Transgressions (22 page)

Did he know that also? Did he know that she would keep his secret? His and theirs. What was he doing now? Washing her off him in preparation for starting a new life or staring at those shiny CDs on his windowsill, remembering, reliving? Had he thrown them in the bin yet?

Listen to what you told him, she thought. Believe that. You did it and now it’s over. You looked into the eye of the nightmare and survived. And having done it, this should indeed be the end of it and both of them would be forgiven and redeemed, even if that redemption may have to grow out of a landscape of humiliation and fear.

And so she got up and very slowly started to get on with the rest of her life.

fourteen

S
he took the hours till dawn deliberately quietly. She went upstairs and showered but didn’t try to wash him out of her, because it was too late for that and because she didn’t want to give in to that kind of frenzy of disgust. She brushed her teeth and stripped the bedclothes, replacing them with a crisp new sheet and duvet cover that Sally had given her six months ago for her birthday but that she had never bothered to open. It pleased her to see how it made the room different, less like her own.

As she folded back the cover she came across the length of twine caught in its folds. The hammer she located halfway under the bed. She had intended to throw it away, but when she put out her hand she found she couldn’t touch it. In the end she used a Safeway bag, scooping it up into the white plastic, turning the bag inside out so she couldn’t see it anymore. She even got as far as taking it out to the rubbish bins by the front gate, but once there she kept thinking about who’d been going through her garbage and instead brought it back in and hid it at the bottom of a cupboard.

Outside the kitchen doors the world was a black hole again, with no starburst of electricity to mark out his presence. She turned on the radio. People who couldn’t sleep were calling a talk-show host, regaling him with stories of real-life nightmares. He listened impatiently, butting in with inane comments until they had bored or annoyed him sufficiently—at which point he cut them off with the sound effect of a scream and a body hitting the floor.

Maybe this was the way she should exorcise it—anonymous and public at the same time, delivering thrills to some loser night jock with a taste for the macabre. Who knows, a certain thin-lipped man with pasty skin might even now be listening, staring out at her from a darkened first-floor window. She looked back over the gardens. What if he had turned out his light deliberately, realizing that if he could see her then she, too, could see him? The thought moved her away from the window. The host took a call from a woman named Fanny in Hendon who had backed out of the garage and run over her dog. “Oh, Fanny. To each their terriers, eh!” In the studio you could hear him trying not to crack up.

She hit the off button, then turned down the overhead light. She wouldn’t need it much longer anyway. The dawn was starting to come in, the sky already fading from translucent mauve to a dull winter gray. The garden took gradual shape in the light. The only thing moving was the cat. She watched Millie jump down from the back wall and pad swiftly across the lawn. For once the black tom was nowhere to be seen. Maybe Millie had triumphed, too, had spent the night fucking him stupid then left him for dead in the bushes.

She emptied a whole tin of cat food into her bowl. Hungry work, confronting your demons. Then she washed up her mug, put it back on the shelf, and made her way upstairs to the attic.

From under the eaves she pulled out a set of boxes that had come from her mother’s house, a collection of things that had proved too personal to sell, too old or strange to ever be of use. It didn’t take her long to find what she was looking for. The pair of old-fashioned binoculars that had once belonged to her grandfather. She unwrapped them carefully from a length of black felt, the cloth giving off a smell of London as she imagined it during the war: a hint of cordite and danger in musty darkness. As she held them she remembered their heaviness and how big they had once felt in smaller hands.

She had watched her own father using them when she was a child. He would stand for hours at the end of their garden at the edge of the marshland, the glasses trained on what always seemed to her to be an empty sky, she waiting next to him, wanting to be included, trying to be still but always becoming bored and noisy, so that in the end he sent her inside. The birds, it seemed, came out only when she wasn’t there. Now she understood why. To catch something unawares you had to wait, be patient. Then and only then would it give itself up to you. She had never had enough time before, was always too busy pushing to grow up. Not like now. Now there was satisfaction to be had in surveillance.

Her bedroom gave the best view. His window, as far as she could relocate it in the light, was like all the others in that house, blank and dark, with a half-curtain across the bottom of it—like someone’s old-fashioned parlor. Was it his kitchen or his bedroom? Kitchen, surely. A door to the left, half glass, half wood, led out onto an iron balustrade and some steps spiraling down into the garden. If she focused properly she could make out the peeling wood on the shed nearby. Was this the pleasure that had so transfixed her father, pulling distance closer, seeing what was not meant to be seen? The garden was unkempt—long ragged grass and overgrown shrubs—with a paved path down one side of it. The wall at the end was small. Easy to get over, and from there you would need only to slip across the bottom of another garden and over another wall to reach hers. She practiced the run through the glasses, each stage of the journey jumping into sharp focus, crossing fences, sliding along boundaries, dodging the path of security-light triggers, before at last moving across her lawn to the cat flap. Easy in darkness.

Prowling. A winter pursuit. She thought of all the layers of clothes on his body, the sweat on his skin, and his clammy weight on top of her. Her mouth filled with saliva. Let it go, she thought, let it rest. But the taste persisted. She imagined it being sperm, saw herself crouched over the limp little cock, sucking it into a fountain of aggression. She ground her teeth together and heard a different kind of groan. Don’t come back, she thought. Don’t even think about it. She let the saliva mingle with the fear and swallowed them both together.

Once she could see him—or, rather, the absence of him—she set about making sure that he could no longer see her. Again the attic helped. Among the boxes left unopened since her mother’s death she found one filled with linen and dug out a set of lace curtains that had once graced their living-room windows. They reminded her of years of teenage imprisonment and her mother’s relentless obsession with privacy. Nets, she used to call them: “So we can see out but they can’t see in.” “They.” She had made them sound like the enemy. How ironic that her refusal to follow her mother’s rules had made her the object of a stranger’s obsession. If she ever had children would they, too, find themselves in flight from her conventions, furnishing a house with lace curtains and strict moral codes?

The feel of the material in her hands brought back memo-ries of spring cleaning. “You have to wrap them in pillowcases, darling, then they don’t shred in the machine.” How was it that everything her mother had taught her had been of so little use? Were they the wrong things or had she simply not listened to the right ones?

Sometimes she thought that her mother had died simply to get away from her sense of disappointment in her daughter. Would she have been able to help her now? “You see, Mother, I had no option but to take the hammer out of his hand and stick his prick into me. Except now I can’t be sure if I’m soiled or healed.”

Maybe it wouldn’t be a question of words. Maybe what she really needed was a pair of arms to hold her and let her cry it out. Forget it, Elizabeth. She’s dead and you’re raped. Use her curtains for comfort.

She closed the box and took her spoils downstairs. One of the sets fitted the bedroom window perfectly. She had no rail or rod so she nailed them up instead, apologizing to her mother for the brutal little holes created by the hammer (hers, not his, though it still felt strange in her hand).

The kitchen proved more problematic, the remaining lace strips too narrow for the large expanse of the French windows. Here she resorted to a sheet instead, hammering it securely along the wooden frame above so that the glass was completely covered, with a train on the floor. Millie would have to learn to negotiate her way under it to the cat flap.

She was halfway through when the phone on the wall rang, quivering with the noise, like some neurasthenic little animal clinging to a tree. Whomever it was she didn’t want to talk to them. The machine took the call. From the hall she heard a mumble of voices, hers followed by another. She couldn’t make out whose. She returned to the window. In a house across the back gardens something caught her eye, a flash of movement from what might have been a first floor. She grabbed the binoculars and focused fast. The lenses located the movement and it jumped into view—the 3-D vision of a woman pulling back a curtain with a small child clinging to her hip. Right direction, wrong house. She swept the glasses slowly to the left, to a set of first-floor windows that were still closed eyes. She checked above and below. Still no sign of life. From anywhere. But someone must be up, surely? He wouldn’t have the whole house to himself, he wasn’t the sort. She couldn’t imagine him in so much space, saw him more as a man crammed in, head bowed under the weight of life’s ceilings.

She put the binoculars down. Why was she bothering? It was not his style to be out in the day: not enough darkness to hide his inadequacies. Anyway, he had been up all night, too. Probably longer. No, if she was going to keep him in her sights then she would have to follow his pattern: sleep when he slept, wake when he did. Cat rhythm. Why not? Her only responsibility was to the translation of a dozen chapters of Czech and, like the princess with her heaps of straw, she might find the night hours more conducive to spinning them into gold.

She checked the gardens one last time and went upstairs. The bedroom felt good, the lace curtains filtering the winter light, making the room softer, more contained. She took off her robe and slid naked under the covers. She closed her eyes. In her mind the house remained empty. Benign. She didn’t remember falling asleep.

S
he woke with a start. It was dark and there was wet between her legs, a slow dripping from thigh to sheet. The panic made it hard for her to breathe. She fumbled for the light as she slipped a hand down to her legs.

Her fingers came out red and sticky. She pulled back the covers. There was blood everywhere, caught in her pubic hair, smeared over her thighs, and a fat stain of it soaking into the sheets. The panic turned to jubilation. She was bleeding early, her body joining in the victory, sluicing out all final remains of him, even down to the lining of her womb. There would be no need for doctors or morning-after pills now. She was doing her own healing. She got up and made her way to the bathroom, enjoying the bright threads of blood that ran down the inside of her leg onto the carpet, comforted by her own warmth after the coldness of his sperm.

As she washed and slid the Tampax in she found herself thinking properly of work for the first time in days. She imagined Mirka marooned in her basement cell. How would she cope if the stump of her little finger wasn’t the only blood she had to worry about? You keep a woman kidnapped for long enough and it has to happen. It made her think about how rarely periods featured in books. Could it be that fictional women menstruate less often than real ones? Clarissa, Anna Karenina, Scarlett O’Hara—not a soiled sanitary napkin among them. The few books in which she could remember the heroines bleeding were ones set in convent schools—studies in hothouse guilt where the only acceptable blood was the miraculous kind, transubstantiating from alcohol to plasma in the communion cups.

She stripped the sheets again and scrubbed at the dark spot where the blood had seeped through to the mattress. It reminded her of a smart hotel in Glasgow where she and Tom had been staying once when her period had come early, and she had been too embarrassed to leave the sheet to the chambermaid. Don’t be so uptight, Tom had told her. That’s what they’re paid for: to clean up stains on the beds.

Not this kind of stain, she’d replied, unless, of course, you want them to think of it as a memento of deflowerment. He had laughed. But it had been an unfair jibe. Among the many men she had had in her bed Tom was one of the few who genuinely had no problem being smeared with blood as well as semen.