by Alice Keale
Joe told me a couple of days later that he had spoken to my boss himself, to explain the situation. I only communicated with her by email during that period, so I don’t know if what Joe said was true, but the thought of them discussing my ‘depression’ made me feel embarrassed and humiliated.
About two weeks later I sent another email to my boss – again at Joe’s insistence – saying that, due to my depression, I had decided that I was going to have to hand in my notice. I really didn’t want to give up the job, but I had struggled to do any work at all on the days when I had gone in, so there didn’t seem to be any alternative.
I had been working on short-term contracts, spending just a few weeks with a particular team before moving on to work with another, and I had already become a bit isolated from the team of people I’d been working with when I met Joe. So although a couple of them did phone, I didn’t pick up, because I couldn’t face the thought of having to explain why I was leaving.
You can’t say someone ‘made’ you do something. I could have said no to Joe. I could have told him that I’d worked very hard to get to where I was and that I loved my job – or had done until then. In fact, I had said no to him countless times, but he’d always worn me down, and I no longer had either the physical or mental energy required to argue a coherent case against abandoning the career that meant so much to me. And he wouldn’t have listened to me if I had.
Trying to find some positive aspect of the decision Joe had made on my behalf, I told myself that at least when I was no longer working I’d have some time alone, to sleep and then maybe to think more clearly. I should have realised he wouldn’t have insisted on my giving up my job if he thought it would result in his releasing even the smallest degree of the control he had over me. So I still got up every morning when he did, after an almost sleepless night of questioning and pleading. Then I drove him to the office, drove back to his house, did the shopping, cleaning and cooking, and drove to the office again to pick him up at whatever time he’d decided to come home – which could be at five o’clock in the afternoon or just an hour after I’d dropped him off. And when I wasn’t doing any of those things, I was writing, then re-writing, the accounts I had to send him by email at intervals throughout the day.
While Joe was at work, every minute of my day had to be accounted for. He sent me texts and phoned at least once an hour, wanting to know what I was doing and where I was. I couldn’t go anywhere without his permission – although, in reality, I was often alone in the house, with no physical constraints to hold me there, and could easily have opened the front door and walked away. But it was as though Joe had built an invisible wall around me, or brainwashed me into believing that such a wall existed. So although part of me wanted desperately to escape from the crazy, sleep-deprived, emotionally overloaded routine that had taken over our lives, another part of me wanted to stay. Because I believed I could fix Joe? Or because I thought I deserved the misery he was putting me through? I still don’t know the answer to those questions.
In fact, I did try to leave, on more than one occasion. But he always seemed to phone just as I was plucking up the courage to open the front door, and by the time the call ended I no longer had the will or the energy required to get away. Then, one early afternoon, I finally made the decision to go. I’d put the few things I might need – money, phone, debit card – in my handbag and was actually holding the latch on the front door when it opened. ‘Where are you going?’ Joe asked, in a voice that made it clear that, wherever I had been going, I wasn’t going there any more. ‘Just to get a coffee,’ I told him. And there it was, another lie told with a conviction that seemed to prove what Joe believed about me was true. Where would I have gone anyway? What I should have done, of course, was go to friends.
After the discovery, Joe had cracked the screen on my iPhone by throwing it on the floor in a rage. Then he’d given me a hammer and told me to destroy the phone, and I’d vented my frustration and distress by smashing it into a thousand pieces, sending shards of metal and glass skittering across the ground like sparks. He’d let me keep the SIM card, though – after he’d copied and then deleted the phone numbers of past boyfriends and anyone else he didn’t think I should continue to have contact with. So I put that into the replacement phone he bought me, which had no internet connection and which he checked every day. Although I still had my best friend Sarah’s phone number, Joe had been so irritated by her pragmatic response to the news of my affair that I didn’t dare try to make contact with her. I rarely spoke to my family either, after Joe’s revelation to my mother, and when I did talk to any of them on the phone I told them we were working things out and that I was ‘fine’, or at least soon would be.
Within just a few days of the discovery I felt as though I had no one to turn to and nowhere else to go. Already, the whole focus of my life had become Joe-and-me, and the more isolated I became, the less contact I had with anyone who might have been able to make me see that Joe’s viewpoint wasn’t reasonable.
My parents would have had me home if I’d asked them. But what benefit would have been gained from going from one place where I was perceived to be an awful, amoral person, to another? So I stayed with Joe, watched him dry retching and vomiting while he tore himself – and me – apart, and believed that things couldn’t get any worse. Once again, however, it turned out that I was wrong.
Chapter 6
One day, Joe told me to write a list of things I could do for him and gifts I could buy that would prove how much I loved him. ‘They have to be unusual and original,’ he said. ‘It shouldn’t be difficult to think of things, unless, of course, you don’t really know me at all.’ But it was difficult, as it always is to come up with ideas for imaginative presents for anyone, even someone you know well. And it was particularly stressful trying to do it under pressure.
In the brief happy weeks of our relationship before the discovery, Joe and I often talked about countries we’d never been to and would like to visit, and others we wanted to go to again, together. One of the places that fell into the former category was Mexico, and taking Joe on holiday there was one of the few items on that first list of which he approved.
Joe’s constant, remorseless questioning, which kept us awake for up to twenty hours every day, wasn’t just driving me to the limits of my mental and physical endurance. It was making him ill too. There didn’t seem to be any answer I could give to any question he asked me that would satisfy him. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, I think he was searching for something he was never going to find, something that probably didn’t really have anything to do with me specifically, with the affair I’d had with a married man, or with the fact that I wasn’t ‘the perfect woman’ he’d told himself I was when we first started seeing each other.
Without the prospect of any other source of light at the end of the long, dark tunnel my deceit had forced us into, it did seem possible that a holiday might be a good idea. I paid for it, for our flights to Mexico City, the hotel we stayed in for the next ten nights, almost every meal we ate and every taxi we took. Using the money I’d saved for a deposit on a flat to try to make Joe happy was all part of proving I loved him and that I was prepared to do anything to make our relationship work. I paid it willingly too, because I was desperate not to lose him and because any price seemed a small one to pay for something that might make him realise how sorry I truly was. What I didn’t realise, however, was that eventually, as my own savings were depleted, I would become financially, as well as emotionally, dependent on Joe, and then his control over me would be complete.
On the flight from London to Mexico City, I almost dared to believe that it was going to work. Joe talked about normal things in a normal voice, the way he used to do when we fell in love. But then, for no apparent reason, he suddenly started firing questions at me that would have been embarrassing even if they hadn’t been asked loudly enough for the people around us to hear. He did lower his voice a bit when some of the other pa
ssengers began to look in our direction, although no one actually told him to pipe down when he shouted at me or asked if I was all right, not even any of the cabin crew.
It was a non-stop flight, which took about twelve hours, but seemed to last for an eternity, and although we did sleep for a few hours when we got to our hotel it wasn’t long enough to make anything seem any better.
It was stupid to have hoped things might be better if we went on holiday: it was like leaving London with a broken leg and hoping to arrive in Mexico City to find that the shattered bone was whole again. There were times during the ten days we were there when we’d be in a beautiful old square or an art gallery or museum – places I’d read about and had always wanted to visit – and I’d think, ‘I ought to be happy here.’ But the reality was that, wherever we’d gone and whatever we’d been doing, I would have been too exhausted to take anything in, and Joe would still have been standing beside me, asking me questions about the past that made it impossible to focus on the present.
While we were there, Joe never left the hotel without me and I wasn’t allowed to leave it without him, although I wouldn’t have done so anyway, because all I wanted to do was sleep. I longed for Joe to fall asleep. When he was awake, so was I, and barely ten minutes ever passed when he wasn’t berating or questioning me. I know that sounds crazy: it seems impossible that anyone could maintain such an intense barrage of verbal abuse for hour after hour, day after day – or that anyone would continue to put up with it. But I seemed to have lost the ability to think for myself. Perhaps that’s what happens when people are subjected to brainwashing or to the sort of torture that keeps them awake for hours on end and then fills their head with illogical ideas that they no longer have the ability to process. Maybe only people who have been involved in abusive relationships themselves can really imagine what it was like.
There were several occasions while we were in Mexico City when Joe opened the window of our hotel room and threatened to jump out. And although part of me knew he wouldn’t do it, I still loved him and was terrified in case he did.
One evening, Joe and I stumbled across a cobbled square with stone steps along one side of it and a crumbling but still beautiful church on the other. It was still quite early, but the square was already thronged with people, almost all of them local Mexicans, who were either dancing or engaged in lively conversation while they waited to be served at the makeshift bar that was doing a roaring trade in beer and tequila.
‘Have you ever been anywhere like this before?’ Joe put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me close to him, so that I could hear what he said above the sound of the music that was being played by a band of four men who were standing on the steps in the opposite corner of the square.
‘No, never,’ I said. ‘It’s incredible. Everything’s so … alive.’
There were no street lamps in the square, or apparently on any of the streets around it. So there was no electric light to pollute the brilliance of the stars that filled the sky above our heads as we walked across the cobbles, found a small space on the stone steps and squeezed ourselves into it. Then we sat there, side by side, sipping the drinks Joe had bought for us and watching the dancers, some of whom seemed to move with the music as easily as breathing, while others laughed and stumbled and rarely hit a beat. There was one thing they all had in common, though – they were having fun. And so, miraculously, were Joe and I.
‘Let’s dance,’ Joe said suddenly, grabbing my arm and pulling me to my feet.
‘I’m a rubbish dancer,’ I told him, following close behind him as he pushed through the crowds and on to the makeshift dance floor in the middle of the square.
‘So am I,’ he laughed. ‘But it doesn’t matter. I love you, Alice. Come on, let’s have some fun.’
We were standing almost directly in front of the band, whose energy surpassed even that of the dancing crowd as they strummed and slapped their instruments and the man playing the double bass spun it around, as double-bass players always seem to do in films.
Joe put his arms around me as we danced and, for once, his body was relaxed and his eyes were full of fun and love, not angry and half-crazed as they normally were whenever he looked at me. I’d just realised that I was actually feeling happy, for the first time in weeks, when the singer in the band tapped Joe on the shoulder, shouted something in his ear and then pointed at me.
I could feel my body tense again, in anticipation of whatever new disaster was about to occur. Then I saw Joe smile and nod, and before I knew what was happening I was being whisked away by the Mexican singer, who twirled and swirled me across the cobblestones and didn’t seem to mind any more than Joe had done that my feet were following some rhythm that apparently only I could hear.
When I looked across the square and saw Joe standing by the steps, still smiling, it was as if all the misery and despair of the last few weeks had simply evaporated and I wished that time would stand still, so that we could remain in the moment forever. I remember thinking as I watched him, ‘We can get back to the way things used to be. Why did I ever doubt that we could? I made a horrible mistake, but Joe gave me a second chance, because he knows, as I do, that we are meant to be together.’
It really was a perfect evening, just like the ones Joe and I had shared before the discovery – until we got back to the hotel and the questioning began again.
The following day, Joe told to me to write a list of gifts I could buy for him while we were in Mexico. ‘They don’t have to be expensive,’ he told me. ‘Just things that prove you understand me.’ But that was far more difficult than it might sound, and he was angry later, when I showed him the list I’d written, because he said that some of my suggestions simply proved that I neither understood him nor loved him.
While we were in Mexico, I also had to write yet more accounts of past events. At some point every day, Joe would lock me out of the hotel room and I’d sit on the sofa in the corridor, trying to separate what was true from what might be mistaken memories that had become confused with reality as my mind had become more befuddled.
The few thousand pounds the holiday cost me was money I’d saved originally as a deposit on a flat, which then became the money I was going to contribute towards the house Joe and I were still going to buy together, despite everything. However, it wasn’t really a holiday at all: we just transported our nightmare from London to Mexico City for a few days, and then took it home with us again.
It wasn’t only on aeroplanes that people tended to look the other way when they heard Joe shouting at me. When he did the same thing in a variety of public places, people rarely intervened. And when they did, I told them Joe was upset because I’d cheated on him, but that I was okay, and no, I didn’t need any help, thanks. I was embarrassed by their concern, which is also why I always refused, at first, to humiliate myself by saying the things to strangers Joe sometimes told me to say, about how I had had an affair with a married man. He always wore me down in the end, though, by arguing and shouting until my embarrassment didn’t matter any more. His was the stronger character, I suppose, and he didn’t seem to have the capacity to feel guilt; whereas I had taken on the mantle of culpability and remorse without giving it a second thought.
For someone who likes to pass unnoticed as much as possible, the attention we attracted when he raged at me in public was another cause of distress for me. It didn’t seem to matter to Joe at all what other people might think, or even that he might encounter someone he knew while he was in full spate, telling me I was a whore and asking me, yet again, ‘Why?’ It was as if his anger was so all-consuming that he became oblivious to the presence of other people. Or maybe he thought his own potential embarrassment was a small price to pay for my public humiliation.
Even in his own neighbourhood, Joe didn’t seem to care that someone might hear him shouting at me. On one occasion he ranted at me for at least half an hour outside a café not far from his house, demanding answers to questions he’d asked thousan
ds of times before. When he went inside to order more coffee, the woman at the next table leaned across to touch my arm and said, ‘You’ve got to leave him. I’m so sorry to interfere, but I had a husband like that – and he ended up becoming very violent and trying to kill me. I know what it’s like to feel as though you can’t walk away. But, believe me, you can, and you must.’
I had been crying already, before the woman spoke to me, and the concern I could see in her eyes made me feel even more alone and defeated. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ is all I managed to reply before Joe came out of the café and the woman turned away, I assume because she knew from her own experience what his reaction would be if he thought I’d been talking to someone without his permission.
I did think about what that woman said to me, and about the fact that she could see and was concerned by what was going on – and Joe hadn’t been anywhere near his worst. But I was already far beyond the point of having any independent thoughts, or of being capable of acting on what was probably the best advice anyone has ever given me.
About a month after the discovery, we were in Joe’s bedroom when he suddenly grabbed me by the throat and pushed me down on to the floor. I can’t remember what triggered it, just that it was the end of another long, exhausting, question-filled day and he was in the middle of a tirade when, before I realised what was happening, he was straddling my body with his legs and pinning me down with so much force I couldn’t move. I tried to prise his hands apart, but he was too strong for me and just kept squeezing, tighter and tighter until I couldn’t breathe.
‘Why are you lying to me, Alice?’ he shouted, his face so close to mine I could feel his hot breath on my cheeks and his spit spattered my eyelids. Then he loosened his grip around my throat and for a moment I thought he’d come to his senses. But instead of standing up and letting me go, he started banging my head on the cold tiled floor, lifting it a few inches off the ground each time before smashing it down again with agonising force so that I could feel the blood pulsing in my temples and thought my skull was going to crack.