I didn’t sleep much. I was so cold. No position was comfortable; every part of me ached. When I saw the light behind the curtains I realized I must have slept a little, but I didn’t remember it.
I sobbed, quietly, for the person I’d become. I’d lost the will to fight. I wanted to give in now, I wanted it all to be over with. I was covered in shame.
And now, as if things weren’t dreadful enough, all I could think about was Naomi.
“Naomi?” I’d said.
“She was a job. A source. She was married to someone we were after. I recruited her—sweet-talked her into working with us. She was going to feed us information so we could bring him down.”
He looked down at his knuckles, the bruising on them, flexed his fingers and smiled. “She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. I was supposed to be working on her, but instead I fucked her and fell in love with her. They didn’t know, they thought I was just doing what I was being paid to do, but after the first time I couldn’t control it. I was going to leave the job, I was going to buy her a house, miles away, somewhere she’d be safe from that shit of a husband.”
“What happened?” I whispered.
He looked at me as though he’d forgotten I was there. Flexed his fingers back into a fist, looking at the skin around his knuckles turning white. “She was screwing me over as well as screwing me. All the time she was giving me intelligence about what he was up to, he was busy telling her what to say.”
He leaned his head back against the wall with a heavy sigh, then banged it back against the brickwork. And again. “I can’t believe I was that fucking stupid. I fell for everything she said.”
“Maybe she was too afraid of her husband,” I said.
“Well, that was her mistake, wasn’t it?”
I considered this for a moment. “What happened to her?”
“There was an armed robbery, just like we’d been waiting for, except we were waiting for them on the wrong side of town. We were all sitting there parked up like idiots, while another jeweler lost a quarter of a million pounds’ worth of stock and an assistant got her skull opened up with a baseball bat. Just when I was wondering what the fuck had gone wrong, I got a text from Naomi asking to meet me. I went to the usual place, opened her car door, and there inside was her old man. He was having a good old laugh about it. I’d served my purpose, he said. They’d both completely fucked me over.”
He brought his knees up and rested his bruised hands on them, loosely, all the tension gone.
“A week later I had a phone call from her. She was in tears, told me all this shit about him putting her under pressure, how she was scared, wanting to know if I meant what I’d said about getting her away from him. I told her to pack her bags and meet me in the usual place.”
“You helped her escape?”
He laughed. “No. I cut her throat and left her in a ditch. Nobody reported her missing. Nobody even looked for her.”
He stood up, stretched as though he’d just told me a bedtime story, opened the door and left me behind, turning the light off and plunging the room into darkness.
I thought I saw him again today.
It was almost a relief, in the end.
Stuart had worked late, so I left him asleep and took myself off to the High Street to pick up some shopping. It started in the Co-op—the normal feeling of being watched, but stronger than usual. The store was pretty busy, lots of people in each aisle, and everywhere I went were faces that looked familiar, people I thought I’d seen before.
When I was waiting at the register behind three other people, the feeling became more acute. I looked up, and he was standing by the fruit and vegetable section, across the other side of the store, staring right at me. I had no doubt that it was him, although he looked different in some way; I couldn’t work it out at first.
I told myself it was okay. In the checkout line I practiced breathing deeply, regularly, making each breath the most important thing in that moment, even though I really wanted to scream and run away.
It isn’t real, I told myself. This is part of the OCD. This is your fertile imagination catching up with you. He’s not real. It’s just some man who looks a bit like him, you know all this. He isn’t here.
When I looked over again, he had gone.
I got home with my bags of shopping, checking all the time to see if I could see him anywhere—doorways, the front seat of passing cars, crossing the street behind me, walking away, all these were places I’d seen him before.
Nothing more. Maybe I’d imagined it—someone who looked a bit like him?
At home I checked the flat before I went upstairs to Stuart with the shopping. I started at the front door, worked my way around the whole flat, finishing up in the bedroom. Everything was normal. I was almost desperate to find something wrong, something out of place, that would prove that he had been in here, but really I hadn’t been gone long enough. Not if he had been out there watching me; after all, even Lee couldn’t be in two places at once.
I woke Stuart up with a cup of tea and a kiss. When he opened his eyes and yawned, he pulled back the duvet and gave me an inviting smile, so I could climb into bed next to him. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted more right at that moment than to take all my clothes off and snuggle up to my warm-skinned, naked boyfriend.
I wasn’t going to tell him about seeing Lee, but afterward, when I lay with my head on his shoulder, he suddenly said, “You’re not your usual self today.”
I raised my head to look at him. “Aren’t I? What do you mean?”
He rolled onto his stomach and propped himself on his elbows so he could look at me. He took my hand and kissed the palm, then slowly stroked his fingers up my arms, across the scars, looking at them intently. “Something happened?”
I shrugged. “Not really. I thought I saw someone I knew shopping, that’s all.”
“You mean Lee?”
Unlike me, he had no issues with saying his name. Stuart was always very good at facing fear, naming it, dealing with it and moving on. Something I was just starting to learn.
“I thought it was. But it was only for a moment.”
He studied me with that intent green-eyed gaze he has, as though I’m the only person in the whole world. “You see him all the time,” he said. It wasn’t a question. We’d talked about this before.
“This was different.”
“Different how?”
I didn’t want to do this, I didn’t want to admit to it, because talking about this made it real. If I kept it to myself I could still pretend I’d imagined it. But there was no point at all in trying to end this conversation—he wouldn’t let it go until he’d probed me to his complete satisfaction.
“He was wearing different clothes. His hair was shorter. Okay? Happy?” I wriggled away from him and got out of bed, pulling my clothes back on.
He watched me with that expression he has, part amusement, part curiosity. “Remember when you asked me, months ago, why I couldn’t be the one to help you?”
“Hm.”
“Well, this is why.” He caught my wrist and pulled me down onto the bed next to him, tickled me until I couldn’t help laughing.
Then he stopped, and looked at me seriously. “Move in with me,” he said.
“Give over. I practically live here as it is.”
“So move in. Save some money. Be with me all the time.”
“So you can protect me?”
“If you like.”
Sudden realization dawned. “You think it was him,” I said.
He’d been caught out. “Not necessarily.”
“Not necessarily? What the fuck does that mean?”
He hesitated for a few moments before answering. “It means I think you’re a rational person. We know Lee was released from custody a few months ago. We still don’t have an explanation for that button finding its way into your pocket. But besides that, I think you’re aware of your condition now to the extent that you know when something is unlikely to be part of your brain’s processing, and you think it might have been him, ergo, I think it might have been him.”
“Stop talking like a fucking psychologist,” I said, hitting him with a pillow.
“If I were to agree to that, how would it make you feel?” he said with a wry grin.
I rolled my eyes at him.
“Seriously,” he said, when I was wrapped in his arms again. “This time it was different. So we can reach one of two conclusions—the most likely being that you saw someone who reminded you of him, but was simultaneously different enough for you to be unsure, which is unusual.”
“Who was staring at me from one side of the supermarket to the other,” I added.
“In other words, a considerable distance from where you were.”
I didn’t want to think about what the second of the two conclusions might have been. I tried to distract him by kissing him, a long, slow, deep kiss that lasted for minute after minute. He was very good at kissing, without having any agenda—he could just kiss me without ever demanding more.
“Are you going to do it?” he asked, at last, quietly, his face close to mine.
“Do what?”
“Come live with me.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said. I don’t think he had honestly expected much more than that.
He left me alone for most of the day. From time to time I wondered if he’d gone out, and then I would hear a noise from some part of the house and realize he’d been there all along. Banging, from somewhere outside—the garage? What was he doing?
I spent some time looking out of the window, willing someone to see me. I looked over into the next-door neighbor’s yard, desperate for them to come out, so that I could bang on the window. I tried banging on the glass with the handcuffs, but the noise was so terrible I was afraid he would come up the stairs. It was pointless anyway. There was nobody to hear, apart from him.
The weather had turned, and it was rainy and windy. More like October than June. I sat with my back to the wall, waiting for him to come for me. I stared at my wrists, at the scabs that had formed, thin and tight, over the scrapes the cuffs had made yesterday. If I moved too much the wounds would open again, so I sat still. The three middle fingers of my right hand wouldn’t bend. The skin was purplish, mottled, but the swelling had subsided a little. I was glad I didn’t have a mirror. My eye was still mostly closed, my ear still buzzing.
When it started to get dark I felt the exhaustion and thirst getting the better of me, and I lay down again, the blanket around me. I must have slept, because when I woke up he was there, standing over me, and despite itself my broken nose was detecting something.
“Get up,” he said, his voice firm but not angry. I struggled against my aching limbs to sit. On the floor, from the light of the hallway, I could see a packet of chips wrapped in paper, and a bucket of water. It didn’t smell of bleach. I fought the urge to put my head into it and drink the whole thing.
He turned and locked the door behind him.
“Thank you,” I called, my voice hoarse, before I tipped the bucket and began to pour it into my dusty mouth.
The light went off, the door was locked. After a few minutes I lay on the carpet, pulling the blanket around me as best I could, and smelled the scent of piss and blood and bleach. I thought about Naomi and wondered how long I had left.
When I opened my eyes, my first thought was this:
Today I’m going to die
.
I knew this because of the pain. It was at a different level, coming at me like a train from the moment I opened my eyes. I was sweating and shivering, and, although I must have been drifting in and out of consciousness for hours, I suddenly came around to reality and I knew.
Between my legs, under the thin blanket, the blood had flowed out of me during the night with such excess that I thought he must have ruptured something internally, and that I was simply going to bleed to death in my spare room. He wasn’t going to have to do anything else. I was simply going to die from what he’d already done.
Despite the food he’d given me, I was too weak to move, and shaking too much to be able to get a purchase on the floor and raise myself up, so I lay there, the pain everywhere, all at once, but most of all across my belly, inside of me.
I drifted in and out for a while, once even dreaming that I’d made it to New York. I was asleep in a huge bed, plate-glass windows looking out over the Statue of Liberty and Central Park, the Empire State Building and the Hoover Dam all at once. My stomachache was because I’d eaten too much, and I had a hangover, and I just had to sleep for a while and it would go away.
So when he came in—was it hours later? It might even have been a day—I wasn’t even really sure if he was there or not. Maybe I was dreaming him too. Maybe I was dreaming when he lifted my head up by my hair and dropped it back onto the carpet. I felt as if I was flying.
“Catherine.”
I heard his voice and I smiled at it. He sounded funny, like he was underwater.
“Catherine. Wake up. Open your eyes.”
He was on the floor next to me, and suddenly through the remains of my nose I could smell it—the alcohol. Or maybe I was tasting it as he breathed out, close to my face.
“Catherine, you whore. Wake up.”
Oh, God help me. I laughed then. It became a cough that hurt.
“Open your eyes.”
Only one of them opened, and then only a crack. And then all I could see was something silver and black, which swam into focus gradually and became something long, something shiny. Beautiful, almost.
In the end, I only really knew it was a knife when he cut me for the first time. I didn’t make a sound. He wanted me to cry out, but I couldn’t anymore.
The second cut, my left upper arm, hurt a little bit, but what I felt more was warmth on my cold, cold skin.
When the next one came, and another, and another, I could hear him, sniffing, crying maybe, and I forced my eye open again, struggled to focus on him. He was going to kill me like this. Why didn’t he just cut my throat? My wrists? Something to make it quicker. Not like this.
I didn’t fight him off. He moved the blanket off me as he started cutting at my legs. “Jesus,” I heard him say. I wasn’t even aware that he’d stopped, but I guess at some point he must have.
I lay there and felt the wounds open, just small ones. My arms, my legs, the blood that was left inside me leaking out, the carpet under me now a long way from the original pale gray.