The Venus Trap (6 page)

Chapter Seven
Day 2

C
laudio reappears with my diary but whisks it out of my reach when I go to grab it. ‘Don’t snatch,’ he says meanly. ‘
Apologise
.’

Arsehole,
I scream at him inside my head. ‘I’m sorry, Claudio,’ I say contritely, not quite risking fluttering my eyelashes at him. I still wouldn’t put it past him to punch me in the mouth, or worse. There’s a horribly volatile air about him—a phrase I once heard springs to mind:
madder and more unstable than a box of frogs on a one-legged stepladder.

When he leaves again, I carry on reading it from the torn-out first page.

I wish I hadn’t, though. I’m not sure there’s any way I can talk to Claudio about this part of it. I’m mortified to think that he’s already probably looked at it. What if it turned him on, got
him going?

I can’t think about that. I force myself instead to think that it serves as a reminder that I’ve been through really tough, shitty experiences before and survived them. Just about.

19th December 1986

I don’t want to write about this, but I feel like I have to. What’s that word that means something that makes you feel better for having talked about it? Am going to look it up in the dictionary.

Cathartic. Will it make me feel better? I doubt it.

I’m going to write about it like it’s an English essay, just a story that I’ve made up. Mr Merwood would have a shock if I handed him this one to mark.

It was freezing cold. I walked down Endless Street towards home, my cold purple fingers fiddling with the plastic toggles on my coat to give me more of a shield between me and the biting wind, dreaming of the day that John realised he couldn’t live without me.

It got really quiet, after the shops turned into houses. Every front room I walked past seemed to have a silently winking Christmas tree in the window, and the only sound was the plastic bag banging against my leg. I had hooked it over my wrist so I could walk with both hands jammed deep into my coat pockets.

When I reached the swimming baths’ car park, I hesitated. There was a gang of teenagers messing about by the bins against the side wall of the pool building, smoking and pushing one another for no apparent reason. Swearing, of course, and laughing self-consciously, all of them wearing toad-coloured parkas with furry hoods and what looked like the tails of beavers trailing down behind their knees.

Mods aren’t usually as intimidating as punks or bikers, en masse, but I felt scared straight away. The trouble was, though, in order to avoid passing them, I’d have to cut across the car park, which was deserted, and down the alley that’s a shortcut to the end of our road. Mum’s always told me never to go down that narrow, unlit alley after dark—and I’ve never had any wish to, either.

I had to decide. I couldn’t just stand there dithering—it would draw attention to myself. All my instincts screamed at me to keep away from the Mods by the bins. It’s only a short alley: if I hurried, I’d be through it in thirty seconds.

That’s what I thought, anyway.

The alley it was, then. I set off, head down, relieved that none of the boys appeared to have noticed me—I could still hear them faintly cursing and sniggering. A fragment of a song appeared in my head, chasing itself insistently round and round: ‘It’s my instinction, it’s my instinction’—it’s a song that’s always bugged me with its grammatical
inaccuracy
and nonsensical lyrics. Was there even such a word as ‘instinction’? Who sang it? It was around when I was about ten and still at primary school. Even then it irritated me.

Deep breath.

I went into the alley and suddenly, from nowhere, running footsteps came up behind me. They made me jump, and I forgot about the song. I glanced round, and moved to one side to let the runner pass. He was tall and skinny, with baggy jeans, but it was when I registered what was going on from his neck up that my heart started pounding so hard I thought I was going to faint. The man was wearing a balaclava,
his eyes two circles of horror surrounded by blackness
.

I still couldn’t believe it. I forced myself instead to believe that this must be some kind of joke, and I waited for him to run past or rip off the balaclava, revealing himself to be a friend of John’s, or even John himself, going ‘Boo—scared ya!’ Any alternative to that just did not seem possible.

But he didn’t run past. Instead, he sort of lunged at me, pushing me against the wall and making my head bang against it. Then he started trying to kiss me, his tongue sticking out through the mouth hole in the woolly face mask in a really obscene way. His breath stank, and there was another smell, too, which took me a moment to place—damp wool. He must have been sweating into his balaclava even though it was freezing.

I shook my head to try to get away from his hideous tongue, closed my eyes, and then opened them again, in the ludicrous hope that I was just imagining the whole thing. My first ever kiss.

I’m crying my eyes out writing that.

But he was still there, and he still hadn’t said anything, not a word. I leant against the wall to keep my balance, trying to think of my feet planted like tree roots into the ground, thinking that he wouldn’t be able to rape me if I stayed standing up. But then it was like he read my mind, about trying to stay standing. I felt his hands grab the sides of my arms, twisting me around until my cheek was pressed against the rough bricks. I could smell chlorine from the nearby pool, and dog poo. He was forcing me to the ground. Even at the height of the crisis, I thought I would actually die if I had to lie in dog poo to be raped. He pushed and I fought, but he was stronger than me and I felt my knees begin to buckle. The plastic bag with the record in it flew off my wrist and across the alley.

Then it was like he suddenly had a different idea: he pressed one arm across the back of my neck, and his other hand shot down and then up under my dress. He was actually trying to pull down my tights. They were already too small for me, like the dress, I’d had them since I was in the Second Year, and the waistband was always annoyingly low on my hips. It meant that his cold hands touched my bare hot skin and I gagged, at the smell of the dog shit and the shock, my hands flailing to try to bat him away.

Finally it occurred to me to make a noise, to attract some attention, but the best I could manage was a pathetic little yelp, more of a feeble shocked ‘eek’ than a full-blown ear-splitting scream.

Or maybe it did work because suddenly, from nowhere, a boy in a beige macintosh ran into the alley. At first I thought it was an accomplice, and I bit my lip so hard that it started to bleed. My legs began to give way and I thought, oh no, oh God, I’m really for it now.

Then there was the sound of a fist connecting with a stomach, once, twice, followed by a loud grunt from my attacker, who instantly released me and reeled back against the wall next to me.

The boy shouted at me to run. But even though my knight in shining mac was smaller and much younger-looking, about my age, the man in the balaclava reacted as if
he’d
been told to run.

There was this totally surreal moment when the three of us set off up the alley together, all running in the same direction like a starting gun had been fired: me and my attacker with a head start, Mac Boy chasing after him. But then he—the attacker—must have realised that all running off together was a bit, well, silly, and so after about ten yards he wheeled around a hundred and eighty degrees, pushed past Mac Boy, and sprinted back the way he’d come, into the swimming baths car park.

I ran without feeling my legs, aware only of a dull throbbing pain between them, until I reached the front gate, which was open, as was the front door. Mum was standing there, bathed in the yellow hall light, fidgeting from foot to foot, clearly very reluctantly listening to a reedy rendition of
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
sung by the small Women’s Institute group of singers gathered around the doorstep. I hurled myself down the gravel path, almost knocking a lady in a hairy tweed coat into the lavender bush by the front door, and I didn’t even stop to apologise. My whole entire being was focused on reaching the safety of my house. All I could think was, Why, oh why, did I go down that alley? If I’d gone past the Mods, I’d have been fine.

So much for my bloody ‘instinction’.

My fears about Claudio having already read it are confirmed when he returns about twenty minutes later, wearing jeans with creases in them and a boring button-down canary yellow shirt. He looks very well groomed—he’s had a shave, and his thick dark hair is gelled back off his expanse of forehead. Is he trying to impress me?

Without preamble he says, ‘So that was your first kiss?’

How did he know which bit I’d been reading? Guessed, I supposed, since it came after the entry we ‘discussed’ last night. I hate him.

‘I thought you wanted to talk about my divorce.’

‘Jo, Jo, Jo . . . I told you, I want to talk about
everything
.’

I hate him.

He sits down again on the bed in his ‘listening’ pose, chin in hand, expectant expression.

I stand up. ‘OK, I’ll talk. But not facing you. It’s not exactly easy to talk about, you know.’

He shrugs, so I go round to the far side of my bed and sit with my back to him. I notice faint white splatter marks around the legs of my bedside table, the residue of when I had to get the pest guy round to spray everywhere. Lester had fleas, and I had to get the flat fumigated.

‘Where’s my
cat
?’ I say suddenly.

‘It’s fine. It’s in the kitchen.’

‘He’s a boy. Lester. Have you fed him?’

‘Yes, yes,’ he says impatiently. ‘I told you that last night. Anyway, let’s get back to your first kiss. Stop trying to change
the subject.’

Horrible, evil man.

‘Not much of a first kiss.’ I stare at the wallpaper, the big peachy rose print that I put on one wall to make the room more overtly feminine now that I was no longer sharing it with anyone. I had been thrilled when the landlord gave me permission to redecorate, and Donna, Steph, Megan, and I had gone mad with pastel shades, wallpaper paste, and Victorian ephemera. I loved it.

I used to love it, until now. Claudio’s presence in my beautiful haven has spoilt it forever.

‘Did they ever catch the guy?’

I shrug. ‘Don’t think so.’

Suddenly I feel something on my shoulder. His hand, tentatively touching me, not like the meaty clamp of yesterday. ‘Must have been tough for you.’

I don’t want his fucking sympathy! I make a noncommittal noise and twitch my shoulder out of his grasp.

‘And did you find out who the boy in the mac was?’

‘Richard. It was Richard Atkins.’

Claudio makes a girly, simpering noise. ‘Awwww, how
sweet.
Little Richard to your rescue. That why you married him, was it?’

‘I didn’t know it was him until ages afterwards.’

‘I’d have rescued you, if I’d seen it happen,’ he says. ‘Tell me how it made you feel.’

I try to imagine he’s my therapist, Eileen.

I fail.

But I answer him anyway. ‘What—the attack, or reading about it again now?’

‘Both.’

I hesitate. It’s so personal, it makes my toes curl. ‘It made me afraid of ever walking anywhere on my own after dark. If someone was walking behind me, I’d freak out. If anyone ever pounced on my shoulders, just for a laugh or whatever, I’d scream. I feel—’ My throat suddenly closes up.

‘Yes?’

‘The same now. You keeping me here feels the same.’ I was going to add, ‘I feel out of control,’ but then realise that he’d probably love me to say that, because that’s what he wants. He wants me to know that he’s in control. I’m not going to give him that satisfaction.

‘Have you read that diary again since?’

I shake my head. He’d emptied out a box of old school exercise books and the diary had been among these. ‘I haven’t seen it for years, and I don’t think I’ve ever been able to read it back before.’

‘I’m sure it’s good for you. As you say, cathartic.’ He sounds so smug and self-satisfied, like he’s doing me this massive favour.

‘It makes me feel sick.’

Sick, and disappointed at my sixteen-year-old self. Somewhere inside me I’d always had a small fantasy about having the opportunity to scream, really loudly—after all, it wasn’t the sort of thing one often got the chance to do without the emergency services being summoned. And then, when any sort of emergency service would have been really handy, I hadn’t been able to do it.

If I screamed like that now, would anybody come?