He moved soundlessly from the kitchen to the front room. The hallway was painted white and there were some cheap Spanish-style paintings hanging on the wall. A wooden coat stand was bursting with the paraphernalia of a normal life in a normal home on a normal day.
A twisted smile played on his lips as he contemplated the idea that nothing much would feel normal after he’d done what he’d come for.
He heard the clackety-clack, clackety-clack of knitting needles, and the soft hum of a vaguely familiar tune. A tick-tock of a clock. A distant barking. Otherwise, silence.
He glanced at his watch. Half past one. Good.
On the red sofa with her back to him sat the humming, knitting object of his violent lust. His accomplice. Dear, sweet Polly.
With a stealth surprising in someone as physically imposing as him, he secretly approached her, two paces, three, four.
Then, a pause to breathe in the scene. Her soft scent, floral, caught in his nostrils and he watched her shoulders gently moving, swaddled in a pale pink woollen cardigan. A white dress peeped out below and kicked out over her knees.
He could just see the pert outline of her right breast. He knew already that her nipples would be darkly dusky and hard, engorged with desire for him.
The blood in turn flowed through him.
He saw the white nets at the window, reassuringly gathered to prevent sight of whatever was about to happen. You would have to really strain to find the one or two spots where slight gaps would allow a peek. Like he did, the other day.
He reached down behind her and pulled his hand over her face, locking her mouth into silence.
She wriggled and attempted to hit out, mouthing a scream which just muffled into groans.
He allowed her to see him, swinging himself around in front of her and pinning her down into the redness of the sofa.
Knitting needles fell helplessly into the floor and a ball of dark blue wool rolled into the hallway.
Sheer terror gripped her heart, crippling her into spasms of resistance.
His excitement mounted, feeling her twitching like a creature caught in a huntsman’s trap. Her eyes were breathtakingly blue, paler than any he had seen. He was momentarily caught off guard by their transparency.
‘Don’t say a word,’ he murmured, breathing hard onto her neck.
She spasmed again, fear locking her into paralysis.
He reached under the white dress and felt her warm legs, shivering slightly. His other hand was gripping across her face, squeezing her clamped shut.
Her eyes searched his for some kind of meaning, an explanation.
He wasn’t about to offer one up.
He was enjoying the sense of control within him and the powerlessness within her. It was more perfect than he could have imagined.
His hardness was at the point of desperation. But he wanted to watch and wait some more.
Seeing her terror was the most exquisite aphrodisiac. He pushed his right hand slowly up her thighs, noticing the soft roundness despite her lean slimness.
He reached up further and pulled her underwear away between his finger and thumb. Then, with agonising slowness, using his third finger, he softly, softly began to stroke the folds buried deep between her legs.
He watched her face, taking in every sign of resistance, and waiting for the moment of submission.
She raised her eyebrows questioningly, still unable to speak. She was achingly perfect, the accomplice of his dreams.
He pulled his hand away from under the dress and moved instead to her right breast. He pulled apart the finely spun cardigan and allowed himself to look. The gentle rise of her breasts asked him to touch her. Come inside, feel me.
He obeyed his accomplice, hungrily, tearing slightly the white cotton of her bodice. But he was curiously tender in his touch as he started down the curve of her breast and reached the nipple. Palming it softly, he massaged hard on her, rubbing its pointiness so it couldn’t help but grow harder under his touch.
Satisfied with her response, he looked down once more at her eyes, pleading with him.
She looked on the point of collapsing with fear. Or with desire?
Perfect.
So this was when he withdrew from touching her and pulled himself up, releasing her face.
‘Not a word …’ he whispered, smiling darkly. He reached inside his trousers and let his hands work up and down, pulling it out and admiring its strength.
What Polly did not know was that Joe had never consummated any sexual encounter. For him, desire and release was all about the imagining, the anticipation, the watching and the waiting. For him, the thrill came through the forensic workings of his frenzied mind, picturing the fear in his accomplice, imagining their terror-struck physicality and making their response a reality. The meticulous planning and the mapping out of detail unlocked a passion which took him on a journey that would end in ecstasy of his own doing.
The faces of his accomplices danced before him, first Finnegan, then another boy, Taylor, then an old woman called Iris. There had been another, a pathetic creature whose whining had cost him dear, irritating the hell out of Joe with his mewlings. So he had smashed his head into a wall, leaving him brain damaged, unable to speak ever again.
And now Polly, pinned by her own fear to the recesses of the sofa, and watching him tug at himself ferociously, groaning. An expression of violent agony gripped his face, his eyes rolling back.
It wasn’t long before that sweet pleasure-pain exploded through him, and all over the white dress.
He raised an eyebrow at her, knowing her desire for him was consuming every cell of her being.
That fear-submission look was all too familiar to him now.
He thought back to the feel of her hardening nipple and the softness of her folds, and he knew he would leave her desperate for her own release.
His green-black eyes bored out at her from beneath his eyebrows. He rearranged himself and straightened up.
‘Good girl, good girl,’ he said, and he sauntered into the hallway.
Pulled the front door open, and walked out into the cool breeze.
Without so much as a backward glance, he walked out of her life, safe in the knowledge that he had destroyed something today. Mr and Mrs Businessman would never be the same again.
Letters
There was a knock on the door, slight pause, then a bright swing inwards.
Billy stepped in, smiles dancing around his mouth but sadness buried deep in his eyes.
It had been almost a week since he’d last visited, but he’d had that cathartic chat with Aidan and was feeling more resigned about it all.
‘Hello,’ he said, peering at the back of the seated figure. A wisp of long, pale hair was tied into a pony tail at the back, a few straggles dangling down either side. She was on the bed, facing towards the window.
She didn’t stir.
He walked around the bed to say hello properly. Perhaps she hadn’t heard him. As he came around in front of her, blocking the light with his stocky frame, she startled.
She looked up at him, recognition dawning.
Thank goodness for that, he thought to himself, she’s having one of her good days.
He wrapped her shawl more tightly around her shoulders and asked if she was alright, whether there was anything he could get her.
‘It’s alright, Billy dearest, I’m quite alright.’
‘How have you been?’ he asked, routinely. Waited for the familiar reply.
‘Well, it’s hard to keep up, you know, so much going on …’, she began. He smiled, encouragingly. ‘I’ve been thinking a lot, you see, trying to join the dots of my memories. But it isn’t easy, Billy. Things go a bit hazy after a while. I find myself wondering whether I had friends. I find myself trying to work out the gaps and plot the story.’
She looked tired, frustrated.
‘I’m trying so hard but so much is missing. I remember things, fleetingly, and when they are there, they cryst
allise, and I feel alive. But they fade again just as quickly, first into black and white and then into a grey nothingness. At times I have a warm glow inside, as if I’d just remembered something precious. At others I feel gripped by a coldness, as if some dark memory is casting my heart in stone.
‘And I wonder about love, Billy. Have I been loved? Have I loved?’
It wasn’t the first time she had asked him about love.
It was as if, deep in her subconscious, she knew.
‘Of course you have had love, of course,’ he said, soothingly, reluctant to go into all the details with her again. She would only forget them, again.
‘Do you remember what our lives were like, when we were in May Close?’ he asked. He found it was a good technique, getting her to natter about the things that she could remember well.
She would perk up and chatter away, her mind whisking back to sunny skies and bubbles.
Her face would grow animated and a light would catch in her eyes. It was nice seeing her like this. The veil would lift and a glimpse of the person she had once been would emerge.
He sometimes wondered whether he did this selfishly, because to hear her recount excitedly this or that recreated a sunnier time for him, too. But he remembered that the carer at the hospice had advised that Alzheimer’s patients tended to respond well to childhood memories – and young adulthood through to the mid thirties. The earlier the better – as of somehow the first couple decades of life had been hardwired into your psyche, indelibly.
So yes, it felt somewhat selfish, but also he knew that he was helping her do some good to herself. And there was something rather lovely about seeing her eyes come to life. It didn’t happen often enough.
Of course, this was partly because she was suffering so much pain. Despite the drugs they were pumping into her, traces of agony would sometimes wince across her face.
And she had grown terribly thin, especially in the last couple of months.
He could feel every bone in her spine when he embraced her, and her clothes were beginning to hang limply off her.
At one point, he had made the mistake of bringing his ancient Polaroid camera in and taking a couple of snaps for her. He thought she would marvel at the machine and be impressed by how clever it was. Instead, her first reaction was one of puzzlement. ‘Who is that?’ she asked, peering down at the picture. There she was, captured on film, a shaky smile. A pale blue cardie wrapped around and a yellow dress underneath, flecked with sprigs of violets.
She’d looked down at herself, noting the dress and the cardigan.
‘But who is that, and why are they wearing my things?’ she asked, in exasperation.
‘But it’s you, silly thing!’ he exclaimed, laughing.
But his laughter was soon cut short when he realised she genuinely hadn’t recognised herself.
‘But that’s an old woman, and she’s thin, look how thin she is …’ she had trailed off.
Shocked, Billy realised that she hadn’t quite grasped the brutal physical decline she had endured and resolved never to confuse her like that again.
It also reminded him how very much she had changed, and he thought about that, wistfully.
And with that, the chatter dried up and she was staring at her dressing table.
It was nice that this establishment let people bring in some of their own things, little mementoes to cheer the place up. It wasn’t too bad, he supposed, but pale purple walls were a bit sickly for his liking – how they expected people to feel better when that nauseous colour was staring back at them from all sides he didn’t know. But they’d made an effort with the faux impressionistic art. She had three paintings hanging higgledy- piggledy on the wall above her bed.
They were a bit of a theme throughout the hospice. In the common seating area, there were several more, and dotted throughout the corridors they were pale, inoffensive splashes of colour which at least made the walls a little less bland.
He looked over and followed her stare. There was that old bottle of perfume and the paraphernalia of all women’s dressing tables – brush set, jewellery casket, usual stuff.
But then he alighted upon something he hadn’t seen before.
A golden skein of silk was illuminated from a dapple of sunlight poking through the leaves on the trees outside.
He went to examine it, wondering if it was something from an old sewing kit. Briefly, he remembered having helped Gracie with her embroidery. She never had got the hand of that sort of thing.
As he neared it, he realised he had been wrong. This was no skein of silk – it was a curl of hair. Yellow blonde hair.
‘Oh God!’ he muffled into his hand.
Gingerly, he reached to pick the curl up. It looked so pretty in the light. The colour hair Rapunzel would have had. The colour hair Gracie would have had. Back then.
He looked at her, sitting on the bed, quietly. Her eyes were staring but unseeing. She was having one of her moments where her mind drifts off.
Billy didn’t mind. It gave him time to look properly at the curl, and wonder at its provenance.
He noticed the open locket discarded next to the jewellery box and understood that this had been the hiding place of this treasure all that time.
Tenderly, he curled it up and placed it back inside the locket.
At that moment, the lump in his throat burst into sorrow and he found himself crying long, wretched rivers of tears.
Like an old cine film, his mind played back a thousand memories, skipping through the seasons, scratchy and obscure in places, shiningly bright in others.
‘Let’s play in the snow! Let’s build a snowman! Let’s build a garden of flowers with icicles for him!’
‘Can we go fishing for cockles? Can we take a picnic?’
‘I’d love to blow bubbles today, wouldn’t you, Billy? We can pretend that bubbles are the magic potion to restore the life back to the sleeping princess. All we have to do is blow them over her and ta-dah! She will open her eyes and smile and kiss the prince.’
Fortunately, she was still gazing into space, locked in a reverie that even his jagged, throaty tears couldn’t stir.
He calmed himself. That bubble game had been a favourite of hers. She always liked taking fairy stories and adapting them for Billy and Gracie land. He thought back how many years must have passed since they last played together. Then he remembered how it was that even when they grew older and stopped playing childish games together, they would still talk, still share secrets and still rely on each other for everything.
He picked up the locket and began to close it. But he thought there was something under the curl, so he carefully unlooped it again and looked beneath.
The letters PH were engraved inside, and there was an inscription. ‘Forever yours,’ it read.
He looped the curl back inside and fastened the oval tightly shut.
‘PH?’ He wondered who that had been, then a flicker of acknowledgement helped him see. Peter Harper? He wondered, out loud. Had Gracie’s Ma been given this trinket by his own father? Did it mean what he had, deep inside, always suspected?
He thought back to that important day when he and Gracie had shared that dreadful experience of hiding and hearing the beating.
Going back to his home and spilling out everything that had happened to his Ma and his Da.
Taking comfort in the ordinariness of jam sandwiches.
Seeing his Da stand tall, to go to Gracie’s Ma, to look after her, to protect her.
A knight in shining armour dashing down the road to save the maiden.
Billy tried to collect his thoughts but they tumbled one after the other. The amount of time his Da would help Gracie’s Ma with fixing things. ‘She’s all on her own, she needs the help of a good man,’ he would joke to Billy’s Ma.
Billy’s Ma would watch him disappear, again, while her own window latch went unmended, the kitchen counter went unsanded and the stool in John and Simon’s room stayed leaning against the wall,
two legs missing their third, broken, brother.
He remembered the increasing number of drives he would take her on, to go and purchase various things that needed buying. ‘She hasn’t got a car, dear, she needs me to help her out,’ he would say. And Billy’s Ma would sigh to herself.
Billy speculated now whether she was wondering what happened to the day trips they had used to make together, Mary and Peter.
And he thought about that single white rose that he’d found on the floor that day. He remembered noticing it, and vaguely being aware that it was a rose from his own family’s garden.
And then he remembered that day was, horrifically, the day this had all started. He asked himself whether it could have all been prevented if only Peter Harper had stayed home with his own family that day. How could he? Off instead with Gracie’s Mother. Leaving Gracie all on her own.
Then, another terrible thought struck him.
What about Gracie’s little baby brother or sister who had decided to go straight to Heaven? Now he knew about these things, it wasn’t that hard to piece the remaining elements of the jigsaw together.
He felt slightly sick.
And he thought of his Ma now, frail and old. He wondered if she had known.
Accomplices
Sauntering through the twilight, Joe allowed himself a moment to play over in his mind again what had just happened. He smiled with a surge of pleasure-pain. The look on her face! Her pleading eyes … the feel of her body tensing up as he touched her, nipples hard and ready. Playing with him, teasing him, provoking him.
Walking along, he liked the feeling that he was hiding in plain sight. He liked knowing he could have extinguished her life, just like that. He liked knowing he could have slit the child’s throat, if he’d wanted.
He liked walking away, safe in the knowledge no one knew who he was or what he had done.
Spotting a boisterous pair of boys ribbing each other and joshing on the street, a memory of his own childhood fleetingly caught his attention. As a boy, he didn’t have friends. Didn’t need them. Preferred doing his own thing. Always far more interested in doing his little experiments.
Seas of Snow Page 16