TheRapist (18 page)

Jezzy
and Frankie had met in the park after work. Jezzy, waiting on a peeling, wooden bench, held up a bag with two punnets
of Chinese food
filled with steaming noodles, tofu and soy sauce. Frankie had supplied two regular Cokes and two Cadbury’s Flakes. She had managed to leave work earlier than usual as Sam’s mother was taking him to an early violin concert at Cadogan Hall. Sam was dreading it. He told Frankie that violins reminded him of a scary, screechy movie. She was seeing Manny later that evening, as he had spent the day meeting colleagues at Cheapside in the City.

‘Adrian will be back soon
,’ Jezzy stuck a forkful of noodles into her mouth.

‘Manny leaves on Saturday, he stayed longer than he was going to and now I don’t know what to do.’ Frankie shoved a piece of tofu into each cheek. She looked like a beautiful chipmunk and it made Jezzy smile.

‘I don’t know what to do either. They come and they go and every time they do they take a little piece of our minds with them,’ sighed Jezzy.

‘You’re so dramatic.’

‘You would be too if you didn’t know what to do!’

‘I don’t know what to do! I wish I’d never spent the night with him.’ Frankie looked momentarily glum.

Jezzy swallowed too many noodles at once and spluttered, ’are you crazy?!’

Frankie looked up at the sky, squinting at a flock of seagulls, probably on a day trip from Brighton, soaring across the sun. ‘He’s amazing, but I think I moved too fast.’

Jezzy began to laugh. ‘Are you kidding? The guy flew halfway across the world to see you. I’m sure he was bargaining for more than a peck on the cheek.’

‘Adrian’s flying in to see you too,’ Frankie pointed out.

Jezzy shrugged, pushing a stray noodle into her mouth, ‘Adrian and I have a history and he is not flying here specifically to see me, he lives between here The States.’ She knew that Frankie knew this, but felt she had to reiterate.

‘That’s true,’ admitted Frankie as she began to pull open her Flake wrapper.

Jezzy watched her, and slipping back in time said. ‘Do you remember when you could literally unwrap the wrapper of a Flake?’

‘I do,’ smiled Frankie, ‘you could just twist open the top and slowly peel it down. Pulling it down was so much sexier than pulling it apart.’

Jezzy had bitten her Flake and it crumbled around her lips. ‘I always wanted to be like a Flake Girl on TV, being able to relish each moment without a care on the world.'

‘Me too,’ mumbled Frankie through chocolate crumbs, ‘but at least we get a little escapism every time we indulge.’

They finished their Flakes, abandoning themselves to its decadence, fleetingly suspending their thoughts to revel in a momentary chocolate fantasy.

‘I don’t know if I want to marry Adrian or dump him and it’s killing me.’

‘Don’t you love him?’

‘I do. I think I do. Or maybe I think it’s meant to be. I just don’t know!’ Jezzy was in turmoil.

‘Fate?’ asked Frankie.

‘Shit,’ sighed
Jezzy
.

The sun began to slide down the sky, entering a pool of shimmering red and gold. The two friends gazed pensively upwards, between elaborate Victorian houses and teenage glass buildings.

‘Don’t look directly at the sun,’ murmured Jezzy.

‘In case it hurts?’ enquired Frankie, somewhat sardonically.

Jezzy smiled. They had an unspoken understanding, having been friends since they were thirteen. Men could hurt them, emotionally, verbally. Feelings could be trodden on, driven down. Therapy had never helped. Not really. It was just too exhausting. So surely something as beautiful and natural as
basking in
the sun could never hurt a girl. Could it?

Frankie was silent for a few moments more. ‘All I know is that we spend years, decades, searching for the right guy and then these men who seem as though they’re right for us come along and we torment ourselves with too many questions. Why can’t it just be easy?’

‘All I know,’ sighed Jezzy, flecks of orange shining in her eyes, courtesy of the sun, ‘is that I never used to question things so much before I saw Mr. Cruickshank. Too much time and money spent with that weirdo mind doctor.’

‘Same with me,’ agreed Frankie. ‘Miss Patterson totally ruined my normal thinking process, she constantly tried to drag me back to the past, insisting that I look for bad stuff that I never believed was really there and now everything’s always so convoluted.’

‘Fucking therapists,’ whispered Jezzy, ‘all they do is fucking rape your minds. That’s why they’re called therapists, because that’s what they are and that’s what they do. The Rapists.’

And the horizon gobbled up the sun in one swift gulp.

*

Devon in Space

Looking down, she could see globules of clouds, creating a pearlescent blanket beneath the Virgin jumbo. She wondered if that was how her mind looked, from the inside. Frothy, grey, opaque. There was a chink of light though. Something was beginning to fight its way through. A tenacious, minute ray of hope. It might take a while, but it was there, finding its way through the clouds in the sky and through the rubbish tip that had become her mind, to bring light into her life.

‘Care for a glass of champagne Ms. Cage?’ The flight attendant looked pristine in her red skirt and white shirt
, make-up perfectly caked on
. She could just as easily have been on the cover of Good Housekeeping.

Devon nodded, smiling a charming smile, accepting the glass. She drank it in one, needing to feel the calming effect of the bubbles. It wasn’t vintage, it was barely out of diapers, but it was palatable. She settled down in her seat and decided to watch a movie. She chose something light and romantic, something with a Meg or Diane above the title. Why not?! She giggled, suddenly feeling like a teenager. She was comfortable in her seat and her mind felt as though it was beginning to rest too. How wonderful. She had waited so long for this moment. She suddenly remembered when she had been on a flight across America many years ago. A woman sitting across the aisle in front of her had pulled a worn Danielle Steele novel out of her bag. She had looked so carefree, just sitting there, reading a book of her choice, not something she was obliged to read, but rather something light, flippant, easy without her mind weighing her down. Devon had envied her, she had seemed so free. She wanted to be able to still her mind long enough to be able to read a light- hearted book. And now she
could, because she was almost free, her liberty within reach.

There was just one more thing she needed to do.

*

Adrian

The door closed softly with no more than a whisper and from where he was lying, Adrian caught his last glimpse of the young man with the peroxide blonde hair and hairless golden limbs. He must have thought that Adrian was asleep. He wasn’t though. How could he sleep in the middle of the afternoon with a complete stranger in the room? Fucking, yes. Sleeping, no way. Besides, his butt really ached. The boy had been a bit too rough, but that was what Adrian had wanted. After all, he had screamed out for more as the stranger repeatedly plunged his uncircumsized cock into his ass. Adrian hated foreskins. Probably because Fred the farmer had had one that had been loose and a bit flappy. Thinking about Fred made him realize that he hadn’t seen
a collared
cock for years, perhaps decades. At least this guy he had just fucked had worn a condom.
Who
knows what a person could catch otherwise. Thankfully, he had never caught anything from Fred the farmer, not unless you counted that horrible skin rash across his back, but that had been from the pigs in the stable. Pork zits, Fred had called them, as he carefully squeezed out the pus for Adrian at the top of the hay barn.

Adrian managed to jolt his thoughts back to the present and he gazed down at his pale body and skinny legs, thinking, promising himself, that this would be the last time he ever had to have sex with a man. He longed to be back with Jezzy. He needed to be in her warm, fragrant arms again, where he could escape from himself. She was his savior. She had to be. There was nowhere else for him to go. He lifted himself gently off the crumpled bed, naked except for a grey, sleeveless T-shirt, and stood in the middle of the small, damp West Hollywood hotel room. The carpet was orange and the bed was hard. Probably reinforced, because the manager knew what kind of damage it needed to withstand. Maybe minds should be reinforced too? Maybe scaffolding should be erected inside a person’s head to stop their thoughts crashing down around them.

He looked out of the window directly at the small apartment building across the street. There were vivid pink bougainvillea aimlessly clambering across the walls, their blossom lingering languidly in the sun and Adrian wished he were as free as a flower. The sun glinted into his eyes, causing him to squint and he knew he was facing west. He turned the other way so that he was facing east, to where Jezzy was waiting six thousand miles away, even if right now he was only looking at the white, painted wall, at least he was facing the right direction. That was the last time that he would ever do anything destructive again, because now he could fly home to Jezzy and they could get married and have children.

And he would be normal.

He sat down on the bed. It was still hot. Damp. He put his head in his hands and cried. He couldn’t live like this any longer. His life had been filled with turmoil since he had been a child, but spending years in therapy had made it worse, he was convinced of that.
Couldn’t he
have just left it all in the past, just pushed it aside and got on with his life? He never had to see his mother or Fred or the school again.  At least when he was fostered he had made a friend for life. But the therapists, the fuck
ing therapists, had dragged it
out of him time and time again. Causing him to have spent the last twenty odd years reliving those vile happenings, forced to dredge them up and out, needing to find solace of some sort and thinking that maybe that was what he wanted. They had made him ask himself all these searching questions. Maybe that was what he needed? They suggested he should experiment again to see if that’s where the answer lie? So he tried and he looked and he lived amongst the ghosts of his past. The therapists would not let him let them go and held his mind in a vice. They said he could only have closure after he had dug to the bottom and worked his way up. A rebirth. Only then would he heal. Thankfully, Devon had always been there, well almost all of the time. And now he had Jezzy. His own true woman and one he must never hurt.

Adrian lifted his head from his hands, flinching at his reflection in the mirror. He had dug his fingers so hard into his temples that he had left two trails of blood.
*

Jezzy

Jezzy needed a
car for the weekend. She thought it would be nice to go to the country
with Adrian, Wiltshire or The Cotswolds perhaps
, maybe give them some breathing space away from the confines of the city. She had noticed a small place called Premier Vehicle People located in a rundown garage, next to the railway tracks, having passed by many times on the bus. She walked up four steel steps, past a metal name plate on the wall with the letters PVP in orange stamped onto it and into an office filled with plastic fans, which moved the hot, stale air around the room. Two boys stood behind the high counter. One was white and skinny, in his twenties, with a name tag that read, Eddie. His colleague, Rash, was short and muscular with black hair and pale brown skin and his teeth gleamed as he smiled, ‘Can I help you?’ to
Jezzy
. Eddie smiled too, only his teeth were yellow and crooked. Typical, thought Jezzy, so English.

‘I need a car for two days please. Small, non-smoking, automatic.’

‘You could be talking about me,’ grinned Rash as he slid a laminated A4 card across t
he counter, poking
his pen at a picture of a blue hatchback. ‘Toyota, Honda or Hyundai, take your pick, I’ve got them all.’

‘I’ll take the newest one,’ said Jezzy.

‘They’re all new,’ gleamed Rash.

‘Then I don’t mind,’ she smiled, ‘you pick.’

‘Good choice!’ Rash grinned and scratched his right cheek. He had two big gold sovereign rings on two fingers. ‘Drivers licence, credit card, I’d advise insurance coverage, it’s only eight pounds odd a day and you’ll have peace of mind.’