If You Love Me

by Alice Keale

  Sometimes, when I was struggling to believe that things could ever be the way they were, I would remember the night when Joe and I ran up the hill in the park together, then stood in the darkness at the top, his arms wrapped tightly around me as he kissed me and told me he loved me. I thought about it that day, when I was sitting in the taxi on my way back to Joe’s house, and it made me feel strong enough to believe that I could help him finally come to terms with what had happened, and fix what I had broken. Perhaps, if I hadn’t been as fragile as I really was, I would have realised that the situation was far more serious than I imagined.

  Chapter 8

  I’d accepted by that time that everything Joe and I did, even everyday things like grocery shopping, was going to involve me defending myself against his verbal and, now, physical attacks. What was even more surreal, however, was doing things with him like buying a Christmas tree – things that had been special to me ever since I was a little girl – while he kept up a constant barrage of questions about the past. I had always gone home for Christmas; even when I was with Jack I hadn’t spent a single Christmas away from my family. But not long after my very brief admission to the private clinic, Joe and I spent our first Christmas together alone, at his house.

  For two normally quite decisive people, it took us a ridiculous amount of time to choose a tree. We spent ages walking along rows of different types of spruce, fir and pine trees, examining the shape and height of each one until we found one that was perfect in every respect, although perhaps a bit on the tall side for a tree that wasn’t going to stand in the middle of Trafalgar Square! While we were struggling back to the car with it, we passed a woman with a little boy, who pointed at it and said, ‘I want a Christmas tree just like that,’ which made me smile – something I very rarely did by that time.

  In fact, the tree we’d chosen was too big to fit in Joe’s car. So we had to leave the boot open and tie ropes around it to stop it falling out on the way home. We were picking pine needles out of the car for days afterwards, and out of the carpet in the house too. But it fitted perfectly in the living room, when we finally managed to manoeuvre it into the space we’d cleared for it. And it looked beautiful when we finished decorating it, with glass balls and clear white lights.

  Christmas was a stressful time, though – even more so than every other waking minute of every other day – because I knew Joe was expecting the presents I bought for him to be innovative and original, the sort of presents that would prove I wasn’t ‘a shallow person’, he told me. Which meant that even spending a lot of money on them was no guarantee that I wouldn’t get it wrong.

  I can’t remember now what I bought for Joe. I do know, though, that as I wrapped up his presents in the paper I’d chosen so carefully, I felt excited because I was convinced he’d be pleased with them. I was wrong, of course. ‘You don’t know me at all,’ was all he said after he’d opened the first one. And then, later, ‘If you loved me as much as you say you do, you’d have put more thought and effort into choosing the presents you bought.’

  The present Joe bought for me was a SousVide, an expensive piece of kitchen equipment for cooking vacuum-sealed food in a water bath. It wasn’t something I’d ever expressed any interest in having. But I suppose if I had been the perfect woman Joe was trying to mould me into, I would have been as delighted with it as I told him I was.

  I don’t know why I allowed myself to have any expectations about Christmas being different from any other day. I didn’t spend it with my family – who thought I’d stayed in London with Joe because that was where I wanted to be – and I didn’t see any of my friends either. In fact, I hadn’t even spoken to any of them for weeks. No antidepressant has ever been developed that would have made me feel better about what my life had become, and on Boxing Day, when the violence and questioning became too much, I took a handful of tablets.

  I can still remember the feeling of despair that overwhelmed me as I sat on the edge of the bed with tears streaming down my cheeks and swallowed first one tablet, then another, and then three more, before washing them all down with a generous quantity of red wine. The fact that I told Joe what I’d done seems to confirm the possibility that I didn’t really intend to kill myself. So maybe it was just a cry for help. But although he phoned my mother, he wasn’t worried at all; just angry. Mum was distraught, though, not least because she thought it was a recurrence of the depression I’d had as a student. ‘You must call the crisis team,’ she told Joe, her voice like an echo inside my head as I listened on speaker phone. ‘She needs help.’

  ‘Of course I bloody well need help,’ I wanted to shout at her. ‘But I don’t need the crisis team. He does. Can’t anyone see that?’ Mum didn’t know about the violence at that point, or even about the constant mental abuse Joe was subjecting me to. And although I wanted to tell her what was happening, that everything wasn’t quite as simple as it seemed, and that Joe wasn’t the wounded martyr he appeared to be, I didn’t say anything. Maybe I was angry with her because I thought she should be on my side automatically, without my needing to explain. Looking back on it now, though, I suppose she was on my side, in her own way. She was certainly very distressed when she eventually found out the truth about how Joe had been treating me. But when he made that phone call to her, she still believed I was the only guilty party and Joe the only victim in our relationship.

  Calling the crisis team would have been the last thing Joe wanted to do, in case it resulted in the truth coming out. So he persuaded my mother that it wasn’t necessary and that he had everything under control. And because he was very good at manipulating people into believing whatever suited his purposes, I think she felt relieved to know that I was being looked after by someone so capable and caring.

  I did open my mouth to say something when I heard the panic in Mum’s voice that day. But I suddenly felt very hot and sweaty, and the room seemed to be filling up with a dense white fog that muffled Joe’s voice, making it sound distant and indistinct. So instead of trying to speak to my mum, I told myself, ‘It’s all right. Just keep very still and be very quiet. You’re not going to die. It’s the booze and tablets making you feel this way. But don’t worry. Everything’s going to be okay.’ And, for once, I was right – about not dying, at least, although not about everything being okay.

  After Christmas, Joe and I went on holiday to Greece, which was another country we’d talked about visiting together during the early days of our relationship. I hadn’t ever been to Greece before, but Joe had, with his wife – a fact which, oddly perhaps, hadn’t put me off his idea of us getting married there. Even more bizarrely, getting married was still something Joe and I planned to do, a few months after the discovery and several weeks after the first of his violent physical attacks. Not on this occasion, though; this time it was just a holiday, paid for, once again, out of my savings – out of the money I hadn’t had to spend on a month’s stay at a private clinic, I suppose.

  Within hours of arriving at Athens International Airport, Greece had become another place – like Mexico – that I’d always wanted to visit but never wanted to see again. Not because of the place itself, which was beautiful; but because I was even more miserable there with Joe than I was at his house in London. We were staying in a hotel just a stone’s throw from the beach in a village a few kilometres from Athens itself. On any normal holiday you couldn’t have wished for a more tranquil, relaxing and picturesque setting. For me, though, the only difference from being in London was that, as I didn’t speak the language, I felt even more isolated and unable to ask for help, should the need arise.

  Joe’s interminable questioning continued while we were in the hotel, walking by the sea, and visiting the sights in Athens I’d always wanted to see and was now barely aware of. In the evenings, we sat in bars and restaurants, where the crouched intensity of our verbal exchanges was punctuated at intervals by Joe’s aggressive shouting, much to the embarrassment of the people at the tables around us.

&nbs
p; One evening, I think it was the third or fourth after we’d arrived, we were sitting in a bar when Joe started fumbling with a match, trying to light a cigarette. The fact that he liked smoking but rarely did it was another aspect of the tight control he exerted over almost all his actions. For some reason, though, he’d bought a pack of cigarettes earlier that evening, and had already smoked four of them.

  When someone opened the door to the street, a gentle gust of air snuffed out the first match Joe struck. And as I watched him light another, I thought how handsome he was and how I’d give anything to be able to turn back the clock and to be sitting there with him having never met Anthony, and therefore having never told him a lie. ‘If it wasn’t for my affair with Anthony,’ I thought, ‘Joe and I would be sitting here laughing and talking to each other the way we did on our first holiday together in Barcelona, when everything was perfect.’ Instead of Joe shouting at me and demanding meaningless answers to pointless questions, we’d be discussing how many children we were going to have and the dog we were going to get – not a handbag-sized pedigree dog, we’d both agreed, but a decent-sized, slightly scruffy and mischievous mutt that would bound up the hill in the park when we took it for a walk. We’d been so certain we were right for each other, I thought. Surely it wasn’t too late to go back to the way we were then.

  When Joe finally managed to light his cigarette, I held my breath as I watched the smoke curl across the table towards me, knowing that he’d be irritated if I coughed or turned away. Then, suddenly, I realised he was speaking to me.

  ‘I … I’m sorry, Joe,’ I said. ‘I was watching the smoke. What did you say?’

  ‘I said, I want you to get drunk.’

  ‘No. No, I won’t do it,’ I told him, emphatically. ‘You know more than a couple of glasses of wine have a bad effect on me. I did it last night and the night before that because you asked me to. But I’m not doing it again.’ It was true that I’d got drunk on the last two nights, because Joe had coerced and bullied me until I gave in. Then he’d questioned me until the early hours of the morning about things that shouldn’t have mattered to him and certainly hadn’t ever mattered to me. It seemed to have become an addiction for Joe, though, asking me the same questions over and over again, demanding that I answer them every time in the same way, using the same words, articulated in the same tone of voice. But even when I did exactly what he asked me to do, he was never satisfied – any more than any type of addict is ever satisfied by just one more fix, I suppose.

  ‘If you love me, you’ll get drunk tonight. You got drunk for him,’ Joe said. ‘You were drunk that first night, the night you got involved with him. Isn’t that how the whole sordid, amoral affair began? So don’t tell me you won’t get drunk for me now.’ His voice grew louder and more aggressive with every word he spoke, and he was swearing too, emphasising each profanity with furious hostility.

  Although I cried and pleaded with him, Joe remained coldly impassive, as unmoved as he always was by my tears and distress. We were in a foreign country, he had all the money and my passport, and I had nowhere to go, except back to our room at the hotel, where no one would see him become violent and where there would be no one to intervene when he started strangling and hitting me. I didn’t think he would attack me in public, however out of control he might seem to be. So at least I wasn’t in any physical danger while we were in the bar, where some of the people at the tables around us were already glancing quizzically in our direction whenever he raised his voice. Would they help me if I asked them to, I wondered? I thought they probably would. But what was the point of asking for help when I knew I would end up siding with Joe so that he didn’t get into trouble for reacting to the pain I believed I alone had caused him?

  Suddenly, I longed for normality: to be able to respond to anyone who spoke to me, wherever and whoever they were; to have a drink with colleagues after work; to talk to friends about all the mundane, inconsequential things that are part of conversation in normal daily life; and to think about my life before Joe without feeling ashamed because I believed I was a horrible person. Just thinking about all those things and wondering if I would ever be able to do them again seemed to absorb the last remnants of my energy.

  ‘Fine,’ I said to Joe, wiping away the tears with the back of my hand. ‘I’ll have one more drink.’ Because you’ll win this argument like you win them all, I could have said, and because maybe the sooner I drink it, the sooner this night will be over.

  ‘You’ll drink as many as I tell you to.’ Joe’s voice was harsh and cold, although it lightened as he raised his hand to attract the attention of the waitress and added, ‘Now, let’s drink.’

  The more Joe drank, the more persistent and bizarre his questioning became, and the more violent his behaviour. But I didn’t ask him to stop drinking, because I knew that doing so would only make things worse.

  Many, many questions later, we had left the bar and were walking back to the hotel along cobbled streets, which were surprisingly full of people for four o’clock in the morning, when Joe asked, ‘Why did you take your jeans off that first night you spent with him?’

  ‘Because I’m a whore,’ I wanted to shout at him. ‘Because I’m an amoral, unprincipled, family-crushing prostitute. Is that what you want me to tell you?’ But that, too, would have just made everything worse, and I knew already that it was going to be a very long night.

  When Joe suddenly pushed me, I sat down heavily on a stone step beside a doorway and he knelt on the pavement in front of me, pressing my back against the sharp, uneven bricks of the wall as he screamed into my face. I hadn’t ever heard anyone else scream the way Joe did. It wasn’t like normal shouting or yelling; it was more high-pitched, like a verbalised, almost hysterical, cry of pain. He was calling me terrible names, accusing me of terrible things, and breathing hot, cigarette-laden breath into my face until I thought I was going to be sick. Although I tried to push him away, the alcohol he’d drunk and the fury that was never far below the surface of his demeanour gave him an irresistible strength. So I cowered against the wall, clutching my arms around my knees, longing, but not daring, to plead for help from the people walking past.

  Some people did stop and watch us with expressions of concern. But none of them intervened in what must have looked to them like a heated argument between two equally drunk foreigners. Then Joe started biting me, first on my arm, then on my chest and breasts, sinking his teeth into the tender flesh and ignoring my cries of pain and pleas for him to stop. A small crowd of people had gathered on the pavement in front of us by that time, but still no one intervened or tried to help me, although perhaps one of them was responsible for alerting the two police officers who suddenly appeared beside us and asked me, in English, if I was all right.

  I could feel Joe’s eyes on me, daring me to answer. But he didn’t have to worry. What I wanted to say to the police officer was, ‘Please, help me. Can’t you see this man is crazy?’ But I was so shocked and distressed, and so befuddled by alcohol, that I just sat there at the side of the road, sobbing hysterically and pressing the palms of my hands on to the red marks left by Joe’s teeth and the painful lacerations on my breasts.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Joe said imperiously, acknowledging the police officers at last. ‘She’s okay.’ Then he turned to me and said, ‘Come on, Alice. Let’s get back to the hotel.’

  He looked angry, as though he thought I was entirely to blame for the police officers’ presence, because I hadn’t sat there silently at the side of the road while he bit and assaulted me. Seeing the look in his eyes was what made me realise that, whatever happened, I mustn’t go back to the hotel with him that night, where there would be no other people and where I knew I would not be safe.

  Somehow, I managed to stand up, and as I did so one of the police officers took an almost imperceptible step forward, placing himself between me and Joe as he asked me, ‘Can I speak with you – alone?’ I nodded, ignoring the warning look Joe gave me before he allowe
d himself to be led across the street by the other officer.

  ‘What happened to your arm?’ The policeman asked me, as soon as Joe was out of earshot. ‘Are you hurt?’

  Maybe I’m particularly susceptible to guilt. Maybe Joe realised that and used it to his advantage, to enable him to manipulate and control me the way he did. I don’t know why that might be the case, but I can’t think of any other reason for feeling as though I was to blame for almost everything bad that ever happened. I sometimes wonder if Joe could have selected a news report at random about some catastrophic event that had occurred somewhere in the world and then persuaded me to believe that I was responsible for it. I certainly felt responsible for anything bad that happened to him, which was why I was so anxious that night about the possible repercussions for him if I told the truth. Would he be arrested, and maybe end up in a prison in Greece? If that did happen, it might ruin his career, which in turn would compound the harm I believed I’d already done to him. So, instead of saying, ‘Yes, I am hurt. My body is covered with cuts and bruises. I need to get away from this man. I need your help. Don’t leave me alone with him. Please,’ I covered the marks on my chest with my hands and said, ‘No, I’m not hurt. It’s nothing.’

  ‘What is your name?’ the man asked me. ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘My name is Alice Keale,’ I said. ‘I’m from London.’

  He wrote something in his notebook and when he looked at me again there was an expression of genuine concern in his eyes as he said, ‘You looked frightened. You sounded frightened, too. What was going on?’

  But it was too late. The moment had passed when I might have helped myself. My instinct for self-preservation, along with my determination not to go back to the hotel with Joe that night, had once again been swamped by the feeling of guilt that always placed his well-being above my own and made me believe that, if I loved him enough, the nightmare we were living would come to an end. So I told the officer that I was fine. ‘We had an argument,’ I said. ‘It’s nothing really. I’m so sorry to have wasted your time. It was my fault.’