I want to get rid of it, forget about it,” I said.
“It’s part of your past that’s clearly having a significant impact on your present.”
“You think I put it in there myself?”
“I didn’t say that.”
I bit my lip. My tea was only half-drunk, otherwise I would probably have gotten up and walked out. In any case, I wanted to go downstairs and start checking, try to work out how the hell he got in.
“Look,” he said at last, “I’m not trying to get inside your head. I just want to know how I can help. Can you try and forget what job I do and just tell me? I’m not your therapist, Cathy. I’m just the poor bastard who’s in love with you.”
I found myself smiling in spite of it all. “I’m sorry. I’ve kept all this in for so long, it’s hard to just let it all out, you know?”
“I know.”
I got up and went to sit on his lap, folding myself into him and tucking my head under his chin. He put his arms around me and held me.
“I had this red dress. It was what I was wearing when I met him. He got a bit obsessive about it.”
I had a momentary picture of the dress when I’d bought it, how perfectly it fit, how I’d had to buy shoes to match. I’d loved it, at first. I’d wanted to wear it all the time.
“And this button reminds you of the ones on that dress?”
“Yes—no, it’s more than that. It is from the dress, I’m sure it is—oh, I don’t know!” I had been racking my memory desperately, trying to picture the dress, the exact size of the buttons, whether the backs were metal or plastic. I veered from absolute certainty that it was, back to doubt. Of course, now the button was outside in the trash I couldn’t check. There was one thing that was beyond question, though. “It’s the sort of thing he’d do, Stuart. It’s exactly the sort of twisted game he used to play. He put that—thing—in my pocket to let me know he’s come back for me.”
Stuart’s fingers were stroking the skin on my forearm, but I could feel tension in him, in the way he was holding me. I was waiting for him to say it. It’s just a button. It doesn’t mean anything.
“You could have picked it up somewhere,” he said gently.
“No,” I said. “I don’t just pick things up. Do you? Do you just go around randomly picking up other people’s crap? No? I don’t either.”
“Maybe it got mixed up in your wash,” he said, “at the Laundromat. It’s tiny. It could have been left in the washing machine by whoever used it last. It was all twisted, wasn’t it? Perhaps it got caught in the machine or something. Isn’t that a possibility?”
“Whose side are you on?”
I got up, suddenly suffocated by his arms around me. I crossed the room and changed my mind and came back again, pacing, trying to stop the panic and the anger and the sheer, dreadful hopelessness of it all.
“I didn’t realize there were sides.”
“Shut up and stop being such an idiot!” I shouted.
He shut up. I’d crossed a line and instantly felt awful. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean that.”
“You should call the police,” he said at last.
“What for? They won’t believe me,” I said miserably.
“They might.”
“You don’t believe me; why should they?”
“It’s not that I don’t believe you. I think you’re severely traumatized by what happened, you’re afraid now and that’s making you ignore the fact that there are potentially rational explanations for how it came to be in your pocket.”
“That’s just the point, Stuart. It was in my pocket. It wasn’t just tangled up in the wash, it was in my fucking pocket. It didn’t just fall in there of its own accord, and I didn’t put it there, he did. Don’t you get it? He used to do things like this. He’d break into my house when I wasn’t there, leave me messages, move things around. Things you wouldn’t necessarily notice. It’s why I started the checking.”
“He’d break into your house?”
“He was—kind of an expert in it. I never worked out how he managed to get in. He could break into just about any house without you knowing how.”
“Jesus. You mean he was a burglar?”
“No. He wasn’t a burglar. He was a police officer.”
Friday 11 June 2004
I drove away from the house, not daring to look back.