The Body of a Woman (15 page)

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Authors: Clare Curzon

BOOK: The Body of a Woman
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‘I don't know. I'd like to go abroad. Granny Knightley lives in Provence. Leila might work it for me to go out there.'
‘Good practice for your French. Will your father agree to it?'
‘He doesn't think Granny would be much … I mean, they aren't all that close. Anyway it's not a good time to ask him at the moment.' I was embarrassed at having to explain that much, so said no more. The very thought of approaching him when I was in disgrace brought back the confusion of Friday.
It wasn't really fair to blame me for getting drunk. I hadn't known the stuff was so strong, though I should have guessed Beryl Ryder was out to make mischief. The moment she had clapped eyes on me there had been a sort of spark between us. Of malice, I was sure now.
Morgan had set up a low Moorish table between us with a beaten brass top and a matching tray with coffee and biscuits. ‘It's decaff,' she said, ‘in case you're afraid it might stop you sleeping tonight.'
‘I don't think anything would do that.' In fact my eyelids were already heavy. I seemed to have done little else but sleep since Friday, when whatever had happened happened.
I was taking a bourbon biscuit from the plate offered me when I caught the intense look in her eyes and I knew, just knew, I had seen her before, recently; seen that same piercing expression on her face. Only she had looked different then in some way. ‘Have we met before?' I blurted out.
She hesitated, as her brother had done when I asked him what he was. ‘That's not likely is it? You've only just moved here from Caversham, you said.'
It wasn't a direct lie like his, but she was turning my question off. I wondered what they had to hide, and I was quite certain now that I had met her before, even been involved with her in some way. There was this stupid business of forgetting and only half-remembering what had happened lately.
They took it all right when I abruptly said I had to go.
Morgan insisted I borrow a plastic mackintosh although it seemed to have stopped raining.
‘Your bike,' her brother reminded me. ‘I'll let you have it back when it's fixed.'
‘Please don't bother. I mean, I'll get it seen to.'
‘My pleasure.'
I was sure it wouldn't be. He didn't look the sort to be any good with fiddly jobs. His fingers were long and slender, for all that, like his face, they were suntanned to a rich mahogany.
He had risen. ‘I'll see you to your door.'
‘No thanks.' It was one occasion when he'd have to accept female emancipation. He picked that up at once. ‘Well, see you around,' he compromised. Morgan handed me my own wet things in a plastic carrier.
The air outside was fresher now, the moon only momentarily obscured by moving cloud. The front of our house was in darkness except for the porch lantern which burned all night. I still had Leila's key-ring so I slipped noiselessly in, listened to locate where the others were and decided that, at eleven-fifteen, they'd retired early.
Leila would have assumed that I'd discreetly withdrawn from any threatening row with my father. I wondered what account of my drunkenness he'd given her. Or if he'd even bothered.
She bent close over me and I screamed, lashing out with my fists. But it was Leila. I didn't see how it could be. Leila wouldn't hurt me.
‘Chloe, it's all right. You were having a nightmare.'
From the next room she must have heard me call out. Because I was threatened. With a tumbler of something salty being poured down my throat. And the face! - not hers but Morgan's, yet looking different, with the fair curls scraped tightly back into a bun under a starched white cap.
‘What was the dream about?'
‘I was - in a sort of hospital, I think. Oh, it was all confused.'
‘But you aren't. You're at home. There's nothing wrong with you, is there?'
‘No. I - I'm fine.'
‘So go to sleep again. You've another four hours. Tomorrow we'll go swimming. How's that?'
‘Lovely'
Leila knew, because I'd once told her, how sometimes in good dreams I'm blissfully cutting through turquoise water, butterfly stroke, with the sun glistening on my wet arms. She thought I had only to close my eyes, think of that, and then any dream would be a happy one. Perhaps she'd forgotten that tomorrow I'd be sitting my last two exam papers.
She squeezed my shoulder and went quietly away. I was afraid to relax because asleep something bad lurked just out of sight to get at me. It was like moving in the dark through an unfamiliar room, knowing someone stood behind a curtain there waiting to leap out.
It was not just Morgan. Another face, a man's, seemed to come and go, emerging and fading in a fog. Someone younger, pale, gaunt-eyed, suddenly there in a subliminal
flash, the features frozen expressionless, his very blankness horrific. An unknown. He hadn't any place in my life, yet he had me deadly afraid. I was far outside the safe world Leila wanted to wrap me in.
Had I actually agreed to her suggestion? Stupid, stupid! I couldn't let her see me in a swimsuit because of the bruises. Tomorrow, after school, I'd have to make excuses, and hope she didn't guess I'd something to hide.
I switched on the table lamp by my bed and reached for a book. From the page where I'd left the marker I read empty words, sentences, mechanically turned pages, but it all passed my eyes without reaching my mind. Again I was seeing flashes that I couldn't account for, incidents from some violent film I don't ever remember watching.
Eventually I must have fallen asleep. I awoke to hear the house stirring to life, and my bedside lamp was still on. I felt heavy and sluggish, in no way prepared to face my Italian Composition paper. Leila insisted on my eating a breakfast of grapefruit and marmalade toast. Then she dropped me at my bus stop on her way to the shop. ‘Don't worry about the exam. You'll be fine. We'll swim this evening,' she promised. So in the night it hadn't been said just to calm me.
Being with the other girls, letting their chatter wash over me, helped; but still it was an effort to pull my mind together. It was only half an hour into the first paper that I began to tackle it as if it was real. I forced myself to eat some lunch: shepherd's pie with green beans, and much too heavy for another steamy day. Last night's storm had done little to break the heatwave.
The afternoon paper was Comprehension, which I found easier to get into. Afterwards I joined in the others' moans and groans as expected, although I knew I'd made quite a good job of it. And then there yawned a great void ahead: the extended summer holiday, because public-exam candidates were allowed to skip the rest of term, and my few
papers had been early ones. I decided to drop into the town library and pick up something to focus my mind on.
We were a group of five as far as the council offices and after that I continued alone. Crossing by the fish market I had the silly idea that someone was following me. It was so strong that I stepped inside among all the smells of dead flesh and disinfectant, the rattling of buckets and robust slapping of scaly bodies on wet chopping blocks.
I pretended to be examining the bright pink steaks of salmon, then turned quickly and looked all around behind. Monday's not a busy day for selling fish, and most people shop there in the morning anyway. Among the small number there I should have been able to pick out anyone I knew.
No one appeared out of place or interested in me.
‘Yes, miss. What'll it be then?' demanded the man in a striped apron and straw hat. I mumbled that I was only looking, and moved off. I glanced back once as I left, and it seemed that a shadowy figure slipped away behind one of the hall's iron pillars.
Not a real sighting. Just another of those flashes that kept bothering me; either half-memories or overexcited fancy. When I reached the library I would look up epilepsy in a medical dictionary. There was something called petit mal but I didn't know exactly what it was, or how it started. I wondered if that was what my mother had suffered from. Nobody had ever explained to me why she'd been an invalid or how it had started. It could be one of those genetic things.
In the library Philip, the dishy young assistant, wasn't on duty at the desk. Instead, when I'd chosen three books at random from the fiction section I took them with my card to Miss Humphreys. She was a massive-fronted dragon whom I usually managed to avoid. She barely looked at me until she was taking my card from the key slot. Then she fixed me with her severe wire-framed gaze and said, ‘I think we have some property of yours, Miss Knightley.'
She reached for a package farther along the counter and handed it to me, a quite fat A4 envelope. Before I could deny it was mine she launched her reprimand: I should really take better care of my belongings. The library staff had more than enough to do without scurrying round tidying up after the public. I was lucky it hadn't been locked away in Lost Property, since it hadn't my address on it.
She was right; it hadn't. But my name was there, typewritten with a new-looking black ribbon: Chloë Knightley. She tucked it firmly between two of my books, looked past me and said, ‘Next, please,' as friendly as a flatiron.
There seemed to be quite a lot inside the envelope. I knew I had never seen it before, so someone had left it, intending it to be handed to me next time I came in. And since it hadn't yet reached the Lost Property cupboard, that person must have left it a matter of minutes before.
Out in the torrid street I hugged my books to me and squatted on the low wall by the bus stop, with the park railings hard against my back. One bus must just have gone because there was no queue waiting. So with twelve minutes or so to spare I laid the books down and eased the envelope open with a fingernail while the traffic droned past, building towards rush hour.
Inside were six glossy black and white photographs and no note to cover them.
I had never seen porn before, but that's what these must be. No way could you call it Art.
The shots were of a woman's naked body squirming in obscene positions, brightly front-lit. Two of them showed the photographer's squat, cruciform shadow projected across her white flesh. Long hair, tangled and rat-tailed, barely allowed a glimpse of her eyes closed in mock ecstasy. The rest of her face was in deep shadow. The last shot was every bit as obscene, although she wore a filmy, translucent dress. It was long and seemed to have a snaky pattern. In only this picture was the face revealed.
With horror I found I was staring at my own. I appeared to be asleep.
 
Automatically I boarded the bus, showed my pass, found a seat. I felt nothing, except some difficulty in breathing.
Time must have passed as I sat there unbelieving. And yet it made sense now. It accounted for so much: the confusion, the film-clip flashes of memory, the bruising.
I didn't think any more that I'd been drunk. This was due to more than alcohol. I'd read sometime in a newspaper about what they called the date-rape drug. I could even remember its commercial name: Rohypnol. Dentists sometimes used it, and there was a similar veterinary product which sometimes got loose on the market.
There had been women who innocently accepted drinks from a stranger. Perhaps as much as a day later they'd woken to the sort of state I'd been in, with whole passages of time missing from their lives. They'd suffered the same symptoms. The friendly stranger - as they'd thought - had drugged and abducted them, then raped them while they were helpless. To anyone watching as they left the bar, the women had seemed a little drunk, not unwilling to be led away. Even co-operative.
Now it had happened to me. I'd been given something like that, when I'd been with Beryl Ryder. How could she let it happen? And why would she?
But she hadn't been alone. I recalled the shadowy sightings - a man, a decadent with pale eyes like washed-out blue denim, the pupils pinpoints. And Morgan, dressed to look like a nurse.
How much of that was nightmare fantasy, and how much real? And I'd thought I'd seen my father looking furious. Perhaps that was a memory escaped from some earlier time I'd offended him. How would I ever know?
But then I didn't want ever to know.
I found the bus had gone past my stop and I rushed to get
off, clutching my library books and the package with the revolting photographs. Now I'd nearly a mile to walk back.
I'd need all of that to get a grip on myself before facing Leila. She hadn't offered to pick me up today, expecting us to hang about after the last exam or go off to discuss it over milkshakes. That was one thing to be glad of.
I started to walk, and to try sorting things in my mind. My mind which I'd thought I'd been going out of. Now I knew I wasn't sick in quite that way.
But there were other horrors every bit as bad: what had actually happened. I could have been made pregnant.
Bile came up in my mouth. Whatever had happened was too far back now for any precautions to work. I knew there was a ‘morning-after' pill but it was too late even for that. And what about AIDS? HIV? I should really see a doctor, but I didn't dare. I would just have to wait and see what happened. How could I, though, with so much hanging over me?
I had to find Beryl Ryder. She had a lot to answer for. She had certainly laced my drink at that pub. Where had she dropped me off afterwards? Maybe she'd taken the photographs too. The idea shamed me. I wasn't sure I could trust myself to get in touch.
Was I imagining the way she'd looked at me once she knew who I was? With silent amusement. Could she be so coldly malicious, the sixth-former I'd admired because she was beautiful and, as I thought, sophisticated?
I still wasn't ready to face Leila by the time I reached home. I couldn't believe I ever would be. She was in the front garden planning where she'd plant a Viburnum hedge. She saluted me jauntily with a soily trowel but I went right past.
‘I'm going for a shower and then early bed,' I said shortly. ‘I couldn't face going out tonight.'
‘Whatever you like,' she offered. I'd worried her, but she doesn't fuss.
I'd reached the foot of the stairs when I thought of something
and went back to her. ‘Do you think I could borrow your mobile? I've a couple of calls to make. I promise I won't run you up an immense bill.'
‘Of course. The phone's in my shoulder bag in the kitchen.'
I helped myself to it and to the current area phone directory from the study. Then, as I'd said I'd do, I showered; but no amount of standing under the water and soaping myself off would ever get rid of what had happened to me.
In bed I looked up the Ryder number. There were only two entries for that name and one was for Truck Rental, so I chose the other. It still took me a long time to get round to ringing it.
It must have been her mother who answered; a languid, rather artificial voice. ‘Beryl's not here,' she told me. ‘Who shall I tell her called?'
When I gave my name and was halfway through my number she snapped back, ‘She has it, as you must know. I'm quite sure she won't want to trouble you by ringing back, Mrs Knightley.' Then the line went dead and the dialling tone returned.
It rather stunned me, but her mistake was understandable. So Beryl's mother knew about her affair with my father and had probably heard her ringing him at this number. She'd taken me for Leila, not knowing her first name. Now she might not pass on to Beryl that I'd rung. Perhaps that was a good thing.
But it seems that she did.
I was lying sleepless at a quarter to eight when the downstairs phone rang and Leila called up that it was for me. ‘Beryl someone,' she said as she passed the handset across.
The voice on the other end sounded a little breathless, and something more, perhaps uneasy.
I made certain the kitchen door was fast closed on Leila before speaking. ‘I want to know,' I said as firmly as I could, ‘exactly what you were up to on Friday. And as for the
photographs, you've no hope of blackmailing me. I've no money of my own. You must realise that.'

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