Deep Desires (13 page)

Emotions are easy, I think. Physical things are hard.

And then I let my nails break through his skin. I let him have something else to concentrate on instead of this panting, desperate pleasure. Instead of his cock inside me and his body pressed to mine and, ohhhh God, yes, then. Then he gives it up for me. I feel it happen the second he does – a kind of shudder goes through him, and then a stillness I can hardly stand.

‘Please,’ I tell him. ‘Please.’

But him obeying isn’t enough. He breaks like a dam bursting, mouth open around sounds he can’t make, eyes rolling up in his head. That glorious cock swells inside me, as his hips pump and his body shakes through the pleasure.

But still, it can’t ever be enough.

Because I know his body and what it needs. He’s let me feel him and understand what it takes to make him let go. To have him break over me and inside me, then rest, laughing, against my shoulder.

But I still don’t know
why
.

I don’t know why he needs to be bloody, before he gives me everything he’s got.

I know I shouldn’t need to know. But I do all the same. I think about it after we’ve had sex; I think about it during. He falls asleep right up against my body, uncaring about the lack of space between, but I still think about it.

And he still won’t tell me.

Or more: I broach the subject, and he changes it so deftly I forget what I was even saying. In my defence, it’s hard to remember with his face between my thighs. It’s hard to remember when he lets me blindfold him, before running my hand all over his body. He balks at the strangest things: a kiss on the insides of his elbows, a lick over the muscular length of his inner thigh, but not for a finger between the cheeks of his arse.

Abrupt rudeness makes him crazy and acquiescent, tentative deliberation gives him time to think, to consider …

But what exactly is he considering? I don’t know, I don’t know. And the more time I spend with him, the more the idea drives me mad. I’m Bluebeard’s wife, unable to sleep for the thought of what’s behind his locked doors, and, to make matters worse, he actually has one. He doesn’t use the walk-in closet. He uses a wardrobe.

But the closet is still here. And the door to it is always locked.

As though he needs to keep the dead body of his wife in, in case she decides to haul her rotten carcass out of there and across the carpet to me.

Seriously. Is it any wonder I can’t sleep? Is it any wonder I spend my time in his apartment, staring at that door through the darkness? Nobody wants to be murdered by someone’s dead wife. And if this is all just my craziness, if this is all just that hole through my middle trying to force my trust back out again, well, isn’t that better?

I’ll open the door and find nothing there, and then the hole will be filled and sealed for good. I won’t have to worry. We’ll keep crawling towards some kind of shaky happiness. I mean, yesterday we actually took a bath together, in the same room, while looking at each other. We’ve got to be almost there.

Or does the fact that I’m trying to prise open his door with a credit card say otherwise? He left me in the apartment this morning – alone. He’s gone out to run errands, to talk with some software developer, to cover the body of his dead wife with lime. Fuck, I don’t know.

So I’m doing this. I’m doing it.

And then it opens, and I don’t want to do it anymore. Thinking about using a crowbar to prise someone’s secrets out of them is fun in the abstract. But it’s not fun when you’re actually doing it. There isn’t even a dead body in the closet to make me feel better about being a snoop – though there are a lot of other things, instead.

There are a lot of video tapes.

And after a second of feeling bad, I start getting that tight feeling in my chest. The one I used to get when I knew Sid was five minutes from home. The one that happens because that hole in me contracts, and, though I’ve got kisses and I-love-yous to fill it in, it’s still just waiting. It’s waiting for this cupboard, filled with home movies featuring God knows what.

For a start: why are they video tapes? He’s obviously technologically competent. Shouldn’t he be lining his walls with DVDs or flash drives or some other fancy thing that you can store films on? Instead, he’s just got this cupboard built out of black plastic, like those vaguely creepy backrooms you used to glimpse in video stores. Everything neatly stacked and arranged, to the point where I can run my hand over the stacks and stacks of tapes and feel only a smooth black slickness.

He’s so perfectly ordered, my Ivan. And so perfectly weird. I can’t even bear to look at the labels on these videos, for a second, in case they tell me just how weird he is. How weird would be too much? Black and white movies of eyeballs being sliced in two? Crackling images of odd children standing at the ends of corridors?

There are a lot of things that could potentially disturb me forever. And a lot of things that could make me feel awful, forever doing this in the first place. He’s got a little TV and VCR set up in the centre of the closet on one of those stands you usually see in schools, and when I pick a tape at random and put it in, it’s not anything like what I had thought.

It’s a home movie. It’s not his psychotic art school project or his sideline in murdering people on camera. It’s just a home movie of a little boy in a stripy shirt, running around a garden. Nothing creepy about it, nothing awful. Just this little boy and his funny antics and, oh God, oh God … then I realise.

It’s Ivan.

The little boy Ivan.

All the tapes are of him and his family, being ordinary and cute – apart from his dad’s weirdly obsessive approach to capturing memories. I mean, there are a
lot
of tapes in here. Hundreds of them. And they’re all labelled the same way: with dates that follow almost every aspect of Ivan’s life when he was just a kid.

And, oh, he’s so cute. He’s so carefree and so open. My heart clenches to see him running across the grass, trailing a kite so colourful it lights up this faded and almost worn-down image. The sun is setting somewhere to his left, and the dying rays pick up little flickers of blond in his curly hair. No sound, but I can hear what he’s saying anyway:

Watch this. Watch me.

And then the kite takes off into the darkening sky.

How did everything go so wrong? I was so sure this would be a sign, a foundation for the way he is. Like the signs I give away for free. My jumpers, my hair, my being in here right now searching around for a reason to trust … all scream about what happened to me. But what happened to Ivan?

These memories are warm and lovely. The only possible clues they give out are to do with watching and being watched, but I can’t see how they would have had a negative effect. It’s not like his dad is evil and into filming his son in his underwear. In all the tapes, Ivan is fully clothed and completely happy.

And then I see the tape that doesn’t have a date on it. The one he’s centred on a slightly shorter pile, right in the middle of the room, behind the TV. There are words on this one, words that send a little wave of discomfort through me, despite their innocuousness.

Mum and Dad
, it says, and I go all weird inside. I don’t want to look, but of course it’s too late for that now. Who wouldn’t look under these circumstances? Stronger people than me, possibly. People who aren’t scared of everything and able to hurt so readily inside for someone they’re only just in a relationship with.

Other people probably wouldn’t care about that little boy and his kite, but I do. I do, and that’s why I put the tape in. I’m not afraid it will be Ivan doing something terrible. I know he isn’t now. In fact, I kind of know what I’m going to see before I see it, which mitigates the gut-wrenching shock of it somewhat.

But not by much.

At first it’s kind of hard to tell what’s happening. Whoever filmed it is doing so through the slats in what looks like a wardrobe or a cupboard of some type, and they’re not holding the camera steady. It wobbles up and down throughout, and I have to say I’m kind of glad about that.

I don’t really need to see too much of his parents being murdered. It’s bad enough knowing that he saw it, that he caught it on camera, while trapped inside somewhere. Did he hide when he heard them coming? I don’t know, I don’t know, and I can’t bear to rewind and see. I can’t bear to watch this. One of the blurry, hooded men on-screen struggles with what must be his mother, and I turn it off all in a big rush.

And then I just stand there in this little closet of horrors, trembling all over, with my heart beating in my ears. Did he actually somehow film his parents being murdered? Maybe they were doing something nice before, some lovely family memory. And then a bunch of thieves and thugs broke in and suddenly it’s
A Clockwork Orange
. Suddenly it’s someone ruined forever in a way I can hardly stand, oh, I can hardly stand it.

Everything he let me do to him, every touch he let me have, every kiss, I thought it was so hard won. But now I see: it’s a goddamn miracle that he ever lets me near him at all. It’s a miracle that he ever lets anyone near him. I’m surprised he’s not paralytic in an asylum somewhere, because his blackbird isn’t someone being an asshole to him a few times.

It’s
his parents being murdered in front of him
.

I don’t know what to do.

And I know even less when I turn and he’s just stood there in the doorway. I think I actually let out a little frightened sound, as though I really did find his dead wife in here. But once that stupidity is over with, my main instinct is to do something even dafter. I just want to cover him with my body. I want to put my arms around him and never let him go, but of course I can’t, I can’t.

He looks kind of like he wants to kill me. He’ll probably do it out of utter terror, but that’s not really the point, is it? I’m still going to die, and, worse, I think I deserve it. I shouldn’t have used the crowbar. I shouldn’t have let my lack of trust guide me. I should have been a normal person who gradually warmed him until he opened up.

But I’m not a normal person. And so here we are.

‘How did you get in here?’ he asks, and it’s no comfort to me that he sounds almost as marvelling as he does upset. Marvelling just means I’ve used my prying tools inventively, and not just the actual, literal ones, like the credit card that’s still in my hand. I mean the metaphorical ones too.

The ones he’s really gutted about.

‘I just …’ I start, but what can I say?
I just wanted to know you
sounds so lame.
I was scared
sounds even lamer. I don’t deserve a proper relationship; I don’t deserve this. Which is probably why I don’t protest when he tells me he thinks I should go.

I’ve been deemed unworthy, and now I’m being cast out of the labyrinth of him. And that’s OK, that’s really OK, because he’s probably right. This isn’t the bit where I hug him and make everything OK. This is the bit where I accept that I’ll never be right or capable of having a relationship, and walk out of the door.

Though once I’ve done it, I know:

I don’t think I can let him go.

I dream that he’s falling through my fingers. Of course I try to hold on, but it’s almost impossible when he’s made of nothing. His arms and legs crumple beneath my grip, and before I can do anything the wind catches his papery body, and blows him away.

And I wake up sweating and crying, still completely unsure of what to do. I tried a letter: he didn’t reply. I went to my window: he isn’t at his. His phone rings and rings until I feel like a maniac again, madly stalking a man who doesn’t want to be found.

His door is shut again. He’s closed back up. And all because I just had to know, I had to know, oh God, why did I have to know? It doesn’t make me feel any better now that I do. Instead, I have more dreams in which he doesn’t turn to paper and blow away. He gets murdered in front of me, while I film everything with a video camera.

That one’s a real doozy, I tell you. Lord knows what kind of dreams he has on a daily basis, after actually going through something like that. I’m surprised he’s functioning at all, but then again he isn’t, is he?