by Alice Keale
Although I believed for a long time that I was entirely responsible for whatever was wrong with Joe, I realise now that there was something latent within him long before we met, the release of which would sooner or later have been triggered by something I said or did. What I could never come to terms with, however, was the fact that everyone who worked with him or knew him in his professional persona respected him, because not only was he successful in his job, he was also always charming, thoughtful and kind to them – as he had been to me on the day after I’d been trapped in my flat by the rioting in the streets. No one who knew Joe at work would have recognised the man he became whenever his control snapped – if that’s really what happened, because I did begin to wonder if the abusive side of his character was actually just as controlled as the respectable, compassionate side.
What was indisputable was that Joe was an intelligent man. So why didn’t he ever try to rationalise what he was doing, or realise there was no excuse for his behaviour towards me? In my more rational, clear-thinking moments I knew there was no justification for it, that nothing I had done warranted being treated the way he treated me. For some reason, though, I had become brainwashed by him into believing that it was my fault that the man I’d loved – still loved, despite everything – had been transformed from the perfect partner into a ranting, vicious opponent.
As we stood in the lobby of the hotel that night, watched warily by the night staff at the reception desk and by the occasional, late-arriving guest, I felt the last remnants of resistance draining out of me, like air escaping from a deflating balloon, as I asked Joe, very quietly, ‘What is it you want me to do now?’
There was a nasty, sneering look on his face as he answered, ‘After you’ve explained to me again – as though you mean it this time – why you’re like a prostitute, I want you to run naked through the lobby of this hotel and to the car outside, where I’ll be waiting to drive you home.’
‘I won’t do it,’ I told him, rallying for a moment and almost hating him for the callousness of his spite.
But half an hour later, worn down by his insistence and light-headed from lack of sleep, I did what Joe had told me to do. Or, at least, I walked from the cloakroom across the lobby in bare feet, clutching the tight bundle of my clothes in my arms and dressed only in my coat, which I kept closed until I reached the revolving door and stepped out into the night, where Joe could see me.
When we got back to Joe’s house, he locked me out. It must have been three or four in the morning, I didn’t have a debit card or any cash, and, in my mind, I didn’t have anywhere else to go. So I’d resigned myself to the fact that I was going to have to sit on the pavement for what was left of the night, in the hope that Joe would eventually relent and let me in, when I suddenly remembered that I hadn’t actually closed the account I’d had with a taxi company I’d used a lot for work. I told the man who answered the phone that I’d locked myself out of the house, my boyfriend was away, and I needed a taxi to sit in for the next few hours until he got home. It seemed like a brainwave at the time – one that, in any other circumstances, might have made me feel rather pleased with myself. Unfortunately, though, and less impressively, it didn’t even cross my mind to phone a friend.
When the car came, I lay down on the back seat and dozed – between phone calls from Joe. I don’t know what the taxi driver must have thought – I was way beyond the point of worrying about it. But he didn’t give any sign that he’d thought about it at all, and just sat listening to the radio until Joe said I could go home, at about 6 a.m.
Joe always got what he wanted. That probably sounds like a very feeble excuse for the fact that, ultimately, I always gave in to even the most humiliating and unreasonable of his demands. I can understand why people might think that in some deep, dark part of my psyche there lurks an exhibitionist who actually got a kick out of running naked through the streets of London and being shamed and embarrassed in public. That isn’t true, though, as anyone who really knows me could confirm. I know now that the real reason I did those things was because I wasn’t in my right mind: I really believed I’d been entirely responsible for breaking Joe, and that I could fix him. It might take months for that to happen, but when it did, he would love me again and we’d have the sort of perfect relationship I hadn’t thought was possible until I met him.
The problem is, I expect Joe thought he was sane too and that he was only doing what I’d made him do by having an affair with a married man and then lying about it. I suppose the difference is that I just wanted Joe to love me, whereas I think his reasons for behaving the way he did were far more complicated. Perhaps they included the desire to punish me for what the woman who’d had an affair with his father had done, when Joe was just a little boy, and for all the unhappiness of his childhood.
Whatever the explanation, it wasn’t just in his dealings with me that Joe was used to achieving whatever he set out to achieve. Part of the reason he was so successful at work, for example, was that when he decided what he wanted he charmed people into doing what was required for him to get it. And if that didn’t work, he would manipulate, bully, even coerce them.
One morning, after I’d slept for four or five hours at the hotel – interrupted at intervals by Joe’s phone calls – I accidentally left behind a locket and chain he’d bought for me before the discovery. Joe insisted on my wearing it all the time, even at night, but I did take it off sometimes, when I slept alone at the hotel, because it often pressed into my collarbone and woke me up.
Within seconds of my arriving back at the house on that particular occasion, Joe noticed I wasn’t wearing the locket and went ballistic. He seemed to think I’d had some deceitful reason for removing it, although I think making me wear it all the time was just a control thing, and he didn’t actually believe that. He kept asking me why I’d taken it off, and although he isn’t the sort of person who believes in fate, he said that if I didn’t find it, it would be like a sign that our relationship wasn’t going to work.
I knew I must have left the locket and chain on the table beside the bed in the hotel room, and couldn’t believe I’d been so stupid. When I phoned the hotel – which I did immediately – nothing had been handed in. So I went back and asked if I could search the room, but still didn’t find it. I even spoke to the guy who’d cleaned the room, who suggested it might have got folded up in the sheets when the bed was stripped and gave me the name and phone number of the laundry company. But it hadn’t been handed in there either.
I didn’t know what else I could do after that, so I went back to Joe’s house, where he ranted and raved at me for a while, telling me that if I didn’t find the gift he’d given me, everything would be over between us. Eventually, though, he drove me back to the hotel, where I asked to speak to the manager and told him that the items I’d lost were of enormous sentimental value and very special to me, as well as being totally irreplaceable.
In the end, I think it was the fuss I was making rather than any feelings of sympathy that prompted the hotel manager to agree to let Joe speak to the guy who’d cleaned the room – ‘In case he’s remembered something since this morning,’ Joe said, with his brightest, most charming smile.
Joe’s attitude as he talked to the man who’d cleaned the room was equally persuasive but otherwise totally different. Without accusing him openly, or even hinting at the fact that he thought the man might be implicated in any way, Joe’s underlying threat was only very thinly veiled as he told him how important the locket and chain were to me and how, for that reason, he was going to have to get the police involved.
‘I don’t really want to do that,’ he said, his face as expressionless as his voice. ‘I know that no hotel wants police poking around, asking questions and upsetting their guests. And I certainly wouldn’t want anyone to lose their job because of it. But I don’t see that I have any choice. Unless, of course, the items were to turn up before the end of the day.’
We’d been back at Joe’s hou
se for less than an hour when my phone rang. It was the hotel manager, who told me, ‘The cleaner had a more thorough search and he’s found your locket and chain in the cleaning cupboard.’
Both items were made of quite high-carat gold and could have been sold for a reasonable amount of money, which is why I thought they’d been lost forever. But Joe didn’t seem to be surprised at all when I told him they’d turned up. As I say, he was used to getting what he wanted.
Chapter 11
One day, seven or eight months after the discovery, I was standing in the hallway of Joe’s house when, in an unguarded moment, I glanced at my reflection in the mirror. I wasn’t supposed to look in mirrors. Joe said he found it ‘destabilising’, ever since he’d seen a photograph I’d sent to Anthony in an email, of me standing in front of one, naked. I’d taken it long before I met Joe, and had been ashamed of it almost immediately, so I don’t know why I didn’t delete it. But although I knew it was a mistake, it was my mistake, from the past, and it had nothing to do with Joe. Apart from anything else, I couldn’t understand why he was so masochistic: if our roles had been reversed I wouldn’t have wanted to know any of the details of Joe’s previous relationships. Obviously he felt differently.
‘If it upsets you so much, you shouldn’t have read my emails and texts,’ I told him one day, when desolation had made me brave. ‘They were nothing to do with us. I wrote them before I even knew you. You had no right to read them.’ But his response was the same as it always was when I tried to argue with him: I had brought the past into our lives and, in doing so, had made every aspect of it his concern.
The result in this particular instance, with regard to the photograph, was that he had forbidden me to look at myself in any mirror. And because I was always very afraid of doing anything that might trigger another horrible, ugly conversation about the past, I did what he told me to do. It didn’t stop the questions, though – Joe didn’t really need any specific trigger to set him off.
‘Why did you send him that photograph, Alice?’ he would ask me. ‘What were you thinking, sending something like that to a married man? What sort of immoral, unprincipled person does something like that? How many photographs did you send him, Alice? Think carefully before you answer that question, because I will discover the truth. And if I find out you’ve lied to me, I’ll kill you.’
Now, months later, I’d looked in the mirror without thinking, and the questions and accusations began again, with Joe suddenly shouting at me, ‘It repulses me to think about that photograph. It makes me sick to my stomach when I think that the woman who said she loved me could have done something so depraved.’
‘I’m leaving you,’ I told him, blurting out the words before I even realised I was going to say them. ‘I can’t do this, Joe. I’ve tried. I’m sorry.’
‘You can’t leave me!’ Joe sounded more shocked than angry. ‘Not after everything I’ve gone through for you. You’ve made me this way, Alice. I wasn’t like this when we met. You know that. You said yourself that our relationship was perfect. You’ve made me ill.’
I think he really believed what he was saying. No, I don’t think he did; I know he did. He truly believed that he had been a normal, well-adjusted, sane man until I came into his life, with my lies and deceit and affairs with married men, and transformed him into the violent, controlling, abusive monster he didn’t even realise he was.
‘It isn’t my fault,’ I told him. ‘I haven’t done this to you, Joe. I’m sorry I lied. You know I am. You know I’ve tried to make it up to you in literally thousands of different ways. But nothing I did could ever justify what you’re doing to me.’
‘It is your fault – you know it; even your mother knows it.’ For a moment, he looked like a little boy, indignant at having been accused of something he hadn’t done. ‘But there is something you could do, Alice. You did say you’d do anything for me.’
I felt my stomach tighten. What could he possibly have thought up for me to do that I hadn’t already done? I’d given up my job, my friends and my family for him; I’d spent most of my savings on holidays and expensive gifts for him; I’d streaked through the night innumerable times and humiliated myself in a hundred other debasing, soul-destroying ways. Surely, if none of those things had provided him with the proof he said he needed of the fact that I loved him, there was nothing else I could do.
I was so used to crying by that time, I didn’t even realise I was doing it as I stood in the hallway of Joe’s house, with my shoulders hunched and my back to the mirror, waiting for whatever obscene new demand he was going to make of me.
‘I want you to cut your hair,’ he said at last. ‘You told me some time ago that you’d do it if I asked you to. And now I do. I want you to cut it all off.’
I think it had been just a couple of weeks after the discovery that Joe had asked me if I’d be willing to cut off all my hair to prove I loved him. When I’d said yes, I hadn’t thought for a moment that he really meant it. It felt as though, all those weeks earlier, Joe had quite deliberately laid a trap, which was now snapping shut around me.
‘No. I won’t do it,’ I said, raising one hand instinctively to touch the long hair I used to be proud of, but that was now usually a tangled mess, because brushing it required more energy than I could muster.
‘But you gave me your word, Alice.’ As he said this, Joe sat down on the stairs and clasped his hands around his knees. ‘Do it and I’ll marry you. And then we’ll never talk about the past again. I promise.’
For a moment, I tried to imagine what it would be like to be married to the perfect version of Joe, to be free of the past and never have to talk about it again, to wake up happy every morning and make plans for our future together. I would do anything to fix the mess I’d created and claw back what we’d had for those few brief weeks before the discovery. Then the fantasy faded, reality returned and I knew that it would never be over, whatever Joe promised, or even truly believed. There was nothing I could do, no sacrifice I could make, that would be enough.
‘No,’ I said again, more firmly this time. ‘I won’t do it, Joe. It’s pointless and crazy.’
Three hours later, worn down by his persistence, I stood looking in the bathroom mirror – with Joe’s permission this time – at the jagged line of hair that just covered my ears. As he was hacking at it with a pair of nail scissors, Joe had promised it would be the last thing he ever asked me to do. It wasn’t, of course, and as soon as he’d finished cutting my hair into an uneven, crazy-looking bob, he said he wanted me to cut it all off. I don’t know why I even bothered to argue about it. It was only hair after all, and the sooner I did what Joe wanted me to do, the sooner I could go to bed and sleep.
But it was Joe, not me, who picked up the nail scissors and cut the strands of hair that dropped on to my shoulders and from there to the bathroom floor around my feet. As he did it, I closed my eyes and listened to the sound of my own breathing, and to the snip-snipping of the scissors. When I opened my eyes again, I saw the reflection of a woman looking back at me who had soft, spiky hair about an inch long, with patches of bare white scalp showing through it. ‘It’ll grow back,’ I told myself. ‘It’s only hair. It doesn’t matter.’ But the tears still fell, because the woman in the mirror looked so vulnerable and because it felt as though Joe had cut away yet another part of what made me recognisable as me.
When he had finished, he put his hand on my shoulder and turned me gently around so that I was facing him. I looked into his eyes, which seemed softer somehow, and held my breath, waiting for him to say something and almost daring to believe that maybe this time it had worked. Now that he’d seen I was willing to subjugate my vanity so utterly pointlessly, simply because he’d asked me to do it, perhaps he had finally accepted the fact that I really did love him.
Then he spoke, and I could almost hear the sound of my delusion shattering like broken glass. ‘I’ve decided that you don’t have to shave it all off,’ he said, as though he was doing me a
huge favour. ‘You can leave it like this.’
The next day, I went to a hairdresser and asked if she could tidy it up. I told her I’d cut it myself to raise money for a charity. I felt awful telling a lie that made me look good. But what else could I say? That my boyfriend had done it with some nail scissors as a test to prove I loved him more than I’d loved a married man I’d had an affair with before I met him? It seemed like the lesser of two evils to feel guilty about making myself sound like a better person than I actually was, rather than telling the truth and sounding like a crazy person.
I don’t know if the hairdresser believed me. There wasn’t much she could do about my hair anyway, because of all the bald patches. But she did try, and then told me to come back when it had grown a bit and she’d be able to cut it to the same length all over. In the meantime, I was just going to have to get used to people’s surreptitious glances, some of which made me uncomfortable because they were sympathetic – probably because they thought I’d lost my hair as the result of some sort of medical treatment.
It was a few days after Joe cut my hair that I phoned my sister. It was half past one in the morning and I was in a taxi, on the way back to London after yet another aborted train journey that had taken me almost-home. I don’t know what was different about that particular night, but for some reason I felt as though I’d reached the absolute limit of my physical and mental endurance.
Lucy’s phone rang for a long time – far longer, it seemed to me, than it would take her to wake up and answer it. But I let it go on ringing, closing my eyes as I waited and repeating the words silently in my head, ‘Please, Lucy. Please pick up.’