by Mark Morris
At last the older man bent down and picked up my clothes. To my disgust he buried his face in them for a moment, and I heard him draw in a deep breath. Then he turned and lumbered across to the door, the younger man following, grabbing my bag from the table as he went. Without another word the two men left the room, taking my clothes and bag with them.
Naked, shaking with the trauma of my ordeal and unable to stop crying, I sank to the floor. I had tried to contain the sobs as much as possible when the men were in the room, but now I gave them free rein. They tore themselves out of me in great rasping whoops, leaving my stomach feeling raw, my chest aching. They went on for a long time and when they finally began to peter out they left me feeling so drained that I couldn’t move.
I think I dozed at some point, or at least slipped into a kind of traumatized torpor. It was the sound of the door opening once again that jerked me from my semi-trance. I didn’t know how long I had been sitting there; all I knew was that I was shivering with cold and that my bladder was an aching anvil inside me. I think I’d been dreaming about Alex, about one of the big dinners we used to have – a few of his friends, a few of mine – where we’d hardly be able to eat we were laughing so much. The sound of the door wrenched that memory away like a layer of skin, and suddenly I was back in a place that was too harsh, too hard, too real.
My body clenched, tensing itself against more humiliation. I hadn’t been physically abused, but I felt battered and ground down all the same. I raised my eyes, expecting to see the two men re-enter the room, but instead a dumpy, uniformed policewoman came in, carrying my clothes, boots and bag. She put them on the table and said, ‘You can get dressed now.’
I stood up gingerly, feeling exhausted and stiff with cold, my bladder crippling me. I tried to blot out the thought of the older man burying his red, sweaty face in my clothes as I got dressed. I zipped my jacket up to the throat and picked up my bag. ‘I need the toilet,’ I said, surprised by the hoarseness of my voice.
The policewoman hesitated, and I said, ‘Don’t let me go, then. I’ll just piss on this floor. I’m not bothered.’
The policewoman pursed her lips, but then said, ‘Come with me.’
She led me out of the room and down the corridor to an unmarked door. She pushed the door open. ‘In here,’ she said.
The toilet was smelly and only perfunctorily clean. Despite my swollen bladder I cleaned the seat with several sheets of the tracing paper that passed for toilet roll, then laid little squares of it all around the seat before sitting down. I gasped when I finally let my bladder go, closing my eyes in near ecstasy. My innards still ached when it was over, but I felt a thousand times better. I remained seated for longer than I needed to, just to give myself time to come to, properly compose myself. I decided to look in my bag to make sure they hadn’t taken anything. The first thing I saw when I opened it, however, was something that shouldn’t have been there at all.
It was a small rabbit brooch that appeared to be made of gold. The rabbit was running, but curling back on itself, as if chasing its own tail. Where its eye should have been was an empty socket that looked as if it was intended to hold a gemstone of some kind. I turned the brooch over in my hands. It was not my sort of thing, but it was a beautiful piece of work.
I wondered how it had got into my bag. Had it been put there by accident or planted deliberately? If the latter, then why? Was the brooch some kind of a clue? Was someone trying to help me? Or was it the Greenwell equivalent of the evil eye?
I checked the rest of my bag’s contents and found that nothing else had been taken or added. When I came out of the toilet, I held up the brooch and said, ‘I found this in my bag.’
The policewoman glanced at the brooch and shrugged. ‘So?’
‘So it isn’t mine. Someone must have put it there by mistake.’
‘What do you want me to do about it?’ the policewoman said.
‘Put it back where it came from. Someone might come in to claim it.’
I held the brooch out towards her. The policewoman took a step back as if she didn’t want the thing to touch her skin. ‘Keep it,’ she said. ‘It’s nothing to do with me.’
I regarded her for a moment, then slipped the brooch into my jacket pocket. It might be a useful thing to keep hold of, if only to find out its significance.
‘So what happens now?’ I asked. Fully clothed and with an empty bladder I felt stronger, more able to cope.
‘Now you can go,’ the policewoman said.
‘Just like that? You’re not going to charge me with anything?’
‘Not at the moment.’
‘So what was the point of all this?’ I asked. ‘Apart from humiliating me, of course?’
‘We’re currently pursuing several lines of enquiry,’ the policewoman said. ‘If we need to speak to you again, we’ll get in touch.’
‘But I’ve admitted I broke into my brother’s flat. What else is there to say?’
‘I’m not prepared to discuss the nature of our enquiries with a potential suspect.’
I glared at her. ‘This whole thing is a joke. OK, well at least tell me this: why was I made to take my clothes off? What were those two creeps looking for?’
She gave a contemptuous snort. ‘What do you think?’
‘I really have no idea.’
‘They were looking for witch marks,’ she said and suddenly burst out laughing as if she had just cracked a joke so hilarious that it had taken even her by surprise.
I looked at her, bewildered and disturbed. What were these people on, for God’s sake? Reality seemed constantly to be shifting out of alignment in Greenwell, like a radio station that keeps wavering and blurring into static on a long car journey. Suddenly I felt weary. I just wanted to be out of there. ‘I’d like to go now, please,’ I said.
The policewoman stopped laughing. ‘This way.’ She led me to the end of the corridor, then turned right. I assumed she was leading me to the front entrance. I started to follow, then heard a burst of laughter behind me. I turned and caught a glimpse of three men entering a door further down the corridor. Two of them were the men who had ordered me to strip. The third was Matt.
‘Hey!’ I shouted and raced after them down the corridor. Enraged, I reached the door I had seen them go through and wrenched it open. The room beyond was larger than I’d expected. It was a busy open-plan office, full of noise and people. How had the door in the corridor managed to contain so much chatter, the constant ringing of telephones, the tapping of fingers on computer keyboards? I stood on the threshold of the room, my gaze sweeping back and forth, but there was no sign of Matt and the two men. I took a step into the room and abruptly everything stopped – all noise, all movement.
I remembered the feeling I’d had the first time I’d stepped into the Solomon Wedge, how I’d half-expected everyone to pause in what they were doing and stare silently at the stranger in their midst. When it hadn’t happened, I’d laughed it off, poured scorn on my overactive imagination. But now it was happening here.
It was like a dream. I felt reality slipping out of alignment, buzzing into static again. As I stood there, one hesitant step into the room, every head turned in eerie unison towards me, every eye regarded me with a blank and depthless gaze.
thirteen
Why do women stay with violent men? Why do they cover for them, stick up for them, feel a sense of duty towards them? I regard myself as an intelligent, clear-thinking, independent woman, and yet I stayed with Matt for over a year after he started hitting me.
Why?
There’s more than one answer. There’s a whole complex array of answers. Some of them sound so pathetic that if I’d heard them from anybody else I’d have shaken my head in sorry disbelief. One of the answers is this: I felt responsible for Matt’s violence. I felt as though I was the one who’d inadvertently opened the cage and let out the wild animal, and that it was my duty to catch the thing and lock it up again.
Another reason I stuck
with him – and I guess this is intertwined with what I’ve just said – is because I felt I could help Matt, change him. For a long time I didn’t see him as a calculating person, or a cruel one. I saw him as a tragic figure, as a victim of his past, saw his violence as something separate from him, like a build-up of toxins that he had to expel every now and again to prevent his entire system becoming poisoned.
For the first few months, in between the bouts of violence, Matt could be attentive, humorous, tender. But each passing day was like a barbed wire fence, snagging a little more of his goodness. He became increasingly sullen and irritable. At the time I thought it was my fault that he was behaving like this, but with hindsight I now believe that his behaviour probably followed this similar pattern throughout the course of any of his relationships. I think that for Matt the initial buzz of a new relationship was enough to keep the demons at bay. And maybe he would be genuinely happy for a while, thinking that his past was finally behind him. But as time wore on, and routine and familiarity set in, there would not be enough in the relationship to distract him, and the demons would come whispering again.
It was almost Christmas. This would have been our second Christmas together. Except I had come to the conclusion that I didn’t want to have a second Christmas with Matt. After eighteen months, I had finally decided that enough was enough, that the relationship was destroying me. Six weeks previously Matt had wrestled me to the ground and kicked me three times in the stomach, causing me to lose the baby I’d been carrying. Matt hadn’t known about the baby. I’d got pregnant by mistake, and had still been in two minds about what to do. In fact, it was getting pregnant that had actually made me realize that I didn’t want to be with Matt any more. When I thought of the child inside me, I thought only of a chain that would link the two of us together for the rest of our lives. It might sound strange, but I had been surprised – shocked, even – to discover how much that prospect horrified me. I knew then that I was going to finish it sooner or later. Looking back, I don’t know why I didn’t end it immediately after the miscarriage. Maybe I was too scared of what his reaction would be.
I never told him about the baby, and I never told him about losing it either. He would only have said its death was my fault for not telling him I was pregnant in the first place. I had avoided a beating there, but I hadn’t been able to avoid the last one he had administered, three weeks earlier. We had been sitting in his flat late at night, watching a movie together, The Piano. Halfway through Matt had announced he was bored and wanted to go to bed, and had got up off the settee and walked across to the TV, arm outstretched.
‘Hey, what are you doing?’ I said.
‘I’m turning this off, it’s shit.’
‘No it’s not,’ I protested. ‘How can you say that? It’s a great film. I’m really enjoying it.’
‘Well, I think it’s shit, and I want you to come to bed.’
You can see it coming, can’t you? And yes, I could see it coming too. But what do you do? Demurely go along with everything he says just because he can hit harder than you, or stand up for yourself, make him aware that you have your own needs and opinions, and that they deserve just as much respect as his?
I won’t dwell on the argument. It was familiar, depressing and inevitable. Suffice to say that it ended with Matt sitting on my chest, trying to ram a TV remote control down my throat. I struggled frantically, panic-stricken by the thought that this time he would go too far, that he wouldn’t stop until he’d killed me. Eventually, starved of air, I blacked out, and came to some time later, still lying on the carpet, the remote lying next to my head. There was blood in my mouth and on my face and in my hair and on the carpet. The remote had broken one of my teeth and badly cut the roof of my mouth. My throat was so bruised and swollen that for almost a week afterwards I couldn’t swallow solids.
I struggled to my feet and cleaned myself up in the bathroom. Afterwards I went to look for Matt and found him in bed, sleeping peacefully, taking deep, long breaths. The first few times he’d hurt me he’d been so contrite afterwards that I’d ended up comforting him. Now, though, he was indifferent to what he did to me. Whenever I tried to get him to talk about it later, he always refused, accused me of dwelling on things unnecessarily, dragging up stuff he’d rather forget.
I watched him for maybe a minute. In sleep his long, bony face looked so peaceful, almost childlike. I’d known our relationship was doomed even before tonight, but now, for the first time, I realized that I loathed him so much I didn’t care what happened to him any more. This was the end, I was going to stop seeing him, and if that led to him throwing himself off London Bridge or under a tube train, then good riddance. As I stood there I actually found myself looking idly around the dark room for something to bash his skull in with as he slept. I clenched my fists as if it was the only way of preventing myself from picking up a weapon. ‘It’s over,’ I whispered to his sleeping form, and quietly closed the door.
I called a cab and waited outside in the freezing cold for it to arrive. As I watched my breath spiral away into the night, I wondered why it had taken me so long to reach this moment. Watersheds should be significant and dramatic, but this was quiet, contemplative; a sense of loss, of mourning, mingled with relief. I knew I would never again set foot inside Matt’s flat, and suddenly felt a fierce, soaring joy that managed to surprise me. My broken tooth throbbed, my mouth felt like an open wound, but my physical pain was vindication for my new-found resolve to leave Matt to face his demons alone.
Over the next couple of weeks Matt called me constantly. At first he sounded irritated that I hadn’t been in touch, accused me of being petty.
‘Matt, you were trying to choke me with a TV remote control,’ I said, as if trying to explain to an aberrant child why his behaviour was wrong. ‘I lost consciousness. You could have given me permanent brain damage, or even killed me.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said. ‘It was just an argument that got a bit out of hand, that’s all.’
For the last I don’t know how long I had been pussyfooting around Matt, subconsciously weighing up what I was about to say before saying it, for fear he would take it the wrong way. Now, though, I didn’t care any more. Emboldened by my conviction that I would never be alone with him again, I said, ‘An argument? You have got to be joking. You don’t argue, Matt, you attack. You need some serious help, otherwise one day you’re going to kill somebody.’
There was a silence, which meant either that Matt was thinking about what I’d said, was too outraged to talk, or was trying to intimidate me. I waited patiently, feeling icy-cool, completely in control. What did I care? It was his phone bill.
At last he said curtly, ‘I didn’t ring up to talk about this.’
I sighed. ‘Matt, there’s nothing else to talk about. It’s become the biggest thing in what’s left of our relationship.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ he repeated.
‘Fine. Then let’s not talk about anything ever again.’
Before he could respond, I put the phone down.
Despite this, his calls kept coming. After a couple of days of vainly trying to explain to him why he should take responsibility for his actions, I gave up and simply stopped picking up the phone, allowing the answerphone to act as a protective shield between us.
Matt left lots of messages. Listening to them chronologically was like listening to a case study of someone who was progressing ever deeper into madness. At first, as I’ve said, he started off sounding irritable, as if I were the unreasonable one. Then, when he realized that this time I wasn’t going to come crawling back to him on the strength of a curt apology and a half-hearted promise that he would never hurt me again, he turned wheedling, saying that he couldn’t cope without me. When that didn’t work he started to become abusive – on one day he left twenty-nine messages, the last dozen of which managed to sound vicious despite being totally incoherent; on another memorable occasion he filled up a whole tape by repe
ating the word ‘bitch’ over and over again.
I toyed with the idea of calling the police, but in the end decided that before I involved them I would make an effort to formally end the relationship myself. Closure, the Americans call it. Matt and I had never had closure. I’d simply walked away from the job, leaving live wires sticking out all over the place.
And so I called him, arranged to meet him at Marco’s, an Italian restaurant just off Tottenham Court Road that we’d been to a couple of times. ‘We need to talk,’ I told him. ‘We need to sort a few things out.’
He was sullen, monosyllabic. He’d been trying to get me to agree to see him for over two weeks, but now that I had he didn’t seem bothered. ‘So you will be there?’ I said. ‘Wednesday, 23rd. You won’t forget?’
He grunted. Exasperated by his behaviour, I put the phone down without saying goodbye. You’d better bloody be there, you looney, I thought. I wanted it all over for Christmas, wanted him out of my life for good.
I rehearsed the evening in my head many times before it arrived, planned exactly what I was going to say to him, as if learning lines. I tried to anticipate his counter-arguments and to come up with responses for them. Tried, too, to imagine what sort of mood he would be in, and found it virtually impossible. I pictured him being sullen, being angry, being upset. The fact that I couldn’t predict exactly what his reaction might be saddened me; had it really taken me all this time to realize that I didn’t know him at all? I talked things over with Alex, a couple of times into the early hours of the morning as we killed several bottles of Australian red. We even role-played to see how I would cope with unexpected responses. I decided I was going to play it calm and friendly, but cool. I wasn’t going to get emotional, because that would only provide fuel for his fire. Alex and I spent a lot of time deciding what I was going to wear, how I was going to do my hair, how much make-up I was going to put on. I wanted to look nice, but I didn’t want Matt to feel I was mocking him by dressing as attractively as I could, or give him the false impression that I was trying to win him back.