Into the Darkest Corner (32 page)
I opened my eyes into the darkness, breathing fast, my heart pounding in my throat. For a moment I was disoriented, then Stuart moved in bed and I was there, with him, in his flat. It was just me and him. No Lee. It was another nightmare.
It’s not real, I told myself. It’s part of it. Let the thoughts come, let them go.
I considered waking Stuart up, but that wasn’t fair. I lay still for a while in the darkness, listening.
I could hear noises.
It took me a moment to realize that they were real noises, not part of the rhythm of the house, not the noise of my blood rushing through my head.
A bang, far away. Downstairs? No, it didn’t sound like it. It sounded farther away. Maybe in the street. I couldn’t hear the noises of the street from Stuart’s flat as well as I could in my own. A car door slamming?
I looked across at Stuart’s alarm clock. It was ten to three in the morning, the coldest and darkest and loneliest part of the night. I should be asleep. I should go back to my nightmare. For a moment I wondered if actually I wasn’t awake at all, if I was still dreaming.
Another bang, followed by a scrape. A noise like something being dragged across a floor. Something heavy, inert.
I sat up in bed, straining to hear. For several moments, nothing. Just the noise of Stuart’s breathing, deep, regular. The sound of the fridge humming in the kitchen. A car starting up outside, driving away.
Maybe that had been it—just someone going out to their car.
Stuart moved next to me and I lay back down, fitting myself into the curve of his body, pulling his arm around me, protecting me, keeping me safe. I closed my eyes and tried to think of good things, tried to fall asleep.
A few minutes later, he came and took the bucket away. I’d used it to scrub feebly at the carpet. Already I could feel the skin on my fingers burning from the bleach in the water. The patch of carpet that had been scrubbed was turning from pale gray to a dirty yellow.
After that, he didn’t come back for several hours.
I spent a while sobbing, but not much. I tried getting out—I tried bashing at the door, but it held. I tried hammering at the window, but it faced out over the back and there was nobody out there to see me, or hear me. He’d left nothing at all in the room I could use as a weapon, or that I could use to try to break the window.
Before I’d left for the airport, this room had held a single bed, a wardrobe, a desk with an old computer, a chest of drawers and a small portable television, along with various other smaller bits and pieces. Now it held nothing. The only decoration was the curtain pole and the curtains hanging from them, but I had nothing at all I could use to get the curtain pole down with. I tried pulling it down, thinking I could use the pole to smash the window, but it held my body weight easily, even when I bounced up and down.
I felt thirsty, wondered what the time was, what day it was. How long had it been since I’d had something to drink? Well, I wouldn’t last long at this rate. If he’d gone to work, if he was going to be away for several days, it would be dehydration that would get me first.
I tried screaming “Help me! Help me! Help!” over and over again, as loudly as I could, but all that seemed to do was leave me with a sore throat.
I sat for a while and tried to think of a plan. I considered using my stockings to make some sort of noose, so that I could try to put it around his neck when he came into the room, to try to choke him. That was about the best plan I could come up with. Thirst, fear and hunger were making thinking harder than it usually was.
I felt the back of my head gingerly and found a lump that hurt so much when I pressed it gently that I nearly passed out. The hair around it was matted with dried blood. He’d knocked me out, then. I wondered how long I’d been out for.
I wondered if I’d have any sort of strength left to fight him when he came back, and whether it was worth it. If I tried to attack him, he’d fight back, and then he would undoubtedly punish me for trying.
Well, I couldn’t just sit here and let him do whatever he wanted. If he killed me, at least this whole shitty mess would be over and done with.
I thought about tying my stockings to the curtain pole, or pulling the curtains into strips, and hanging myself. I thought about it in such detail I even began to picture myself, and his face when he found me. It would be a victory, of sorts. Although all my friends, his work colleagues, everyone, would think I committed suicide because I was depressed. He would get away with it—nobody would ever know how he’d treated me. And he would go on to do it all over again, to someone else.
I turned a corner, then, and I decided to try to fight. I had another go at screaming.
And that was how I managed not to hear him coming in through the front door, climbing the stairs and unlocking the door to the spare room, to my prison.
When I came in from work tonight, there was a bowl and a spoon and a cup on the dish rack in the kitchen.
To any sane adult, the rational explanation would be that I’d washed my bowl after having cereal for breakfast, and had left it to dry and gone to work.
In reality, though, I’d done nothing of the kind.
It was a measure of how far I’d come already that I didn’t descend into a panic attack. I didn’t even go back to the front door and start the checking process all over again. I stood there and stared at the bowl, knowing what it meant. My heart was thudding in my chest and I was almost too afraid to look around, in case Lee was there standing right behind me.
He wasn’t in the flat at all—I knew that, I’d already checked the whole place once. The front door downstairs had been firmly shut and locked, the way it had been every day since Stuart moved in. The flat door had been securely locked, and I’d locked it behind me and checked. The doors to the balcony had been locked, too. The flat had been fine—
fine
—until I’d finally come to the kitchen to start making something to eat.
I waited for the anxiety to subside, determined not to give in to it. First the button—now this.
The red button with its attached scrap of cloth had been like a warning—less subtle than this new message. The first one had been like a flag, literally a red flag even though it was tiny, telling me he was back, he had found me. It was meant to be an alarm, a warning. He knew that anyone I chose to tell about it would look at me in an odd way, think about what sort of an attention-seeking person might rip a button off something, tuck it in her pocket and then have a panic attack about it. This time, though, he knew I wouldn’t tell anyone at all about it. What would be the point? No rational person would believe that a person would break in—leaving no trace—just to leave some dishes in the dish rack.
I put the bowl, the spoon and the mug into the garbage can and took the bag outside to the landing. After that I made a cup of tea, giving myself time to think.
I should have moved out. I should have started looking for somewhere new to live the day after the button appeared in my jeans pocket, almost a month ago. I realized it was too late to do that now—he would be following me, he would see me going to visit new flats and he would know where I was going to live even before I’d moved in.
Even if I ran, even if I just left everything and caught a train somewhere, he would still find me. And besides, I couldn’t just leave everything behind—my job, the flat, Stuart. The thoughts that had begun to form in Alistair’s office crystallized into a sense of resolution. What good would running away do? It didn’t work last time and it wouldn’t work now either. I was going to have to stay. I was going to have to get ready to fight.
The door slammed open with such force that it made me jump and stopped me midscream.
I was completely unprepared for what came next—his fist coming toward my face at speed, smacking my cheekbone and propelling me backward, the back of my head, already fragile, hitting the wall as I fell.
I couldn’t move for a moment, stunned, but I didn’t have time to contemplate my next move anyway. He took hold of a fistful of my hair and hauled me back to an unsteady kneel, before hitting me again, harder. This time his fist connected with my nose and I felt the blood start to pour out of it, watched through dazed eyes as it formed a puddle on the carpet. I gagged, sobbing, retching.
“Shut the fuck up!” he yelled. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, screaming like that?”
“Let me go,” I said, quietly, pleading.
“I don’t think so, Catherine. Not now.”
This time I winced before it hit—my right eye, the bridge of my nose. My hand against my face, trying to protect it, and he pulled it away, placing it on the floor. I watched him stand on my fingers and heard a crack.
I bit back a scream, the pain going through me like a slice. “No, please, Lee—no more. Please.”
“Take your clothes off.”
I looked up at him. My right eye felt strange, wouldn’t focus.
“No, no . . . please.”
“Take your fucking clothes off, you stupid, dirty bitch. Take them off now.”
Seated, I pulled my jacket away from my shoulders. My right hand wasn’t working properly, the fingers starting to swell. After a moment he lost patience and pulled my jacket away, ripping it away from my aching shoulders. My blouse he just tore off. Then he dragged me to my feet, pulling away a handful of my hair as he did so, tossing it to the carpet and wiping his hand on the back of his jeans, then pulling my skirt down.
Then he stopped. The thought of him sickened me, but even so I raised my head. I wanted to see his eyes, to see if I could find out what he intended to do to me.
I tried as hard as I could to focus on his face. The leer. Oh, my God. Oh, shit—he was enjoying it. He really was enjoying himself.
As I watched, he reached to the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out the knife, the black-handled lock knife with a curved blade, partly serrated, about five inches long.
I found my voice again, begging, pleading, my voice rising into a wail. “No, no, no, Lee—don’t, please don’t . . .”
He reached forward and slid the blade under the fabric of my underpants at the side, slicing the fabric with a neat, crisp sound. I felt the coldness of the blade against my naked skin. I couldn’t move. Then the other side. He reached between my legs and grabbed at the material, pulling it away.
Then he took a step back and surveyed me. “You’re ugly,” he said, a smile in his voice.
“Yes,” I said. I felt it.
“You’ve lost so much weight you’re like a fucking skeleton.”
I gave a little shrug.
“You’re so fucking skinny. I liked you before, when you had some flesh. You were so beautiful, so gorgeous I couldn’t stop myself looking at you, did you know that?”
I shrugged again. My right eye was starting to close, my head was pounding. I looked down at the blood that had splashed from my broken nose down the front of my body. Blood everywhere. Who’d have thought so much could come from one nose?
He sighed heavily. “I can’t fuck you like that. You aren’t even remotely attractive, you know that?”
I nodded.
He turned and left the room, but before I was even fully aware that he was gone, he was back again, something in his hand, something red. He threw it at me, and it slid across my naked skin like a kiss, so soft.
“Put it on.”
My red dress. I found the opening, slid it over my head, biting back the tears, pulling it down over myself.
I looked up at him and tried to smile. Tried to look beguiling.
Again the back of his hand, this time across my mouth. I fell to the floor and the pain was so intense, so complete, that I felt myself laugh. I was going to die here, and I couldn’t stop laughing.
He was on top of me, then, forcing my legs apart, grunting with the effort, pulling the fabric of my dress up to my waist. I heard it tear, and that seemed to turn him on even more.
What made it worse was that he didn’t smell of alcohol. He wasn’t even drunk this time, he didn’t have that excuse.
I lay there and smiled to myself, as he grunted and thrust at me, ramming himself into me again and again, thinking that the pain, the pain all over from the weeping grazes around my wrists, my broken fingers, my nose, my head, my right eye, the split to the corner of my mouth that let the blood seep in—I was drinking it, tasting it, almost wishing there was more—it was all just so fucking funny. So ironic! I’d nearly been on a plane to New York, and I needn’t have bothered, the whole time. I could have just stayed here, locked myself in my own spare room and waited for the inevitable.
The pain of him fucking me hard, every way he could, somehow wasn’t even worse than everything else. I’d been here before, after all. While he was raping me he wasn’t doing anything else. He wasn’t killing me.
“How’s it been going?” Alistair said, when I got into his room.
“Not bad,” I said. I handed over the sheet of paper I’d been diligently filling out all week.
On the left, a list of my checking compulsions in order of importance, followed by a list of my avoidance compulsions, similarly ordered. We were starting with the easy ones. I’d scored each one by how much I imagined not performing each ritual would distress me, out of 100. The worst one, not checking the flat door, scored 95. The lowest, not checking the bathroom window, scored 40. The avoidance compulsions—crowded places scored 65, the police scored 50 and the color red, of course, after the incident the other day, was the worst—80. Below that, my ordering compulsions—not shopping on particular days, eating on certain days, neither of which seemed to be as bad as they had been in the past, and scored just 20 each. The main ordering compulsion, having cups of tea at set times—I’d given that one a 75.
I’d been set the task of challenging myself with exposures to my lowest fears, as often as possible. Next to the original scores, I’d written in how much distress I’d felt after performing these exposures, once the anxiety had lessened.
Alistair was reading my list and nodding, occasionally raising his eyebrows. I felt like a pupil showing my homework to the head teacher. “Good, very good,” he said.
“It reminds me of that bit in
Harry Potter
, you know, where they confront the thing that most scares them by magicking it into something funny.”
“Absolutely. Or, indeed,
Hamlet
.”
“
Hamlet
?”
“‘For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’ Anyway, tell me about some of the things you tried.”
I took a deep breath. “Well, I managed to watch some police shows on the television. I started off with a drama, then I managed to watch one of those reality shows where they film from the back of a police car.”
“And?”
“It was okay. I wanted to turn it off, but I didn’t. I kept up the deep breathing while I was doing it, and in the end it was quite interesting. I kept telling myself it wasn’t real. I thought I was going to have nightmares after it, but I didn’t.”
“That sounds excellent. You need to be careful about telling yourself it isn’t real, though, or telling yourself anything at all, for that matter. Internal dialogue can be just another safety behavior. Try it again but see if you can just watch it, and enjoy it. Just accept it as a television show like any other.”
“All right.”
“And the checking?”
“I left the bathroom alone. I skipped it out of the checking ritual when I got home.”
“And how was that?”
“Surprisingly easy.”
“You’ve got the distress levels here as just five—excellent.”
It was true. I’d gone straight past the bathroom. I’d had to tell myself that there was no way on earth it could be unsafe—after all, the stupid window doesn’t even open—but even so, I did it. It wasn’t very nice at first. When I’d finished checking everything else it still felt odd, and for a long time afterward I was sitting staring at the bathroom door, thinking all the time about the window being fine, not open, picturing it. Eventually it subsided and I didn’t feel so bad.
Seeing progress with it already was a real motivator. I wanted to go home and try some more, try some harder things.
Our hour together was nearly up when Alistair picked up my list again. “I think you should consider that there are a few elements missing from the list,” he said.
“Such as?”
“Think. What’s your biggest fear? The real biggie.”
I thought, not knowing what he meant at first, and then suddenly knowing and not wanting to say. I felt the anxiety responses we’d just been discussing—my heart rate speeding up, my hands starting to tremble.
“You’re quite safe here. Just try and say it.”
My voice came from a long way off. “Lee.”
“That’s right. And you’re going to need to tackle that fear too, otherwise tackling all the others is going to be a bit pointless. I think the sooner we deal with that one, the better. All the other fears have their source in that main one, don’t they? So if we tackle how you feel about Lee, then the others should all come toppling down too. Does that make sense?”
“Yes,” I said. Of course it made sense. If I wasn’t scared of Lee anymore, there was no point checking the door or doing any of the other stupid pointless tasks I filled my whole day with, was there? It all sounded so damn obvious. “It’s not a meaningless fear, though, is it? I mean, I can just about comprehend that checking the silverware drawer six times is silly, it’s a waste of time. But being afraid of Lee is about self-preservation.”
Alistair was nodding. “Yes, but you need to consider that we’re talking at cross-purposes. There is Lee himself, and then there is the
thought
of Lee. Lee himself is presumably puttering about his daily life up in the north somewhere. The
thought
of Lee is disturbing your daily life. You think you see him when you’re out and about. You imagine that he’s going to try and break into your house. So it’s the thought of him, this picture you’ve created in your mind of this omnipresent figure, this source of all bad things, which we need to deal with.”
I was starting to get a headache.
“So I’m not saying you need to go and find the real Lee and confront him and wait for your anxiety to subside. I think you need to tackle your perception of him, and do it in the same way that you’re tackling your compulsions, with exposure and response prevention.”
“How? How can I do that?”
“By just letting the thoughts come, and letting them go. Let yourself remember. Let the anxiety come, wait for it to subside, and then, before it’s gone completely, think about him again. When you’re at home, imagine him coming into the room. Picture him. Think about standing in front of him, facing him. And then wait for the anxiety to subside. These are just thoughts, Cathy. Let them come, and let them go.”
He made it sound so easy.
“Will you give it a try?”
“What—now?”
“We can try now. But especially when you’re at home. At first you can get Stuart to sit with you, if you like. But don’t use him for reassurance. You need to be able to do this by yourself.”
“I’m not sure I can do it.”
“It’s up to you, of course. But think about the implications of being unafraid of Lee. It’s worth a try, isn’t it? And if we try now, it might be easier to give it a go than when you’re at home. At least here you won’t be tempted to go and start checking the door. What do you think?”
I didn’t answer.
“Think about how much thinking about Lee would distress you first. Let’s use our scoring system. On a score of zero to one hundred, how bad do you think it would be?”
“Just to think about him? Ninety.”
“All right. Let’s try—yes?”
I closed my eyes, not sure what I was doing and if it was all going to go horribly wrong. Lee wasn’t hard to imagine. He was in my thoughts all the time anyway, even if I did fight against it. This time, I let it come. I pictured my flat. I was sitting on the sofa, looking back toward the door. Waiting. I pictured the door opening, and Lee standing there.
I felt the fear coming like a wave, my heart racing, tears starting in my eyes.
“That’s it,” said Alistair. “Just let it come, don’t try to stop it.”
I pictured him walking toward me. Lee, as he always was, handsome, short blond hair, complexion that always seemed to be slightly tanned even in midwinter. Those eyes, bluer than the summer sky. And the size of him, too, the bulk, the muscles in his arms and across his chest. He came and stood next to the sofa and looked down at me. He even smiled.
I waited. Already I could feel the anxiety was less than when I’d started thinking. I’d expected this to end in a full-blown panic attack, but it wasn’t that bad at all.
“Tell me about what you’re imagining,” Alistair said.
“Lee in my flat,” I said. “Just standing there.”
“All right, good. Now I want you to picture him leaving again. Put him into a car and have him drive off.”
I did it. He turned, gave me a wink—where that came from I had no idea—and shut the door behind him. I went to the front windows, saw him getting into a car, a silver car, shutting the door and driving away. I pictured myself going back to the sofa and turning on the TV.
I opened my eyes.
“How was that?”
“I did it,” I said.
“And think about your anxiety. How bad is it now, thinking about him?”
“About—about seventy. Eighty maybe.”
“Good. See? You can do it. It’s a good start.”
