It took a long time and, in the end, I was almost sorry it was over. He pulled out, pulled himself away from me, over to the wall, sitting there, his head in his hands. I saw my own blood on his hands, his face. Then I heard him sob. I pulled myself gingerly up to a sitting position.
“What am I doing?” he said, his voice broken. “Oh, my God. What the hell . . . ?”
I looked at him and he was actually crying.
I inched my way over to him, every bit of me sore. As he cried, I found myself sitting next to him, the wall for support, and I slipped my arm around his shoulders. He put his head against my neck, the tears from his face sliding down my skin. I put my ruined right hand, three fingers now fat as sausages and numb, cold, on the side of his cheek. “Shh. It’s okay.” My voice sounded distorted, my lip split and swollen. “It’s okay, Lee. It’s all right, really.”
He cried against me for a long time, while I held him and wondered whether, actually, I was going to be all right after all.
“I’ll get locked up,” he said, his breath coming in rasping sobs, “they’ll put me away for this.”
“No, they won’t,” I soothed. “I won’t say. We’ll be all right, honestly. Just you and me.”
“Really?” He looked up at me like a child.
I wondered if he could even see my ravaged face. Did I look suitably comforting? How could he possibly imagine that anything was ever going to be all right again?
I had to continue down this path—it was my only chance. “You have to let me clean up a bit.”
“Of course.”
To my surprise, he got up and left the room.
I crawled across the landing to the bathroom, found my way into the shower and stood there, seeing the blood diluting as it washed away, swirling into patterns against the white enamel that were almost beautiful. I rinsed the piss out of my hair, trying not to watch as clumps of it came away in my fingers and blocked the drain. My skin stung; my right hand was still useless. I wondered what would happen if I had broken bones in my hand and they weren’t fixed.
Fortunately the towel in the bathroom was the navy blue one, not one of the white ones, so the blood that dotted it as I dried myself gingerly was not too noticeable. I was bleeding from between my legs. Probably my period, I thought, which had been overdue. I hadn’t thought about it, putting it down to the weight I’d lost, the stress, the fact that I wasn’t eating regularly. Maybe it had been brought on by the trauma.
It was as though all this was happening to someone else. I went into the bedroom and found some sanitary towels, underwear, clothes to wear, jeans, a belt, a loose sweater. I could have run away, right then. I could have run out into the street, shouting for help.
But that was just it. I couldn’t run. I had nowhere to go. I couldn’t call the police, could I? He was one of them. They would look at me, and he would invent some story about me being traumatized by some incident he’d been working undercover on, how I was showing signs of mental illness and he’d been trying to help me. They’d take me to the hospital, patch me up, and then I’d end up back in the loony bin. Or worse, they’d send me home. With my left hand, I made a half-hearted attempt to clean up the blood in the spare room. It was everywhere—walls, carpet, smeared over the door. I gave up in the end, and went downstairs.
On the way back from Leonie Hobbs House I walked fast, long strides, getting my heart rate up. If I was physically tired this evening at least I stood a good chance of being able to sleep. That was the theory anyway. I was finding it harder and harder to sleep in my flat, spending hours lying awake listening out for noises outside. Even sleeping with Stuart upstairs was difficult; every noise sounded as though it was coming from my flat below us.
Once I turned away from the main road onto Lorimer Road, the noise of the traffic faded away.
I could hear footsteps that matched my own, perfectly. For several yards I thought they were mine. Then I realized that there was someone on the sidewalk behind me. I thought it was quite far away, so I stole a look behind me. Just a glance.
A man was walking behind me, about thirty yards behind, matching my pace. Dark clothes, a hooded top, the hood down. I couldn’t see his face because the streetlight behind him left it in shadow. Just clouds of his breath in the cold air.
I picked up my pace and waited for the sound of his steps to match mine. The sound of them was jarring.
He’d speeded up, too.
At the end of Lorimer Road, the main street again. I could see buses, still stationary in the traffic, but at least I’d be able to get on one of them if I needed to. I didn’t care which one.
Before I reached the main street, though, I realized that the noise of the steps had ceased. I looked behind. The man had gone. He must have turned into one of the houses.
At home, later, I looked and looked. I checked the door and the windows and the kitchen. I even checked the bathroom, though I’d stopped checking that weeks ago. I knew he’d been here. I could smell him, sense his presence, as a rabbit scents a fox.
It took another hour on top of the checking I normally do before I found it. In the silverware drawer, which I’d checked already—one single knife and one single fork, buried under all the others, carefully swapped over into the wrong section and hidden.
He was in the kitchen, stirring a cup of tea. The happy little domestic scene, after what we’d gone through half an hour before, was peculiar.
He gave me a smile. His blond hair was stained with red and brown bits at the front where he’d run his bloody hands through his hair. He gave me a kiss on the cheek and I managed a smile in return, the cut on my lip splitting open again as I did so. “Are you okay?” he asked me.
I nodded. “Are you?”
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
“I know.”
We went into the living room and I lowered myself onto the sofa gingerly.
“I didn’t want you to go,” he said lamely. He sat in the armchair across from me, giving me some space. I felt that all the anger had gone from him. If I was going to run, now would be a good time. But I had no energy left at all.
“Well, I’m not going anywhere now, am I?” My voice sounded odd to me—not just the slurring of the words because my mouth was out of shape—I think one of my ears was funny, too. I could hear a ringing, a buzzing.
“Why did you do it?” I asked. It didn’t really matter either way, now. I meant what I said. I wasn’t going to run again, I’d decided.
Lee looked wasted. His skin was pale, tired, his bright blue eyes dulled. “I wanted to see what you’d do.”
“Was that you, on the phone? Pretending to be Jonathan?”
He nodded. “I thought you’d recognize me, but you didn’t. I set up an e-mail address. It was all pretty easy, really. I never thought you’d fall for it. You never checked to see if any of it was real, did you?”
“How did you get down to Heathrow so fast?” That was the only other thing that had bothered me.
He shook his head and sighed. “You really are unbelievably stupid sometimes, Catherine—you know that?”
I shrugged. What the hell? He was right.
“I’ve got blue lights and a siren. Traffic jams and speed limits don’t apply.”
Well, knowing that didn’t make it any easier.
“Of course, you did give me the fucking runaround, you know.”
“Did I?”
“I didn’t think you’d go by train. I thought you were going to drive all the way down to Heathrow. When I couldn’t find your car on the highway I just hammered it all the way down there. Do you realize how close you came to getting on that plane? If I hadn’t gone as fast as I did you would have been on that plane and away.”
I didn’t want to think about it, how close I’d come to being free. It hurt too much.
“What about the CCTV in the airport? Won’t they have seen you pretending to arrest me?”
“I’m not bothered about the CCTV. You know there are cameras everywhere at the airport—all the stores, all the entrances and exits, every square foot of that place is covered. But it’s all owned by different companies, half the cameras aren’t working at any one time, or the quality is too shit to make anything out, or the tape’s overwritten every twenty-four hours because they’re too tight to pay for more tapes. Often the person in charge of it is on vacation and nobody else knows how to work the system anyhow. Even if you could collect it all up, it would take someone years to review all the footage from that one day alone. And as long as you know who to call, you can deal with whatever’s left. I was more worried about the ANPR, to be honest.”
“The what?”
“Automatic number plate recognition. It would prove the car went all the way down to Heathrow on a day when I was supposed to be reviewing surveillance logs in the office. Or it would have done—I switched the plates on the car.”
This wasn’t getting us anywhere. I wondered how long it would be—how many days I could endure.
After the cup of tea, and a sandwich that he made me, we watched some television together in some sort of pretense at normality. At eleven o’clock, he told me to strip my clothes off. I did so without argument, although it was difficult doing it one-handed. When I was wearing just underpants, he told me to hold out my arms in front of me and I complied as he clipped the handcuffs back around my wrists. Instantly the cold metal sliced at the raw skin and the pain started again. He took me back upstairs to the spare bedroom, and threw a blanket in there after me.
I sat down on the floor as he stood in the doorway, thinking that he would leave, but after a few moments he shut the door behind him and sat with his back to the wall opposite.
“I never told you about Naomi,” he said.
I got up early on Saturday and went for a run.
I tied my hair back into a bunch, since it was at that annoying length—long enough for the wind to blow it all around my head and into my eyes, too short to do anything stylish. The bunch at the back of my head was about the size of a brussels sprout, and all I had to tie it back with was one of those infernal red elastic bands dropped on the step outside by the postwoman. It was too early to be busy, still a bit chilly, when I started to run. I set off at a nice even pace toward the park, the sidewalk wet under my feet. It was cloudy now, but it might turn into a nice day later. I could go and do some shopping. I could actually try to find some new clothes. I hadn’t bought anything new for a long time. And I would do some work, too. I would work on the OCD. Alistair said to keep doing it, keep challenging myself, don’t let the anxiety go away completely. Get used to it. Get used to letting it go away by itself, without appeasing it by checking.
When I got back to Talbot Street I deliberately went straight in, without my usual detour through the back alley. That felt really strange, and when I’d checked the front door, and Mrs. Mackenzie’s door, the first thing I did in the flat was check the curtains, from the inside this time. They were fine. I checked the flat door, it was fine. I checked the rest of the flat and missed out the bathroom, fine.
I kept thinking I should go outside and check the flat from the back alley, but now I was inside it seemed a bit pointless. Nevertheless, I was anxious.
I got dressed in jeans and a sweater, and, as I was performing my checks ready to go out, I decided I was going to stop checking the silverware drawer. I wanted to do it one last time, just to be sure, but I resisted. To make up for it, I concentrated hard on the flat door. That was probably cheating, really, replacing one safety behavior for another, but even so it didn’t make me feel a whole lot better.
By the time I was on the bus, I tried to assess my anxiety and worked out that I was probably about forty or so. That wasn’t half bad. Especially considering that, realistically, I was spending most of my day in a state of tension anyway, always on the lookout for him, always waiting for something bad to happen. In fact, even after not checking the bathroom and not checking the silverware drawer, I was probably feeling better than I usually would, going out at the weekend.
I couldn’t believe this was actually working. I couldn’t believe I was actually feeling better.
The bus took me toward Camden, and I got off at Camden Lock and started to wander around the stores. I’d thought about going into the city, to Oxford Street, maybe, but that really would be scary. This was a good start.
I knew what I was looking for, what I wanted to buy, and when I finally saw it in a vintage store I knew I’d have to get it.
It was red silk, just a camisole top, not unlike the one poor Erin had gotten me for Christmas. It was a size eight. I stared at it for several moments, feeling my body responding to it, everything telling me to turn away, run away from it.
It’s only a top
, I told myself.
It’s a piece of cloth, stitched together. It’s not going to hurt me, it can’t hurt me
.
After a few moments I touched it. It was soft, very soft, and surprisingly warm to the touch, as though someone had just taken it off.
“Want to try it on?” I looked around to see a small girl with short black hair streaked with bits of electric blue.
“I’m just looking, thanks.”
“It’s your color,” she said. “Go on. It can’t hurt.”
I actually laughed. She was right, in so many ways. I took the hanger and went to the dressing room, just an alcove at the back of the store with a cotton curtain hanging from a rail on three rattling metal rings, my heart pounding.
Don’t think. Just do it.
I pulled my sweater over my head, my back to the mirror. I took the top off its hanger and slipped it over my head, my eyes closed. I felt a bit queasy, dizzy, as though I was on some wild fairground ride.
Now you’ve done it
, I told myself.
Now you’re going to have to open your eyes and look
.
I looked. Not in the mirror, just down at myself.
It was a different shade from the red dress. It was pinker, cherry-red, rather than the blatant scarlet of the dress. The top was peachy in texture, a beautiful thing really, a thread of gold running through the bottom edge.
I’d had enough. I took it off, replaced it on the hanger, pulled my sweater back over my head. The urge to go and wash my hands was very strong. I put the hanger back on the rack where I’d found it, and left the store right away, before the assistant could say anything.
Farther on, there was a bench. I sat down for a few moments while people walked past, thinking about how scared I was, waiting for it to go away. I already knew what I was going to do, and the thought of it was keeping the fear there. I don’t know when I suddenly got this brave. It’s not something I’ve been good at in the past, is it?
When I felt at about level thirty, I got up again and continued wandering around the stores. It was busy, but not enough to make me afraid of all the people. I found a spice store, and bought some Mexican spice blends for Stuart. Next door was a secondhand book store, and I spent a while browsing in there, looking through novels and travel books and even, for a while, the self-help section.
After that, I sat in a café and had a pot of tea. Normally I would go to the back of any coffee shop, as far from the door as possible, out of sight, so that I could see anyone coming in before they saw me. I made myself sit in the window. Fortunately there were tables outside with people sitting at them, so I didn’t feel completely exposed, but even so I wasn’t exactly comfortable.
Stuart had sent me three texts already, presumably between patients. How was I doing, what was I up to, that sort of thing. I sent a reply.
S, I’m in Camden shopping. Can you believe it? Anything you want me to get? C x
His answer came back quickly.
Does this mean we can go shopping together next weekend? S x
I laughed. He’d been trying to get me to go shopping for ages. The only way he could do it was disguise it as a day out, the way he’d done the day we went to Brighton.
I watched the people going past, expecting to see someone who looked like Lee. In fact I was almost hoping for it, so I could test my response. Every man that passed, everyone with his physique, none of them seemed to trigger the fear.
It was time to start heading back.
I didn’t think too hard, I just went back. I walked into the store. The assistant smiled at me. “Hi,” she said. “I had a feeling you’d be back.”
I smiled back at her. “Couldn’t resist,” I said, taking the top and putting it down on the counter.
“What shoe size are you?” she asked, looking at me with her head appraisingly on one side.
“Six,” I said. “Why?”
“I’ve just had these brought in.” She lifted a shoebox from behind the counter and opened the lid. Inside, a pair of red suede heels, slingbacks with a peep toe at the front. Rich, cherry-red suede. They were new; they even still had the tissue paper balled into the toe. “Try them on,” she said. “It says they’re a five but you never know.”
I pulled off my sneakers and my socks and slipped my feet into the shoes. They fit well. It felt strange standing in heels again. I looked down at my feet. How weird this all was. How strange to be wearing shoes like this and feeling all right—a little light-headed perhaps, but all right.
“I’ll take them,” I said.
Taking the top home, and the shoes, in a large bag, was strange too. I thought about Erin’s present and how I’d had to get rid of it without so much as touching it. Now I’d gone and actually bought a top, a red silk top. The bag felt heavy and I put it on the seat next to me on the bus. I didn’t look at it. I would have to be brave and take it with me when the bus got back to High Street and I got off it. All the way home, my anxiety levels were high, probably about forty or fifty. I waited for them to subside, but they didn’t go down by much.
I took a detour through the alley, but I didn’t linger. I just looked. I was scared now, scared of what I’d done. I checked the front door, Mrs. Mackenzie’s door, all the while my shopping bags sitting on the bottom stair waiting for me. I could picture the red top, throbbing like a living thing.
I was just fabric, I thought. It couldn’t hurt me.
Nevertheless I took the bag all the way up to the top floor, to Stuart’s flat, and left it just inside the door.
When I got home and checked, everything was fine. Already I felt better. I left the silverware drawer alone, left the bathroom unchecked, had a drink and a cookie, and felt all right.
It was a start.