The Venus Trap (4 page)

Chapter Five
Day 1

I
assumed that we’d be having dinner in the kitchen where the dining table is, but at 6.00 p.m. sharp—like I’m an OAP having an Early Bird Special—Claudio comes back in with a tray that he sets down on the bed. I have never been less pleased to see anybody, and I’m disappointed that I’m apparently not allowed to leave the room yet. As soon as the door opens, my heart rate doubles. Sweat springs out on my forehead and prickles my armpits.

‘I’ve just made you something light in case your tummy is still a bit unsettled,’ he says with a hint of pride, as though I ought to be impressed with his consideration. I glance at the tray. A poached egg sits messily on one of Megan’s plastic plates, next to some spaghetti hoops and a slice of the sort of crap white bread that I never eat. I take a sip of the drink, also in a plastic cup, and make a face when I realise it’s the sort of horrible cheap blackcurrant squash where all you can taste is sweeteners and carcinogens.

‘I poached the egg the proper way, loose in the pan in vinegar,’ he comments. We both regard the egg, which looks grey and straggly and utterly uninviting. I had been starting to feel hungry but now I feel sick again. The hoops have clearly been on the plate for a while as they’re starting to congeal at the edges.

‘Aren’t you having any?’

Claudio shrugs. ‘I’ll get something later.’

I take a deep breath. ‘Oh, that’s a shame. I was hoping we might be able to sit down for a proper dinner together. You wanted to talk, didn’t you?’ I didn’t mean it to sound aggressive but I’m worried it comes out that way.

‘We can still talk.’ He sits down at the end of my bed, looking constipated and uncomfortable, like he has something to say but can’t spit it out. I put the tray on my lap and toy with a couple of hoops with the plastic picnic fork he’s provided. My hand is shaking, which frustrates me, but I can’t seem to stop it.

‘I know this is a bit . . . awkward,’ he says to the bedpost.

No shit, Sherlock.

‘Well . . . it’s certainly not conventional.’ I’m trying to keep my voice light, conversational.

A long silence follows. The television is on in the background, a re-run of MTV’s
Pimp My Ride,
so I focus on that.
Keep calm, Jo, keep calm. You’re all right, so far. You aren’t tied up or gagged any more. It’s not like a real kidnap. He just won’t let you leave, that’s all
. And he’s just sitting there staring at me. I can talk him round, I’m sure I can. If he tries to rape me at any point, I’ll tell him I’ve got herpes, or syphilis, or AIDS.

But would that make him more likely to want to kill me? And what if he doesn’t care what diseases I pretend to have, if he’s planning to rape and kill me anyway and then top himself? He’s a big man: I won’t stand a chance if he tries to overpower me. I’m trying to recall what to do in these situations: a knee in the nuts, an elbow in the throat, fingers in the eyes.

Don’t think about the odds of Claudio wanting to kill me, or of Claudio not
wanting
to kill me, but ending up killing me anyway because he doesn’t know what else to do with me . . . Think about Megan cuddling up to one side of me in the mornings; Lester the cat to the other. Our own strange little family.

I eat another hoop and a string of vinegary poached egg, although it almost makes me gag.

‘What do you want from me, Claudio?’ I blurt.

I don’t want to know the answer, but I suppose I need to
know it.

He stares at me in silence for a long time, his face in eerie shadows cast by my bedside light, and I force myself to look back at him, to challenge him. His skull beneath his sparse, cropped black hair is a weird, distorted shape, with an unbecoming lumpiness at the side and above his forehead, like a baby Elephant Man. I noticed that on our date the other night. He won’t look good once he finally goes completely bald. His cheeks look doughy and pallid. I can’t believe I ever found him even remotely attractive.

‘I want you to love me,’ he says simply.

I’m blindsided by this. I don’t know what to say.

‘Love you?’ I repeat stupidly.

‘I love you, Jo, and I want you to love me. I want to have a future with you.’

Bile rises in my throat again and I force myself to swallow it back down. It won’t look good if I puke all over the tray, let alone over his romantic little vision, although that’s all it deserves.

‘But . . . Claudio . . . you’re a bright man. You must know that this is—’

Insane? Criminal? The least likely way on earth to ever make me fall for him?

‘. . . not the right way to get me to love you.’

He snorts derisively.

‘What?’

‘I knew you were going to say that,’ he says, glaring at me. ‘Next you’ll give me a load of bullshit about how the only way would be for us to get to know each other conventionally, go on more dates, more dinners—only you won’t mean it, will you, because you’ve already dumped me! It would just be a load of lies to try and fool me into letting you go, so save your breath because I’m not that fucking gullible.’

It comes back to me in a flash: he’s right—I did dump him, last night. After our third date. Had he planned all this already, or was it a spur-of-the-moment idea? How did h
e k
now I’d have a bed that he could handcuff me to? I suppose he didn’t, and I’m fortunate not to have been chained to the radia
tor instead.

I ask him a more obvious question: ‘But how do you really expect me to fall in love with you when you’ve drugged me and you’re keeping me a prisoner?’

He tips his lumpy head to one side as if he’s contemplating the question. ‘You’ll never find anyone who loves you as much as I do, you know. You just need a few days to get to know me, and to know that I’m serious. Eat up now, before it gets cold.’

It’s already cold. I put the fork down.

‘No? OK, let’s talk then. Let’s start with this—’

He pulls a crumpled piece of paper out of his jeans pocket and smooths it out on his large lap. In the dim light I don’t at first see what it is—and then I do. It’s a page of my diary.

‘
You’ve torn up my diary?
’

He frowns, offended. ‘No I haven’t! I just brought this page in so we could start a chat about it. It’s the first page. You can always sellotape it back in, if it’s all that important. But honestly, nothing happens! You won’t miss it.’

Oh my God
, I think. He’s insane, or really cruel, and I’m not yet sure which.

To my horror, he starts reading out loud in a high, slightly mocking voice, squinting at the occasional word he can’t immediately make out in my tiny cramped handwriting:

‘ “19th December 1986. Horrible day. I hate my body. I spotted my reflection in the window of Snellers Music Shop, and the sight of it made me cringe. My shoulders were all hunched against the December air, bedraggled even though it wasn’t raining, red nose, watery eyes. My duffel coat makes me look like an Oxo cube.”
An Oxo cube? Really? That’s a bit of a strange comparison, isn’t it? You reminded me of many things when you were sixteen, Jo, but I have to say that an Oxo cube wasn’t one of them.’

He sniggers, as though he’s made a hilarious joke. I hate him.

I can’t speak, and he seems to take this as encouragement
to continue.

‘ “There was a bitterly cold wind cutting through my woolly tights and blowing up the front of my Laura Ashley dress. I hate that dress, too. It’s got a frilly yoke, like a nightie, and puffy sleeves, and I’ve had it since I was thirteen . . .”
What’s a
yoke
? I thought that was an Irish word for a thingamajig?’

I drop my head. My eyes are full of tears again. ‘Please go. Leave me alone.’

He looks hurt. ‘I’m interested, Jo! Come on, talk to me.’

‘I don’t want to.’

I don’t want to. Richard and I used to talk to each other for hours, recounting stories to help each other sleep, or just for the sheer pleasure of it. This feels like a twisted, horrible parody of something that I now realise was sacred to me. Something I hadn’t realised I missed so much.

He stands up suddenly and throws the torn-out sheet of diary at me. ‘I asked you a question: what’s a yoke?’

I have to bite the sides of my tongue to produce enough saliva to be able to speak; fear has dried me up and shrivelled me.

‘It’s a . . . I don’t know how to describe it. A panel across the front of a garment.’ I gesture with my hands across the top of my chest to indicate where, not meeting his eyes.

‘So why did you hate your body then? I always thought it was really nice. And where were you going that day? See—I haven’t even read it. I want you to tell me about it.’ Claudio settles back against the bedpost, crosses his legs, and folds his arms, ready for a story.

Slowly, I set the tray with the almost-untouched food aside and smooth out the sheet of my diary. The sight of it gives me a pang. Even though I’ve not looked at it for years, it takes me right back, sitting writing it in my little attic bedroom in Brockhurst, my mother downstairs empty-eyed in front of the television, a huge gap in our lives where Dad had been. The gap had swelled and ballooned and pressed all the air out of the house until all that was left was stale, recycled grief.

I read the two pages to myself, refusing to look at Claudio. The writing is
really
tiny. I remember doing this intentionally to put off potential snoopers—little could I have imagined who that snooper would end up being, more than a quarter of a century later.

I don’t know anybody else that wears needlecord. I’ve been trying to persuade Mum to let me get rid of it for ages—apart from being horrible, it’s much too tight across my boobs now. Everyone else wears acid-wash jeans or baby doll dresses, while I’m still stuck with the prissy sprigged monstrosity. I’d die if any of my mates saw me in it.

‘That dress cost £30. It’s got heaps of wear left in it,’ is all Mum says whenever I whinge about it. She’s generally pretty good about letting me choose my own clothes, but the Laura Ashley’s a particular bone of contention because Dad bought it for me. I used to get embarrassed that my dad did spontaneous, un-male things like buying me clothes. He didn’t even mind putting on an apron and making the dinner. But Mum loved it.

‘I miss him, Jo,’ she sobs. ‘I miss him so much. Who’s going to look after me now?’

I just hug her, but I’m thinking, ‘So who’s going to look after me?’ I don’t say it, though. There’s no point. If I can’t even get my own way over the stupid dress—even though Dad bought it for me, it doesn’t mean that I like it—then I might as well give up on asking for
anything
more ambitious, like security, or stability. That’s what Dad was to us, and now he’s gone, we’re left
floating untethered across a vast sea of doubt and grief
.

Does that sound pretentious? I think it would be good in a poem. I’m going to underline it so I don’t forget. I said to Mum the other day, about the dress, ‘But it’s so babyish,’ and all she said was, ‘Yes, well, you’re my baby, aren’t you?’

At least she smiled when she said it.

I hate Christmas, too. Even before Dad died, I hated it. Why does Mum’s name have to be Carol Singer? It’s so embarrassing and you wouldn’t believe how much stick the swimming club boys gave me when they discovered.

It would be so much better if I only had a boyfriend, one who had a huge welcoming house with a Christmas tree that touched the ceiling, and enough turkey to share with me and Mum. A boyfriend like John Barrington-Brown. He’s SO gorgeous. If John and I got married, then me and Donna would be sisters. How amazing to have your best friend as your sister too! Is sixteen too young to get engaged?

And then there’s the small problem of John’s current girlfriend
Gill. Cow.

I’m still blushing from when I bumped into John on his lunch break from Safeways. Because I wasn’t wearing a slip, the bunchy
fabric
of that hateful dress kept crawling up inside my thighs, and every ten paces I had to stop and shake it out. I’d just extracted it for the
umpteenth
time, in a particularly unladylike fashion—knees bent
outwards
,
bottom
slightly sticking out, hand stuck up inside my duffel coat to reach the climbing dress.

Naturally that was the moment when John emerged from the supermarket’s staff entrance, looking edible in those tight black trousers he wears for his job on the cheese counter. There’s a little
stripy hat
that goes with the uniform, too (I know that from all the many hours I’ve spent lurking around Aisle 9 spying on him) but sensibly he’d removed that before venturing out in public. I hoped beyond hope he hadn’t spotted me fishing around in my duffel coat, but he was
already smirking.

‘Well, look—it’s little Jo. What have you bought?’ Little Jo? How patronising! He tweaks the WHSmiths plastic bag dangling from my wrist. I’ve already forgiven him.