Dying for Christmas (4 page)

‘We’ve been through this,’ she said, trying to sellotape over the tear. ‘I have to work. It’s my job. You knew that when you married a police officer.’

‘Then you get a new job. Or …’

‘Or?’

‘Or get a new family.’

* * *

‘So, just to be clear, you’re holding me prisoner here.’

By spelling out the situation in all its ridiculousness, I was giving him one last chance to make it not true. One last chance for it to be a joke, or a misunderstanding.

Dominic nodded enthusiastically, as if I was a child who’d just grasped some complicated mathematical concept. ‘Exactly!’

‘But why?’

‘Because, like many people, Christmas is my very worst time of year. It has so many memories, doesn’t it? It comes so loaded with expectation. I just don’t want to be alone. We outsiders must stick together. More champagne?’

He had brought the bottle over and was topping up our glasses, even though mine was still half full.

‘So you want me here for … company?’

He nodded again and reached out to touch my knee.

‘Exactly right. Company. And other things.’

I didn’t like that. Those ‘other things’.

‘But people will be looking for me. I’m due to spend the day at my parents’ house tomorrow. They’ll get the police involved.’

‘I expect they will.’

‘Someone will have seen us,’ I pressed on. ‘In the café. Someone will have seen us. There’ll be CCTV footage.’

‘There’s a chance there might be footage,’ he said, as if he was considering my argument carefully. ‘If we were sitting in the right place, which we weren’t. Anyway, it was a last-minute change of plan, you said, to come into the West End instead of shopping locally like you’d originally intended. I imagine that will … confuse things. True, they will probably trace your bank-card payments. But that will take a while, and then they’ll have to find out where you went afterwards. Did you see how many people there were on Oxford Street when we walked to the car? Good luck trying to find us in that!’ He paused. ‘Anyway, if you’re worrying about missing Christmas, please don’t, we have plenty of festive cheer right here.’

He indicated the tree with the beautifully wrapped presents piled up underneath.

‘So, you want me to stay here for the whole of Christmas Day?’

The thought of twenty-four hours in that apartment with him was like a pair of freezing hands squeezing my chest. Now Dominic was laughing, as if I’d made a deliberate joke.

‘Not Christmas Day, of course not.’

Hope surged briefly.

‘What I mean is, not
just
Christmas Day. You’ll be my guest over the twelve days of Christmas – from now until January sixth. Did you know, by the way, that day is called Epiphany? Don’t you think that’s neat?’

‘Twelve days?’

‘Well, technically, it’s thirteen as the twelve days don’t actually start till tomorrow. Don’t worry. We’ll find plenty to do to amuse ourselves. I have so much to tell you. That’s the thing about Christmas, isn’t it, you give yourself to other people, like a gift? The actual gifts are just a bonus. Have you noticed there are twelve presents under the tree? One for every day. And we have New Year to look forward to, all those resolutions to be made. The days will just fly by.’

Now Dominic had moved up the sofa so close to me that I was breathing in the warm breath that he’d just breathed out.

‘I want us to get to know each other, Jessica.’

I watched his hand stroking my thigh as if it was a wasp about to sting.

‘I want us to … unwrap ourselves for one another. Doesn’t every human being long for that above all else – to be fully known?’

I wondered if he could hear the bile that had just come shooting up, swilling around in my mouth. I wondered if he could feel my leg muscles shrinking from his touch. My eyes darted wildly around the apartment, canvassing for escape routes. Not the windows, all of which gave on to the black void of the Thames. And as far as I could tell there was just the one door in and out, wide and industrial and solid. If I could just find my bag with my phone …

‘I’ll just pop to the loo.’ I’d never to my knowledge used ‘pop’ as a verb before.

‘Sure,’ he called, as I made my way across the floor on trembling legs. ‘Help yourself.’

Once in the inner hallway, my fingers closed around the knob of the door closest to the bathroom, even as my heart threatened to punch its way clear out of my chest. I turned it, hoping against hope there would be no noise.

There was no noise.

And no movement.

The door was locked. Likewise the one next to it.

In the furthest top corner of the hallway the red light of an alarm sensor winked.

In contrast to the other two rooms, the bathroom door had no lock. After I pulled the door shut, I slumped against it, shaking. I needed the toilet but it was on the other side of the room, beyond the distance where you could sit down and hold the door closed. I glanced around the room in a futile search for a cupboard where there might be hidden razor blades or nail scissors or mega-strength sleeping pills I could add to his champagne when he wasn’t looking. There was another alarm sensor in here too. I couldn’t remember ever seeing one in a bathroom before.

There were footsteps in the hallway outside.

‘Is everything OK, Jessica?’

Could he tell I was just the other side of the door, two inches of wood separating his breath from mine, crouching on trembling legs that threatened to give way? I prayed he wouldn’t try the handle, wouldn’t try to push his way in.

Springing across the room, I pushed the steel button for the flush, catching my breath at the sudden explosion of water shooting through the bowl. I ran the tap in the sink, trying to avoid looking into my own frightened eyes in the mirror.

He was waiting outside the door.

‘You look scared, sweetheart. You’re not scared of me, are you?’

I shrugged instead of answering straight away. ‘The situation is quite challenging,’ I replied eventually.

I turned it round so that I wasn’t commenting on him. I was commenting on the situation – not what he was doing but how it was making me feel, just as I’d learned in therapy. Sonia Rubenstein would have been proud.

On our way back through the living area of the apartment, Dominic paused and plunged a hand deep into the pocket of his jeans. He withdrew a huge bunch of keys, all with a different-coloured fob. ‘Purple, I think,’ he said. He walked over to the massive metal front door and turned that key. ‘There,’ he said, with a smile that cracked his face open like a coconut. ‘Now we’re safely locked away from the rest of the world. And you know what would make it even cosier?’

I shook my head.

‘If we get rid of our phones as well.’

Now I saw he’d laid out two phones on the dining-room table – one black, that must be his, and my own white one, in its pink leather case. Without stopping to think I lunged forward to grab it.

The pain came out of nowhere, a sharp stinging on my scalp that pulled me up short. I tried to turn my head, crying out when I realized he had a hank of my hair wound around his fist.

‘I don’t think so,’ he said.

With his free hand, he reached out and picked up the phones, then, still pulling me by the hair, he led the way over to the windows. At the glass door, he finally let go. While I rubbed my sore scalp, he turned the handle and, before I knew what was happening, he’d taken both phones and hurled them towards the river. The darkness swallowed them one after the other. Closing and locking the door in one fluid movement, Dominic turned back to me and smiled.

‘Where are my manners? Let’s eat. You must be starving.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

The thought of food made me nauseous. I was hardly able to breathe, let alone chew and swallow.

But his face had tightened, like it was threaded through with invisible wire and someone was pulling on it. Hard.

‘Do you want to hurt my feelings?’

I shook my head. He swung open the door of the huge American-style fridge-freezer, and I felt hope drain away through my veins and arteries right down to the polished wood floor. The shelves were packed with plastic boxes, all labelled. I caught sight of ‘Lasagne’ and ‘Thai Green Curry (chicken)’ as well as the ‘Beef Stew’ he eventually brought out.

‘Did you cook all that?’

‘Do I look like the kind of man who spends his life in the kitchen?’ His tone was calm but his face remained unsmiling.

So he’d bought it in, all this pre-prepared food. He must have been planning this for a while.

The thought was a punch to my stomach. He’d bought in the food, locked the relevant doors, and then gone looking for a victim.

Me.

And if it was planned, he already knew what was going to happen next. And how it would end.

Chapter Seven

We sat down at the long dining table that delineates the end of the living-room space from the beginning of the kitchen space.

This flat is all about the space.

The shallow white bowl he put in front of me was huge – the kind you might buy on aesthetic grounds and never use once you find they don’t actually fit in the dishwasher. The brown gloop nestled on a bed of rice, glistening with fat where it caught the light. The lumps of beef half submerged in gravy the consistency of mud.

‘Dig in,’ he said.

He was watching me intently with those close-together eyes, so I picked up my fork and scooped some rice with a bit of brown sauce.

‘Delicious, isn’t it? I get pre-prepared food delivered from the same company every week. I can’t bear cooking. People who dwell too much on food make me sick.’

I dipped my fork again into the rice and brought it up to my mouth which was still coated with the dregs of the last mouthful.

‘You’re not eating the beef.’

‘I don’t eat meat.’

Dominic put his fork down in his dish and slowly ran his tongue around his gums.

‘Then we have a problem, Jessica Gold.’

I swallowed down a clot of rice.

‘It’s no problem,’ I said.

When it happened, it was so quick, I didn’t even notice him moving. One moment he was sitting there opposite me, staring with his head to one side as though listening to what I was saying, and the next he’d leaned forward and picked up the biggest lump of meat from my plate with his fingers and rammed it past my teeth, clamping his hand over my lips so that I couldn’t spit it out. I was choking, the meat lodged in my mouth, big as a boiled egg.

‘I’d chew it if I were you,’ he said as my eyes streamed.

I pressed my teeth into the beef, feeling that stringy texture at once so familiar and so alien.

‘What is it about meat that offends you?’ His hand stayed pressed to my mouth. ‘Is it the idea that you’re chewing on something that was once living that you don’t like? Is it biting into a mouthful of tissue, fat, skin? Let me guess. You had a pet you loved once – a cat maybe, you seem like the cat type. Do you think about that cat when you’re chewing on meat, I wonder? Do you imagine you’re sinking your teeth into its flesh?’

I began to retch, with a violence that shocked me, although nothing came out but a trail of thin bile. He moved his hand away, looking with disgust at the traces of yellow liquid on his fingers. After washing his hands at the sink, he sat back down opposite me and sighed.

‘It’s like you’re deliberately trying to spoil things,’ he said. ‘Now, will you please just eat.’

It wasn’t a question.

By then the retching had died down, but still I could feel the strings of flesh caught between my teeth.

I remembered Sonia Rubenstein, and how at one session she’d been asking me about my fear of buttons. It’s a real phobia. Even writing the word just now gave me the heebie-jeebies. Nasty, threatening things. I’d been talking about how it affected my life. How I couldn’t stand to touch Travis when he was wearing a shirt, how if I came into a room and found a button on the carpet, unattached, I screamed and couldn’t go back in there until it was gone. About how once we went to dinner at the house of one of Travis’ old friends and they’d put up a decorative clock made entirely out of buttons of different sizes and I’d had to position myself facing the other way so I wouldn’t have to look at it. Sonia Rubenstein listened to me, while her fingers played with the end of her orange or pink or emerald-green scarf, and didn’t laugh, and at the end she said, ‘You know, sometimes you just have to fake it to make it.’

Sometimes she talks like an American self-help manual. She went on to explain that when you don’t have any choice, you have to just adopt a different mindset. So I’d adopt the mindset of Travis. I’d imagine myself walking into the room with his step. Imagine how I would feel, with my eyes gliding right over the front of a jacket or a coat without even wondering how big they were (the small ones are scarier) or how many there were. ‘By thinking yourself into someone else’s skin,’ Sonia said, ‘you’ll learn to control your fear.’

So that’s what I did now. Because I could do nothing else. I imagined myself into the skin of someone who ate meat. A habitual carnivore like one of my brothers. Someone who was so used to eating meat that a plate of stew sitting there right in front of them wouldn’t even register, and when they put it in their mouth it would taste of nothing in particular.

I dug into the stew, pulled out a steaming forkful and shovelled it into my mouth. I chewed without thinking. Because if I thought about what I was eating, I wouldn’t be able to swallow it, and if I didn’t swallow it, something would happen.

All the time I was eating, Dominic was watching me. ‘Much better,’ he said.

When I’d finished and put down my fork, my stomach was protesting as if the cow I’d just eaten had got loose in there and was bucking around. Dominic still had half his food left.

‘See how hungry you were, after all that fuss?’ he said.

I nodded.

Suddenly he stood up and picked up his plate and scraped the rest of his food on to my empty dish.

‘You wolfed that down so quickly, I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t let you have more. It is Christmas, after all.’