let myself properly inhabit that word. Your hands on me in the park. Your vile pictures.

  I shove the yogurt onto a shelf as I flee the shop. I am a terrible runner. Within seconds I am breathless and there’s a stitch in my side. People stare as I weave through the crowds, running my ridiculous flapping run through the outside market to rush back to the safety of the jurors’ waiting room. All the while I’m hoping like mad that Robert isn’t among them and doesn’t see. I check behind me as I round the corner into the street where the court building is, panting, tripping and only just catching myself, but you aren’t following. You must realise how obvious it would be that you were chasing me if you came after me at speed.

  It must have been the intensification of the sick terror that was with her all the time now. That must have been what made her think of the Bettertons again. She found a quiet corner of the jurors’ room and dialled. The woman answered.

  It was a pitch; she had an instant. ‘I need to know what happened to Laura,’ she said.

  ‘So do we.’ The line went dead.

  She tried again. ‘Please talk to me,’ she said. ‘Please.’

  ‘Leave us alone.’ It went dead again.

  She tried a third time. There was no answer.

  If they didn’t want to be phoned and asked about Laura, why weren’t they ex-directory? Why had it been so easy to find them? She’d left her number unblocked each time she called, in the hope that they’d be less suspicious of her then, or even that they’d call her back, though deep down she knew that they wouldn’t. So why were they continuing to pick up?

  Her adrenaline was still pumping at the end of the day, as they waited in the annex room for the usher to escort them downstairs. She was trying to reassure Annie, who was wondering why Clarissa looked as if she’d been bleached around both eyes.

  Grant’s booming voice came as a welcome diversion. ‘Why was there so little of Tomlinson’s semen? It don’t make sense. If he came in her face and then she wiped it off on the shirt and jeans like she said, there’d be more.’

  ‘The quantity of semen varies between men. As little as one millilitre is considered normal, and as much as five.’ Clarissa’s voice sounded calm. It wasn’t how she felt. ‘The fact that the forensic people only found a few small areas on the clothes doesn’t mean Miss Lockyer was lying.’ She caught Grant’s eye and felt colour rush to her face. ‘He may just not make a lot of it.’

  Clarissa and Robert had taken to lingering at the end of the court day, then walking out the door together. She did truly enjoy being with him in his own right; the fact that he made her Rafe-proof, that he made her walk to the station entirely safe, was only a bonus.

  She was pretending not to be waiting for him to come out of the locker room. As if it were urgent that she commit them to memory before leaving, she was dutifully reading the stern warning signs above the jury officer’s desk. No jury tampering. No taking photographs. No talking about what happens in the deliberation room because that’s a criminal offence punishable by a fine or even prison – a rule that lasts for ever.

  She solemnly repeated these important precepts to Robert when he appeared. He nodded in mock-stern appreciation at each one.

  ‘Did you see Grant’s face when you started talking about semen?’

  ‘I deliberately refrained from looking.’ That was a big lie. They both smiled.

  ‘They shouldn’t be, but most men would be uncomfortable hearing that,’ he said.

  She wondered if he was right.

  ‘It was an important thing to say,’ he said. ‘How do you know about it?’

  ‘I’m good at human biology.’

  ‘I’m sure you are. But I think there’s more to it than that.’

  ‘Too many failed IVFs. What they call severe male factor infertility.’

  ‘Ouch,’ he said.

  This time her straight gaze was aimed at him as she spoke. ‘I know more about semen than I ever wanted to.’

  He laughed, but then quickly turned serious. ‘It didn’t work?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No baby.’ She tried not to look sorrowful, but feared she did anyway. ‘Henry made me swear never to tell anyone why we needed treatment, but I think the confidentiality clause has expired.’

  It wasn’t a betrayal, she told herself: Robert would never meet Henry; the truth was that she didn’t want Robert to think the fertility problem was hers.

  ‘Bab
ies weren’t what drew us together, anyway. He’s not the kind of man who coos over them. But he agreed to it for me, because he knew I wanted a child so badly.’

  ‘Would you have stayed with him if he hadn’t?’

  ‘I wanted to be with him very much, so yes,’ she said slowly. ‘But Henry made me a promise early on that we’d try for a baby. I’m not sure the relationship could have survived his breaking it. As it turned out, it couldn’t survive his keeping it. He was terrified of how a baby would disrupt his writing.’

  ‘That’s understandable,’ Robert said.

  She nodded. ‘He was secretly relieved each time the IVF didn’t work. It was an unspeakable thing between us, but I knew that’s what he felt.’

  She remembered a note Rafe had sent, just before the trial, now with the other things that she hoped Mrs Lawrence would never inspect. I could give you a baby, Clarissa. Let me.

  ‘I’m sorry for you,’ Robert said.

  ‘I’m not sure I deserve it. I didn’t let myself stop and properly take in how ambivalent Henry was about the whole thing. I was too scared to let myself see it; scared that it would get in the way of what I wanted. I told myself he’d love the baby once it was there, and be glad of it. I got too obsessed. I’d even bought patterns for baby clothes and nappies.’ She rolled her eyes in embarrassment.

  ‘He must have cared for you a lot,’ he said, ‘to have done that for you, if he’s as you say.’

  ‘He’s – He was complicated. But he didn’t want to try any more. All that failed baby-making was too much for him. For us both, really, though I couldn’t admit it then. He felt … bad, and angry – as much as Henry could express such a feeling – watching me take those drugs, seeing what they did to me, when it was all because of him, and for something he didn’t even want.’ She tried feebly to joke. ‘I rivalled Lottie for needle use.’