by Alice Keale
‘Stop it, Joe!’ My voice was rasping and barely audible. ‘You’re going to kill me. Please!’
‘Why do you keep on lying to me, Alice?’ He paused for a moment as if waiting for an answer, and then smashed my head on the floor again. ‘You know I’ll find out the truth in the end. I always find out the truth.’
The room was starting to spin, the pain in my head had become unbearable, and in that moment I truly did believe he was going to kill me. ‘I love you, Joe,’ I gasped, forcing the words out of my swollen, aching throat. ‘You said you loved me too. Don’t do this. Please.’
I knew no one was coming to help me, and the thought that I was going to die there that night, on the floor of Joe’s bedroom, filled me with fear and sadness. In fact, I thought I’d given up when something seemed to burst inside me and I began to tug at Joe’s arms with a strength that must have been born of desperation. Somehow – perhaps because he, too, thought I’d given up, so my attack took him by surprise – I managed to loosen his grip on my throat just enough to be able to take a deep breath and scream ‘Help! Help me!’ as loudly as I could.
It was only a few seconds before he’d regained his hold on me, then he bent down until his face was touching mine and hissed, ‘Are you trying to make the neighbours hear you, Alice? Are you trying to get me into trouble? Do you want me to go to prison? Is that what you want? To ruin me?’ And as he spat the words at me, he punctuated each one by lifting me up by the neck and then crashing my head down on the floor.
‘Yes, I want someone to hear me,’ I told him, when I could speak again. ‘I want someone to stop you, Joe, because if they don’t, you’re going to kill me.’
I don’t know whether any of the neighbours did hear my cries for help that night. But no one came. So maybe Joe would have killed me if I hadn’t taken the opportunity when it arose and tried to escape. Or maybe, despite the wild, crazed look in his eyes, he was actually in control of his actions the whole time.
When he stopped banging my head on the ground and started shouting at me that I was a whore and a liar, I glanced sideways and realised that we were little more than an arm’s length away from the bedroom door. That’s when the thought struck me that if I could somehow manage to push him off me I might be able to run down the stairs and open the front door before he caught up with me. ‘You can do this, Alice,’ I told myself. ‘You have to get up off the floor and run to where there are people who will help you.’
So while Joe continued to scream at me, I relaxed my body and lay completely still for what felt like a very long time but was probably only a few seconds. Then, channelling all my anger into physical energy, I pushed him as hard as I could, catching him off guard so that he toppled backwards on to the floor. Somehow, despite the fierce pain in my head, I managed to stumble down the stairs and into the hallway, whispering aloud to myself as I ran, ‘Damn it, Alice. Move! Get out. Don’t faint now. You can do this. You have to do this.’
I was almost within reach of the front door when Joe grabbed me from behind and I fell, face down, on to the pale blue woollen rug that almost covered the tiled floor of the hallway. I just managed to turn over on to my back before he fell on top of me and started slamming my head on the ground again. At least this time the blows were slightly cushioned by the rug, although it still felt as though my skull was going to crack.
I’d known that I would have only one chance to escape, and having failed in the attempt I really did believe that I was going to die. I can remember looking up at the very expensive, and hideous, chandelier above Joe’s head and feeling almost resigned to what was about to happen. Then something seemed to snap inside me and I started shouting at him, ‘You’re insane, Joe. You’re evil. A psychopath.’ But he was so lost in his own world of rage and resentment that I don’t think he even heard me. And then, suddenly, he stood up and walked away, without saying a word.
When I sat up, very cautiously this time, the pain in my head was intense and I could feel the veins in my temples pulsating as if they were about to erupt. But it wasn’t until I looked in the bathroom mirror and saw how swollen my face was that I realised just how close I had come to being seriously – possibly even fatally – injured. I was running my finger very gently and tentatively over the red marks and grazes on my neck when Joe came into the bathroom and stood behind me. He didn’t apologise for what he’d done, either then or at any other time, but his anger seemed to have evaporated and he was completely calm, without even the slightest trace of the apparently uncontrollable temper that had gripped him for the last hour or more.
‘I’m frightened, Joe,’ I told him, wincing as I brushed away the tears that stung the broken skin as they rolled down my cheeks. ‘My head really hurts and I don’t feel well at all. What if an artery has burst in my brain and I have a stroke? I think I need to go to hospital and get my head looked at by a doctor.’
‘Don’t be silly, Alice,’ he said, in the tone of voice an adult might use in response to an anxious child with an over-active imagination. ‘Of course you don’t need to see a doctor. That’s just nonsense. Now come to bed.’
I thought Joe’s attack on me that day had been an aberration, the cumulative result of lack of sleep, not enough to eat, and driving himself – as well as me – mad with his questions and unremitting analysis of every meaningless detail of every minute I’d ever spent with Anthony. It wasn’t an aberration, though. It was the beginning of a new phase in our already supremely dysfunctional relationship that added physical violence to the armoury of weapons Joe was already using against me. But, even then, I didn’t walk away. I suppose I’d been completely brainwashed by Joe and felt so guilty that I believed I deserved to be punished for what I’d done, and I was so exhausted I don’t think I had enough energy to leave him.
He was violent again the next day, and then quite regularly after that. Sometimes he pushed me up against a wall and held me there by my throat; sometimes he banged my head on the floor, as he’d done on that first occasion; and sometimes he bit me. In fact, some of the worst injuries he inflicted on me were bites – mostly on my arms, breasts and thighs – and the marks made by his teeth were clearly visible among the scratches and bruises that often covered my body.
Joe didn’t seem to care how much he hurt me. It was as if he was completely impervious to my sobs and cries of pain, and to the fear he must have been able to see in my eyes whenever he assaulted me. Then, one night, he went too far and really scared me, banging my head against the bedroom wall again and again, until the room began to spin and I could feel my body going limp. What frightened me even more that night than the thought that I might lose consciousness, or that a blood vessel in my brain might burst, was the glazed, blank expression I could see in Joe’s eyes, as if he wasn’t really aware of what he was doing and couldn’t hear me pleading for him to stop. Fortunately, he did stop, and when he released his grip around my throat I can remember curling up on the floor, where I must have fallen asleep.
Joe behaved the next morning as if nothing had happened. But I was shattered, and my head was thudding. So after I’d driven him to work I went back to the house, crawled into bed and went to sleep.
It was almost two in the afternoon when I woke up again, and for a while I just lay there with the duvet pulled over my head, wishing I could sleep forever – until the realisation finally dawned on me that I had to leave.
I think I’d known for some time that Joe was dangerous. What I hadn’t ever wondered about before that day, however, was how anyone could hurt someone they loved the way he hurt me and then simply walk away, without any apparent sense of remorse or regret. Joe often said that what I’d done had broken him. Well, now I was broken too. So what was the point of trying to fix him when I couldn’t even fix myself? I was tired of being frightened, and I knew it was time to accept the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to make everything perfect again, the way it had been for a few short weeks after we first met.
I had tried to put
things right, to convince Joe I loved him and make him understand that the only reason I’d lied was because I was so afraid of losing him. But even if he was right and my affair with Anthony was unforgivable, I didn’t deserve to be punished the way he was punishing me. No one deserved that, whatever they’d done. And with that realisation came an awareness of the fact that I needed help. Pushing back the duvet, I levered myself up and off the bed, then picked up the crumpled dress I’d worn the previous day and pulled it, very carefully, over the lumps and bruises on my head.
I’d just dropped my phone into my handbag when I thought I heard the sound of a key turn in the front door. Clutching the bag to my chest like a shield, I held my breath and listened. It was too late to wish I’d left earlier, instead of going back to bed. But it was all right; it was just my imagination. It couldn’t have been Joe anyway: I wasn’t due to pick him up from work for another couple of hours, and he would have phoned if he was coming home earlier.
I was still standing in the middle of Joe’s bedroom when I heard the door open behind me and he said, in a soft, cold voice, ‘Hello, Alice. I thought I’d come home and surprise you.’
It didn’t even cross my mind that it was just a coincidence – bad timing on my part; good timing on Joe’s. I thought he knew what I’d intended to do that day, and that he would always know, so there was no point trying to escape. In fact, for some reason based on twisted logic, I felt guilty for even having thought about leaving him.
Chapter 7
I don’t think I can have realised at the time how vulnerable I was when I met Joe, in ways and for reasons I still don’t entirely understand. It was partly due to the depression, I suppose, and to having my confidence so badly shaken when Jack left me. I assume that was why I’d got involved with a married man, although I know it isn’t any excuse. The question I was to ask myself later, however, was this: was I so desperate to be loved that I closed my eyes to the fact that, during those first few weeks, Joe was, quite literally, too good to be true?
Although, at first, he just wanted to know about my relationship with Anthony, he then started questioning me – over and over again – about every boyfriend I’d ever had and every man I’d been on a date with, even once. I’d try to make him see how pointless his questions were by asking him, ‘How could it matter to you where I went on a date with a man I didn’t ever go out with again, long before I even met you?’ But he’d just say something like, ‘If you had told me the full truth immediately, I could have dealt with it. I’m staying with you because I love you and because I believe we’re supposed to be together. I gave you everything, Alice, and in exchange you made me ill. Well, now you’ve got to make me better.’
On the days that Joe didn’t go in to work, he would question me for hours on end. And when he was at work, I spent an increasing amount of time writing accounts of every detail of my relationship with Anthony and of every other man I’d ever dated. I didn’t just write a paragraph or two; I filled page after page with dates, times, what I was wearing, where we went, what we ate, descriptions of restaurants and hotel rooms, details of every single sexual act, whether or not I’d had an orgasm, what happened afterwards … It was crazy – crazy that Joe told me to do it and perhaps even crazier that I did.
There were many reasons why I hated writing those accounts, including the fact that I’d always been a very private person and the last thing I’d have wanted to do in any circumstances was reveal details of something I was ashamed of. Sometimes, I tried to make Joe understand that I couldn’t remember some of the things he asked me about. ‘When you keep insisting that I describe some detail I’ve forgotten,’ I told him, ‘you’re forcing me to lie and make something up.’ But he would always say the same thing: ‘I don’t accept that, Alice. You will remember. You’re just not trying hard enough. How could anyone forget even the smallest detail of something so abhorrent?’
I lost count of the number of times Joe threw me out of the house quite late in the evening and I’d have to sit in the small car park that served some of the houses on our side of the street until I remembered something I hadn’t mentioned in a particular account before – ‘a new truth’, he used to call it, although, eventually, the only way I could satisfy his expectations was by making up ‘a new lie’. The problem was, if he ever caught me out in a lie, or if I misremembered some minor detail that I later corrected in one of the many updates I had to write of almost every account, I had to do a forfeit.
Joe was always coming up with new ideas about things I could do to prove I loved him. And however inexplicable or bizarre they might seem, I did them all, either because I really did believe that, this time, it would finally be the proof he needed, or because I was afraid of him.
One of the most humiliating things he made me do – on many, many occasions – was run through the streets in the middle of the night, wearing only my underwear or, sometimes, nothing at all. One night I was crouching behind the low stone wall that bordered the car park, naked and with my heart thudding as I checked to make sure the street was empty before I set off, when Joe crept up silently behind me and pushed me, so that I fell on to the gravel, cutting my knees and the palms of my hands quite badly. He always gave me his phone after that – there was no camera on the one he’d bought to replace my iPhone – and I had to prove that I’d run to the end of the road by taking a photograph of the pub or of a particular tree that had flowers growing around its base.
There would be a time limit too, which heightened still further the huge anxiety I always felt, because it meant that if I did hear footsteps while I was checking the street, I never knew whether the greater evil would be to risk being seen or not getting back to the house by the appointed time. It’s strange when I think about that now, that I was more afraid of Joe than I was of running naked through the streets of London in the early hours of the morning.
Fortunately, the man who stepped out of the shadows in front of me one night and then staggered after me was so drunk that I managed to outrun him. I was very frightened, though, and by the time I reached Joe’s house the soles of my bare feet were bruised and bleeding.
I didn’t blame the drunk man for pursuing me that night, or for scaring me so badly. Even someone completely sober would probably have reacted in some way to the sight of a naked woman running through the streets of London in the early hours of the morning. The only person I blamed for anything that happened to me at that time was myself, because of what I’d done to Joe that had turned him from the perfect boyfriend into a relentless interrogator and tyrannical bully.
On another night I thought I heard someone walking towards me and had darted into a garden, where I was standing, listening, with my back pressed against the wall, when I saw a flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye. It was well past midnight and every house in the street was in darkness. But when I turned my head towards the house, I realised I was being watched.
There were no lights on in the house, but the face of the woman looking out of the uncurtained window was sufficiently illuminated by the yellow glow of a street lamp for me to be able to see the contours of her gaunt cheeks and the dark circles under her eyes. I could hear the blood pounding in my ears and for a moment I thought I was going to faint. Then I moved my head and the woman moved hers, which is when it dawned on me that there was no one watching me, and that the face I could see was the reflection of my own. For a split second I felt a sense of relief, until I glanced down at the watch Joe had given me, which he insisted I must wear at all times and which hung, heavy and loose, around my wrist, and realised I had just four minutes to get to the pub two streets away, take a photograph and run back to his house.
I could feel panic rising up from the pit of my stomach to form a solid lump in my throat. Then, suddenly, I felt angry. I wanted to shout into the dark silence of the night, ‘I give in. You win, Joe. I can’t do this any more.’ But, even as the thought came into my head, I knew I would do what Joe had told me to do. Becaus
e I always did, and because I had just two options: I could do it now or I could do it later, after hours of relentless questioning, by which time both my mind and my body would be bruised and exhausted.
‘Maybe this time,’ I told myself as I turned my back on my reflection in the window, ‘when I get home and show Joe yet another photograph that proves I’ve completed the task he set me, he’ll believe I really love him and he’ll forgive me.’
In comparison to the physical assaults, all the lists, letters and detailed accounts of past events Joe made me write should have been insignificant. In fact, they wore me down almost as much as the violence did. I had to write a letter to him every day, telling him why he was so special and what new sacrifice I was going to make to prove how much I loved him. When he read the letters, he criticised almost everything I’d written in them. He would accuse me of repeating myself and say things like, ‘Am I supposed to believe that you love me more than you loved the married man when all you can think of to write fills just two sides of A4 paper?’
To be constantly trying – and always failing – to please Joe was exhausting and demoralising, and I’d begun to wonder if it was ever going to be possible to prove how sorry I was for what I’d done and how much I loved him.
And then there were the rules. When Joe first mentioned them as a specific entity, he talked about them as though they were the result of a joint decision, something we both thought would be useful. ‘We need a set of rules about how we will both act,’ he said. ‘Don’t you agree, Alice? What do you think the first one should be?’ But there were no joint decisions by that stage, and although the Alice who’d existed before the discovery might have laughed at the suggestion that one partner in a loving relationship should have to abide by rules and regulations set by the other partner, I knew he wasn’t joking.