leave me. I gave you chances, Catherine. I gave you so many fucking chances. And you let me down.”
“You know you can’t keep me here forever. They will find out. You’ll lose your job.”
He gave a short laugh. “Yeah, right. You mean if I’m planning to do anything, I’d better finish you off?”
I nodded.
“You want me to kill you?” he said, curiously.
I nodded again. All the fight in me had gone. I wanted it over with.
He got up, suddenly, stood over me. I started to feel sick. “You see, that’s what I fucking hate about you, Catherine,” he said, his voice a growl. “You just give in too fucking easily.”
He nudged me with his knee and I toppled back onto the carpet, struggling back up to a sitting position, tears and snot running down my face into the corners of my stinging mouth.
I waited for the blow. I waited for the smack to the head, the punch, or the kick. I wanted it. I braced myself, but I longed for it too. I coveted the oblivion.
When he next spoke, it was through gritted teeth, as though he was so disgusted by me that he could hardly bring himself to speak. “You’re a piece of filth. You’re a dirty, slutty whore, Catherine. I can’t decide whether to kill you, fuck you or just piss on you.”
I let out a sob as I heard the sound of his jeans being unzipped, and seconds later the warm, wet splashing of his piss over my hair, the remains of my chic suit, the new gray carpet. I cried, trying to keep my eyes and my mouth shut so none of it would go in. The sound of it, the smell of it. I started to retch.
When he’d finished he left the room for a minute, leaving the door wide open. I started to crawl toward it, seeing the hallway outside, the bathroom beyond, but before I got there he was back. A bucket of cold water, the sponge that I used to clean the bath out, a bar of soap. The water smelled like bleach as he dropped the bucket onto the carpet.
“Clean yourself up, you cunt,” he said.
Then he left the room, locking it behind him.
I howled. But he hadn’t put the handcuffs back on.
Sunday 16 March 2008
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.
Saturday 12 June 2004
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,