by Alice Keale
It was on one of the occasions when I’d stayed overnight with my parents and was on a train bound for London the next morning that my phone rang. I assumed without looking at the screen that it was Joe, because it was always Joe, now that almost all my friends had given up trying to contact me, having been brushed off once too often with some lame excuse. This time, though, it wasn’t Joe; it was my best friend, Sarah.
I hesitated for a moment before answering the phone. I knew that, after she’d failed to condemn me for having an affair with Anthony, Joe didn’t want me to have any contact with Sarah – or with anyone else. But I longed to hear a friendly voice, and almost burst into tears when she said, ‘Hi, Alice. It’s been weeks since I last saw you. I phoned your mum and she said you were on your way back to London on the train. Which is great, because my mum’s in town and we thought it would be nice to meet up.’
‘Oh, well, I … It isn’t really a good time, I’m afraid.’ I was fond of Sarah’s mother, who had always been very good to me, and in any normal circumstances I would have leaped at the chance of seeing them both. But I wasn’t living in ‘normal circumstances’ any more and Sarah’s suggestion made me anxious.
‘We’re just round the corner from the station,’ she persisted. ‘We can meet you there when your train gets in. Just for ten minutes, if you haven’t got much time. For a coffee.’
Sarah had been my best friend for years. We’d always confided in each other about the things that mattered to us, and she knew I wasn’t the evil person Joe believed – and had almost made me believe – I was. At that moment, more than at any other time in my life, I needed to talk to her. So I agreed.
As soon as I hung up, Joe rang, wanting to know who I’d been talking to.
‘Why would you agree to that, Alice?’ he asked me coldly when I told him. ‘What’s wrong with you? Do you ever keep your word about anything? Or are you completely untrustworthy?’
‘It’s just a cup of coffee with a friend,’ I said. ‘What could possibly …’
‘Have you forgotten what I said, Alice? That you must do everything you say you’ll do. No changing your mind about something, or doing anything without telling me. Have you forgotten about our rules? You’ve broken my trust, Alice. If there’s going to be any chance of rebuilding it, you must stick to your word now.’
‘I don’t understand why agreeing to meet my best friend for ten minutes can be construed as untrustworthy,’ I retorted. ‘Why don’t you want me to meet her?’
If I hadn’t been so weary of going round and round in pointless, never-ending circles, I would have been angry with Joe at that moment. But his voice was calm and he spoke very slowly, as if explaining something to an apparently slow-witted child, as he told me, ‘The reason it shows that you’re untrustworthy, Alice, is because you promised you wouldn’t do anything – and that includes agreeing to do anything – without telling me first. And now you’ve broken that promise. So how am I ever going to be able to trust you?’
Joe had driven to the station to meet me and was waiting at the ticket barrier when I got off the train. And when Sarah phoned me, about ten minutes after the time we’d arranged to meet, he told me to answer it. ‘She’s not going to stop calling unless you do,’ he said. ‘But if you want us to work, Alice, you won’t go and meet her. You’ll get rid of her – quickly.’
Obviously it didn’t matter if I lied to my best friend, or to my sister or parents, I thought. It was just telling lies to Joe that was dishonest. ‘I’m sorry,’ I told Sarah, hating myself for being such a coward. ‘I’m not going to be able to meet up after all. I’m with Joe. I’m sorry to cancel at the last minute. Say hi to your mum for me.’
‘What you mean is that he won’t let you come and meet us. Isn’t that right? Be honest with me, Alice.’ Sarah waited for me to answer, but when I didn’t say anything she continued, ‘We’re really worried about you, you know. Oh, wait a minute … Mum wants a word.’ And before I could stop her she put her mum, Livia, on the line.
I remember Sarah telling me once that, before she met Sarah’s father, Livia had been married, briefly, to a man who was very controlling. I suppose that’s why she’d been one of the first people to suspect what might be going on between me and Joe, and why I could hear genuine concern in her voice when she said, ‘Joe isn’t acting normally, Alice. Have you asked yourself why he isn’t allowing you to see us? Please come. Just for ten minutes. We really care you about. You know that. I’ve known you all your life, Alice, and I know you’re a good person. You don’t deserve to be with someone who wants to control and manipulate you. No one deserves that.’
The whole time Livia was talking to me, Joe was mouthing at me, with increasing impatience. ‘Get rid of them,’ he hissed at last. ‘Just hang up, now. I want to go home. Now, Alice!’
But I didn’t do it ‘now’. I waited until Sarah’s mum had finished telling me, ‘It’s only going to get worse, Alice; not better. Believe me. You’ve got to get out. Please, let us help you.’ If only they’d suddenly appear on the road in front of me, I thought. If only Livia could talk to Joe, she might be able to make him realise he’s being unreasonable. And if that didn’t work, maybe they could drag me away with them, so that I didn’t have to make the decision about whether to stay with him or go.
‘I’m sorry,’ I told her. ‘I just can’t meet you now.’ Then I hung up the phone, and Joe sighed as he asked me, ‘How am I ever going to be able to trust you now, Alice?’
I don’t know why I didn’t do the sensible thing and tell Joe I was going to meet my friend and her mother. He might have shouted at me, but he wouldn’t have attacked me physically while we were in the station. And even if he had done, there were plenty of people around who I could have asked for help. Perhaps the reason I didn’t do what I wanted to do was some misguided sense of loyalty to Joe, or because I was afraid of losing him altogether if I attempted to break the psychological hold he had over me. Or maybe I was so worn down by lack of sleep and by constantly having to account for almost everything I’d ever done during my adult life before I met him that I was simply no longer capable of independent thought or action.
Whatever the real reason was, I returned to Joe’s house with him, to be questioned and accused for the rest of the day and most of the night, and then to be woken up the next morning, after just a few hours’ sleep, by him saying, ‘That blue skirt you mentioned yesterday, I need to know …’
It didn’t matter if I woke up urgently needing to go to the loo, I always had to answer Joe’s questions first.
Chapter 10
As well as sending me almost-home on the train at least three or four times a month, Joe often decided quite late in the evening that he couldn’t ‘take it any more’, and sent me to a hotel for the night. It seemed that, as long as I was with him, he wasn’t able to divert himself from his self-imposed, and ultimately pointless, task of discovering the truth. So when the anger, vomiting, dry retching and lack of sleep became too much for him to bear, he would tell me to phone for a taxi and go.
‘Just stay in a hotel for one night,’ he said the first time. ‘I need a break. We both do.’ Six months later, I’d stayed in the same hotel on at least forty different occasions, for at least part of the night, and Joe had long since stopped pretending that my doing so was for the benefit of ‘us’.
It was quite often one or two o’clock in the morning when Joe told me to leave, but whatever time it was, I always had to be back by 7 a.m., at the latest. Fortunately, the hotel was just a short taxi ride from the house. But it was expensive – particularly as I turned up every time without booking – and, on top of all the holidays and gifts I was buying for Joe, it was yet another cost that helped to deplete my rapidly dwindling savings.
I can remember the first time it happened how relieved I felt as I climbed into a taxi outside Joe’s house and closed the door behind me. Although there was always the worry at the back of my mind that he might hurt himself, it was far out
weighed on that occasion by the prospect of spending a few hours asleep in a bed on my own, without anyone hurting me or demanding answers to unanswerable questions.
I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere or see anyone without Joe’s permission, not even my family or closest friends. So, except for the nights I spent travelling almost home on the train and then back to London, or the very rare occasions when I actually got all the way and slept for a few hours in my bedroom at my parents’ house, I was with him all the time. A few weeks earlier, that might have seemed like a dream come true. By now, though, I felt as though I was living in a nightmare. But as the taxi sped through the empty streets that first time, I knew that every turn of its wheels was taking me closer to the two things I craved more than anything else: peace and an empty bed.
When I arrived at the hotel Joe had stipulated and walked through the rotating doors into its spacious, high-ceilinged reception area, the night porter nodded and said ‘Good evening’. That night I was just like any other weary traveller, albeit one with just a handbag and no luggage. It did strike me later, though, when I’d arrived in the middle of the night on numerous other occasions, that the hotel staff who recognised me might wonder why I was there. But I decided they must get so used to guests checking in at all hours of the day and night, in all sorts of circumstances, that they probably didn’t think about it at all – until the night Joe decided to humiliate me there.
The questions had continued until the moment the taxi arrived at the house at about 1 a.m. on a Thursday morning, and I was very tired as I checked in to the hotel a few minutes later, opened my purse to take out my debit card and saw that it wasn’t there. I’m not the sort of person who loses or misplaces things – I’d certainly never lost my bank card before – and I could feel panic expanding inside me as I searched frantically through my handbag. The man at the reception desk had that ability some people have of being able simultaneously to convey polite concern and complete indifference and, feeling embarrassed, I moved away from the desk, sat down in a chair next to a tree-sized potted plant and tipped the contents of my handbag on to the table in front of me. But the card wasn’t there. Did I leave the card at the house? I wondered. Or maybe it fell out of my purse when I paid the taxi driver. Neither explanation seemed very likely, in view of how careful I always was, but something had happened to it.
I was so tired I couldn’t think straight. And then it struck me that I’d have to tell Joe when he phoned – as he always did, because despite telling me that he sent me to the hotel when he needed a break from me, he still called me incessantly throughout the night. I began to look again in all the places I’d already searched, as if I thought the card might have miraculously reappeared, and when I opened my purse I realised that, not only did I not have enough cash to pay for the hotel, I didn’t even have enough for a taxi back to Joe’s house – which, at that moment, was the last place in the world I wanted to go.
Would the hotel staff let me sit in the lobby for what remained of the night, I wondered, or would I be embarrassed further by being asked to leave? If they did let me stay there, maybe I could walk back to Joe’s the next morning, or maybe he’d pick me up on his way to work and I could drive his car back to his house after I’d dropped him off. I could have phoned a friend and asked for help. That would have been the sensible, logical thing to do, particularly when I knew that Sarah, or any of the other people I used to be close to, would have gone out of her way to help me. But I don’t think the idea even entered my head.
I was running my fingers along the lining of my handbag, hoping there might be a gap in one of the seams that it had slipped through, when I heard someone say, ‘Is this what you’re looking for?’
At first, my brain wouldn’t process the fact that the man standing beside me when I looked up was Joe, and for a moment, as he walked around the table and sat down opposite me, I just stared at him, blankly.
‘Where did you get it from?’ I asked at last. ‘I … I don’t understand. What are you doing here?’
‘I took it out of your purse,’ Joe said calmly.
What I wanted to shout at him was, ‘Oh God, Joe, not another of your stupid, pointless, abusive games.’ But showing him I was angry would have been even more stupid and pointless, particularly in a public place, where I was the only one of the two of us who’d feel humiliated if he started shouting at me. So all I said was, ‘Why? Give it to me, Joe. Please.’ To which he responded by leaning forward, across the table, holding my bank card just a few inches in front of my face, and snapping it in two.
‘What have you done?’ I gasped. ‘That’s the only card I’ve got, and you know I don’t have any cash. What am I meant to do now? It’ll take days for me to get a new card.’
I wasn’t trapped physically by Joe, just psychologically, for whatever reason. So there was no logic behind the thought I had then, which was that, without a bank card, I no longer had any chance of escaping if I needed to. Joe must have been able to see that I was beginning to panic, but he just smiled, without humour or affection, and said, ‘Do you want to come back home with me?’
‘No,’ I wanted to scream at him. ‘I don’t want to go anywhere with you, because I know what will happen when we get there, and I need to sleep. Even if it’s just for a few hours, I need to be alone in a hotel room, where I can feel safe.’ But before I had time to say anything at all, Joe asked, ‘You didn’t come to this hotel chain with him, did you?’ It was a question he’d asked me a thousand times before, the answer to which he didn’t seem able to accept.
‘No, Joe,’ I sighed. ‘No, I’ve told you the names of all the hotels I stayed at with him – long before I met you. I wrote them all down for you, with a list of all the other hotels in the same chains. You know this isn’t one of them. That’s why you’ve let me stay here before.’
I made a huge effort to sound calm and reasonable, in the hope that he’d stay the same way – or at least that he’d remain calm, as he was rarely reasonable. But it was too late, and his voice was loud and angry as he told me, ‘You’re no better than a whore. You know that, don’t you? Only a whore frequents hotels with a married man. Only an amoral person has sex with a man who has children.’
‘Please, Joe. I’m sorry,’ I whispered. ‘Please stop. Those children can hear you.’ I nodded towards to the reception desk, where a woman with two small, very tired-looking children was checking in. But, clearly, Joe didn’t care about those children, and he continued to swear at me and call me names. I felt terrible, even more for the children than for myself, because although it crushed another bit of my soul every time Joe verbally abused me, at least I was used to it, almost.
When I stood up and started to walk away, he grabbed my arm and asked, loudly, ‘What’s the problem, Alice? You didn’t mind screwing around with a man who had children. So don’t pretend you give a fuck about anyone’s kids. People need to know that you’re a whore and a bitch. Don’t you think so, Alice?’
I was crying by the time he finished his tirade, because I wanted to sleep and because I was weary of being shamed and debased. The questions Joe was asking me now were rhetorical – he wasn’t really expecting me to answer them – so it didn’t matter to him that I couldn’t catch my breath as he continued to work himself up into a state of disgusted fury, until he was shouting, ‘You’re a useless piece of shit, Alice. Tell me again why you’re like a prostitute.’
‘Please, Joe,’ I whispered again, glancing towards the woman who was standing at the reception desk with a protective arm around the shoulders of each of her children. ‘Please don’t make me do this. Not now, Joe. Not here. Please.’
I knew as I pleaded with him that there was nothing I could do to divert the inexorable course of his anger. After all, humiliating me was the whole point of what he was doing, although I don’t know if he was conscious of that at the time. He certainly didn’t seem to be bothered by the fact that the inevitable side-effect of degrading me was embarrassing himself. What w
as odd too, although I didn’t think about it until much later, was that every time he harangued me in public he was running the risk of being seen by someone he knew or at least might recognise him.
‘Tell me, Alice,’ he said now, his voice rising in pitch as well as volume. ‘Tell me why you’re like a prostitute or I’ll make sure that everyone in the hotel can hear me.’
‘Because prostitutes do amoral things and I did amoral things,’ I mumbled. ‘Because prostitutes are emotionally damaged, and so am I. Because prostitutes have sex in hotels with married men, just like I have done.’
‘You didn’t say it correctly, Alice. I didn’t like your tone of voice. It didn’t sound as though you meant it.’
‘When will you stop this? Please stop, Joe.’ I was sobbing as I pleaded with him. ‘You know I meant it. You know I’m sorry. If my tone didn’t sound right, it’s because it’s almost two o’clock in the morning and I need to sleep. You need to sleep too, Joe. Please.’
But he was completely unmoved – as he always was – by my tears and desperation. ‘You have no money,’ he said, his voice icily controlled again now. ‘You have no bank card and nowhere to go, except to come home with me. And if you want to come home with me, Alice, you’re going to have to say it correctly. So say it again. And when you’ve done that, there’s something else I want you to do.’
I never understood the transformation that would take place in Joe. As soon as it occurred, I could see it in his body movements, the expression in his eyes and the way he spoke. It was as if a darker version of him took control, a version that was always there in the background, but that some unknown and unknowable trigger would suddenly bring to the fore without any warning – or, at least, with none that I was ever able to detect. I couldn’t work out what was going on in his head either. What was it that made him switch so abruptly from a state of such severe distress that he’d be retching and fighting for breath to violence and vindictiveness? I still don’t know the answer to that question.