I Own You

by Dawn McConnell

  I knew by now: if it wasn’t an easy win, a quick buck, then the Kelly cousins just weren’t interested.

  Chapter 18

  A Change of Perspective

  I hate you, I thought, staring blankly at my husband as he went off on one of his usual rants. I hate you and I wish I’d never married you.

  Stuart, face flushed from booze, the purple veins throbbing in his temples, his grey hair receding into a widow’s peak and his little pot belly poking out through his dressing gown, was pacing our living room, working himself up to full-on apoplexy. For years I had put up with these rants of his, his violent temper and his constant drinking. And, frankly, I was tired of pretending that it was all okay. All the lies, the abuse, the control and the torture he’d put me through had built up like a brick wall in my head, just waiting to topple over and bring down the whole edifice of our marriage. I never contradicted him, never showed him my true feelings or fought back against his outrageous demands, but I couldn’t help how I felt inside. As the years had gone on my hatred for my husband had grown in my heart. There was no love from this man, no care and no respect, just endless abuse and manipulation. He only cared about the money and I had accepted that a long time ago. I didn’t have to like it, though.

  ‘How am I going to live now?’ he railed, practically frothing at the mouth as he considered life without The Cavendish’s cash. If only he got up off his backside and did some work occasionally, he wouldn’t be so heavily reliant on me and my labours! He’d been at the booze since midday and now it was gone 4 p.m. His eyes were bloodshot and his mouth was stained red from the wine.

  ‘What am I going to do for cash?’

  ‘Well, you could always ask your cousin to let you have a couple of properties from your so-called property empire,’ I responded drily from the sofa. ‘This supposed empire which gives you a grand total of £12,000 a year. I can’t quite believe that it exists, frankly. I mean, how could it? We get that much every month from our flats. And you get £1,000 a month from £7 million? Why don’t you try selling a couple of flats? I’m sure that will tide you over for a while at least.’

  ‘Don’t speak about me or my cousin in that tone,’ Stuart snarled. ‘I made you and I can quickly destroy you. You think all this is yours? Think again. If you like your face the way it is you’d better shut your fucking mouth.’

  I shot him a surly look. I was like a rebellious teenager, enjoying the challenge of verbally sparring with Stuart yet too scared to really stand up to him properly. After all these years, I knew my boundaries. I knew by his demeanour if he would be violent or verbal; I knew if he would hit me or if he would just rant. Today I guessed it was probably just a rant. He might throw a pot at me if I carried on giving him cheek, but nothing more. Although I was growing up, I didn’t yet feel strong enough to stand up to Stuart, and I believed him when he said he would do those horrible things to me. As much as I yearned for freedom from Stuart’s control, I also clung to the life I had created with him because it was all I knew – and all Callum knew too.

  ‘You need to work so that we have cash flow,’ he went on. ‘Don’t think for a minute you’re not going to be doing anything, you need to work!’

  ‘I could always get a job . . .’ I mused, setting up the idea of me working for someone else rather than running one of his businesses. I rather fancied the idea of going to work in the real world, but I knew the idea was out of the question to Stuart.

  ‘You will not get a fucking job, Dawn! You will not get a fucking job because I need to know where you are at all times. You are not going into business with anybody but me. Got it?’

  I decided to change tack: ‘Well, I suppose there’s a business in town I’ve been thinking about – a cafe.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s more like it . . . Go on . . .’

  ‘Well, I think I can make it work but, you know, it won’t be like before, Stuart. The hotel made a lot of money for us. It won’t be anything like that.’

  ‘Humph. Better than nothing, I suppose.’ Stuart poured himself another large glass of wine.

  ‘Honestly, Stu, what about this money you’ve got invested with Adam? I just don’t see why he should decide where to invest your money when you’re clearly smarter in business. A grand a month is peanuts! Surely it makes more sense for you to make your own money?’

  Now I was buttering him up – it couldn’t have been further from the truth. I’d seen from the way he had plundered the bars and hotel that he had no clue about how to keep a business profitable. All he knew was how to get his grubby hands in the till and run when the business collapsed. But I had a long-term plan and that basically was ‘don’t get screwed’! If I had learned anything from watching the way Stuart and Adam treated their former partners, it was that they would stop at nothing to leave them penniless. I wouldn’t let that happen to me. If I was going to leave one day, I would walk out with what I had earned for myself. But if this plan was going to work, I needed Stuart to get his cash back from Adam. I needed to kill the Panama connection.

  The only way I could do that was to make Stuart see that Adam was screwing him over. It was clear to me that Adam wasn’t giving him a proper return on his money; if I could make Stuart see that, we could take those millions and reinvest the money together in the property market.

  The money and the property would then be part of our matrimonial pot – and not a separate side pot for him. I’d seen what he’d done to Maria and I was determined that I wouldn’t get trampled the way she had. At one time, I might even have been worried that Stuart might find himself another, younger version of me – another schoolgirl who didn’t know better, another innocent ripe for his demands – and consequently send me packing. But Stuart didn’t seem to be actively looking for another woman at all. No, he seemed pretty happy just to sit back and let old age come to him.

  After all, I was a nice little earner.

  Now, as I carefully flattered his ego, my husband preened himself. A more intelligent man might have noticed I was giving him a load of old flannel but then Stuart was hardly an acute observer of human behaviour at the best of times, let alone after three bottles of Pinot Noir.

  ‘It’s true,’ he sighed between swigs. ‘It’s true – I could make that money really work for me, but you know Adam. Adam would never let me dissolve the partnership.’

  ‘Not let you? Let you? Well, it’s nothing to do with me, of course, but it does seem that he’s controlling all your cash. As I said, £1,000 a month is a very poor return on your investment. I’m sure you could do better than that.’

  ‘Of course I could do better!’ he snapped, then he went back to his study to watch TV and brood. Aha! I thought. The seed has finally landed in fertile ground.

  It was just one of many conversations we had in the weeks between the end of the hotel and the start of my new business: the cafe.

  It was on a recent trip to London that I’d had the idea; I’d seen some new-style cafes in Shoreditch with large sofas, soft music and free USB terminals to plug into which were doing a roaring trade. Cafes were turning into hang-out destinations and coffee was the new beer. In the course of a few conversations with owners, I’d discovered that the profits were massive. There was a 600 per cent mark-up on a coffee and, best of all, you didn’t need a licence to sell the stuff. I’d visited some brilliant new cafes in London, which sold food all day, and I realized that if I could bring this idea to Glasgow, I could be one of the first to create a destination coffee shop in the area. So I’d been scouring the trendy parts of town for suitable premises and eventually settled on a tatty, run-down greasy spoon in an up-and-coming area. Now, using the money I’d saved over the years, I completely redesigned the place, preparing for my grand opening.

  First I put in a solid glass front, then I installed USB sockets and stripped back the walls to the old brick behind. We regrouted so that it looked quite industrial and I put in an assortment of comfy sofas and chairs. The look was half-industrial and half-shabb
y chic and by the time we finished, I knew we had pulled off something quite special. This was a place I would want to come and hang out!

  The next thing I had to do was work out my core business – I reckoned this would be coffee and soup. Both cost a small amount to produce and yet I knew we could sell them for a premium if we used the best quality ingredients. Two hundred cups of soups and four hundred coffees a day would net me £7,000 a week. This was my foundation and everything else would be extra. We had lovely display cabinets with homemade cakes, pastries, biscuits, traybakes, fresh sandwiches, paninis and a selection of soft drinks. Catering was about making things look good – I had learned this from my previous businesses – so as long as we had full fridges and our displays looked attractive, people would buy from us. I bought the best quality coffee I could find, hired two members of staff and named our cafe Terminal Two – now I was ready to open the doors for business.

  At first, we just had a few curious stragglers coming to look at the distinctive new decor but it didn’t take much to persuade them to stay for a coffee and a slice of cake. Then the lunchtime market wandered in and started ordering our home-made soups with a slice of chunky wholemeal bread. And then, at around 4ish, people started to come in for a coffee and a panini. This wasn’t like a normal restaurant or cafe – the idea wasn’t to serve people and turn them out, it was to encourage them to stay as long as possible, to keep ordering coffees, to bring their friends and use Terminal Two (or TT as we became known) as a meeting place. I started selling magazines at the counter and we had a rack of daily papers people could read for free.

  The paninis were a cut above the usual fare: we had roast chicken with stuffing, roast pepper with courgette and Stilton, curried potato and wilted spinach, buffalo mozzarella and sun-blushed tomato. It was all a bit different to the boring cheese-and-ham, tuna or egg mayonnaise fillings that you’d get in a standard cafe. Word got round and gradually, the idea caught on. Within a few months we had a strong business bringing in £22k a month, though of course it wasn’t easy. I had to be in at 5 a.m. every morning to put on three pots of soup and produce one hundred sandwiches before the morning rush. Fortunately the hours were more sociable than at The Cavendish and I was able to finish work at 4 p.m. so that I could have all of the evening with Callum – ultimately what I wanted and what he wanted too. He was growing up but he still needed his mum around.

  We were open 364 days a year which meant there was very little let-up for me or the staff but there was no denying it was a good cash business. In the course of a year, TT became a favourite hot spot with the young, upwardly mobile set, who all came to us for their morning coffees and croissants. At lunchtime we had office workers and the buggy brigade and throughout the day there was an assortment of freelance ‘creative’ types who brought their laptops and drank coffee like it was going out of fashion. I felt so proud that, for the third time in my career, I had built a successful business from scratch. Not bad for a school-dropout teenage mum with no qualifications.

  As for the man who had got that teenage girl pregnant, well, as usual, Stuart made his contribution – which was to wander in every other day and empty my till. It drove me mad. It was so selfish and destructive and, worst of all, it took advantage of all my hard work. But I’d learnt not to confront Stuart about things that bothered me – that never worked with him, for he would threaten and lash out, and I’d had enough of enduring his vile temper – instead, I found a way to thwart his greed.

  I had a regular customer called Pam who became my eyes in the shop front. She’d sit on one of the large chesterfield armchairs in the glass window, smoking her Benson & Hedges, and when she saw Stuart coming down the road she’d roar: ‘He’s coming, Dawn! Action stations!’ At that, I would pull out every large note from the till and hand it to her. She would put it all in her bag and then sit there, calm as you like, smoking her fags and reading the Racing Post while he ranted and raved at me.

  ‘What do you mean there’s no bloody money?’

  ‘We’ve just paid the cash-and-carry, Stu,’ I’d say. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Find some more!’

  ‘I haven’t got any. See for yourself. Nothing!’

  Then he’d storm out, puce with rage, just as Pam prepared to hand me back the contents of the till.

  ‘Disgusting, that’s what he is.’ Pam shook her head disapprovingly. ‘Leaching off you like that. He’s nae a real man.’

  It wasn’t just resentment that made me employ this subterfuge, though: there was a point to denying Stuart the cash from my till. I wanted to make him desperate for money. I wanted to make him see there was another avenue for cash apart from me.

  ‘Just think of the life you could have if you had your half of the £7 million at your disposal . . .’ I’d say at night, uncorking another bottle of red wine for him. I rarely drank but I liked to keep him nicely sozzled because I knew that if he were drunk enough, he wouldn’t pester me for sex.

  Over the years, I’d come to realize that sex with Stuart was quite simply bad. I’d never realized before because I had nothing to compare him to but, in time, I started to read magazines and watch films and I came to see that sex with Stuart was only ever about his pleasure and he never once took the trouble to make me happy in bed. He said that it was my duty to give him oral sex, but that giving a woman oral sex was disgusting and insisted he would never do it. Neither did he bother to try and arouse me with his hands. He just grabbed at my tits when he was trying to get himself hard. I was no more than a blow-up doll to him, an inanimate object there for his pleasure. To me, sex with Stuart was passionless and predictable, a dismal duty I had to carry out if he wanted it. He had never once given me an orgasm, or even tried to, so what was the point? I hated the look of him, the smell of him and the touch of him too.

  Now thirty-one years old, I’d begun to feel that life was passing me by. I had worked solidly since the age of eighteen and now I wanted more from life than working to keep Stuart happy.

  ‘We could buy a nice place in Portugal,’ I suggested one day. ‘If we had our £3.5 million we could enjoy our lives. You know, we would have plenty of income coming in. Don’t you want to enjoy your money before you die? What’s the point of having it all tied up with Adam? I mean, is he really giving you the best return for your money?’ This was a slow-burner, this project of mine, but gradually, very gradually, it began to gain ground.

  Meanwhile, our son Callum had decided on a new direction for his life and I did my best to encourage him. He wanted to train to be a professional tennis player and he had his heart set on a school in the US which specialized in turning out the next generation of Grand Slam title winners. At first neither Stuart nor my mum understood my eagerness to send my son abroad at the youthful age of fourteen. He was still so young!

  But I kept insisting how important it was to follow his dreams. After all, I hadn’t had the chance to follow mine and I wanted to give him everything I wished I had done myself. Fourteen – it had been such a critical age for me. I looked back and saw how weak I had been, how impressionable. I was there for the taking and Stuart had seen that. He had plucked me so easily . . .

  I knew, too, that if I let Callum stay in Glasgow, there was every chance he would get sucked into Stuart’s world. I didn’t want that. I wanted more for him and if sending him to the other side of the world was the personal sacrifice I had to make to give him a fighting chance of a good life, then it was a small price to pay.

  There was no question that now, at the age of thirty-one, I was starting to change. I had shrugged off my youthful insecurities and I was now a woman of the world. Confident in both my abilities and instincts as a businesswoman, I was realizing my own power now. I could challenge Stuart’s views occasionally because, ultimately, I thought that one day I would leave him. I earned the money, I cooked the meals and I washed his clothes – and for what? This fifty-three year-old drunk gave nothing in return except threats and intimidation. Don’t
get me wrong, he could still scare the hell out of me when he wanted to, but nothing could stop me growing up. Not even him.

  One day, after two years at the helm of Terminal Two, I looked in the mirror and I realized that I’d let myself go. Too many cakes, too many Danish pastries . . . I sighed, grabbing hold of a large portion of flesh where my waist should have been. Dawn, you have to get your figure back!

  That’s when I started training. Now, instead of going home every night, I went to the gym for a session with a personal trainer. At first I found it exhausting and annoying but within a couple of weeks I started to see the results. For the first time in years, my arms looked toned, my stomach was flat and I’d dropped a dress size.

  ‘Who are you getting yourself all buffed up for?’ Stuart demanded to know, suspicious of this sudden transformation. ‘Thinking of having an affair? There’s no point, you know. Nobody would have a fat bitch like you!’

  But I didn’t need his approval anymore. I was beginning to find my inner confidence.

  ‘Don’t you want me to look good for you?’ I asked slyly. ‘Don’t you want to impress your mates with a young, slim wife? You’re always telling me I look like an elephant. Well, I’m doing something about it for a change.’

  But this only wound him up more.

  ‘You are nothing, Dawn. Nothing! I own you! I made you and I could take it all away tomorrow. Never forget that!’

  His words were no longer true. The house was in my name, the cafe was in my name, we had twelve flats in our joint names and all the money I made was mine. So how could he own me? He couldn’t threaten to take it away anymore because he was the kept man!