If You Love Me

by Alice Keale

  Chapter 13

  We were in Sardinia, on the last holiday I was going to be able to afford before my savings ran out, and I could hardly believe how well things had been going – ‘well’ for us, at least. On the third day we were there, there was a period of maybe two hours when Joe didn’t ask me a single question about the past.

  We had hired a small open boat with an outboard motor to explore the isolated coves and bays along the coast, mooring it offshore so that we could swim in the crystal-clear water. After we’d swum, we would lie on the pebbly beach, letting the warmth of the sun soak into our bones. On this particular day Joe was lying at one end of the boat with his back to me, reading, while I was sitting at the other end, sketching the bay and an old villa that could just be seen among the trees on the cliff above it.

  As I sat there, listening to the sound of the birds gliding through the cloudless sky above our heads, I felt almost happy. I rarely daydreamed since the discovery; I was always too anxious, miserable and exhausted to think about anything beyond the confines of my life with Joe. But I found myself wondering what it would be like to live in a house like the one I was drawing, and to wake up every morning to the sound of the waves lapping gently on the shore.

  It was late afternoon, but the sun was still very hot, and when I glanced up from my sketchpad I could see that the skin on Joe’s back was starting to burn. ‘I should tell him,’ I thought. ‘So that he can put on some more sun cream.’ But that would mean breaking the rare tranquillity of the moment and risk setting him off again, demanding answers to his crazy questions and shattering the silence with accusations and abuse.

  So I didn’t say anything, and it wasn’t until we were finishing our dinner in a restaurant that evening that he started again. He wasn’t drunk, but he’d been drinking, and alcohol always seemed to make it worse. As soon as he spat the first question at me, I could feel the tears filling my eyes, because I knew I’d been stupid to have allowed myself to hope that night might be different from any other, and because I also knew that, if I gave up hoping, there would be nothing left.

  ‘Why didn’t you say something?’ Joe asked me angrily.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I replied, confused by the question and desperately searching my mind for something that might have triggered it, something I’d done wrong or had failed to anticipate.

  ‘Are you telling me you didn’t even notice the family who’ve just left?’ he demanded, nodding his head towards the now empty table next to ours and speaking so loudly that several people at other tables glanced warily in our direction.

  ‘Yes, I … I saw them as we sat down. But what about them?’ I whispered. My heart was racing as I tried to remember if I’d looked at them in some unguarded moment in a way that Joe could misinterpret.

  This had happened before, in a restaurant in London one night. I hadn’t even been consciously aware of any of the people at other tables on that occasion, and Joe hadn’t said anything until we got back to the house, when he suddenly lost it and started screaming at me, ‘You know what you did.’

  ‘I don’t know, Joe,’ I kept telling him. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. What did I do?’

  ‘You tell me,’ he’d insisted, grabbing me around the throat and pushing me with such force against the wall that I could almost feel the bruise spreading across my windpipe. ‘You tell me what you did wrong. Don’t pretend that you don’t know.’

  But I didn’t know what I’d done on that night in London any more than I knew now, in the restaurant in Sardinia, and I was afraid to guess in case I said something that gave him an excuse to blame me for something else too. In the end he told me that, as we walked into the restaurant, I’d looked at the two men sitting at the table next to ours – ‘flirtatiously’, Joe said. The accusation was ludicrous. If I ever had been prone to looking at men flirtatiously – which I don’t believe I was – those days were long gone. In fact, most of the time I barely noticed my surroundings at all, and I certainly hadn’t been consciously aware of any of the people sitting at any of the tables in that London restaurant. Maybe I did look in the direction of the two men when we walked in. Or maybe it was all in Joe’s imagination. But whatever he believed I had done, I didn’t deserve his vicious attack that night, or the bruises and bite marks that were its legacy the next morning.

  So now, as we sat in the restaurant in Sardinia, I tried desperately to guess what heinous crime Joe might be accusing me of.

  ‘The girl,’ he said at last. ‘Don’t tell me you didn’t notice the girl. She must have been about the same age as the daughter of the married man.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I stuttered, resisting the sudden urge I felt to lay my head on the table and sob until I fell asleep. ‘I should have paid more attention. I didn’t notice her. I wish I could take back what I did. You know how sorry I am.’

  I hated hearing myself speak in that pathetic, obsequious ‘victim’s’ voice. But it was as if I’d become conditioned to being servile and submissive, accepting blame without question for anything and everything Joe accused me of, however unlikely or absurd it actually was.

  ‘How could you do it? It’s disgusting.’ He was shouting now. ‘You’ve ruined that girl’s life forever. You’re a fucking whore.’

  In fact, Joe always swore at me when he was angry. He had a way of saying certain words that made them sound particularly harsh and ugly. But I haven’t normally included them here, mostly because I find it so upsetting to remember the expression on his face when he said them.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said again, while silently, in my head, I was pleading with him: ‘Please don’t do this. I can’t take it any more. It’s madness. The way you behave is crazy. And I’m crazy too, for trying, over and over again, to find the key that will make everything the way it used to be, when the rational side of me knows that will never happen and I should simply walk away.’

  I knew the violence wouldn’t start until we were alone in our hotel room, but the verbal abuse was just as damaging in its way.

  ‘How could you do that to a family?’ he asked me again. ‘You met his daughter and then had an affair with her father. What sort of person does something like that? Tell me, Alice. Really – tell me. I want to know. Because I can’t even begin to imagine who would do that to a seventeen-year-old girl. You disgust me. Depression is no excuse. There is no excuse.’

  By the time he paused for breath, the people who had been glancing in our direction had all turned away and were pretending they couldn’t hear him. No one told him to be quiet or asked if I was all right, although it wouldn’t have made any difference if they had, because I’d only have said I was fine. What did often surprise me, though, was how averse people were to interfering, even when Joe’s tirades quite clearly interrupted their own enjoyment of meals and conversations. The trouble was, the more often Joe ranted in public without anyone intervening, the less likely it became that I would ask a stranger for help, and the more trapped I felt.

  Bizarrely, in the circumstances, after we left the restaurant that night we went to a bar. No one intervened there either, even when Joe twisted my arm behind my back, leaving a mark that became a bruise where each of his fingers had dug into my flesh. At least he wouldn’t really hurt me while there were other people around. And if we stayed in the bar long enough, he might have calmed down a bit by the time we did go back to the hotel, and then he might fall asleep. He didn’t, though; not that night.

  As soon as I had closed the door of our hotel room behind us, he grabbed me by the throat and slammed me against the wall. I was sobbing and gasping for breath, but he just tightened his grip and then spat into my face. I still don’t know whether he lost control in those moments – overcome by whatever mental torment or affliction fuelled his rage – or whether he always knew exactly what he was doing. Then, suddenly, he banged my head so hard against the wall I thought he might have cracked my skull. I cried out in pain, but that just made him do it again, and again, unt
il the room was spinning and I thought I was going to pass out.

  ‘Why are you doing this, Joe?’ He had his hand around my throat and the words were barely audible. ‘I love you. Stop. Please.’

  ‘If you speak again, I’ll kill you,’ he said, his breath hot against my cheeks and his eyes full of hatred. ‘If you move, I’ll kill you. Do you think I won’t do it? Oh, believe me, Alice, I will. No one knows where you are. I could throw your body off the back of the boat and no one would ever find you. Maybe, one day, it would wash up on some distant shore. But by that time it would have begun to decompose and be so bloated by seawater you’d be unrecognisable.’

  And I did believe him. Ten months earlier I’d have sworn on everything I held dear that Joe wasn’t capable of hurting anyone, let anyone of cold-blooded murder. But I knew he meant every word of what he said that night, and I didn’t doubt for a moment that he was capable of doing the things he described. So I didn’t try to resist when he dragged me across the room, pushed me down on to the bed and then lay beside me, releasing his grip around my throat as he did so and starting to rap on the side of my head with his knuckles. The pain was excruciating, and I was very afraid that he might kill me with one of his blows, intentionally or otherwise.

  ‘In some countries,’ he said, his tone almost conversational now, ‘you would be imprisoned, even put to death, for what you’ve done. In some countries whores are subjected to very strict laws.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered again, and although I could feel my tears soaking into my hair – the way Joe used to tell me that his mother’s did after his father left them – I didn’t dare to move. I knew there was nothing I could do or say that would make him stop hitting me: he would stop only when he wanted to, when he was ready to go to sleep. If I did survive the night, I would have to think up excuses to explain to anyone who asked why my body was covered in bruises – the shower head fell on me; I tripped on an uneven pavement; I walked into something when I wasn’t looking where I was going. But I was used to telling lies for Joe.

  The sun was just starting to rise and I could hear the sound of birdsong when Joe finally fell asleep. ‘At least I’m still alive,’ I told myself, although, at that moment, I couldn’t think of any reason why that was a good thing. Then, despite the terrible, throbbing pain in my head, I slept too.

  Sometimes, instead of threatening my life, Joe said he was going to kill himself. I always thought he was bluffing, until one night when I really did believe he was going to do it.

  The interrupted train journeys home still happened occasionally, when he suddenly decided I was making him so ill he couldn’t take it any more. But it had been a few weeks since he’d last allowed me to get all the way home, arriving late at night and leaving again very early the next morning, despite my parents’ pleas to stay or at least to talk to them. I didn’t ever talk to my sister or parents on the phone either, except when Joe was there, telling me what to say and how to say it. So, at first, I couldn’t understand why he agreed so readily to visit my father’s elderly cousin, who was staying with my great-aunt while on holiday from her home in Australia. But then he explained that he wanted my father’s cousin to see what a well-adjusted, happy couple we were, so that at least one member of my family would realise that it was my parents and sister who were dysfunctional, insisting that they wanted to see me when all I wanted was to be left alone, with Joe.

  I was very fond of my great-aunt and in any normal circumstances would have been looking forward to seeing my father’s cousin too. But after a really bad, almost sleepless night of abuse, I woke up on the morning of our proposed visit dreading the thought of having to pretend that everything was fine and that Joe really was the charming, kind, considerate man he appeared to be.

  I don’t what triggered his meltdown on that particular night. It didn’t really make any difference, because even on the occasions when Joe did tell me why he was more than usually upset, the reasons he gave didn’t make any sense. That evening, though, it somehow ended up with Joe sitting on the floor in the hallway holding a knife to his neck, while I knelt beside him trying to think of some way of distracting him from doing what he was threatening to do.

  He often took a knife out of the wooden block in the kitchen and said he was going to kill himself. Sometimes he would lie in bed with the duvet pulled up to his chin, making stabbing motions against his stomach. This time, though, as he interrogated me about whatever trivial detail he’d decided required further clarification, he kept pressing the tip of the knife against his neck so that it made an indentation on his skin and eventually drew a drop of blood.

  ‘You will stay with me while I die, won’t you, Alice?’ he pleaded, the cold expression I could see in his eyes seeming to belie the pathos in his voice. ‘If you love me, as you say you do, tell me that you’ll do this one last thing for me and hold me while I bleed to death.’

  It sounds absurdly melodramatic when I describe it now, but at the time my judgement was so skewed by guilt and lack of sleep that I didn’t see it clearly for what it was. I did wonder, though, if it was just another form of the control and cruel manipulation that he was so good at and that directed every aspect of my life. But something made me realise, as I knelt on the floor beside him, that I didn’t really know him at all, and maybe this time he did really mean it.

  ‘Please stop it, Joe,’ I begged him. ‘Why are you doing this? I’ve told you thousands of times that I love you. I’ve done everything you asked me to do to try to prove it to you. What more …’

  ‘I’ve left a note in the drawer of my desk at work,’ he said, as if he hadn’t heard me. ‘And another in the glove compartment in the car. They explain everything. I want my colleagues and my family to know why I’m doing this.’ He paused for a moment, holding the knife away from his throat and bending forward slightly as he dry retched, and then, when I shifted my position, he again pressed the blade against his skin.

  I didn’t know what to say to try to calm him down. He’d already told me several times about the notes, and I’d asked him if I could go and get the one in the car. I wanted to read it myself so that I’d know whether he really was as distraught as he appeared to be, or whether the two hours I’d just spent kneeling on the floor while he prodded and poked at himself with a knife had been a pointless waste of time. But he became so agitated when I suggested it – without telling him the reason, of course – that I was afraid to risk leaving him on his own, in case he really did hurt or even kill himself.

  At one point, when he jabbed the knife against his throat with more force than he’d done before, I screamed, which made him angry.

  ‘Why did you do that, Alice?’ he demanded to know. ‘Do you want the neighbours to hear you? Is that what you want? The neighbours to come round? Or maybe the police?’

  ‘Yes, that is what I want,’ I told him. ‘Because I don’t want you to kill yourself. You need help, Joe. Please, let me go to the neighbours and get help.’

  ‘All you had to do was tell me the truth,’ he said, switching the focus, as he always did, away from himself and back to my amoral, repulsive, disgusting behaviour, which had apparently pushed a lovely, sane man over a precipice into a state of cruel, obsessive retribution. ‘That really was all you had to do, Alice.’

  I didn’t know what truth he was talking about. I’d lost track of all the questions he’d asked me that night, questions I’d already answered countless times before, about things that didn’t matter anyway.

  Suddenly, I felt the urge to shout at him, ‘Just do it! If you’re going to kill yourself, get it over with. Or put the knife down and go to bed, so that I can sleep too.’ But as soon as the thought entered my head, I imagined him lying on the floor with blood dripping from a wound in his neck while I cradled his head on my lap, crying and telling him how much I loved him, as we waited for the ambulance to come and for someone to rescue us both. And although Joe had hurt me a thousand times, biting me, bashing my head on walls and floo
rs until the world around me slipped out of focus, and covering my body with bruises, I couldn’t bear the thought of him hurting himself. So I continued to kneel on the floor beside him, until he tired of the melodrama he’d created, stood up, dropped the knife on the kitchen work surface, got into bed and immediately fell asleep.

  That was why I was so tired the next morning, as I sat beside Joe in the car, holding the box of expensive cakes he’d bought as a gift for my great-aunt, and opened the glove compartment to look for his note. He hadn’t been out to the car on his own that morning, before we came out together, so there was no way he could have removed it. But all I found was an out-of-date parking sticker, some plastic gloves from a petrol station, a biro and a few pound coins.

  I don’t know why I was surprised that he’d lied about the note. I believed I still loved him, and I certainly didn’t want him to harm himself. But I hated the feeling of having been tricked into spending hours sitting on the floor in the hallway, crying and trying desperately to think of something I could say that would prevent him from taking his own life.

  Suddenly, he reached across the car and slammed the glove compartment shut, shouting at me as he did so, ‘What the hell are you doing? What are you looking for?’ And as I sat beside him, not daring to say anything that might antagonise him further, while he continued to harangue me, I couldn’t help thinking that only Joe could reinterpret the events of the previous night and somehow make every aspect of what happened my fault.

  When we arrived at my great-aunt’s house, Joe was charming, amiable and polite, while I tried my best to act the part of his fortunate, loving girlfriend. I don’t know if we managed to pull it off, or what my relatives said to each other after we’d gone. I no longer had a reliable yardstick by which to measure reality, so it’s possible that what seemed convincing to me didn’t fool the people who loved me for a moment.