Chasing Innocence (2 page)

He led her into a living room, sparse and frayed, propped the stick against the wall and made his way carefully to the kitchen. Sarah examined the room without moving then sat on the edge of a sagging sofa, her bag on her lap, knees together, grateful for trousers although she always wore them.

After a few minutes he returned and handed her a cup on a saucer, taking his own and easing himself down into a matching armchair.

‘Out with it then,’ he said, staring at her over his cup with those eyes. He drank from it and swilled noisily, as if testing a vintage.

She watched the fall and rise of his throat, considered her own cup and what might be mixed with her milky drink. Did not want him seeing what she was thinking, needed him to see her innocent. So she drank a mouthful of the hot liquid and stared back at him.

‘Do you have guilt?’ she asked. Not the question she had rehearsed.

He nodded without pause and they sat in silence. Eventually he spoke. ‘Every day it’s there as I wake. Then I shut it out. My needs are part of who I am, as is my guilt.’

Sarah felt disorientated, light-headed, knocked sideways. Not from the drink but from her mind’s desperate attempts at rationalising this room, for her being here. The voices screamed at her, for what his body could do, had done to her. Those strong arms from which she never escaped.

She sat still with her bag on her knees, hands resting on top holding the cup. In the bag was the knife she had stolen from her mother’s kitchen, fourteen years ago. A carving knife with a six-inch blade, once gleaming but now rusted and pitted. She had stolen it after sixteen of the seventy-seven weeks. She had survived his lessons by escaping to her imaginary world and because of the hope the knife gave her. For what it promised. Although she only ever hoped, could never bring herself to that promise. Until now, but now felt all wrong.

‘Would you say sorry to me, apologise for what you did?’ She placed her cup on its saucer on the floor.

‘Unreservedly,’ he said. ‘I wish…I wish…I am sorry.’

‘Just like that?’

‘What else?’ He shrugged. ‘I cannot take it back. I have served my time.’

She leaned in a little, frustrated at her inability to conjure vengeance, her wrists resting on her bag, her knees pressed together.

‘You said it was my fault, that I caused it.’

‘You did, in a way,’ he answered. ‘But you weren’t to know. You were too…too hard to resist. You still have it you know, that innocence that children lose.’ He licked his lips and drank more tea.

‘You haven’t paid your debt,’ she said. ‘You served time for what you did to someone else. What you did to me is unspoken. You changed what I was. Changed what I was meant to be and made me something else. My…life.’

Her voice trailed away and she mentally crept back into herself. With every minute in this room her determination, so strong in getting her there, was seeping from her. She was still the child to his adult.

‘I am sorry,’ he repeated. ‘Is there anything else?’

She shook her head and faded more. They sat in silence. She stared at the carpet around his feet, could picture those feet bare in the shower. It was all wrong. She had rehearsed this conversation a thousand times, a constant rerun in her mind as she watched from her car. Except now she was here there was no momentum for redemption. She felt defeated in the face of reality. There was no changing anything, making anything better. He was an arthritic old man with a walking stick. She had so wanted him to know her pain.

She stood and self-consciously smoothed her coat, waiting as he slowly rose. She stepped aside as he passed her, following him to the hallway. He pulled open the front door.

Sarah had thought this moment through with every other. She did what she had planned because the plan was all she could think to do. She stepped towards the door and turned, put one hand up on his shoulder and on tiptoe kissed that horrid stubbly cheek. She whispered, ‘
Thank you for apologising.
’ The tea churned in her stomach at the sudden memory of that beard, of being that close. Her hand inside her bag, her fingers tight around the leather-bound handle.

He looked touched and surprised and for a moment she saw a glimmer of the monster behind his eyes. Her opportunity, but in that unguarded second her hand refused to move. With the evidence of her memories locked away her conscience would not pass sentence. No matter how much she willed her arm to motion, for all she had pent up inside, her hand stayed buried at the bottom of her bag.

He held the door open wider and a breeze rolled through the doorway, brushed against her legs and swirled around them both, washing the smell of his body across her face. A hard smell that jarred like a violent impact, bubbling free the memories so carefully locked beneath a dark ocean. The sound of a child’s confused sobs, the pain, his ever ceaseless hands, fingers pushing inside her wherever they could. Thin lips that touched all of her skin, that scratchy, stubbly beard. Her struggle to breathe and her panic as he forced himself into her mouth, the searing pain inside her stomach as he thrust over and over.

She heard the cry as if from a distance, a wail that turned to a scream and then a primal snarl. Aware she was moving, punching forward, so hard she stumbled as her fist bounced off his chest. The force of the blow knocked him backwards and unsteady, down on to one knee, then on to the floor. His face contorted, not from shock but horror at what he saw in her face. Unaware of the blade buried to the hilt in his chest, crimson spreading across his shirt as his head hit the floor.

Sarah watched him gasping at the ceiling, for seconds, possibly minutes. Then she pulled her phone from her pocket and dialled with trembling fingers as she walked back to her car.

ONE

The Present

Adam Sawacki did not need to open his eyes or reach out a hand to know he was alone in bed. That was a given. Just as the shower was always the first sound he heard each morning, his first thought to imagine Sarah beneath the cascading water.

A sudden heave of plumbing heralded silence. Opening his eyes he blinked at the light shining through yellow curtains. Gradually he focused and looked beyond the rise of duvet over his feet to Sarah’s dressing table. It was seven fifty, Saturday morning.

The bathroom door opened, creating a draught that chased through the apartment, bossing the curtains. He heard the light pad of feet.

‘Tea?’

‘Please,’ he answered, imagining the towel captive on her waist and hips, her bare skin goose-pimpled, the smell of talcum, listening to her clatter crockery.

He shifted his focus to the three pictures on the wall beside her dressing table, holiday snaps printed to canvas. At the top a glittering translucent sea, at the bottom a close-up shot of flowers. His and hers. In the middle a concession by her for what she could not be for him. A picture of her topless on the beach, with a tentative smile and hopeful eyes, ponytailed hair bleached by the sun and tugged by the wind, her body adolescent save for a woman’s poise.

He turned on his side and watched as she closed the door with her foot, placing his drink on the floor beside the bed. Then awkward seconds laced with expectation, usually broken when she stepped across to her dressing table.

But today, as she very occasionally did, she simply took a step back. Just out of reach. Her cup held between both hands, her arms covering her chest, a tentative smile and her deep brown eyes, a quality beyond the physical. It was everything she was, fragile and lithe. A heavenly creature. Her curse she said, his irony.

‘What’re you gawping at?’

‘Some kind of beautiful,’ he answered. It was the truth, but what he usually said for fear of tipping the balance.

‘You always say that, I know what you want,’ she said, a little playful, shifting her weight from one hip to the other, a shy nipple making itself known as she moved her arm. She did not step away. He relaxed. Her need outweighed her fear.

‘Why don’t you come here Mrs Sawacki, maybe this man can make you happy.’ He gave her his biggest grin.

She could not help snorting as she laughed. ‘You’re stupid.’

He exaggerated nodding, watching her hopeful eyes. ‘I promise to be on my very best behaviour.’

‘We haven’t got time. We need to get ready.’

‘We’ve got all weekend to go shopping. Come here,’ he repeated.

‘I’ll make the sheets wet.’

‘I hope so.’

She hesitated, caught between decisions. ‘You’re changing them.’

He nodded.

‘Promise?’

He nodded again and immediately forgot. Her desire and his expectation hardening him beneath the sheets.

‘Then you have permission to touch,’ she said, although she did not really like being touched, at least without invitation.

She placed a knee on the edge of their bed and leaned towards him. He placed a hand gently on her shoulder, tracing the curve of her back through damp trails of water as she kissed him closed mouthed, which was how she always kissed without compromise. She reached across and placed her cup squarely on a coaster, then sat back and tugged free her towel, revealing a bikini shaped triangle of white flesh and neatly trimmed pubic hair. She pulled the duvet from his body, revealing him naked. Her fingers closed around the shaft of hard flesh, squeezing, an eyebrow cocked as she looked at him with a nervous smile. As intimate in the realm of foreplay as she ever got. She crawled onto all fours and kissed him again, whispered into his ear.

‘Please me husband, and please be gentle.’ She rolled onto the bed beside him, onto her back, eyes wide and watching.

He let his fingers drift, creating a slow pace in her mind while replenishing the tactile memory of her body in his. He kissed her shoulder and tried not to loom over her, drifting his mouth down across her chest, lingering at her nipples, down to her stomach, letting his breath roll warm across her skin. Her body lay rigid.

He eased open her legs and as his tongue found moist flesh, the first tremor of pleasure rippled through her body. He resisted his own need to push her legs wide, to satisfy his own want rampaging inside, letting her relax to the trusted touch of his tongue, calves tapping against the back of his arms, resting on his shoulders, gradually opening her legs wider as she lost herself.

His tongue danced and nurtured the tension, building a fire that marched a blush breathless across her stomach, up her chest and to her neck. Holding her on the brink, tantalising as her body writhed, fingers locked in his hair, pulling him into her restless groin, holding her in the moment until she could stand no more, reaching her gasped tremulous conclusion. It was the only way he could pleasure her, and he immediately wondered how long before the next time, with her legs open with breathless abandon. Weeks, sometimes months.

He fought again the need to push into her, to take from her what he needed. Instead he kissed the inside of her thigh and moved slowly forward, feeling the damp promise of her flesh on the tip of his. Then her eyes flared to wide panic and she jacked her palms against his chest, rolling him aside. He immediately bottled his frustration, taking a deep breath. A moment’s silence was usually followed by her quiet apology, a tension that took days to dilute. Except this time she eased him back and climbed onto him, taking him aching into her hand, lowering herself down. He felt her flesh warm as it eased over his, encompassing, then very slowly rising up and down in turn.

These moments made up for almost everything. He revelled in the sensation, Sarah moving to an increasing rhythm, with flushed cheeks and earnest eyes, the visual and tactile beauty of her body a priceless feast. The repeated friction of pelvis on pelvis gradually turning her earnest face to determined. She placed her hands flat on his chest, pulled her legs up to a squat and leaned back with her hands now on his thighs. Opening her legs decadently wide for him she thumped down hard.

Adam’s sense of delirium immediately burst, giving himself to the unstoppable as her movement slowed and he pumped then ebbed into her. Bottling his frustration again, he managed a contented sigh as she half clambered, half fell onto the bed, effecting a giggle as she did. Then, crawling forward, she gently kissed his darkly stubbled chin. A kiss of love and apology that she held longer than he expected. She laid a hand on his chest and her head beside her hand, studying him with those innocent eyes. He winked and was rewarded with a smile that bounced his heart on elastic, watching her watching him as they caught their breath. Then she swung her legs off the bed and pulled open the curtains.

He closed his eyes, his mind restlessly flitting from thought to thought, listening as she headed to the shower, the heave of plumbing. Collecting her tea when she returned, she sat at her dresser. He kept his eyes closed, picturing the play of muscle across her narrow back. Struggling as he always did, to imagine her plunging a carving knife into any man, let alone an old man.

It was nearly four years since the police had found her, sitting shaking in her car outside the old man’s house. In a world subsequently turned upside down, the reaction of parents had been the biggest surprise to him. Sarah was vilified for dragging the past horrors suffered by their children into the public domain. It had forced them to move halfway across the country.

Her lawyer said she was lucky. The old man had survived a punctured lung and a heart attack, and the judge had been sympathetic. Adam had never considered six months in psychiatric care, and many more of debilitating tests and evaluation, any kind of lucky. Not when you considered everything else.

TWO

Simon Thompson waited in the quiet of his car, parked beside the park beneath a row of high trees, waiting for the girl.

The girl’s name was Andrea. Simon felt sorry for her. She was driven from Northampton every other Friday, just her and her dad, asleep when she arrived and carried into the dreary flat. After a trip to the pool on Saturday mornings, she was left alone all Saturday afternoon while her dad worked the door of pubs and clubs, picking her up and taking her for something to eat between shifts, before abandoning her alone in the flat to spend all night by herself, watching TV and falling asleep on the sofa.