Tales of Crow- The Complete series Box Set

by Chris Ward

  One thing all the arguing had done was help her forget about the waiting email from Brian. As she climbed the stairs and unlocked the door to her room, she felt it rearing up again, making its presence known like a dead animal in a cage she was reluctant to clear out. It wouldn’t be anything good, she just knew it. Putting off the inevitable was just going to hurt her more in the long run, but as she stared at her laptop sitting hostile and threatening on top of her bed she just couldn’t do it.

  After dinner for sure. Once we’ve got that mini-bus away, we’ll deal with it then. One thing at a time.

  She busied herself by taking a shower, redoing her makeup and changing her clothes for dinner. The computer watched her from the bed like a mechanical grudge-laden goblin, daring her to give in. She wouldn’t. Not yet.

  Downstairs she was surprised to find that the tour guests had all assembled and seemed to be in high spirits after the crushing disappointments of the afternoon. Sitting at the head of the table with the young couples on either side of her, she spent the first few minutes apologising informally and profusely as if everything was her fault alone. None of them seemed as upset as the pack mentality had led her to believe, and she was beginning to enjoy her food, even allowing herself to partake in a couple of glasses of beer. She’d never been a strong drinker, but Brian had liked a few and she had just gone along with the ride for a while. Their nights out were one of the few things for which she still retained fond memories.

  Some of the old folk at the far end of the table were a little on the downward side of lubricated by the time dessert was brought out. Getting up to go to the bathroom, one of them, an elderly man called Yamagawa, fell backwards off his chair. The others bellowed with laughter—even the old women—and lifted their glasses in a toast. Shortly after, both of the young couples excused themselves, leaving Jennie sitting alone and exposed at one end of the table. As she sipped her beer and silently watched the old folk having fun, she felt less like a tour guide and more like a death row prisoner eating her final meal.

  They seemed so happy, though, that she was starting to think she ought to just slip away like the young couples had done and leave them to get up to whatever they wanted. The hotel had installed a karaoke room especially for Japanese guests, and the group had booked it for the evening. If it cheered them up, she would quite happily put up with the sound of enka coming up through the floor all night.

  ‘Hey, you. Yeah, I’m talking to you.’

  She closed her eyes a moment, wishing she was invisible. Why didn’t I just get up and leave?

  ‘Hey, what are you doing down there with a smirk on your face? Is this some kind of joke to you?’

  She opened her eyes to see Naotoshi standing halfway down the table looking towards her, Yamagawa swaying beside him with one arm wrapped around his shoulders. Naotoshi’s face was beetroot red, his eyes bloodshot.

  ‘I know all about you, you know.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  An uneasy hush had fallen over the others, except for Yamagawa who giggled and spat at Naotoshi’s shoulder as though nothing untoward was happening at all. Other guests, and even one or two of the kitchen staff had paused what they were doing to watch the confrontation as it unfolded. The gestures were obvious, even if they couldn’t understand what was being said.

  ‘They ought to screen you better, you know,’ Naotoshi slurred. ‘Shouldn’t let any old riff raff lead a tour like this. They should employ people with a sense of responsibility.’

  She stood up, her anger rising. ‘What are you talking about? Why don’t you just sit down and shut up, you old fool? You’ve been nothing but trouble this whole trip.’ She shut her mouth with a sharp snap. She’d let her words run away with themselves. It was too late now; it would be prudent to go straight upstairs and prepare her resignation letter. She had no chance of further employment once Naotoshi’s report went in.

  Yamagawa giggled. A couple of the old ladies whispered harshly to each other, but Jennie was too far away to know whether they were on her side or not. Naotoshi lifted an accusing finger, and the gnarled, crooked, liver-spotted digit shook in the air like an ancient wizard’s wand.

  ‘You’re a stain on our proud society, you are,’ Naotoshi spat, and Jennie braced herself for a torrent of racial abuse. It wasn’t just her name that gave her away as what Japanese society called a “half”, with a Japanese mother and American father; her hair was too light, her face not angular enough. While the younger generation thought nothing of it, there were still those among the older folk who believed the purity of the race should be preserved.

  ‘I got a friend to check you out,’ he said. ‘You didn’t even have the decency to divorce him, did you? You just ran out on him like a coward.’

  She stared at him, her mouth suddenly too dry to form words. ‘I …I….’

  Naotoshi turned towards the other women. ‘It’s no wonder this tour has been such a shambles,’ he said. ‘This tart ran out on her husband and then aborted his baby. She’s nothing more than a common whore.’

  One of the old ladies ran over and slapped Naotoshi hard across the face. He recoiled in shock, but Jennie no longer cared that anyone had stepped up to defend her, regardless of how accurate his accusations were. They were too close for comfort.

  Where had he got that information from?

  The staff, bored of the show, had closed in to shut the party down. Yamagawa was lying across the table, laughing at the top of his voice, while Naotoshi was sitting on the floor, shouting at anyone who came near. Two of the old ladies were pushing each other back and forth while two others tried to part them.

  Jennie, sick and tired of the calamitous circus that was enveloping her, got up and ran for the door, tripped on a step and sprawled across the hotel corridor. Hot tears both of pain and shame filled her eyes and she nearly choked on her sobs as she scrambled for the stairs, ignoring the shouts of alarm from behind the reception desk. She half ran, half crawled up the stairs to the third floor, fumbled for her key and let herself into the room, misery overcoming her as she dived for the scant comfort of her bed.

  As she lay there with her face crushed into her pillow, hoping the world would disappear around her, she felt something hard pressing into her thigh. She shifted her leg, but her flushed, sweaty skin had let it stick to her like a barnacle, refusing to let go.

  It was her laptop computer.

  11

  Jennie finds a way out

  ‘Um, yes?’

  Brian, kneeling on the ground with the water of Manhattan Bay lapping against the side of the dock behind him, with the Statue of Liberty looming over his head from across the water, held the box out towards her as he stood up. She gazed into the tiny box and saw a dozen twinkling lights; there were enough diamonds on the ring to buy her parents a new house.

  A tear formed in the side of her eye and dribbled down her face. She had dreamed of this moment, but now it had finally come she was speechless. Brian, though, a wide grin on his perfect face, had heard the only word that mattered.

  ‘We can make the arrangements later,’ he said. ‘Whenever you feel ready. It’s a done deal now. As we say in the trade, the cuffs are on.’

  Months later those words would take on a far more sinister meaning, but with Brian’s arm around her shoulders she felt like nothing in the world could touch her. He led her back across the port to a fine restaurant for lunch, then an even finer hotel for dessert.

  At only three p.m., as Brian lay sleeping with a grin on his face, Jennie lay awake, staring up at her naked body in the mirrors on the ceiling and wondered if the weariness she felt for Brian’s intense sexual appetite was just a passing phase. He had a body like an athlete, smooth and hard in all the right places, and he knew how to use it to make her happy. He never left her wanting; more often than not leaving her exhausted and drained, her muscles aching and stiff, but there was something robotic about it, that sometimes when she looked up at him rising and falling above
her, she saw only a vacancy in his eyes, as if his mind was somewhere else. She wasn’t naïve enough to believe he didn’t think about other women, but at times she felt nameless, a clone; not Jennie his fiancée but just a woman, a warm body provided to satiate his needs.

  And it worried her.

  As their wedding day approached, she realised she had never really tried to talk to him about anything deep. Their conversations were also circumstantial: where they were going that weekend, how had her classes been, would his work take him out of town this week or not. Nothing about how he really felt or she really felt; was she happy with the relationship, did he want children, when did he want children, where would they live?

  She really had been dragged along by a rip tide, and now that she was running in its direction, she had no way to stop.

  They got married, happily. Her parents, her two brothers, and her best friend attended a quiet ceremony which lacked all the bluster and bombast with which Brian led his life. It was peaceful, romantic, and a memory she still held dear, when she could manage to blot out Brian’s face.

  Like a switch being flicked, after the wedding he immediately began to change. They moved into a nice house on Long Island, the kind of place Jennie could only dream of living in. She had finished her studies and graduated, and wanted to find a job. Brian, suddenly busier than ever, often away at night during the week and sometimes taking work-related trips at the weekend, didn’t seem to care either way. She could work if she wanted, or she could stay at home. They were independent people, right?

  ‘That’s not why we got married,’ she said, and he pushed her for the first time.

  His hand snaked out and collided with her shoulder, knocking her into the wall. The wall hurt more, but the shock of it knocked any sound out of her and she stared in silence as Brian stalked off, out of the front door and into his car. He was stressed, she knew; it couldn’t be easy being a lawyer in New York. His money wasn’t free; he had to earn it by working long hours on high profile cases with millions of pounds at stake. She ought to be more sensitive.

  Not only had Brian’s demeanour changed, but the sex also. He had always had an appetite that stunned her, but whereas he had been sensitive and loving before, now he was rough and cold. He no longer made love to her, he fucked her; whenever and however he wanted. She had once felt it her duty to pleasure him as he did her, but each time he pushed her to her knees and put his hands on the back of her head she felt less and less like his wife and more and more like a hire-purchase, kept at home on long-term rental for him to use whenever he felt like it.

  And she began to fear him.

  The first pregnancy test might have lied, but the second and the third were surely telling the truth. As Jenny looked down at the blue line on the little plastic object in her hand, and at the blue lines on the two others on the edge of the bathroom sink, she felt a mixture of happiness and despair.

  It was a week before she could tell him, because he was on business that kept him out of town. She told both the young maid and the housekeeper before she got to tell her husband, and that she would later find out he had been screwing both of them for years went some way to explaining the coldness of their reactions.

  When finally he was at home and she had plucked up the courage to tell him, he looked up from the newspaper he was reading on the couch, smiled, and said, ‘That’s great,’ as if she’d done no more than got a promotion at work. ‘Should give you something to keep you busy.’

  The sex stopped. It was immediate, cut off like a dead limb, not even a gradual dying out. He never touched her again, rarely even slept in the same bed. Bizarrely, the old levels of his affection briefly returned, the gentle touches, the hugs. She began to feel that he loved her after all, and didn’t even mind the lack of sex, something she had long ago begun to dread.

  And then, almost as soon as it had come, it was gone.

  There was no great drama, barely any pain. One morning she woke alone with stomach cramps, and found a little blood in the bed and in her water when she used the toilet. A doctor later that same day confirmed what she was dreading, that she had in fact miscarried, at such an early stage in her pregnancy that the baby had barely been there at all, briefly part of her and then gone in a fleeting instant.

  That there would be no pain or any repercussions for future pregnancies was little comfort. Jennie was distraught, inconsolable. The house staff gave her a wide berth, let her cry herself out. She told Brian over the phone, but was crying too much to really guess his reaction from the tone of his voice. It was cold, professional.

  The following afternoon he came home with a puppy in a box, a pink bow tied around its neck.

  She shouted and threw plates at him for his utter insensitivity, for passing off her miscarriage with an “it happens” shrug. For a few hours she locked herself in the bedroom, refusing to come out. When she did, she found the puppy in its box sitting outside the door. Brian had gone back to work.

  She called the fluffy little Pomeranian Pogo, and she poured into it all the love she wanted to give Brian and had dreamed of giving to her child. She had never thought a simple animal could ameliorate her pain, but it did. The dog became her child, and they became inseparable, Jennie taking it everywhere she went, the dog trotting happily along beside her.

  Brian became a ghost, but Jennie entered a period of muted mourning, the aching pain of her miscarriage gradually soaked up by the pretty little dog that always seemed to have a smile for her. She spent as much time as she could out of the house, away from the sideways glances of the house staff, meeting her friends for lunches and afternoons browsing the shops in Manhattan, and she even began to entertain the possibility of getting a job. Money had never been an issue, and when she had fallen pregnant her half-hearted attempts to find employment had fallen by the wayside. After her miscarriage, the idea of work had seemed too strenuous, but as the months passed and Brian became more of a stranger, Jennie needed something to occupy her time.

  And then the killer blow came, the hit that knocked the life out of her, spent her sprawling, bloodying her knees and elbows and tearing away the foundations that she had begun to rebuild.

  She was having coffee with Noline, her best friend, at a quiet little restaurant not far from Central Park. Noline had looked uncomfortable from the moment Jennie had come through the door, Pogo trotting along beside her on his lead.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Jennie asked. ‘You look a little pale.’

  Noline winced as if she was chewing around a piece of sour root, and leaned forward, her voice low. ‘There’s no easy way to say this, Jennie,’ she said. ‘But Andrew … found something on the net.’

  Andrew was Noline’s sometime boyfriend. Jennie didn’t know the guy well and had only met him a few times. As Noline held out her phone towards Jennie, an apologetic look on her face as a video started playing, Jennie realised that he knew her a lot better. And he wasn’t alone.

  The video was grainy, and Noline had been good enough to turn the sound down. At first all Jennie saw was a heaving wall of flesh, shifting back and forth, pixilated. Then she recognised it as Brian’s muscular back. And in front of him, lying flat on the white sheets, her arms tied up to the bed frame with pink ribbon….

  ‘Oh!’

  She dropped the phone on the table and slid her chair backwards. At her feet, Pogo whined as she knocked him with her foot.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jennie. Andrew was just browsing, he said. It just showed up.’

  Brian had liked to film them. It excited him, he said, but she had never for a second thought the videos would be seen outside of the intimacy of their marriage.

  He’d uploaded more than a dozen to a porn site, where they’d had thousands of views. Brian, of course, was barely visible, always seen from behind or partly out of shot. She was the real star, or so she thought at first.

  It turned out he was prolific. Of over two hundred videos he had uploaded she only featured in a few. The rest were of
strangers. Not all of them were women.

  ‘I think he has an addiction—’ Noline started to say, but Jennie flung the phone across the restaurant and stormed out, Pogo running to keep up as she jerked him along on his lead.

  She had no idea what she was going to do, only that she needed to get home.

  She didn’t expect him to be there. She understood now what was going on when he said he was working, that in actual fact he was off living in one of his sexual fantasies. To find him casually sitting on the sofa watching a baseball game came as something of a shock.

  She wanted to berate him, scream at him, rip the skin off his face. But as he looked up and said, ‘Oh, hey Jennie,’ all her resolve died away.

  They had a computer in the corner of the main lounge. She went over to it and sat down. Blissfully watching the game, he had his back to her as she searched for the videos Noline had shown her.

  It only took a couple of minutes. She chose the longest one of them together, turned the sound down, clicked repeat and then expanded it to fill the full screen of their thirty-two inch monitor.

  Then she went upstairs to pack a bag.

  The housekeeper’s scream was the first indication that the video had been noticed. Her heart racing, she rushed to grab a last few things, only to turn and find Brian standing in the doorway, leaning on the frame, blocking the way out.

  ‘You should learn to stop prying,’ he said quietly. ‘Nothing good ever comes of poking your nose into other people’s business.’

  ‘I … I … trusted you.’

  He smiled. ‘Of course you did. I’m a lawyer. Now, unpack your bag and let’s forget about all of this.’

  She turned to face him. ‘No. I’m leaving.’

  ‘No, you’re not.’