Taming the Beast (31 page)

Sarah undressed, turned off the light and slid in beside him. When she tried to kiss him he grunted and curled his body into a ball at the edge of the bed.

‘Daniel? Why are you being like this?’

He sighed. ‘I told you.’

‘You’re annoyed by my incessant chattering?’

‘Yes, that and your pasty face and bony arse.’

Sarah knew he used insults as a tool to deflect attention from what was truly wrong. This did not make it hurt any less. She took several deep breaths. ‘Would you like me to leave?’

‘Yes, good idea. Go and annoy one of your other lovers. I’m sure there’s at least one among the thousands who will put you up for the night.’

‘Okay, that’s enough.’ Sarah turned on the bedside lamp, climbed over his body and squatted at the bedside, looking up at him. ‘Tell me what the fuck is wrong, Daniel, or I really will leave.’

‘Fine, Sarah. Come here.’ He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and held his hands out to her. Melting, she let him pull her up. She went to kiss him and he laughed, grabbed her around the waist and lifted her off the ground. ‘You just don’t know when to stop, do you?’

He carried her out of the bedroom, through the hallway, past the kitchen and living room and along the entrance hall. Sarah kicked at him and cried, but he was unmoved. He opened the front door and dropped her. ‘Don’t–’ she started, but the door had closed.

There was only one other apartment on this floor and it was vacant, but she was still in a common area and in clear, humiliating
view if anyone should happen to press the wrong button on the elevator. She spent the night huddled against the door, naked and terrified.

When morning came and Daniel opened the door, she was too exhausted to stand or speak. ‘Oh, Sarah,’ he said, and gathered her in his arms. He carried her to bed, where he cried into her stomach and begged her to forgive him.

‘Yesterday,’ he explained, ‘I was hauled in front of the board and given an official warning. Inappropriate behaviour and unsatisfactory performance, they said. I demanded they specify their complaints.’ He sobbed. ‘Inattentiveness. Lateness. Unkempt appearance, specifically–’ he sobbed again, ‘bruises and grazes on my face, giving me the appearance of having “frequent violent altercations.”’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘We have to stop doing what we’ve been doing. You have to calm down.’

‘I’ll try.’ She was already having trouble. His head on her stomach, his tears, his touch after that long, cold, terrible night were enough to make her want to tear open his chest.

‘I never used to be like this. I was married for twenty-five years without receiving a single facial wound. I certainly was never late for work because I couldn’t stop licking my wife’s arsehole.’

‘So it’s all my fault?’

He sat up and held her face between his palms. ‘Not you,
us
. We’re out of control. God, this is why I left in the first place.’

‘Yeah, well you’re not leaving this time. No fucking way. We will calm down, Daniel. I promise. I won’t bite you or scratch you, and I’ll make sure you get to bed nice and early so you can concentrate the next day. And I’ll keep my arsehole far away from your tongue in the mornings so you’ll never be late again.’

‘Thank you.’ He kissed her lips, ran his hands down her spine. ‘How long until I have to be at work again?’

‘Forty-nine hours or so.’

Daniel was inside her within seconds.

On Monday morning, Sarah watched him attempt to cover the purple bruise on his cheek and the bloody gouges on his neck with her foundation. ‘This can’t go on,’ he said to his reflection. He left for work without saying goodbye.

Daniel would not let her touch him; he growled and held up his hands if she so much as edged towards him. He spoke hardly at all, and when he did, it was to say
shut up
or
keep away from me
. She kept trying, though, because what else could she do?

The Ancient Greeks believed that at the time of Creation every human being was made up of two separate people, joined together in body, heart and mind. Angry that these creatures were perfectly content within themselves and therefore had no time or deference for the gods, Zeus tore them apart, separating each whole into two halves. Ever since, human beings have been miserable and lonely, wandering the planet searching for their other half. Everybody feels dissatisfied and empty until they find the one person who completes them; once the match is made, they need nothing else. Not work. Not family. Not gods.

Sarah didn’t believe in Greek gods anymore than she believed in the Christian one, but the essence of this story seemed to her to be perfectly true. Love was not about happiness or security. It had nothing to do with common interests and shared life goals. Respect, kindness, affection: irrelevant. Love was blood rushing through veins searching out its source. Flesh screaming to be joined with flesh. The bone deep understanding that there wasn’t anything else but
this
.

Sarah tried for a week to make Daniel speak to her. She tried poetry, lectures, lingerie, nudity, begging, shouting, screaming and sobbing. He stayed out late every night and locked himself in the bedroom when he was at home. By the end of the week, the marks on his throat and face had faded but he looked to have aged ten years. The strain was showing under his eyes and across his forehead and in the way his shoulders slumped. His physical deterioration heartened her: he was dying without her touch.

Then on Saturday night he did not come home at all. Sarah sat up all night, watching the door, dialling his number, telling herself he would be home any minute. In her mind she saw him passed out in a gutter, smashed up in a car wreck, mugged and beaten, in the arms of a woman who looked like his wife, being stroked by a prostitute with oversized breasts and no front teeth, sitting alone on a park bench, sobbing on the floor of his office, in a jail cell, floating face down in the harbour, extinguished.

At nine o’clock Sunday morning, his key turned in the lock and he stumbled into the apartment. He leant on the doorframe, struggled to get his wallet out of his pocket, dropped his keys, hit his head, swore and burped. Sarah’s insides liquefied and she was drowning in what she felt.

He looked up as she ran at him, his face crumpled, as did his legs. He scrunched down into the corner, between the front door and the hall table. Sarah fell on him, and when he tried to push her away she beat him with her fists and ripped the hair from his head. He sobbed at her to leave him and she tore at his cheeks and nose and chin with her fingernails. She spat in his eye, and when he stopped fighting her, she grabbed his dropped keys and gouged at the flesh on his face. Her skull became a weapon, smashing up against his cheekbones and nose. His tears made it easier. His wet face produced a satisfying
Splat
when she slapped it. Her arms
ached, her vision blurred, there was blood on her hands and in her mouth. She beat on.

She thought she might kill him and was scared, but could not stop. All week he had frozen her out and now she was melting into an icy sea. Her elbows replaced her bruised hands and slammed fresh blood from his nose. She thrashed at him with her whole body. His eyes were half opened, watching her. She felt as though she was watching herself. Watching her bony elbows fly through the space between them and land on his face. She could hear herself screaming. She was so frightened. She couldn’t stop. She ripped open his bloody shirt and stabbed the keys into his stomach with as much force as she was capable of. He didn’t flinch. Sarah found the strength to push harder. Her biceps were quivering like a junkie without a fix. Concentrating on her hand she noticed that her knuckles were red raw from scraping against his weekend beard.

In physicality there is honesty. Sarah had always been able to know the truth about a man through his body. The pale circle on the ring finger gave away a cheating husband. The labourer, masquerading as a stockbroker, couldn’t hide his sun freckled shoulders or his work worn hands. The bloke who told her he was into extreme sports made her laugh when later she touched his flabby buttocks and saw the moonlight reflecting off his lily white skin. And how many men claimed that they did not care about appearances and then proudly flexed their super sized biceps and mega-crunched abs at her in the bedroom? The surface holds the truth.

In the expression of physicality, in the tearing of the flesh and the intermingling of fluids, there is honesty. Sarah had always known the things that Daniel had never been able to admit out loud. She knew them ever since he pushed himself onto and into
her immature body. All the time he had been spewing out justifications and explanations and rationalisations, his true nature was pounding the hell out of her flesh. And now she was showing him, with teeth and claw, that they were the same. One.

His hand closed over hers and it was over.

Freud believed that the sublimation of desires was responsible for civilisation. The basest, most animalistic urges were repressed, and the energy that would otherwise have been wasted in hedonism was harnessed and re-directed. In other words, Daniel told Sarah, instead of having sex, people built cathedrals and cities and nations.

‘The world has enough of all those things, don’t you think?’

‘More than enough.’

The last thing Jamie expected at five fifteen on a Friday afternoon was for Sarah Clark to walk through his office door. The only time Sarah Clark ever walked through his door these days was in his dreams, and even then it was never his office door.

She was much thinner than in his dreams and she was wearing more clothing too. She looked different all together. Older, smaller, tireder. Defeated. But he must have been reading her wrong or projecting, because Sarah Clark had never been defeated in her life.

Defeated, old, tired, thin, whatever. She could have snakes for hair and blood pouring from the eyes and she would still be the most beautiful thing he had seen in over a year. He stared at the fortnightly sales sheet on his desk and concentrated on breathing.

‘There was no one at the front desk so I just wandered in.’ She was standing in the doorway, and he thought she sounded nervous but that was impossible. ‘Is it okay that I’m here?’ She sounded scared but that was impossible too. Sarah Clark did not get nervous or scared. Jamie thought he must be projecting again. He was fucking terrified.

Thirteen months and twelve days. That bastard must have finished with her. She must have been dumped out on the street and had to come home. He knew she’d given up her job, because he’d gone to the restaurant to find her. He’d tried to find her at the university too. That was over a year ago.

‘I guess you’re not happy to see me then?’ Sarah started to cry.

Jamie’s paralysis broke. Sarah in pain caused a reflex reaction much like the mother’s instinct to protect her child. He knew he was weak and weedy, a pathetic excuse for a father, a terrible
husband, a failure as a man in general, but what he could do and would do with his dying breath, was take care of Sarah.

He wrapped his arms around her, wincing as his fingertips scraped her too prominent spine and his ribs clashed against hers. She felt different than he remembered, and it wasn’t his memory failing him. The end of time was when Jamie would forget the way Sarah Clark felt. He remembered
perfectly
how she felt: bony and smooth and warm. And she felt too light, as though a heavy hand would crush her. She had always felt that way, and she felt that way now, but more so. Bonier, smoother, warmer, lighter. That wasn’t what made her feel strange to him though. It was something else, something that wasn’t to do with the tiny bones and the impossibly pale, always hot skin.

He tried to pull back from her to see her face but she clung tight, quivering like a tiny bird thrown from the nest before its wings were strong enough to support it. She was injured and afraid, and that was why she felt so unfamiliar to him. Jamie had always been aware of how breakable she was, but now, as she shivered in his arms and drenched his shirt with tears and mucus, she was broken.

‘Come and sit down.’ He tried to step out of her arms but she held fast, so he had to half walk, half stumble backwards with her clinging to him, and then ease her into the chair. Her grip remained tight on his arms. ‘Stop crying now. Everything’s fine. Come on now.’ He pulled one hand free and brushed away some hair that had broken free of her plait and was plastered to her cheek.

‘Jamie, oh God. I missed you so much. I needed you and now it’s all a mess. I understand why you didn’t want to… I know you were mad, but, Jamie, you’ve been mad before and I’ve done stupid stuff, but you always helped me. Why didn’t you…’ Sarah released his arms, burying her face in her hands.

She was verging on hysterical which scared him, because if Sarah was
anything
she was calm and unemotional. ‘You have to stop crying, Sarah, I can’t understand you.’ Jamie stroked her face and then her arms and made what he thought were comforting noises. They were the kind of noises that Shelley always made when he woke up from one of his nightmares. Sarah kept crying and shaking. Jamie wondered if she was on drugs.

She stopped abruptly and stood up, knocking him backwards. ‘Enough. If I keep crying like this I’m going to burst a fucking tear duct.’ She walked to the window and peered out, wiping her face with her sleeve. Jamie noticed that she was wearing a white cardigan. It was very odd, the kind of hand knitted matinee jacket that they dressed Bianca in when there was a cool breeze outside.

She cleared her throat a few times, leaning her forehead against the glass. ‘You must be doing well. Got a view of the river and everything, huh? Must be nice looking at the fast flowing sludge all day.’

‘Yep, I saw them drag a body out the other day.’

‘You did not.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

Sarah sat back down at his desk and lit a cigarette.

‘This is a non-smoking building, Sarah.’

‘Aren’t they all? You want me to hang out the window or something?’

He shook his head. ‘So how ya been, Sarah Clark?’