Growing Up Twice (45 page)

‘Owen,’ I say, as loudly as I can get away with, ‘I understand how you feel but you can’t just break into my flat and expect everything to be all right. Expect us to have sex, just like that.’ It’s not what Owen wants to hear but it is exactly what I want Josh to hear. If he can hear me. There is no sound coming from my bag now.

‘Look, you silly little cunt, I had to get your attention somehow, for Christ’s sake. I tried everything else. If you’re pissed off about this you’ve only got yourself to blame. God knows, I tried to talk to you. You made a mistake when you thought you could ignore
me
. I don’t like to be ignored, Jenny. I don’t like it at all. And you know how it upsets me to lose my temper. Well, maybe the time for talking is past, maybe I should just show you how much I care.’

‘OK, OK, wait. I understand. Let’s talk then. Let talk.’ He sits next to me on the sofa now, taking my wrist in his hands, and he talks. Hearing his words but trying not to listen as he makes his plans for me sickeningly clear I sit perfectly still oddly calm against the rising waves of physical fear that have begun to break over my body. I’m waiting for what I know will be my only choice. Over his shoulder I watch the minutes tick by on the video clock, each minute seeming like an hour. I nod, I agree, I pacify him, six minutes. I sit still as he strokes my hair and I agree with him that I do love him, and that I could never love anyone else. Eleven minutes. I hold my breath and swallow hard as he grips my chin in his fingers and turns my face to his, forcing my mouth open with his tongue. Fourteen minutes.

I blink hard to fight back tears as he whispers, ‘I can’t wait for this any more.’

Seventeen minutes. No help is coming. I am not letting this happen to me. This is my last chance.

I take a deep breath and with all the force and anger I can muster I punch him in the throat and make a dash for it. He catches me at the living-room door. I fall, twisting on to my right shoulder with a wrenching thud; from somewhere else I can feel pain. He looks at me with disgust and straddles me. I open my mouth to scream, but before I can it is filled with blood. He has hit me. He’s going to hurt me and I can’t find the strength to fight any more. I close my eyes and pray, ‘Just let it be over quickly and please don’t let me die.’ He’s won.

The loudest sound I have ever heard rips through the flat, the door is flung off its hinges and suddenly the room is filled with shouting men.

‘Back away, get on the floor. Get ON THE FLOOR.’ Before my eyes Owen is wrestled to the ground by two policemen. They are followed in by at least half a dozen others. I draw my knees up under my chin and watch them. A woman police officer crouches down next to me, helps me to my feet and takes me into the bedroom.

‘It’s all right now, love, it’s all right. Has he …?’ I shake my head, unable to speak, and watch as Owen is taken out of the flat.

‘You fucking bitch, you fucking bitch, I’ll kill you, I swear, I’ll kill you,’ are his last words to me. I look at the woman sitting next to me and open my mouth but I can’t speak.

‘You’re all right now, aren’t you? You did well. Your friend called us straight away, we listened to the conversation on the phone. We got here as quickly as we could. Just in time, and you’re OK.’ She seems to be reassuring herself more than me. I can’t feel my toes or my fingers, I can’t speak.

‘It’s all right, love, there’s an ambulance on its way. We’ll take you in to get checked over. Oh look, here’s your friend. You’re OK now, OK?’

I nod, hoping to shut her up, and suddenly Josh is kneeling in front of me. I flinch as he takes my shoulders but then I throw my arms around his neck and let him hold me.

‘Were we in time?’ he whispers. ‘Jen, you have to tell me, did he hurt you?’

I shake my head and relief floods his face.

Having been a terrible, uncommunicative daughter for some months, I’ve now been at my mum’s house for the last few days, sitting on her brown velvet sofa, watching winter insinuate its way into her garden.

My brother and mum came and picked me up from the hospital. There was nothing broken, only bruising and a lost tooth, near the back. I keep running my tongue around its empty groove, making my mouth sore. Mum’s taking me to the dentist tomorrow, just as she used to when I was a kid. I don’t want to go, just as I never used to when I was a kid.

Owen’s on remand. The police are pressing charges. It seems surreal, to say the least.

The first morning (or was it afternoon?) that I woke up after it happened, I woke up to Josh’s face. We watched each other, solemn and still for a moment, and then he said, ‘I’ll get your mum.’ He leant down and kissed the back of my hand before he went. I haven’t seen him since, he’s called several times, but I just don’t feel as though I’ve got anything to say.

The hospital had given me something, drugs to make me feel calmer, or to take away the dull throb of pain in my jaw and my shoulder. I felt peaceful and detached, totally fine. My mum cried whenever she looked at my face. It wasn’t pretty, I guess. Swollen and bruised.

‘I can’t believe it but they say they need your bed, darling,’ she said angrily, shedding tears on to the sheets.

‘They probably do, Mum. I’m OK really, aren’t I? Just a few cuts and bruises,’ I said mildly, hoping to cheer her up.

She sobbed again and hugged me so tightly that I winced. ‘You’re so brave. When I think about what might have happened it makes my blood run cold. Well, the doctor’s on his way to discharge you so come on, let’s get you dressed.’ I looked at the jumper and jeans I had pulled on so quickly the night before. It still seemed like a dream, even then.

Then there were the police, statements, checking, double-checking. They wanted to work out exactly what happened when. At that point, for the first time, a deep freezing fear lurched in my chest. I shook my head, no.

‘Jenny, we only want to make sure we have as much evidence as possible. This could really help put him away.’

I shook my head, rigid with horror. ‘No. You found him
in
my flat,
after
forcing entrance, beating me up and on the point of raping me. If that isn’t enough, what is? No. Not now anyway.’

I knew all that would have to come out eventually. I knew without anyone having to tell me that for weeks Owen must have been following my every move. All the time I had my head in the clouds over Michael or Josh he was close behind me, planning his attack.

Arrangements were made for me, phone calls and leave from work as long as I liked. Adem promised to re-secure the flat, once the police had finished with it. I was taken back to my mum’s house.

She brings me in a plate of the nursery food she has been feeding me since I got here. Baked beans on toast and a glass of milk.

‘Here you go, love. You’ve got to eat. I’ve got you some of those little cakes you like for after.’ She pats me on the arm and sits across from me.

‘Fancy watching
Neighbours
?’

I don’t fancy watching
Neighbours
, I fancy turning my face to the wall and closing my eyes, but I know she does. Since her retirement Mum’s TV and dog routine have become pretty much set in stone.

‘Yeah, why not.’ I let the taste of childhood sink into me with a comforting warmth and watch the wind beat the rain against the trees outside. Mum’s dog, Horatio, presses his nose up against the glass of the door. He looks at me and Mum in turn through a shaggy fringe, picking his paws up and down in a little dance, giving sharp high-pitched barks which hardly seem fitting for a dog of his age and size.

‘Oh you,’ Mum says to him as she gets up to open the door. ‘No sooner are you out there than you want to come in with your muddy paws all over my floor. It’s no wonder this carpet has gone to rack and ruin.’ Her whole face is filled with an indulgent smile as she ticks him off. His big floppy paws leave small pools of muddy water across the carpet on his trip to the kitchen in search of food.

‘That’s your lunch, that is,’ Mum says to me. ‘He knows he doesn’t like baked beans really, but it’s the smell. Drives him crazy, but I bet you, if I went out there now and put some in his dish, he wouldn’t touch them, the mad old dog, and I’d end up throwing them away.’ I smile at her. I’m sure she fusses more over that dog than she ever did over us when we were kids. She looks at the kitchen door.

‘Oh well, there were a few left over. Maybe I’ll just pop out there and see if he’s changed the habit of a lifetime. Could have changed his taste in his old age.’

A sudden gust of wind hurls rain at the window pane like a handful of stones, and I shiver. This is it, limbo. I can’t imagine going back to work. I can’t imagine going back to the flat, new lock or no. I can’t imagine leaving the house and going to the dentist, I definitely can’t imagine seeing the counsellor who has been arranged for me. All I can think about right now is this sofa, the trees outside the window and the dark dense clouds above them.

I had three years to avoid that moment, that look on Owen’s face when he hit me. I can’t be sure if I remember it accurately or if it has become a nightmare vision that has stuck in my memory, but all the same, when I close my eyes, when I see his face, I see that at that moment he wanted me dead. Three years when, almost daily, I had the opportunity, all the clues to see why Owen was all wrong. I had countless chances to get out and be safe. To let him let me go before he got this way. Before whatever anger and hate he had harboured against the world for so long finally crashed into overdrive. I had
three years
and only have myself to blame. I just didn’t see it coming. I didn’t let myself see it coming.

I jump out of my skin as Horatio erupts in a barking fit worthy of any Rottweiler and I hear him hurl himself at the front door. I put my plate on the coffee table and hug a cushion to my chest. More police? Owen? The thought, no matter how irrational, starts my heart thundering in my chest.

‘We’re not expecting anyone, are we?’ Mum says curiously. ‘It had better not be that bloke from the catalogue again. I’ve told him. I’m not interested in his special offer on shoe storage. Horatio, if it is I give you full permission to bite him.’

She hauls Horatio back between her legs and opens the door a crack. The dog’s bottom waggles where his tail would have been if he wasn’t an old English sheepdog.

‘Hello, darling! What a nice surprise!’ I hear Mum say and then her voice drops to a more confidential tone. Overcome with the excitement of a visitor, Horatio runs back into the living-room and looks for a gift, sees my toast on the table and grabs it, leaving a sticky trail of baked beans as he bounds off to bestow his treasure on the new arrival.

‘Oh cheers, mate,’ I hear Rosie say to him in the hallway and she appears before me, gingerly holding a bit of soggy toast between her thumb and forefinger.

‘Do you want this back?’ she asks me.

I nod at the dog dancing at her heels. ‘I think I know someone who wants it more.’

Horatio snaps it out of her fingers and takes it under the table to kill it before eating it.

‘I’m making you tea,’ my mum calls out from the kitchen. ‘And there are biscuits. Or cake. Biscuits or cake, girls?’

‘Either thanks, Mum.’

Rosie sits next to me and for a second or two we watch the TV
Neighbours
getting aerated in swimwear.

Everyone has called me since I’ve been here. Josh, Selin, Rosie and even Jackson. But I just haven’t been able to talk to them. I haven’t been able to find anything to say. And now Rosie is here, in person. She looks well, the shadows and strain around her eyes seem to have diminished and the small curve of her belly has begun to grow into a rounded bump.

‘Do you mind me being here?’ she asks tentatively.

‘No, of course not.’ I am genuinely relieved to see her. ‘I mean, thanks for coming. We didn’t exactly part on the best of terms.’ Everything we said to each other seems so trivial now. It doesn’t even seem worth talking about. A look between us silently agrees to let it go without discussion.

‘Selin said we should wait until you felt like talking about it, or felt like coming home. You know how sensitive she is. But well, I go for the bull-in-the-china-shop approach to friendship. I said, “I have to talk to Jen, face to face. I have to let her know I love her. That I’m still her friend, no matter what.” So I came.’ She shrugs and grins.

I sink back deep into the sofa. ‘How are you? How’s it going with Chris?’

Rosie smiles and nods. ‘He’s outside in the car,’ she says. ‘I’m fine, good actually. I’m starting to feel really well with the baby. And Chris … well, things are very good at the moment. I’m keeping an eye out. Taking one day at a time. I’m prepared for the worst but optimistic for the best. I think he might have grown up, you know. Finally.’ I nod and hope with all my heart that she gets what she wants.

‘But I didn’t come here to talk about me. I came to talk about you.’ I brace myself for the quiet sympathetic questions, questions I don’t have any answers for. Over the last few days I have gained a fraction of insight into what Selin and her family have had to endure.

‘I mean, fucking Owen, what a cunt, hey? What a fucking nutter!’ She looks at me with such incredulous comic horror that I start to giggle.

‘I mean, we always knew he was a total dickhead, but fucking
wanker
or what? Never saw that coming.’ Rosie claps her hand over her foul mouth as my mum enters with a tray of tea and puts it on the coffee table. She looks at us laughing and smiles at Rosie.

‘I knew you’d cheer her up, you’ve always had a knack for it. There are the biscuits. Don’t give that dog any, he’s had far too much today already. Well, maybe save him the end of a couple.’ And she’s gone again. Horatio appears from under the table and positions himself between Rosie and me, his brown eyes fixed on each of us in turn. I think about what Rosie has just said and the light-hearted moment slips away.

‘
Didn’t
you see it coming, Rose? I mean, really? I keep thinking I had an awful long time to see it coming, but even when I did, even when I
knew
it I never let myself see it. I tricked myself into believing that it would just go away. I feel as though it’s my fault.’ I scrape my dirty hair back from my forehead and tie it into a knot to keep it off my face.