by Pip Drysdale
He picked up a biro with a chewed end, opened a notebook and said, ‘You’d like to report an incident?’
‘Yes, sort of,’ I replied. My fingernails bit into the palms of my hands.
‘Why don’t you tell me what happened.’
‘It’s my boyfriend. I … he’s, well, he’s got a cocaine problem and he’s violent and he’s threatening me. And I don’t know what to do.’
‘Oh,’ he said, trying to write. The pen wouldn’t work. So he picked up another.
‘He’s vicious,’ I continued. ‘He tried to get me fired. Twice.’
‘Are you living with him?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘So, you’ve left him, and he won’t stop bothering you?’ he asked.
‘No, not yet. I’m frightened to leave him,’ I said.
He sighed. ‘Would you like to press charges about the violence? Was it recent, do you have any bruises?’
I looked at him. ‘Yes, it was recent but no bruises. He just grabbed me by the hair and threw me around the room.’
‘Christ,’ he said, and then added: ‘Okay, look, I’ll take a statement, and then we’ll talk to him.’
I imagined an inept policeman turning up at Angus’s apartment, or worse yet his office, and telling him not to be mean to me anymore. Angus would smile his hypnotic smile, throw around his Eton accent as though that rendered him above suspicion, assure the policeman that I was just being a silly and melodramatic woman, and then the policeman would go away. And I would be left to deal with the fallout.
‘Do you have to talk to him?’ I asked, and he shifted his weight in his seat.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘usually getting a warning is enough.’ Another smile.
I was happy for them to take a statement – that could help me – but I couldn’t risk them talking to him; him finding out I’d gone to the police would enrage him further. And if they couldn’t even protect me from him physically, they sure as hell couldn’t protect me from the insidious variety of life-ruining blows he seemed capable of dishing out.
‘We just need you to make a formal statement,’ he continued. ‘Can you give me your full name?’
‘Oh,’ I said, standing up. ‘Let me think about it.’ Then I moved towards the door.
I rushed down that brown hallway, past the man at the front desk and out through those big glass doors onto Buckingham Palace Road. And as I stood beneath a thick grey blanket of cloud, inhaling the fumes from red London buses and backfiring motorbikes as they whizzed by, a finely ground calmness settled on my soul: because I knew exactly what to do. And I knew how to do it.
It was 7.10pm and I was standing in the middle of the sitting room. I’d spent the last hour meticulously searching the cabinets in the bathroom then the cupboard and drawers in the bedroom. I was looking for his other phone. I’d been lying in bed when I first heard it ringing, so I knew he must keep it nearby. Hidden beneath a pile of jumpers in the closet. Maybe inside a shoe he never wore. I’d gone through it all carefully, strategically skirting the eyeline of the mirror – I didn’t know whether his camera was recording continuously – but all I’d found was his silver cigarette tin, heavy with a new stash of cocaine.
So I’d moved through to the sitting room and that’s when I’d heard the storage cupboard vibrating. My forehead crinkled as I registered both the source of the sound and its point of origin.
I moved quickly towards it, grabbed the handle and turned: it was locked. I don’t know whether it had always been locked – I’d never needed to open it. I’d always just imagined it full of skis, golf clubs, smelly old shoes and boxes.
I pressed my ear to the door. It was definitely a phone. And just as quickly as it had started, it stopped. I moved my face away from the white-painted wood and stared at the door.
And then the vibrating started up again.
I moved to the fridge and lifted my hand to the terracotta bowl above it that held the spare keys. Tangled in elastic bands, buried beneath the pens and bottle opener, lay three small keys, all on the same flimsy metal loop. I rushed with them to the door, then one by one I tried them in the lock. First: no. Second: no. Third: no.
Fuck.
I walked the keys back to their home above the fridge, and glanced at my watch. Angus would be back soon.
I picked up my handbag, went to the bathroom and locked myself inside.
Now that I knew where his other phone was, I could put my plan into action.
I turned on the taps, and as the bathroom filled with steam I texted my mother and told her I was fine and would call her soon. Then I texted Charlotte to say: Going home for the night and turning off my phone so he can’t call me. Can I come stay from tomorrow? xx
Then I turned off my phone so neither could check. I needed to do this alone.
I got into the bathtub, and lay there long past the point I heard him arrive home, long past the point my toes began to wrinkle. And all the while the same image of Sophie Reed flashed before me: the picture used in most of the articles showed her wearing a blue satin dress that hit the floor, and her smile was big and bright. Then, still frames of her lying on the floor, blood coming from her pretty head, filled mine. He would hurt me too one day, I could feel it.
But that DVD had shown me that I was right all along: I couldn’t just leave. I couldn’t just disappear like they do in the movies. That train to East Sussex was a nice idea in theory, but in real life I’d have to deal with the fallout. With his rage. I knew what he was capable of now and it was far worse than sex tapes – Stepanovich and Sophie Reed had shown me that. The best-case scenario was that it would end in humiliation. The worst was unthinkable. Un-riskable. A fabricated crime that could cost me my freedom. An ‘accident’ that may cost me my life. And as my trip to the station had shown me, the police couldn’t protect me.
I would have to protect myself.
I just had to survive one more night with him.
wednesday
Master Sun said: ‘Discard rules. Follow the enemy to fight the decisive battle.’
22 FEBRUARY
That was the day I bought a gun.
And I almost wish it was harder. But it wasn’t. All it took was a phone call, nineteen minutes on the Tube to Brixton and half a Valium.
I was sitting in a greasy spoon across from Hayley Cravick: Charlotte’s ex-weed-dealer from when we used to live together. I’d only met her once before and I’d had to sift through my old messages from 2015 to find her number – but now there I was. Except I wasn’t there for weed. I was there for the ‘other’ thing she dealt in. The reason Charlotte got scared and stopped using her. Guns. Small ones. The kind that fit into your pocket. The kind I needed.
The kind she was about to sell to me.
Because nobody runs at a girl who’s holding a gun. Not even Angus. A knife, maybe, but not a gun.
And so there I sat, my blood racing, trying to pass the little money I had left in the world to her under that plastic table, the underside of which was full of old chewing gum. All I wanted was for her to take the money, give me the gun and for everything to be over.
But even then I knew it wouldn’t be that easy.
My eyelids were heavy. I hadn’t slept. There was wet cotton wool in my head and an electric knot in my stomach. And as hard as I tried, my mind wouldn’t let go of the morning’s events. It was trying to find a hole in my plan, anything I might need to plug up.
‘Come here,’ he’d ordered, standing by the open door. It was 7.56am and I was dressed in a pencil skirt, pantyhose and a crisp white shirt. I had a mascara wand in my hand and was about to apply a second coat. To an onlooker I was getting ready for work. But I wasn’t.
I walked over to him.
‘Don’t look so scared,’ he’d laughed, an awful smug laugh. ‘I just want to kiss you goodbye.’
His lips found my forehead in a gesture of false tenderness, then: ‘Maybe we’ll make another video later.’ Wink.
Then he’d
picked up his briefcase, turned and walked out the door. It had echoed as it closed behind him and I remember squeezing my eyes shut and thinking: I have fifteen minutes to pack.
Then I’d stood there by the door, still as stone, listening as his footsteps faded to silence. Waiting until I knew I was safe. I’d run through to the bedroom, pulled out my suitcase and laid it on the bed. Reaching for my phone I’d sent three communiqués.
One: an email to Val, telling her I had just discovered that Angus was cheating on me again and I needed two days to move my things out of his flat and get my head straight. She replied with a short, sharp message saying I’d need to take them as ‘leave’ days.
Two: a text message to Charlotte, letting her know I’d be there late morning. She wrote straight back to remind me that the key was underneath the money frog to the left of the front door.
Three: a text message to David, asking to see him on Friday evening to talk. I suggested the Coach and Horses. 8pm. And he immediately wrote back to say yes. I was going to warn him that Angus was investigating him, of what he was capable. That I knew that even if Angus couldn’t find genuine dirt on David, he’d fabricate something, so he needed to be stopped. Now. Then to prove my point I would hand David the green thumb drive and Angus’s second phone. Because if there was one call Caz would definitely pick up, it was one he thought was coming from Angus. And maybe, when he answered, David could offer to pay Caz for information on Angus instead …
Then I’d packed. Quickly. Efficiently. Quite unlike my previous attempt two days before. First, everything hanging in the closet went into my suitcase, laid flat, folded over. Then the contents of my drawers went in. My toiletries and make-up. And I moved through to the sitting room: I was looking for the five paper reasons I’d had to get through one more night.
It was Wednesday. And that meant Elena, the cleaning lady, would be there by 8.30am at the latest. Angus had left five £20 notes on the coffee table for her. Apparently her market rate was higher than mine.
I picked them up and slipped them into my pocket, adding to the £80 he had given me and the £38 I had in my bag. My sum value as I walked out that door was £218.
Can £218 buy a gun?
Probably. According to Google, £250 could buy me a grenade. My eyes glanced at my watch: 8.13am.
I needed to be gone before she arrived – and not only because I’d taken her money. She might have told Angus if I was still there and then he’d want to know why I wasn’t at work. It would alert him, and I couldn’t risk that.
Five minutes later, I rolled my suitcase past Jake and stood on the kerb waiting for an orange taxi sign to save me – I had no money left in my account and no space left on my credit card, so the fare would need to come out of my £218 cash.
I watched the door at Starbucks across the road open and close as people came and went and the traffic lights cycle through green, orange, red. And then a cab stopped.
I hadn’t seen it approaching. I gave him Charlotte’s address, he put my bags in his boot and we drove away.
Forty-five minutes later I was inside Charlotte’s flat, dropping off my suitcase, then just as quickly as I’d arrived, I was leaving again, the spare key in my pocket.
I was heading to Brixton, to the little restaurant with the yellow plastic tables and old chewing gum. Hayley’s suggestion.
And now she sat across from me: Louis Vuitton handbag beside her, thick black liner on her lids, and her expression stating clearly that she didn’t want to take money from me in a public place. I slipped my remaining £190 into my handbag.
My mouth was dry, so I took a sip of water. The glass smelled like it had been dried with a dirty rag.
She was trying to give me a crash course in shooting, but it was proving troublesome because I’d never held a gun before. She was using a teaspoon as a prop and a ketchup bottle as her target. And I was looking at her confused.
What the fuck am I doing?
‘You try,’ she said, handing me the spoon.
But it made no sense. There was no handle, no trigger, no safety catch (everybody knows that there’s supposed to be a safety catch). My breath was shallow and my pulse thumped.
She watched me awkwardly clutch the spoon, her eyes scanned my businesslike outfit, and I saw pity flicker behind those kohl-framed blue eyes.
‘Let’s go to my place and try with the real thing,’ she said, leaning in towards me. Her voice was older than her face.
‘Great,’ I said. Relieved.
‘I live just around the corner.’
I nodded. Then I dropped the teaspoon and motioned for the bill. It came quickly, I paid – I was now down to £184 – and we left.
She lived in a bedsit, with an unmade double bed and a mezzanine up a rickety wooden ladder, the rungs threaded with fairy lights. The room smelled of weed but there was an innocence about it. Around the mirror that hung in the middle of the wall were photographs of her, laughing and smiling, with one boy in particular.
‘Right,’ she said, pulling the gun from her bag.
I flinched.
She giggled. ‘Calm down, there aren’t any bullets in it yet. Besides, you see this?’ she asked, pointing to a small part of the trigger. ‘If this isn’t held down with a finger it won’t shoot. Not even if you drop it.’
‘But where’s the safety catch?’ I asked.
‘That is the safety catch,’ she said. ‘Now, you hold it like this.’ She demonstrated, one hand grasping the handle, finger on the trigger and the other steadying it.
She handed me the gun. ‘You try.’
A shiver ran up my neck and goose bumps appeared on my arms as I tried to mimic what she had just done. ‘Good,’ she said gently. ‘The hardest part is aiming. If you can do it at super-close range it will be way easier. The further away you get the harder it is. But you know, with self-defence it’s usually at close range, so you’ll be fine.’
I’d told her I had a stalker ex-boyfriend and the gun was just to make me feel less frightened. And she’d nodded in a knowing sort of way, as though most of her clientele had similar issues.
‘Try pulling the trigger,’ she urged. I hesitated. Then I aimed at the window and pulled the trigger. It was stickier than I expected and required more pressure.
I glanced down at my watch: I wanted to get lost in the crowds of rush hour, so I needed to hurry.
‘Bullets are extra,’ she said. ‘So is the silencer.’
‘Shit, how much is it all together?’ I asked, worried.
‘One eighty?’ she asked.
My stomach dropped: I couldn’t give her everything I had.
‘I only have one-seventy,’ I lied, eyes to the floor.
Her eyes were on me, I could feel their heat.
‘Can I give you the rest in a few days? I promise I’m good for it,’ I said, looking up.
She smiled kindly. ‘That’s okay, don’t worry about it, one seventy is fine,’ she said. ‘You bought tea.’ Then her eyes moved back to the gun. ‘Now, the silencer screws on like this.’ Eyes back to me. ‘But a silencer doesn’t actually make it silent. It just means you won’t blow your eardrums. So be careful. And the bullets like so.’ I watched as she slid them into the inside part of the handle then click, it was back in place.
Two minutes later, with £14 to my name and a loaded gun in my bag, I left.
It began to drizzle, and I ran towards the station. There was a small stationery store I’d noticed a couple of hours earlier when I’d arrived. It had a blue fluorescent ‘Open’ sign on the door and a handwritten note on the window that read: ‘Quick Cheep Printing’.
The typo made me smile.
I was met by a young man, paid him £5 to use one of the computers and typed out a single line of text: Felicia: 0770 090 0007, 0207 946 0139.
And then I pressed ‘Print’, ‘Close’ and ‘Don’t save’.
I would leave Brixton that day with £9, a gun and that printed piece of paper.
‘Oh my G
od, are you okay?’
It was around 7pm and Charlotte had just arrived home. She was in the kitchen pouring heavy-handed gin-and-tonics into red-wine glasses. Ben was at a play rehearsal and so it was just us.
She came through and handed me a glass, sitting down next to me, her face tight with concern: ‘Tell me exactly what happened.’
And so I told her my intricate lie. I’d been refining it since I got home from Brixton.
‘It was horrible,’ I said. ‘It was yesterday morning, and he was in the kitchen. I was late for work and looking for my hairbrush and I couldn’t find it anywhere. So I looked under the bed.’ I paused and took a deep breath, looking down at my glass. ‘And there were a pair of dirty knickers under there.’ I looked up at her. ‘They weren’t mine.’ My shoulders were slumped forward and I hoped I looked believable.
‘Oh my God,’ she said, disgusted. ‘What did fucking Angus say?’
‘Well, I took them through to him and showed him,’ I said. ‘I was pretty cross. I was yelling, and things got out of hand.’ My mouth was freezing up the way it always does when I lie, and I willed it to relax. ‘Maybe it was my fault.’
‘It was not your fault,’ she said. Firm. And I wondered what she’d think if she knew the whole story. If she knew there was a loaded gun hidden at the bottom of my suitcase.
‘Anyway, he just started screaming about how I didn’t trust him and then the next thing I knew he was holding me against the wall.’
‘Fuck.’ Her eyes were narrow and her forehead creased. ‘Of course you don’t trust him. Did you go to the police like I told you?’
‘Yes, but they wanted to go and talk to him,’ I said.
‘So let them,’ she said loudly, her hands gesturing wildly. ‘It might do him some good to be scared.’