The Venus Trap (21 page)

Chapter Thirty-One
Day 4

I
wake up later that morning to the noise of Lester scratching in his litter tray in my bathroom, the diary’s pages creased and stuck to my swollen cheek. In a flash it comes back to me, the lost
photographs
. What Claudio tried to do last night. How do I know he won’t try it again? What he said about calling Megan.

I need a new strategy. I will talk to Megan as instructed—in fact, that will help my resolve, like a novice marathon runner spotting a loved one in the crowd at the twenty-five mile mark. Her voice will keep me going.

I will be normal to her, and then I’m going to pretend the effort of it has made me lose my mind. I will tell him I love him, but I won’t get dressed, or bathe, or eat anything. I will rub my hair into a giant tangle. I won’t use deodorant or clean my teeth. I will make myself ill.

I climb out of bed, switch on the light, and start by doing as many press-ups as I can manage—not many, in my weakened state: four full ones, then another dozen on my knees. My head still aches but I don’t care. Then I hook my feet under the base of the bed and try a few sit-ups. When I close my eyes I am transported out of this gloomy bedroom and back to the neon lights and bass-boomy music of the gym. I see Sean’s patient, amused face and kind eyes. I feel his hand pressing gently on my thigh to encourage me, and the slippery Lycra of his top when, after we’ve become a clandestine couple, I slide my arm briefly round his waist. It wasn’t allowed when he was working, but I couldn’t keep my hands off him.

Oh, how I wish I’d never set eyes on that man. Had I not, I’d still be with Richard and therefore, had I been in Pizza Express at all that day it would have been with him and Megan, not Whore of Babylon Gerald, and even if Claudio had been in there our encounter would merely have constituted a brief hello.

I flip over onto my hands and knees and perform the series of leg raises that are meant to tone your hips and thighs. I push myself as hard as I can, as sweat drips down my face and off the end of my nose onto the carpet. Then I do more sit-ups. My head is swimming and black spots float in front of my eyes—I’m far too hungry to be doing vigorous exercise but I keep going.

The energy I’m expending seems to be generating a new emotion in me, overriding the pain in my head and the fear in my chest.

Fury.

I swear, if he’d come in right then I’d have torn him limb from limb, or at least tried to. I want to scream and kick things, but I don’t want to risk alerting him as then I’d have to
see
him and the sight of him makes my stomach heave and my throat constrict. It’s him who’s making me sick.

I take one of my pillows off the floor and whack it as hard as I can against the wall, again and again, imagining I’m holding that saucepan again and that the wall is Claudio’s stupid head. On the fifth whack, the pillow splits down the seam and I’m enveloped in a huge cloud of soft soundless bees whirling around my head like my panic personified. It’s a release, of sorts, and I sit back down on the mattress, spent. I hang my head down between my knees to attempt to combat the dizziness.

I’m definitely starting to smell already. It’s so hot and airless in here with the window boarded shut and the door permanently closed that I’ve been having two showers a day to prevent me stinking worse than a tramp’s armpit.

Not any more.

I keep my head down and the faintness gradually settles, along with the feathers around me.

Then I have a moment’s doubt about my new MO. If I transform into this unlovable stinky fright, will Claudio forcibly try t
o w
ash me—or, worse, panic and just clonk me over the head and leave me for dead? The best case scenario is that he locks me in and leaves me here. I’d survive till Richard and Megan got back, I think. I’ve sort of lost track of the date, but as long as he didn’t turn the water off at the mains, I’d be OK. I’ve been stockpiling food under the bed, biscuits and apples, although they wouldn’t keep me going for long. How many days is it that you can live on water alone?

If he did switch off the water, I could pee in the bath and drink out of the toilet—couldn’t I?

Then I have a horrific mental image of poor Megan and
Richard
bursting back into the flat, full of blue sky holiday tales, to find me barely alive or, worse, behind a locked and bolted bedroom door, covered in feathers and excrement.

I can’t let that happen.

I still think on balance that the best available plan is to try to let myself go to the extent that it wrongfoots Claudio and he starts doubting his ‘love’ for me—or at least quashes his desire for us to sit down to a nice dinner every night. But surely after last night he’s not going to do that again?

I slide off the bed and onto the floor and lie on my back on the carpet, my chest still heaving with exertion. Something catches my eye under the little set of drawers by the bed and I lunge for it—it’s a biro! Claudio confiscated all the other ones he found in the Great Bedroom Purge, but this one has slipped through his net. I scribble on my palm and after a few scrapes, it bursts into glorious blue lines over the skin of my hand. It’s not by any means an escape route, but at least I can leave instructions for the police to find in the event that Claudio clonks me over the head and dumps me in a ditch somewhere. There are a few empty pages at the back of my 1986/7 diary; I can use those.

What else could I write on? In a flash of inspiration, I crawl over to my chest of drawers and pull my tired, aching body up. I open the second drawer down. It’s full of t-shirts and tops that I start to pull out and then stop—Claudio might guess what I’m up to if he came in now. Instead, I push the clothes to one side and get to what I want—the yellowy brittle lining paper that’s been in there as long as I can remember, right back to my childhood when this mahogany chest of drawers belonged to Mum and Dad. Mum used to keep her baby-blue plastic Tampax case in the top drawer, and it took me years to figure out what it was when I used to go on my regular sly childhood rifles through their drawers when they were out. I’m not sure what I was looking for. Perhaps it was some kind of foresight, a premonition that one day it might save my life to remember this unexpected secret source of writing material.

In big capitals I write on the lining paper: KIDNAPPED BY CLAUDIO CAVELLI OF . . . Then I couldn’t remember his address, even though I’d plugged it into my satnav when I’d driven over to his place. I rack and rack my brains but nothing comes, apart from Oak Road, Twickenham, so I write that, plus THE UGLY APARTMENT BLOCK NEAR THE CHURCH. BEEN HELD IN THIS ROOM FOR FOUR DAYS SO FAR. IF I’M NOT HERE WHEN THIS IS READ, HE’S PROBABLY KILLED ME. HIS MUM LIVES IN BROCKHURST, IN A NURSING HOME OR HOSPICE BUT I DON’T KNOW WHERE. TELL MEGAN AND RICHARD I LOVE THEM.

Then I pile the clothes back over the top of it, close the drawer and sink back onto the feathery bed, succumbing to the throbbing of my head and the aching of my muscles.

Some time later Claudio unlocks the door and comes in, with a cup of tea too tepid for it to hurt if I threw it in his face. But I wouldn’t. I have worked out all the fury and am meek as a (malodorous) lamb again—I want to hear my daughter’s voice, and I suspect that compliance is the only way forward, until after the phone call at least.

‘Can I still call Megan?’

‘What’s been going on in here?’ says Claudio, putting the tea down on the bedside table. He glances at my bruised cheek and quickly looks away, and then at all the feathers. ‘It’s a mess!’

‘Can I still call Megan?’ I repeat.

He sighs, regarding the feathery chaos again, like a disappointed parent.

‘Yes. But there are rules.’

I thought there might be.

‘If you give even a hint that something’s wrong, I will stab you,’ he continues, conversationally. ‘We are going to practise. What would you usually say to Megan when she’s away?’

‘We don’t usually talk when she’s away with Richard. She only gets homesick and misses me when we speak, so it’s easier to let her just get on with it.’

‘Then why has she been texting you, asking you to call her?’ he demands suspiciously, as though Megan has been somehow complicit in plotting my escape.

‘I don’t know,’ I say, truthfully. ‘Can I see the texts?’

‘No. I deleted them. I replied first, saying you would call today.’

‘You replied, as me?’

‘Obviously.’ He looks at me as though I’m stupid.

‘How did you know what to say to make her believe it’s me?’ Although I already know the answer.

‘I just copied the style and number of kisses on your other texts to her. How old is she, seven? Bit young to have a mobile, isn’t she?’

I want to tell him to fuck off—how dare he sound disapproving when he’s been through and read my texts, replied to them pretending to be me? Instead, I just shrug.

‘So, what will you say to her?’

I roll my eyes. ‘I will tell her I love her, that I’m fine, Lester’s fine, ask her what she’s been up to, tell her I miss her but I’ll see her very soon. That kind of stuff.’

Claudio seems satisfied. ‘Tell her not to ring again as your phone’s going in for repair. What about Richard, would you normally speak to him too?’

‘I would usually just have a quick check with him, to make sure that Megan’s OK, eating properly, getting enough sleep and so on.’

‘I don’t want you to talk to
him
.’

‘All right, I won’t. You can hang up if he comes on the line. Can I have my phone now?’

‘I’ll go and get it. I’m dialling the number, and holding the phone. If you try to grab it, I’ll stab you. Understand?’

He leaves, bolting the door, then unbolts it again a couple of minutes later. In one hand he’s holding my mobile, in the other, my biggest, sharpest Sabatier knife. The sight of both these objects has a strange effect on me, making me feel faint. I grit my teeth as he comes close and puts his right arm around my shoulders, holding the knife so that the tip of it pushes slightly in between the ribs of my right side.

‘Are you ready?’

Even though he is right up next to me, he doesn’t seem to have noticed how much I smell. This is disappointing. Fear is making me sweat even harder, so surely he will do so by later tonight?

I can’t bear his body being this close to mine.

I nod. He taps the screen of my phone with a fat thumb to connect the call, and then holds it up against my left ear. I hear the continental ring tone. It rings and rings.
Come on, Megan, please, darling
, I beg silently.
I need to hear your voice.
But Megan doesn’t answer. Tears spring into my eyes as the automatic answer message clicks on. I curse my laziness in not getting around to helping her record her own message, in her own voice.

I look at Claudio and mouth
What do I do?

‘Leave a message,’ he hisses back.

At the beep, I try to speak but at first my words are lost in the croak of my voice. Claudio presses the knife harder into my side, and I somehow manage to sharpen up my tone.

‘Hi, sweetie-pie, it’s Mummy! How are you, my darling? I’m so sorry I’ve missed you . . .’ It takes every ounce of self-control in me not to break down. ‘. . . But I just wanted to say hi, and tell you I love you, and Lester and I will see you very soon, in five days’ time! That’s not long, is it? I hope you’re having an amazing holiday with Tilly and Jemima. Don’t call me back because, er, my phone isn’t working properly so I have to take it into the shop to get it fixed. It’s the screen. I need to get the screen fixed. Anyway. I really love you, Megan. So much. Goodbye, angel . . . .’

Claudio abruptly snatches the phone away and terminates the call. I can’t help hyperventilating. It’s either that or sobbing, and I don’t want to do that.

I take a big slurp of tea. Very odd experience, drinking tea with a knife sticking into your side.

‘Can you take that knife away now, please?’ I ask him, between pants, and he does. As he’s standing up, my phone rings in his hand. We both freeze.

‘Who is it?’ I say, in as much of a panic as he is.

He looks at the screen. ‘It’s your ex-husband. You’re not answering it.’