Taming the Beast (34 page)

‘Yeah, I do.’ Jamie lifted her easily and sat her on the desk with her legs dangling. She did not fight him as he pulled off those stupid underpants and threw them in the corner on top of the stupid dress. Sarah’s body was completely hairless, and he knew he shouldn’t have been surprised. This animal she loved liked her starved and waxed into pre-pubescence while he maimed her. Jamie noticed that her hair was tied back with a yellow ribbon. He pulled it out and hurled it across the room.

‘That hurt,’ she said, as though having a few strands of hair pulled was more painful then being burnt or bitten or having hot wax poured all over you. ‘Why do you want to do this?’

‘Because there isn’t anything else to do with you, Sarah.’

She stroked his hair and his neck. ‘You could talk to me. I miss talking to you, Jamie. You were always saying that I placed too much importance on sex. You once said that you would give up sex if it meant more time talking. Remember?’

‘I remember.’ Jamie took her hands away from his head, held her arms up, and guided her down onto her back. ‘And look where it got me.’

She didn’t make a sound when Jamie pushed into her. Her eyes showed shame, helplessness and a sad sort of tenderness. She was his in a way that she never had been before. The knowledge that he could really hurt her had always made him determined not to, but now her vulnerability appalled him; it was disgusting that she would let him do this to her. And it was more revolting still, that she had allowed this to happen to her so many times with so many men. To just lie there and be penetrated like she was
nothing
!

The Zoloft gave him the power to go on and on. The friction was painful for him and was without doubt agonising for her. She lay still, silently staring up at him as he worked harder and harder. There was no indication she was even alive, except for the tears running down her cheeks. He closed his eyes.

‘I’m sorry for doing this to you,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry for making you hate me. I didn’t realise. I didn’t understand. I love you. I know it’s no comfort to you, but I want you to know it anyway.’

‘Quiet,’ he told her, and she was. He pushed harder, deeper, faster. The muscles in his thighs were burning, and he was going to run out of breath soon, but he knew it was almost over. There was no pleasure in it, just a painful drive for it to be finished. And then it was. He collapsed on to her sharp little body.

After a few minutes his breathing returned to normal, and he propped himself up on his elbows and opened his eyes. She was looking right at him.

‘Do you feel better now?’ she said.

Jamie saw the creases around her eyes, the yellow tinge to her skin, the cracked lips and the jutting cheekbones as if for the first time. Her eyes were red and teary like they had been since she
walked in, but now –
oh, God, he was going to be sick
– now, the tears were because of him. Now
he
was the arsehole, the abuser, the pitiless man who could not see that she needed help and protection, not more fucking. The last thing his poor little Sarah needed was another dick, another careless intruder.

He climbed off her, forgetting he was on the desk and half falling, half stumbling to the floor. He sat with his arms around his knees, his hands pressed together. She was moving behind him but he couldn’t bring himself to look up. He didn’t want to see her bruised knees or her chewed over breasts or her resolute jaw. For the first time since he’d met her, he didn’t want to look at her, or speak to her or touch her. How could he, when the damage he would see was his?

‘Jamie?’

He held his breath, focussed on his hands. He heard her sigh and then the click of her lighter. The smell of cigarettes was always the smell of Sarah to him. How many times had he inhaled second-hand smoke while his body recovered from making love to her? His brain had not yet rewired, for he felt the peace and gratefulness that came with the scent of smoke and sex.

‘I hurt you,’ Jamie said.

‘Yeah, well, I’ll live.’ Her hand closed on his shoulder. Cold, dry hand on his hot, wet skin. Hot and wet from the effort of abusing her. Her voice was unnaturally high. ‘I think on the balance of things you still come out on top. You’re still the best friend I ever had. I guess you owed me some hurt.’

He couldn’t respond. He had nothing left. His shoulder was cold where her hand had been. The smoke was no longer drifting into his eyes. He stared at his hands for a few more seconds and then got up. He stood in the doorway and watched Sarah walking across the reception area. The lift took a long time but she didn’t
turn and look at him or fidget or anything. She stared straight ahead. The lift came and she stepped inside, and for half a second she looked at him before the doors closed. Her face in that second contained her entire history and was too much to bear.

If she returned to Daniel he would know. He would know as soon as he saw her. Without her even getting close enough for him to smell the scent of another man on her skin, Daniel would know she had been touched. He would look at her, and she wouldn’t speak or breathe or cry, but he would know. And then he would find Jamie and rip his head off his body.

She couldn’t go home, although she ached for him, and she was so, so, sorry –
unbelievably sorry –
that she’d gone to see Jamie in the first place. She couldn’t face Daniel’s hurt, and his demands and his questions. She couldn’t face lying to him. She couldn’t face the battle that would inevitably follow if she told him the truth. Couldn’t face his wrath. Couldn’t allow Jamie to be hurt any more than he already was.

She was directionless. Aware of people and the soft rushing of the river and the busy whir of Church Street on a Friday night, but with no sense of being a part of it.

She had nowhere to go.

When Sarah had nowhere to go she went to Jamie.

She had nowhere to go.

She had been ambushed. Seeking out the safest place she knew she had walked straight into a trap. Jamie had –
what?
Round and round her head, while the wind whipped branches heavy with rain against the windows of the scungy flats in Sorrel Street. While kids on skateboards taunted her from a distance and a truck driver yelled at her to get out of the rain, she wondered what it was that Jamie had done to her. She buried the panic at being alone in the dark, wet night, and walked on, trying to figure out why she felt so destroyed.

When Sarah was eighteen, she had a fling with an Alistair Crowley wanna-be who could only come if Sarah lay perfectly still, with unblinking eyes, pretending to be dead. This was exciting at first, quickly became frustrating, and by the fourth or fifth time, was just boring. It was kind of sick, and kind of degrading, but it never, ever, made her feel this bad. Neither did getting fingered by Mike while he talked to his wife on the phone, blowing Todd while he scored coke out the car window, or pulling off Jess’ Uncle Rodger under the dinner table.

So many men and boys and faces and cocks and hands and lips and tongues. Gentle, rough, loving, impersonal, fast, slow, needy, indifferent, handsome, ugly, young, old, sober, wasted, sick, mean, go down, get up, against the wall, under, over, back, front, tied up, hair pulling, bed smashing, window breaking, face slapping, ear licking, eyelash kissing, whispers and shouts and love and hate and
never
did Sarah want to disappear because of how and why and where she had been touched. Because of
who
she’d been touched by.

Jamie had not raped her. She had been raped before and knew what that was. It felt nothing like sex. Even the roughest, cruellest most violent sex, even Daniel sex, felt nothing like rape. Being raped and having sex were as different as being mugged at knifepoint and donating to your favourite feel-good charity. Sarah’s rape felt like being robbed and beaten up by a couple of street thugs who she would have given her money to of her own free will, if only they had asked nicely. She had never considered those two mongrels to be sex partners: they were armed bandits.

She thought that what hurt so much about the thing with Jamie was how cold and controlled he had been, not caught up in furious passion at all. She had looked in his eyes, and where she expected to see friendship she saw coldness; where she remembered love, there was bitterness. Her body was unimportant; he had wrecked
her inside, and no one else had ever done that to her before. Was there any hurt worse than this?

She had been walking forever. There was a bus stop up ahead, and she sat for a while staring at the road, trying to work out what she should be doing. Part of her wanted to go back to Jamie’s office and look into his face and see that she had misread his coldness and his cruelty. Part of her wanted to die. She did not at all want Jamie to die, which is why she could not go home to Daniel.

‘Want a lift?’

Sarah focussed on the blur in front of her. A man leant from a car window. Sarah shook her head at his shape. ‘Just come for a ride then, eh?’ Car doors opened, closed. There were two men, no, three, standing on the path.

‘No,’ she said, but as she said it she realised that the men were not listening. It was dark and wet, and she had nothing in her but the horror of being touched. It was enough: she ran and ran and ran. She kept running long after she was sure that the men had driven off to find an easier victim. She realised that if she stopped running she would fall down, and she doubted her ability to get back up again.

Three streets away was Jess and Mike’s house. They did not like her, she knew, but if she fell down they would help her up. If she asked to stay safe inside until morning, to shower the smell of Jamie’s bitterness away before she returned home, they would not like it, but they would say yes.

At the front door, she stopped running, banged three times with her fists and then she fell down.

When Sarah opened her eyes she was looking at photo of Jess and Mike on their wedding day. She was in their bedroom, in their bed, naked. She had a moment of panic at what Daniel would do when
he found out she was here, then she remembered everything that had happened and her panic turned to dull despair.

‘Jess?’ she called, surprised at the huskiness of her own voice. The rain, she remembered and the crying. ‘Mike?’ She climbed out of the bed and looked around for her clothes.

‘At last.’ Mike stood in the doorway. ‘I thought you were going to sleep all day.’

Sarah glanced at the bedside clock. Twelve past eleven. ‘My clothes?’

Mike glanced down at her body and cringed. ‘In the wash. You’ll have to put something of mine on until they dry.’

‘Something of Jess’ would be–’

‘Jess moved out.’

‘Oh.’ Sarah wondered why Mike wouldn’t look at her for more than a second. Not that she minded; if he touched her sexually she would scream and never stop.

‘Have a shower,’ he said, handing her a towel. ‘Then we’ll sort you out.’

She would have laughed if she’d had the energy. The lowest point of her life – rock fucking bottom – and this was who she had to help her out. Mike Leyton, professional cad. She walked past his down-turned eyes to reach the bathroom, and thought that life would never surprise her again.

Sarah found Mike in the kitchen. She sat next to him and he filled a mug with steaming black coffee, looked into her eyes and took her hand. ‘What’s going on with you, Sarah? You got an eating disorder or something?’

She closed her eyes and took a gulp of the coffee. It burnt her tongue and the roof of her mouth, but was soothing going down her throat. ‘Nothing as glamorous as that, unfortunately.’

‘What were you doing passed out on my front porch?’

‘Seeking asylum at the home of my oldest friend.’

He looked at her over the top of his coffee mug. ‘Jess hasn’t lived here for months.’

‘She finally caught you, huh?’

Mike nodded, lighting a cigarette. Sarah grabbed the pack from him and lit herself one. She didn’t know what had happened to her cigarettes. Probably got ruined in all the rain. Or maybe she’d left them in Jamie’s office. Yes, that was it. She could see them in her mind, the blue and white packet sitting on top of his blotter, the red lighter beside it.

‘It turns out that I really miss her. Don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone and all that.’

‘Ah, so that’s why you haven’t tried to ravage me. You’re lovesick.’

Mike took a drag of his cigarette. He looked into her eyes, winced, and looked down at the table. The silence dragged on. Sarah felt icy fingers on her spine. If there was one thing she had liked about Mike back in the old days – apart from the sex – it was his straight talking. Evasiveness and awkward silences were not his style.

‘Heh,’ she said, showing him her palms, ‘I’m not having a go at you. I appreciate it that you haven’t tried to jump my bones, really I do, and I think it’s sweet that you have all this loyalty for Jess, even if it did take you–’

‘Sarah!’ Mike grabbed her wrists. ‘That isn’t it! Jesus!’ He swallowed hard, as though there was something stuck in his throat. His hands fell away from her wrists as he looked back into her eyes. Looked at her as though it hurt him. ‘Have you looked at yourself in a mirror lately?’

She turned her head against his disgust. ‘Oh. I forgot you like curves.’

‘No, Sarah, that’s not…’ Mike covered his eyes and sighed. ‘I didn’t recognise you when I first saw you. I was about to call the police to come collect the bashed up ten-year old lying on my doorstep. I’m scared to touch you in case you break in two. I wouldn’t have undressed you except your clothes were soaked and filthy and I had to try and dry you… you were shivering and…’ Mike swallowed again, his eyes closing for a second. ‘What’s happened to you? Did that old man do this to you?’

‘No. Well, I don’t know. If you mean the bruises and stuff, then yeah, Daniel did that, but that’s not why I’m here. He’s not the reason I’m… I went to Jamie’s office.’

Mike’s coffee cup crashed to the table. They watched in silence as the coffee soaked into the pale blue tablecloth. If Jess ever came back she would go off her head about the stain.