The House at the End of Hope Street - By Menna van Praag Page 0,87
do the one thing she wants to do: to sing in public—her swan song. She wants it to be the most brilliant thing she’s ever done, so beautiful that the memory of it will light up all the dark nights to come.
Perhaps she should ignore Peggy and just run, leave Cambridge for that remote village Alba mentioned, or emigrate to Australia. She could start a new life there. But what about the ring? Crazy thoughts circle Carmen until she starts to feel slightly mad, but then she gave up any claim to sanity a long time ago. That went out of the window the day she killed her husband.
Tiago Viera wasn’t a mean drunk. In fact, alcohol calmed him down rather than riled him up. But he was always sure to be stone cold sober on the nights he beat his wife. He wasn’t set off, triggered by something that suddenly made him snap. He wanted her to know he meant it. It wasn’t an accident, a mistake, something he’d regret in the morning. No, Tiago’s punches came with purpose because he told her she deserved every blow.
Different things decided him. And before long Carmen could feel it coming: the heat of his gaze on the back of her neck, the twist of his mouth, the look in his eye. She knew what to expect and she braced herself for it. For hours on end, Carmen would think about leaving. Sometimes just the idea of escaping was all that got her through one day, and then the next. Before she knew it, a year had passed. But she never planned anything, because she didn’t have the first idea where she’d go. She’d never been out of Bragança, had never seen Lisbon or been to Spain. And she’d have to go much farther to stand a chance of not getting caught. Tiago had friends, he warned her, friends everywhere. There was nowhere she could go that he couldn’t find her. One day, Carmen’s cousin left for England to take a job in a Portuguese restaurant in a city called Cambridge. After that, when she fantasized about escaping, that was where Carmen went.
On the last night of his life, Tiago decided his wife might be pregnant by another man and he was going to beat the baby out of her. “You’re fat,” he’d said first, spitting the words out over his supper, as though this was something she’d done intentionally, to annoy him. In the past, before jealousy had deformed him, Tiago had adored Carmen’s curves. He’d spent hours smoothing his hands over her breasts, her soft belly, her bottom and thighs. “All this,” he’d whisper reverently, “all this just for me.”
“You’re fat,” he said again, and she waited.
“You’re pregnant, aren’t you?” he snapped. “Who’ve you been fucking?”
He accused her of sleeping with every member of his band, and not just one at a time. It all happened very quickly after that. Carmen stood up, walking to the sink with her plate, her food untouched. He reached her before her hand touched the stainless steel tap.
He leaned into her ear. “This time I’m going to kill you—kill you and bury you in the back garden.” And, even though it was almost comical—the soap opera sentence and the way he said it—Carmen didn’t laugh because she suddenly knew, deep in her bones, that he meant it. This time he was going to kill her.
The first blow was always the worst. This time Tiago grabbed her hair, yanked her head back, then slammed her face into the sink. He held her down, punched her in the back, then let Carmen slide to the floor. She gasped for breath, blood dripping into her eyes, pain firing through her body, and then she surrendered. It was enough. She didn’t want to live anymore. The last thought she remembers passing through her mind was a prayer: Please may it end quickly.
She was slipping into a merciful darkness when Tiago pulled her back up to her feet and shoved her against the wall, holding her with a splayed hand pressed to her chest. And then he did something that Carmen had never understood at the time, and can’t even now. With his free hand he reached into the sink for a frying pan, still coated with scraps of fried egg, and held it in front of her face. Carmen flinched, expecting another blow, but instead Tiago wrapped her fingers around its handle one by one.