I drove away from the house, not daring to look back.
The sun was bright already, the sky cloudless and blue, the air chilly but not cold. It was going to be a beautiful day, a fantastic day. When I got to the end of my street, indicated right, turned the corner, I felt a scream starting to bubble up inside me, a laugh, a manic laughter of release. All the panic that had built up in me for so long.
I drove to work, let myself in through the rear doors so that I didn’t have to say hello to security, and retrieved my suitcase from its hiding place. In the side pocket were my U.S. dollars, my passport complete with three-month visa, and my travel documents. My office was bare and empty—someone else would be moving into it next week. I dragged my suitcase out to the back door, hoping that security wouldn’t be looking at the CCTV cameras right at that moment, hoping that nobody would see me, ask me how I was doing and wasn’t I supposed to have left already?
Part one of the plan had gone well.
Once I got to the highway, I was singing. I drove two junctions down the highway to Preston and negotiated my way through the gradually building rush-hour traffic to the railway station. In the next street was a secondhand-car dealership. I parked on the street in front of the crowded forecourt. On the front seat next to me was the car’s log book and MOT certificate. I’d signed the portion of the V5 that stated that I was selling the car, and left the remainder of it blank. Next to it I left a note:
To Whom It May Concern
Please look after this car. I don’t need it anymore.
Thank you.
I left the keys in the ignition. Hopefully whoever found it wouldn’t feel the need to report it to the police.
I pulled my suitcase from the boot and wheeled it up to the station entrance. I bought a ticket for London, paying cash, dragged my case down to the platform to wait. The London train was due in five minutes. I wanted to be gone, already, even though I knew Lee was probably still fast asleep in bed; I wanted to be away from him; I wanted to run and never look back.
The train was busy at first, each station bringing new people on and taking old people off. I wanted to relax, to read a book, to look like a normal person. I sat still and gazed out of the window at countryside and towns rushing past, each station we went through taking me farther and farther away from my old life and closer to freedom.
A week ago, a week to the day, he’d come in late—after eleven o’clock. I’d thought he was out for the evening, I’d thought I’d be safe until Saturday at least, but he’d turned up and let himself in. I was watching a show on New York and the sound of the front door opening and closing made me jump, and without thinking I turned it off.
The smell of alcohol preceded him into the living room. It was not going to be pleasant, I knew.
“What you doing?” he demanded.
“I was just going to bed. Would you like me to make you a drink?”
“Had enough to bloody drink.”
He fell onto the sofa beside me. Still wearing the same jeans and hooded sweatshirt he’d been wearing two days before when he’d left for work. He ran a weary hand over his forehead. “I saw you in town last night,” he said, his tone challenging.
“Did you?” I’d seen him, too, but I wasn’t going to admit it. “I was out for a drink with Sam. I told you—remember?”
“Yeah, whatever.”
“I thought you were working,” I said, wishing I could just tell him to leave me the fuck alone and stop following me.
“I was fucking working,” he said. “I just saw you going from the Cheshire to the Druid’s. Looked like you were having a right laugh. Who was that guy?”
“What guy?”
“Guy with you. Had his arm around you.”
I thought, forced myself to remember. “I don’t remember him having his arm around me, but the guy that was with us was Sam’s boyfriend.”
“Come here.” His arms were held open, swaying slightly, and I gritted my teeth and snuggled up to his chest. He gave me a crushing hug, pressing my face into his sweatshirt. He smelled of pubs, takeout food and alcohol. His hand pushed the hair out of my face, and then he pulled my face up to his for a kiss. He was clumsy about it.
After a minute he said, “Your time of the month?”
I thought briefly about nodding, but it wouldn’t do me any good. “No.”
“Why you being so unfriendly, then?”
“I’m not being unfriendly,” I said, trying to keep my voice bright. “Just tired, that’s all.” To prove my point, I hid a delicate yawn behind my hand.
“You’re always fucking tired.”
I was at that crossroads again, the one where I could either be brave and let him have what he wanted, or try to fight it and risk getting another serious beating. When he was drunk like this, he wasn’t going to let me get away with saying no, and I didn’t want to risk starting my new job in New York with yellowing bruises on my face.
“I’m not
too
tired, though,” I said, with a smile. My hand in the crotch of his jeans, giving him a rub. Undoing his belt.
In the end, he beat me anyway. He fucked me and I tried hard to make sure it didn’t hurt too much, trying to make it last as though I was enjoying it. I knew the way it was going when he started slapping my backside while he was fucking me, just a slap at first, but carrying on getting harder and harder until I had to cry out. That was what seemed to turn him on these days. He could fuck for hours, especially if he’d had a drink, his erection coming and going, until he found some way of hurting me—biting me, or pulling my hair until I cried out, and as soon as he heard that genuine note of pain in my voice, he’d go at it harder until he’d hurt me enough to tip him over the edge and he’d orgasm.
He pulled out of me abruptly and turned me over onto my back, his breath coming in ragged gasps, his eyes glinting with pleasure. The skin on my behind stung as it came into contact with the carpet underneath.
I wondered what he was going to do. I thought by now it wasn’t possible to still be afraid of him. He’d hurt me so many times that this was now almost a regular event. He was getting ever more inventive, finding new ways to humiliate me.
“Don’t hit my face,” I said quietly.
“What?”
“Anything—just not my face. They ask too many questions at work.”
He grinned, an ugly leer, and for a moment I thought he was going to do just that, hit me again and again across the face until my skin split. I felt tears start, although I hated letting him see me cry.
“That so?”
I nodded, not able to look at him anymore. Then he deliberately put one hand under my chin, choosing his place, thumb on one side, fingers the other.
“No,” I said, “please, Lee . . .”
“Fucking shut up,” he said, “it’s good like this, you’re going to love it.”
While he fucked me, he took away the air from my lungs, my fingers at my throat, trying to relieve the pressure, the air burning my lungs, the roaring in my ears signaling that I was going to lose consciousness in just a matter of moments.
Then, still fucking me hard, he’d ease the pressure and I’d cough and gasp, dragging air into my lungs. The only way to stop him was to give in. I screamed, as loud and as hard as I could, tears racing down my cheeks. I’d almost seen death. I was utterly terrified and screaming was almost involuntary—so I screamed.
He didn’t try to stop me, didn’t put his hand over my mouth again, and just let me scream. It did the trick. A few seconds later he pulled out of me and jerked off over my face.
On the train now, the Midlands rushing by in a blur of green and sunshine, I closed my eyes against the nausea.
Afterward, he’d picked himself up off the carpet, staggered to the downstairs bathroom to wash in the sink, and then he’d gone upstairs and fallen into bed. I’d waited until I could hear him snoring, then I got to my hands and knees, still crying, and went to have a shower. At least the only bruises I had that time were around my throat. I wore a neck scarf to work every day this week. They all thought I’d gone and gotten myself a hickey, at the grand old age of twenty-four.
At nine o’clock, the train pulled in to Crewe. I heard the station announcer run through the list of stations that remained on the journey, all the way to Euston, and then, “Due to a signal failure at Nuneaton, this train will be delayed for half an hour.”
Half an hour? I checked my watch, although I knew what the time was. It was fine. I’d allowed an extra two hours in addition to the three-hour check-in time at Heathrow. As long as there were no further delays, there wouldn’t be a problem getting there on time.
I wanted to sleep, but I was too wound up, too fraught. When would I be able to relax? Would I relax when I was on the plane? When I got to New York? When I heard that he’d moved away from Lancaster, or when a year had passed and I hadn’t heard from him?
Would I ever, ever be able to relax again?
In the end I phoned DS Hollands, in the Domestic Abuse Liaison Office at Camden Police Station, just to bring an end to the argument. When I eventually got through to her, she had completely forgotten who I was. I explained about the curtains and the button, and—stumbling over my words—how this had been typical of Lee’s actions when we’d been together. Even as I said it, it sounded stupid even to me. It sounded like something someone would say just to get attention. I was half expecting her to tell me off for wasting police time, but in fact she said very little. She said she would phone her contact in Lancashire and would get back to me if there were any concerns.
She didn’t phone back.
That night Stuart didn’t sleep very well. I lay next to him waiting for him to sleep, knowing that he was awake because of the things I’d told him. He deserved better than me. He deserved someone who wasn’t so fucked up, someone who wasn’t trailing a psychopath along with a whole host of other baggage. We lay in bed next to each other in silence, not touching. I wanted to talk some more, but there was no point.
It wasn’t just a button. It wasn’t even just any red button, I was certain of that now. It was a button that came from a dress that I’d worn in another life, another time, with my heart on my sleeve. A dress I’d loved and then hated. And at some point after that, fingers that had once caressed the satin with such a curious, sensual reverence had taken hold of the tiny button and twisted it around and around with force until it had torn away.
When I woke up the next morning, Stuart was already dressed and ready for work. “We should go away this weekend,” he said.
“Away?”
“Just for a break. Somewhere out of the city. What do you think?”
In the end we spent the weekend at a hotel in the Peak District, going for long walks during the day, eating too much in the evening and then holding each other in a magnificent four-poster bed, all night. It was a wonderful weekend, and, contrary to expectations, I had no need to fiddle with the curtains.
It was the sort of weekend I would have talked over in great and extensive detail with Sylvia, in years past. Of course that won’t happen now. I sometimes wonder where she is, what she’s doing. It could be that she’s living just up the street from me, and that I pass her house every day. I don’t know where she is. I guess if I phoned up the
Daily Mail
I could probably find her, but a lot of water has passed under a lot of bridges now, and I don’t know if that is something I could do. Sylvia, although she was my best friend for a long, long time, is part of my old life—the life I was convinced I couldn’t go back to.
I have a new life now, and it’s with Stuart.
Gradually the panic about the red button faded, and going away for the weekend gave me a chance to think about it. To me, there wasn’t any rational explanation of how it came to be in my pocket, so I pretended it hadn’t happened. Maybe Stuart was right—maybe I’d even picked it up myself, in some kind of reverse-psychology absentmindedness—maybe it was some perverse new symptom of my OCD.
But when we got home I went back to checking, properly. I made a point of going into the flat every morning before work, checking and leaving everything in order, and then checking it when I got home, turning the lights on when it got dark, making it look to anyone who might have been watching from outside that I was home, even when I was upstairs with Stuart. I bought another automatic timer, and I would turn on the television when I got home from work, leaving it to turn itself off again at eleven o’clock at night. Sometimes I managed to restrict the checking to three times, as per Alistair’s instructions; sometimes it was more.
As for the feeling of being watched—that had never, ever really gone away. Now it was back properly. In every street, every store, every time I went outside the house, I felt eyes on me. I knew it was my imagination; after all, he was miles away, wasn’t he? He might well have been released at the end of December, but if he was going to come looking for me he would have done it by now.
Part of me wished he’d found some new person to be with, and another part of me hoped he hadn’t, for her sake.
By the time I got to Heathrow, I had less than an hour to check in. The latter part of the journey, arriving at Euston, taking the Tube to Paddington, getting the Heathrow Express, dragging my stupid suitcase from place to place, had been hard. I was getting more and more fraught.
I checked in at the American Airlines desk, and that was a defining moment. I was here, I was safe. I spent a few moments wandering around the stores in the terminal, thinking about spending money on things I didn’t need. I hadn’t bought any lingerie since before I’d met Lee. If I’d bought some for myself, he would have accused me of sleeping with someone else. I touched some delicate lace panties in the lingerie store and thought about buying them. Then, looking out across the crowded terminal, I caught a glimpse of a figure that looked too much like him. I caught my breath, but the man turned and it wasn’t him at all.
Lee was all the way back in Lancaster, I thought. He thought I was at work. He was five hundred miles away, and even if he found out I was gone now, I’d be safe on the plane by the time he got here. There was nothing at all he could do now.
Still, I wanted to get into the departure lounge. There was no point whatsoever in hanging around now.
Every step I took, I felt watched. Even here, miles from home, miles from Lee, I could see his face everywhere I looked. It was going to be so good to get away from all that.
I joined the line to pass through the checkpoint into the departure lounge, casting one last glance across the terminal at the sea of faces, faces going about their business, happy vacation faces and tired business faces. Suits and shorts, sunglasses and briefcases. I was nearly there. A few more steps, another couple of hours in the departure lounge, I’d be on the plane. I’d be free.
And then, suddenly—there he was, walking past Tie Rack toward me. His eyes on me, his face impassive.
The line was still snaking around the metal barrier—I couldn’t stay here.
I just ran, panicked, ran as fast as I could, toward a security guard, a man in uniform, who was strolling along the concourse without any idea what was about to hit him. I didn’t risk a look behind me. If I had, I would have seen Lee flashing his badge at the security guard whose eyes were widening as I flew toward him, my mouth open in some sort of soundless scream, some sort of “Help me, help me” . . . and instead of putting himself between me and Lee, instead of being my protector, my savior, he grabbed me and threw me to the floor so my face and hands and knees smacked into the granite; held my arms back while Lee pulled out his cuffs and snapped them onto my wrists. And while Lee struggled to get his breath back and gasped, “You’re under arrest, you are fucking under arrest,” the guard said nothing, just panted and sweated with the exertion and the excitement of being involved in something so dramatic on only his second day on the job.
I heard myself sobbing, “Help me, please—this is all wrong, he’s not arresting me, I haven’t done anything . . .” but it was no use.
The guard helped Lee haul me to my feet.
“Thanks, buddy,” Lee said.
“No problem. You need any more help?”
“No, I’ve got backup outside in the van. Thanks again.”
It was all over within a minute. There wasn’t any backup in the van, of course. There wasn’t even a van. There was just a car, an unmarked cop car, abandoned with its lights flashing just at the pickup point outside the main entrance. Holding me tightly under one elbow, he frog-marched me out of the door.
I could have tried to run again. But there wasn’t any point.
“Be a good girl, Catherine,” he said to me. “Be good. You know you want to.”
He pushed me into the back of the car. I expected him to shut the door, climb in the front and drive off. But instead he got into the back with me.
I don’t remember what happened after that.