It was Marco who caught my hand as I unlocked the front door. I did not hear him coming up behind me. He circled my wrist with his long fingers and half pulled, half dragged me inside. His face was a slack mask, terrifying. In contrast my fear was as sharp and shiny as a new pin.
‘What are you doing?’ He clutched my cheeks in one of his large hands, pushing my lips together into a surprised ‘O’. He leaned his body against me until I was crushed into the wall. His erection pressed against my thigh. I was frightened. The flat was still and dark, the curtains drawn. There was a lit cigar in his hand. He told me I am spoilt, that my parents ruined me, always letting me get my own way. I could smell whisky and his aftershave, and beneath it something musky and sour, my sweat, my fright.
‘What did I tell you, Stella? What did I ask you explicitly not to do?’
‘Embarrassh oo.’ My voice was soft and pulpy.
‘It’s a simple request, isn’t it? You can follow instructions, can’t you?’
‘Yesh.’
‘Okay, great. Well, here’s an instruction for you. Turn around.’
His breath was boiling out of him in hot gasps, as it did when he was aroused. I shook my head.
He nodded in response. ‘Yes. Turn around.’
His hand tightened on my face. Later I would look in the mirror and see broad strips of scarlet there as though my flesh had been seared.
I shuffled myself around so that I was facing the wall. My legs were watery and weak. He pressed up against the length of my spine, the cigar smoke thick and toxic. It was right by my left ear. His mouth bent to my right, pressing up against the soft fleshy lobe.
‘I want you to remember this,’ he said, and then a searing pain just below my hairline, the nape of my neck. There was a moment of intense heat followed by the rich smell of burning. My skin was burning. It smelt like crisped pork.
I screamed, but I had no strength, and he was pressing against me and, oh God, it hurt, it hurt. When he pulled away, I put my hands there and felt a raised welt where the skin was scorched and tender, weeping a light fluid.
Marco was looking at me like a man awakening from anaesthetic, his eyes seeming to focus and lose their hazy, frightening blur. He crushed the cigar out beneath his foot and clawed for me, pulling me to his chest. I did not resist. The smell of burned skin and hair made my stomach roll. Marco was whispering apologies, stroking my shoulders.
‘I’m so sorry, Stella. Look what I did to you, my beautiful girl. My favourite thing. Look what I did to you. I’m so sorry.’
I let myself be stroked and after some time – surely only a few minutes – I returned his apology, telling him that it had been me, I had provoked him, telling him not to be upset, not to cry. I kissed him and told him we would seek help together. ‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘we will both get help. I’m so sorry—’
‘No, I’m sorry.’
‘You complete me,’ he’d said, taking my hand, stroking my hair, ‘you complete me.’ Over and over and over and over. And then, like magic, with the swallowing of each little grey pill I had forgotten the crawling, prickling fear, just like I had forgotten the way my flesh had smelled like roast meat as it burned. A week or so later I would lose my own phone, misplace it, just like he told me I had. All these things I had forgotten.
When I come round, one of the windows has been opened and the air is clearer, less pungent. I apologise as Beverley hands me a glass of water. I sip it, hands shaking. ‘You complete me.’ Oh, I have heard that before all right, always delivered softly into my ear as we lay, hands entwining each other, on his bed or on the couch. ‘You complete me,’ he would whisper, and I would feel a heat somewhere behind my ribs, a slow-burning furnace. ‘You complete me.’ My mouth tasting of red wine and semen. ‘You complete me.’ Singed hair and burning flesh. ‘You complete me’, as he stripped me of my friends one by one.
My phone is ringing again. I can’t face it. I can’t face anything. Tremors beneath the surface of my skin. Something inside is beginning to split wide open, and there will be pain that comes with it.
‘I have to go, Beverley.’
Beverley nods and waves a hand in the air. ‘I shan’t get up. It’s too much effort and my bones are weak. You seem a lovely girl, Stella. I know it must be hard work to live in the shadow of a work of fiction. You mind and pay attention.’
Chapter 30
Outside the light is bright and clear, the day magnified as though through a lens. In the dappled shade of the trees I smell wood smoke and earth, the effluvious dank smell of ditch water and wet leaves. Everything about me seems to have an extraordinary clarity but inside my thoughts buzz and collide like flies shaken in a jar. I am walking too fast, head down, thin stem of my neck drooping. Soon the sky will darken; funeral clothes for the dying day. I pull my phone from my pocket and call Frankie.
‘I need to get into the loft,’ I say breathlessly.
Frankie hesitates and I wonder if he is regretting getting involved in this.
‘The loft.’ I’m breathless, sweating. ‘The loft has a lock on it, a big one. I need to get in there. I need to see what he’s hiding. Can you come over? Reckon you can break it?’
‘Well – sure, I suppose so. I mean, there won’t be any finesse to it, it won’t be my finest piece of work – but I reckon I can smash it open with something heavy unless it’s one of those industrial ones.’
‘I don’t think so. Can you come now? Right now?’
‘Yeah, course. You okay?’
‘I just need to know – I need to see it for myself. Who he is.’
‘Okay. I hear you.’ A pause. ‘You know what? You’re incredibly brave.’
I stop, panting. I have never thought of myself as brave before. I am struck by it. I am brave. I am a brave woman. But inside something is moving, some new knowledge as lethal as a blood clot.
Chapter 31
When I get back to the cottage there is someone sitting on my front porch. Long legs drawn up to their chest, head resting on their knees. A dark globe of hair. An Erinys. A Fury.
‘Carmel,’ I say.
She stands awkwardly in the kitchen, her coat folded in her arms. She won’t have a cup of tea, and she can’t stay long, she tells me. When she looks at me, right at me, my eyes slide away from her gaze. I feel almost delirious. I haven’t forgotten what I did to her, you see. At the end. I’d believed Marco when he’d told me that she wasn’t going to press charges, that I’d never see her again. I want to reach out and touch her.
‘You look well,’ I tell her. She looks better than that. Vital. Even with no make-up on and her hair growing out from her buzz cut in weird kinks. She is wearing a white shirt, neatly pressed. The sleeves are rolled up to her forearms. There are still marks there, in the places that my teeth had broken the skin. Marco had said she’d probably be scarred for life. He’d laughed when he’d told me that, and said it was about time. ‘Bitch got her comeuppance,’ he’d said with that same wide smile.
Carmel lifts her chin, her jaw set. Her eyes are flat and cool and dark and I miss her so much I am aching as if with fever.