never sever an incision that had not properly healed and he would cut in a pattern of lines, only millimetres apart, always with precision, on a slight diagonal and always working from the outside in. The backs of Kathryn’s thighs were a dense matrix of lines and tracks, over six and a half thousand of them, in varying states of healing and recuperation.
Mark only ever made one cut per night – a single line – regardless of the number of points he had dished out. The points were not about quantity: they were a measurement of depth.
The points allocated ranged from zero to twelve. In all their married life Kathryn had never scored a zero and did not believe she ever would. Twelve points meant she would lose consciousness, but this was sometimes preferable to the lingering pain of a nine or ten.
She found it morbidly fascinating that her blood continued to flow. A thick, sticky trickle, night after night. Would she never run out? Would the day come when he would make his incision and there would be nothing? A barren source: used up, finished, gone, enough.
The cutting could take anything from three minutes to ten. Her blood would meander, warm and viscous, down between her legs and onto the white linen sheets. There it would form lake-shaped patterns; on a good day it might be Placid, on a bad day, Geneva. When he had done cutting, Mark would rape her.
Kathryn was not allowed to wash following this nightly ritual. In fact she wasn’t even allowed to move until her husband had fallen asleep. She would then wince as she shuffled across to her side of the bed; sleep would come to her eventually when the throb of pain subsided slightly. Sometimes she would cry hot, silent tears into her pillow, but mostly she did not, not any more. This too, experience had shown her, was futile; there was no one to see or hear those tears.
The alarm pip-pipped its irritating echo around the room; it was 6 a.m. Kathryn reluctantly opened her eyes. Mark was already awake and standing by the side of the bed, watching her come to. He reached out and tenderly took her hand as she slid off the mattress, still foggy with sleep. Her nightdress, as was customary, had dried and stuck to the bloody cuts on her thighs. She stood still and upright as he gently gathered the fabric in his free hand and, pulling it taut, yanked it from its plasma tethers. It woke her up.
He took her hand and led her into the bathroom. She watched as he turned the nozzle and allowed the shower to run into the tray.
‘Today, Kathryn, you have two minutes.’
He smiled and bent forward, grazing her forehead with a kiss. She raised her bloodied gown over her head and let it fall into a cotton heap on the tiled floor. Stepping into the current, it took a few seconds for her body to adjust to the temperature, which was as usual slightly too hot. But there was no point raising an objection. The fresh cuts always stung in protest, but that too would settle down to almost bearable.
She closed her eyes and let the water run over her face, washing away another night and heralding a new day much like any other. Reaching for the bottle, she squeezed out a blob of apple-scented shampoo, a little larger than the size of a fifty pence piece, just as her mother had taught her all those years ago. Now that the fifty pence piece had become considerably smaller, should she apply a little bit extra to compensate? Kathryn’s mind flitted to other things that had diminished in size since she was a little girl: Wagon Wheel biscuits, telephones, journey times to Cornwall…
Kathryn applied the shampoo to her hair and scalp, feeling it grow into a mound of froth. Mark stood on the other side of the glass screen, watching her every action. She closed her eyes and scoured her scalp and hair, enjoying the sensation. Suddenly the water stopped running. She yelped slightly in surprise, the suds still in her hands and eyes.
Mark opened the door and she stood there dishevelled, slightly disorientated and covered in sweet-scented foam. Her hair looked like an uncooked meringue.
‘I said two minutes.’
She knew that protest would be pointless, even if she were able to find the courage. It was her own stupid fault, daydreaming about rubbish from her childhood. She wouldn’t say