The Keeper

by Jessica Moor

  She lightly touched her wedding ring. She’d thought to take it off, but the knuckle had swollen too much. Arthritis, made worse by fingers that had been broken and had never properly set.

  You could go to the jeweller’s and get the thing taken off with a tiny saw. Lynne had told her.

  She’d do it. When she got round to it.

  Not yet.

  Where should she begin?

  Angie had lost all sense of beginnings. Things just went on for ever and ever. There was no possibility of change.

  ‘How long have you been married, Angie?’

  ‘Forty-nine years,’ Angie had said. She had done what she automatically did – the wry smile, the slight roll of the eyes. The look that said, Oh, well, you know, we put up with each other.

  Usually, people laughed. Or said, ‘Ah, isn’t that lovely?’

  Sometimes they asked her what the secret was.

  Katie hadn’t done any of that. In fact, she’d done nothing at all. She had looked at Angie with an expression Angie hadn’t seen for a long time.

  It was curiosity.

  ‘Well?’

  Usually, nobody wanted to know.

  * * *

  • • •

  When you got old, your skin had a different way of bruising. Young bruised skin can still be peach-pretty, the gathering of blood below the surface proof of life.

  It changes when you’re old. The skin resigns itself; there seems little point in pretending at real repair. Old bruised skin gathers in its collapse like a flock of wet newspapers grinding themselves into the pavement.

  It seems unkind to say that nobody cares – it’s just that nobody notices.

  * * *

  • • •

  ‘And how often do you claim these beatings took place?’ the defence barrister had asked.

  ‘I suppose something like twice a week. It’s been a great many years, I’m not quite sure. Perhaps twice a week. Always on a Sunday.’

  ‘Twice a week for forty-nine years, Mrs Woods?’

  ‘I . . . I think so. Yes. That’s probably right.’

  ‘Probably?’

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  ‘Louder, Mrs Woods, please.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s five thousand and ninety-six separate beatings,’ the defence barrister had announced.

  The judge had taken off his glasses and polished them on his robes. With his rheumy eyes and mottled pate, he was a dead spit of Charlie.

  ‘Five thousand and ninety-six beatings, Mrs Woods. And why is it that you have only chosen to leave now?’

  Charlie had stood in the dock with his tie neatly knotted, his saggy man-breast body held in by a pale yellow polyester shirt, his eyes swimming with tears which the light of the courtroom alchemized from self-pity into dignity.

  What people didn’t realize about an old man like Charlie, Angie had thought as she looked up at him, is that whatever was rotten inside him has had that much longer to rot. It had become dense and tarry-black and sticky as sin, spilling out from his eyes and mouth.

  Katie squeezed Angie’s hand.

  ‘He’s always pulling that one,’ Angie whispered. ‘The crying.’

  ‘It’s manipulation, Angie. Control.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Angie muttered. ‘The jury don’t know him like I do.’

  ‘Maybe they’ll see through him.’

  Katie didn’t sound like she believed it herself.

  ‘Maybe they won’t.’

  In his testimony, Charlie placed in Angie the ability to be in two places at once. To be simultaneously at the stove cooking his dinner and out on the town, the last forty years fallen away to let the silly, sexy girl she once was walk the night. To have power over all men, the power that, somehow, she held over him.

  He told the court that she was a witch or a cat or a snake. Not a dumpy woman of nearly seventy with a caved-in face from all the fists that had fallen on it. Something beyond language, something with the ability to shrink and grow his cock at will and to distort his mind and lie, lie, lie to him, to make him believe that she loved him when she didn’t.

  Maybe there was some truth in the claim of her magic. Angie had known that she was invisible for a long time; she could enter a room and the great oil-painting bruises across her face would attract barely a second glance. Or those who did look would leave their mouths suspended like trap doors, waiting for her to reassure them.

  She could always go above the pain and say the words in her mother’s voice.

  ‘Oh, just a little fall. Don’t worry about me, love.’

  They thought it might be dementia. Or that was one of the tacks the lawyers tried, in any case.

  ‘They’ll never go for that,’ Katie had whispered.

  He was acquitted.

  * * *

  • • •

  ‘Tell me about Charlie.’

  Charlie was all the things she’d loved when they’d married forty-nine years ago.

  Heartbreaker. Jack the lad. Always dressed to kill, though God only knows where he got the money from.

  ‘The best-looking young man in the village.’

  ‘So he was charming?’

  ‘I fancied him since school.’

  They’d walked together, Charlie and she. Paraded, really, admiring the sculptures of light their two shadows cast, joined by the hand that enclosed her still-neat waist. She’d been terribly young then, younger even than this young girl, Katie, with the wide brown eyes and the unfeeling set of forms and the hand that kept twitching as if to reach out and take Angie’s.

  ‘And then you got married?’

  She had held a bouquet of violets in the church and said her vows in a voice that sounded so much surer than her own. She had got the dressmaker to alter the collar of her dress, to show off her slender throat.

  But it had ended up a little too tight, and when Charlie, her new husband Charlie, had tilted back her chin to kiss her as his wife, the sheath of lace pulled tight across her windpipe. That moment was frozen in a black-and-white photograph that sat on their mantlepiece for forty-nine years, until the frame was smashed.

  She, so slim then, so pretty. Legs to here, eyes like a deer getting ready to flee. His big hand gathering in the neatness of her waist.

  When he cried, he looked like how their babies had looked in the moments she’d first glimpsed them over the midwife’s shoulder, when they were still wet with Angie’s blood. Pre-human, agonized.

  Charlie had lain down on the floor like a toddler having a tantrum when they took him away. A big man, Charlie – it had taken three policemen to get him up and into the car. He had wailed the whole time.

  Angie had rolled her eyes at the police. Men, eh? What’re they like?

  That had counted against her later, in court.

  * * *

  • • •

  Who did you fuck? Tell me

  You

  Old

  Bitch

  ‘He whipped me with his belt.’

  Katie hadn’t looked away. She’d nodded.

  ‘Thought I was going to die. Hoped I was going to die.’

  The moment when the belt was raised was even worse than the moment when it slammed down, on to torn flesh, on to flesh that had lost its integrity and unity.

  ‘But you got away.’

  She had told him that she didn’t love him. It was a terrible risk, but it worked. Charlie howled like a dog that had been abandoned by its master and turned away, slamming his own head against the wall.

  Angie used the moment to seize the cordless landline, dial 999 and throw the phone under the sofa, where Charlie would not be able to hear it over the roaring tide of blood sliding into his eyes. Even if he saw it, he wo
uldn’t be able to reach it. His back was too bad.

  Then he beat her more.

  Look what you made me do, you old cunt.

  In court, Angie had found out that the space between her calling the emergency services and the angel-sound of that calm, measured knock on the door had been eleven minutes. Eleven minutes of screaming, which she realized the police must have heard and recorded. Eleven minutes of calling herself a liar, promising she did love him, there was only him, there had only ever been him.

  ‘I’m useless,’ Angie said aloud. She didn’t mean much by it beyond the basic statement of fact.

  ‘You shouldn’t feel that way,’ Katie said.

  But I do, Angie thought, and a piece of loneliness seemed to crash into her and pin her against the floor so that she could no longer breathe. Katie reached over to take her hand, seeming to see her distress, but the hand didn’t feel like anything at all.

  They went for a meal for their wedding anniversary, Charlie and Angie Woods. Angie’s bruises were still the colour of crushed violets, and the gash on Charlie’s forehead was still blackish and scabby, a streak of humanity across his still-handsome face. Angie put on the purple silk scarf he’d given her for their ruby-wedding anniversary.

  They just went to the Harvester, nothing fancy. A quiet meal, a little elegy to the life they sometimes agreed to pretend they had.

  He had been silent, then sorry, and then they had shared a slice of chocolate fudge cake and he’d made her laugh and she had reminded him that he shouldn’t have cake with his cholesterol levels.

  He had laughed, patted her on her thigh and told her she was a bossy old cow.

  The prosecutors were furious when they found out. You can’t just see him whenever you fancy it, they said. It destroys the case for harassment.

  He had sent her over three thousand texts since she had arrived in the refuge. Yes, her Charlie had learned to text.

  ‘You hold down this button . . . and this button . . .’ Katie held the phone in her hands like a ticking bomb. The screen flickered for just a moment. ‘And that takes a picture of it.’

  ‘Wouldn’t have thought I’d have to put my own evidence together,’ Angie said, without thinking. Then she looked up at Katie and smiled. ‘Ever so good for me. Gets me into the modern world.’

  They held a smile between them like a tightrope, then Katie looked back down at Angie’s phone and frowned.

  ‘You’ve still got your location on. You need to . . .’ A few intricate swipes, the screen dancing under her fingers. ‘There you go.’ She handed the phone back to Angie. ‘Now he can’t use it to track you down. You never know.’

  * * *

  • • •

  She did feel silly being in the refuge, but he’d been so damn persistent, following her to her sister’s and posting nasty things through the letter box; in the end, Angie had relented.

  When she’d entered the refuge Katie had asked her if she was frightened of Charlie – it seemed to be on one of her lists of set questions. It took her a long time to answer. She wasn’t frightened of Charlie – he wasn’t a frightening man, just a baby and a coward.

  Who?

  Who is it?

  Who the fuck is it?

  ‘I just have to let you know how I feel,’ he had told her over the phone. He had gone to a phone box and slid in his chunks of silver because the phone had been cut off, everything had been cut off. He had stayed in that dark, dank place. She had no idea what he ate – her Charlie couldn’t boil an egg.

  She had put the phone down after hearing his voice start to shake because, somehow, when she heard it, she saw the old man with the rheumy eyes and the shaking hands. She’d felt herself fill with love – the kind of bone-deep love that meant you’d chosen your person – the person who’d swear blind at the gates of heaven that you’d existed. That there had been a woman called Angie and that Charlie had loved her like hell, that he’d never stop loving her.

  Whatever it was he felt, he couldn’t tell her. There was nothing available in him to tell.

  Did you fuck that bloke George Fielding?

  Did you fuck him?

  Oh, bless you, love. He’s forty-one. I’m a used-up old woman. You should know, you were the one that did the using.

  The names he spat at her were like a roll call, or a prayer, or a volley of pistol shots in the dark. A boot in the ribs, each kick curving like a question mark.

  Tell me tell me tell me

  Not knowing is always the worst thing.

  Oh, Charlie. Bless your fool heart. You think I’d be with all those men? I’m tired. All I want is to be away from men. From you. We’re like Adam and Eve, after it all went wrong and they were thrown out of that lovely garden and left to scrabble around in the dirt.

  42.

  Then

  He sits with her until visiting hours end, at eight. He is evicted by a large, solid-looking nurse. Jamie kisses Katie on the forehead and tells her to sleep well. She feels certain that, for a second, she saw the nurse frown. She isn’t sure why that would be – she doesn’t wince when he kisses her. She’s trained herself never to do that.

  It seems obvious to her that she needs to get out.

  Perhaps if they’d had a night apart over the last eighteen months, it would have been obvious to her then, but the fantastical intimations of taking her things, leaving, are always blocked by the fact of his body.

  If she tries to leave him, he will kill her.

  He has said so, and she believes him.

  Katie plucks the tubes out of her arm like daisies, one by one.

  She has to have clothes around here somewhere – an overnight bag?

  There’s nothing. She isn’t even wearing underwear.

  Katie stands at the entrance to the ward. She doesn’t remember how she got there.

  There, in the space that isn’t supposed to be a car park, Jamie’s car dawdles. Perhaps her gowned figure has caught the moonlight more than she realized, but his head turns.

  He doesn’t smile, doesn’t wave, doesn’t look at her.

  But he saw her, she knows. Perhaps more than she’s ever seen herself.

  She goes back into the hospital foyer, retreating to where Jamie’s headlights can’t follow her.

  The nurse from earlier is watching her.

  ‘Do you need any help, darling?’ she says.

  Katie shakes her head and feels like she would have cried if the fire hadn’t evaporated the tears from her. The nurse’s long black braids swing around her, but everything else about her has a stillness that makes something in Katie slacken and rest.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ Katie says. ‘Sorry, I might have got a bit confused. I’ve been a bit out of it. Did you ask me about surgery earlier?’

  The nurse nods. ‘Yes, lovely, that’s right.’

  ‘I do want it,’ Katie says, very, very quietly. ‘Or maybe . . . maybe not. I don’t know.’

  ‘The consultant’ll come round and talk to you about it properly. I know it seems intimidating.’

  ‘I’d rather he didn’t.’

  ‘She. Why not?’

  ‘It’s just . . . it’s just for the best.’

  ‘If you think so, darling. But wouldn’t you like to speak to the consultant, anyway? It’d all be confidential.’

  ‘It’s not confidential,’ Katie says, feeling her voice thickening. ‘The thing is . . . he won’t let me. Jamie . . . makes choices for me. It’s . . . it’s not in a bad way. He loves me. He’s got a clearer head than me, especially right now. I’m indecisive. I always have been.’

  For a moment, the nurse looks as though she’s deciding which claim to reply to, but then, instead, she takes in a sharp breath and tilts her head to one side.

  ‘Jamie’s your boyfriend?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A
re you afraid of him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Katie doesn’t know where the answer even came from.

  It seems to slip out before she had the chance to slam the gates of her mind shut. Her heart gives a strange leap as she says the word. There is an old feeling there, under all the haze of the drugs and the fear.

  The feeling of living in the sun.

  The nurse is still looking at her steadily, as if nothing could surprise her. Maybe nothing could.

  ‘I thought you might be,’ she says. ‘That’s why I left the curtains open earlier. To keep an eye on you.’

  Katie’s eyes narrow slightly. She hadn’t been expecting that. Now that she has acknowledged her fear, it seems to live separately from her, as undeniable as any fully formed being.

  But this nurse is saying that she saw it earlier, when it was still unborn.

  How is that even possible?

  ‘I’m being stupid,’ she says. ‘There’s nothing to be scared of.’

  ‘Nothing?’ The nurse is looking at her as if she’s failing to pick up on something obvious. Katie has dreaded that look her whole life, has fled before it.

  ‘You’re in hospital, darling.’

  ‘But that’s my own fault.’

  ‘Is it?’

  Katie’s heart has never pounded so fast before. It seems to speed up the sluggish tempo of her thoughts, dragging her back towards something she knows to be true.

  ‘The smoke alarms were working. The smoke alarms were working. I know they were. Someone disabled them.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because he wanted to kill me.’

  ‘You just said he wasn’t dangerous.’

  Katie goes blank inside.

  ‘I want to help you, darling, but you’ve got to be completely honest with me. Do you think he’s dangerous?’

  Katie doesn’t answer, and the nurse sighs.

  ‘It’s all right. I know it’s a shock. I’m not going to ask you anything more. I’m going to tell you that a man who disables a smoke alarm and sets a place on fire – or even a man who might have done those things – is not the sort of person I want a patient of mine around.’