The Venus Trap (26 page)

Chapter Thirty-Eight
Day 5

H
e keels over like a solitary domino, a surprised look on his face, blood pouring out of a spot above his ear. Fortunately for him, my aim was not as good as I’d intended and I hit him
with the
shaft of the club, rather than the heavy end of it. I wonder if I’ve killed him, but at that moment, I can’t stop to think about this. I’ve got to get out: now.

I scrabble for the bunch of keys in his jeans pocket and, my hands shaking, pull them out and unlock my bedroom door. My front door keys are on the same bunch—I recognise the fob. I run as fast as possible down the hallway, skidding on the rag-rug, feeling it ruck and slide beneath my feet, as if I was still on the ice on the day John died.

As I reach the front door, I hear a long, low moan from my bedroom. Shit, I forgot to lock and bolt it behind me in my rush to get out! I dither for a second—should I go back? But I might risk him grabbing me again, and every instinct screams at me to put as much distance as I can between us.

My hands fumble faster with the bunch of keys and I ram the biggest one into the Chubb lock. It turns immediately. I push up the snib on the Yale, twist the knob, pull the door, throw myself through it, and start half-running, half-skidding, down the stairs outside in my socks. A roar behind me makes me jump out
of my
skin, and I slip on the uncarpeted wooden staircase,
twisting
my knee
so viciously that something goes ‘ping’ inside it and I gasp with pain as it then bangs hard against the wall on the first landing, compounding the damage. I turn to see Claudio looming at the top of the stairs, clutching his bleeding head with one hand like a zombie freshly risen from the grave. The blade of a knife—my big carving knife, the one he threatened me with when I rang Megan—glints in his other hand. Yelping with fear and pain, I try to stand, but my knee gives way and I can’t. Claudio is stumbling unsteadily down the stairs towards me, ricocheting off each wall of the stairwell. Glancing in terror over my shoulder, I stagger to the top of the stairs from the ground floor. The door to the street is in sight, and I focus all my energy on it, launching myself down the staircase by bumping myself down on my bottom. Claudio is gaining on me by the second.

I reach the front door and grab the handle to drag myself up to standing on one foot. If it’s locked, I’m screwed. There’s no way I’ve got time to fumble with the keys to find the right one. Claudio is four steps away from me, four seconds at most, the knife blade only three
. . .
I can’t see his face because it’s covered with blood, but he wipes it angrily with his sleeve. He’s sobbing and roaring incoherently, but the noise only acts as a blast of propulsion to get me out. I grit my teeth to ignore the pain in my knee, fling open the door, and thank God thank God thank God it’s not locked—air! I’m outside! The feel of fresh air in my lungs is as weird as anti-gravity, but I don’t have time to think about it.

Outside. The world is going on as ever. The gum-pocked concrete is cool beneath my socked feet; that beautiful, beautiful warm city air fills my lungs, redolent of kebab and
cigarettes
, stale booze and exhaust fumes, but I don’t have time to stop to appreciate it. The shops in the shabby high street outside my front door are all open, oblivious to the dramas that have unfolded inside my rented flat over the past week. I look frantically up and down the road, and there are people there—an Asian woman in a headscarf with a shopping trolley, an old man hobbling along on a walking stick, a traffic warden slapping a sticky notice on the windscreen of the white van parked on a single yellow line at the wrong time; normal distracted people doing a bit of shopping on a—whatever day it is—and cars and even a bus. I catch a glimpse of horrified and concerned faces staring out at me as it passes, and I must look a sight in my dirty pyjamas, hopping up the road screaming my head off as Claudio lumbers up behind me, catching me up . . .

‘Help me!’ I scream again, but I can’t hop any more and I put my left foot down on the ground and try to run but the pain shrieks throughout my whole body and I collapse on the pavement and cover my head with my arms waiting for the cold steel to puncture my ribs and stop my heart right there outside the closed-down charity shop, opposite the betting shop and next to the convenience store that Megan and I call the Inconvenience Store because it’s shut more often than it’s open and the fruit’s always going rotten . . .

Megan’s face fills my mind, her grave blue eyes and her gappy smile, the softness of her curly hair, just as I’m thinking, with a great plunge of regret,
I’ll never see you again, my darling,
and instead of the knife blade I feel a gentle hand on my shoulder
and hear
a kerfuffle behind me. I dare to open my eyes and see Claudio being rugby-tackled by the traffic warden, whose hat flies off as he jumps on Claudio’s legs. The knife clatters across the pavement and someone kicks it into the gutter, I don’t see who. Claudio is howling and roaring still, and trying to get up, flailing at the traffic warden who looks like he’s riding a bucking bronco. A terrified-looking girl pushing a screaming toddler in a pushchair is yelling into her mobile and pointing at me. More people crowd around me, but nobody else helps the traffic warden. Someone puts their coat under my head. Someone else awkwardly strokes my hair. There are
questions
:

‘Are you hurt, love?’

‘Who is he, your husband?’

‘Aren’t you Carol Singer’s daughter Jo? I know your mother!’

‘The police are coming . . .’

‘Did you do that to him? He’s covered in blood!’ (this from a censorious-looking older lady with a white stripe through her black hair, like a badger).

I snap at her, ‘He’s been keeping me prisoner in my flat for nearly a week! He’s off his head!’ The woman who says she knows my mum clucks protectively. I don’t recognise her, but Mum knew lots of people, and it’s a small town.

‘Don’t ring my mum,’ I beg her over the collective murmur of horror at my revelation, which rises to a fever pitch as Claudio, strengthened by his rage, manages to land a punch on the now-dazed traffic warden and stagger to his feet again. Several of the women around me scream, but instead of heading for me, Claudio crashes back through the still-open front door to my building and slams it behind him.

He’s gone, spots of blood on the pavement and a bloody handprint on my front door the only evidence that he’s ever been there.

I hear sirens, and suddenly the pain in my knee sweeps back over me in a mighty wave. I groan in agony—but the pain feels blissful, because I’m free. I’m alive. I will see Megan again.

Everything will be fine.

The next thing I’m aware of is sitting up in the back of an ambulance, strapped to a stretcher. Someone I recognise is staring into my face. His face is kindly, and tight with shock. He’s wearing a policeman’s uniform.

‘Jo! It’s me, Henry! Oh my God, Jo, I can’t believe it. I was on my way to check on you—Donna’s been so worried. You’ll be all right. You’re safe now.’

It’s Donna’s husband Henry—of course. I am too dazed to speak for a moment.

‘Donna’s already called Richard. He’s on his way. Shit, Jo, I feel awful . . . we should have done something much sooner . . .’

‘Richard’s in Italy,’ I croak.

‘He’s coming back. She rang him this morning when we couldn’t get hold of you. He and Megan will be back tonight.’

That’s all I need to hear.

Chapter Thirty-Nine
Day 5

I
spend a couple of hours in the Casualty department of
Brockhurst’s
hospital, first having my knee strapped up and X-rayed, and then in a small private room being interviewed by two of Henry’s police colleagues. I feel OK. Bit shaky, and spaced out from the painkillers the nurse gave me for my knee. I think I
managed
to give them the basic details about my five days’ enforced house arrest. I also told them that Claudio had confessed to sexually assaulting me back
in 1986.

Henry eventually comes back and drives me to his and
Donna’s
house. Donna and Richard greet us at the front door, Donna tearfully, the dogs padding silently around her feet as I limp in on crutches. ‘I’m so sorry I didn’t realise sooner. I feel terrible, oh, Jo, I’m so sorry. We should have come days ago. You poor thing. Are you OK?’

I’m so knackered I can’t speak. I just give her a wan smile and hug her back, then fall into Richard’s outstretched arms. He holds me tight and I breathe in the scent of him. He looks tanned from the holiday, but stressed and tight with anxiety beneath the tan. Tears glimmer in his eyes too. ‘Sorry you had to come back early,’ I whisper.

‘Don’t be daft.’

‘And sorry, I really stink.’

‘Again, don’t be daft.’

‘What do you want to do, Jo?’ Donna asks when Richard finally releases me. ‘Megan’s asleep upstairs. Glass of wine? Food? There’s stew in the oven.’

I regard the staircase doubtfully. I’m desperate to see Megan but I know I won’t have the energy to come down again once I’ve hobbled up. Tiredness is sweeping over me in great crashing waves.

‘I think I just want a shower and to sleep, if you don’t mind. Sorry, I know I stink.’

‘Of course, no problem at all.’ Donna is being slightly odd with me; formal, as though my incarceration has suddenly bestowed some sort of royal status upon me that requires her treating me with polite respect. Hope
that’s
not going to last.

‘Come on then, Hopalong.’ Richard takes my arm and helps me upstairs to the spare bedroom where Megan is asleep, looking tiny in a double bed. At the sight of her, the jigsaw pieces of my life finally start slotting back into place.

He leaves me to shower and change into pyjamas that Donna has thoughtfully left out on the bed for me. When I climb in next to my daughter, blissfully clean again, she stirs and flops an arm possessively across me, muttering, ‘Where have you been, Mummy? We came back early,’ before sliding back into gentle snores.

The normality of it all almost destroys me with gratitude, and I gaze and gaze at her beautiful sleeping face, putting tendrils of her hair back from her forehead. Then Richard comes back in, sits on the edge of the bed, and does the same thing to me. The familiar feeling of his fingers on my fringe makes me shiver with nostalgia.

‘Talk to me till I go to sleep, Rich?’ I whisper, feeling my body start to relax next to them both. ‘Tell me a bedtime story. Tell me about when you had your wisdom teeth out.’

He shifts so that he’s on the other side of me, on top of the bedclothes, though, where Megan and I are beneath them. I feel him pause, to try to think how to begin—or perhaps how to do it; it’s been so long since he talked me to sleep—then he starts, a small laugh in his voice.

‘That was when we became friends, wasn’t it? The start of it all. The summer after the first year at uni. I remember Ben calling me a purple puffer fish because my jaw was so bruised and I had cheeks like a hamster’s . . . he must have been about six then.

‘ “Richard, be a dear and pop to Boots for me?” Mum goes. “Ben’s got the runs and we’re out of Diorlyte. I can’t leave him. Richard, please?” ’

Richard mimics his mum’s high querulous voice, and it captures her perfectly. I’m in heaven. This is the best sort of therapy I could wish for. ‘Go on,’ I murmur.

He talks about how it was practically inevitable that he would bump into me when he looked so revolting, wearing grey sweatpants and an ancient Cure t-shirt . . . I hadn’t noticed what he was wearing, but I didn’t tell him that I had noticed his massive swollen cheeks, greasy hair, and the huge spot on his nose. He really looked awful—but as I didn’t see him as a love interest anyway, it hadn’t bothered me.

I didn’t tell him that either, although I know that he knows it.

‘We had a nice chat, didn’t we?’ I mumble instead.

‘We did. You had a whole, proper chat with me, about working in Boots for the holidays, about uni, how nice it was that everyone was home for summer. Did I know that Donna and Gareth split up? That sort of thing. I couldn’t get over that I was standing there, with you chatting so effortlessly to me, after all my attempts over so many years to get you to do just that. You looked so lovely, even in the white lab coat thing. You’d cut your hair short. If I was honest, I preferred it longer—like it is now—but I’d still have fancied you if you’d dyed it pink with purple spots.

‘Then you said you’d better get back to work, and you held out your hand for the Diorlyte. I passed it over, with Mum’s fiver and asked you if you fancied a drink some time that holiday. I nearly died of shock when you said yes.’

What had I been thinking, when I said yes? Why would I agree to a date with a boy I had never fancied? I suppose that I saw something in him, some spark of potential husband material that
overrode
my initial lack of sexual attraction to him. Perhaps my instincts weren’t quite as crap as I’d always thought they were. Although we were friends for a long time after that before anything happened between us.

This was why I seriously thought I might be able to convince Claudio that I loved him: because when you’re head over heels in love with someone, you see only what you want to see, hear what you want to hear. It didn’t actually matter what I thought, with either Claudio or Richard—although God knows their motivations were very different. Claudio wanted me as some sort of consolation prize for his own desperation. Richard wanted me because he just genuinely loved me.

As I feel the soft dark pull of sleep, fear-free, deep sleep,
Richard’s
voice starts to drift in and out of my head like a badly tuned radio. This must have been what it was like for Claudio when I was telling him about the ice rink.

‘We agreed on the next day. My hands were shaking as much as my jaw was aching. All I could think about was whether or not my breath would smell as a result of the surgery, if we—finally—kissed . . . We didn’t kiss the next evening, though, did we? Not for months and months after that—you wouldn’t speak to me for ages, do you remember? But that first night was still insanely wonderful, out at that country pub. I drove because I couldn’t drink anyway, on the painkillers. My face had subsided a little, but had turned a sickly kind of yellowy-green. I managed to shave properly, at least, and dressed up in my newest t-shirt and cleanest jeans. I contemplated borrowing some of that brown sludgy stuff my mother puts all over her face to hide her broken veins, but thankfully resisted . . . It was the best date I’ve ever been on, even though it was only as mates. We talked and talked—after all those years, I’d been a bit worried that we wouldn’t have enough in common—but we did. You were completely awesome. And you laughed at my jokes . . . Do you remember what you said to me when we kissed goodnight, just a peck on the cheek? You said, “You’ve liked me for ages, haven’t you?”—but you didn’t say it in an arrogant kind of way.’

I nod, already dozing.

‘I told you it had been years. I told you I couldn’t believe you’d finally agreed to go out with me when my cheeks made me look like a hamster someone had beaten up. You said you liked me too, but it was a bit soon after John, and could we just be friends for
a while . . .’

I remember that. He said OK, he’d take that. He could wait.

Richard laughs softly. ‘I’d have preferred you to say that you absolutely wanted to rip my clothes off then and there and couldn’t live without me, but I supposed it was a start. I wanted to tell you that I’d waited so long for you that I didn’t mind how long it took now, that I was sure I was going to marry you . . . All manner of corny things were streaming through my mind: “I feel like I’ve come home when I look at you,” or “You are the only one I will ever love,” but thankfully I managed not to go that far. It would have sounded utterly ridiculous coming from someone who looked like they’d been busy storing nuts up for winter.’

‘I knew, anyway,’ I murmur sleepily. Richard gets up off the bed, kissing both Megan and me on the cheek. She doesn’t stir.

‘By the way,’ he says when he gets to the door. ‘I still think you’re completely awesome.’

I dream of when Richard asked me to marry him. In real life, he’d gone down on one knee in the utility room of Mum’s house, at a New Year’s Eve party where the front room was full of her and Brian’s friends and Richard’s family, all getting giggly on cheap champagne. He had dragged me through the kitchen and out to the utility room just after the midnight countdown. I remember the ring box sitting on the top of the spin dryer. It had flecks of washing powder stuck on its black velvet carapace.

In my dream, though, Richard said, ‘Jo, will you marry me? I know we don’t have masses of sexual chemistry between us, but hey, let’s be adults about this. I’ve loved you for years, you like me as a friend, and I’m sure you will love me one day because I’m a really, really good guy. And look, here’s a photo of the daughter we’ll eventually have together. How could you say no to that? She’s called Megan. I want you so much. And if it doesn’t work out, then we can get divorced. Deal?’

I looked at the photo he was holding, of Megan dancing on the sand, trailing a blue plastic spade in one hand, her curls blowing in the wind and an expression of sheer joy on her face.

‘Deal,’ I said.

‘Great!’ said Richard, turning into Sean, as he beamed at me and slipped a blood pressure cuff onto my arm, instead of a ring onto my finger. I looked up into Sean’s beautiful eyes, and felt an overwhelming swell of lust through my body, followed by an even bigger swell of panic as I realised Richard had gone.

‘Come back!’ I shouted, and woke up crying.