The Venus Trap (7 page)

Chapter Eight
Day 2

H
e leaves shortly after that, muttering something about
making
coffee
and going to read the paper, but it’s clear that he needs a dump: after he’s bolted my bedroom door, I hear him go into the guest bathroom and lock that door—like anyone could come in! But he strikes me as the sort of guy who habitually locks the toilet door even when he’s on his own in a house. He’s in there for a long time. He took my diary with him so he’s probably sitting on the loo reading it. I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to use that bathroom again.

What am I saying? I’m never going to be able to spend another night in this
flat
after this. Megan and I will have to move again.

I lie back on my bed, a fresh wave of hatred washing over me. Perhaps it’s not even worth clearing up in here. But then I regard the mess on the floor around me and decide that I should. Putting things away might make me feel marginally better.

As I sit up again, something catches my eyes: the loft! This is a top floor flat, and the hatch is in the corner of my bedroom. I can’t believe I’ve been in here this long and it didn’t occur to me before.

I’ve only been up in the attic space once, to store a load of stuff when I first moved in. Donna and Henry were helping me move and I think they were in charge of putting stuff up there, so I’m not a hundred per cent sure I would find anything useful even if I could get in—which I can’t. The loft doesn’t have a pull-down ladder and, obviously, I don’t have a stepladder to hand. There’s one in the flat, but it’s in the tall cupboard in the kitchen and therefore not accessible to me. My chest of drawers is about three feet high, and the ceiling about ten. I’m five foot six, so if I stand on the chest, I won’t even be able to see inside the loft, let alone climb in. So it’s of no use at all to me, unless Claudio does by some miracle decide to helpfully provide me with a ladder.

As if.

I hear the toilet flush and him going into the kitchen. Presently, the smell of my Columbian coffee sneaks underneath the door on tantalising fingers, but he doesn’t bring me a cup.

I spend the next two hours folding and putting all my clothes back in my chest of drawers. I can’t hang my dresses back up because he confiscated all my clothes hangers, even the nice padded ones, so I fold them too and put them on the floor of my wardrobe. I work slowly and methodically and even set aside a bag of stuff that I never wear, to give to charity. It is soothing to have something physical to do, but all too soon, my heart leaps painfully into my chest as I hear the scrape of the bolt being unlocked again. I jump back into bed—I’m not sure why; perhaps because it’s less confrontational—and am sitting up meekly when he comes in, clutching the duvet to my chest.

‘I’ve brought you some lunch, darling.’

So it seems we’re back to ‘kind and concerned’ mode, after the earlier ‘snarky and aggressive’. He puts the tray down on my lap, with a plastic bowl, a mug, bread roll, apple, and a finger vase on it—mine, one that Richard bought me as a Valentine’s gift once. The vase contains a rose that I can tell immediately is fake, and I wonder if the bowl contains plastic soup.

‘Chicken soup,’ he says proudly as if he made it himself, but I can smell that it’s out of a can.

I clutch the edges of the tray to stop my hands shaking.

‘How are you feeling now, my love?’ His eyes are so full of pity I have to look away to prevent my expression antagonising him. ‘Much better, thanks. Just been tidying up, but it made me a bit tired so I’m having a rest now.’ I gesture to the much-clearer floor.

He beams. ‘Excellent! I hope you like soup!’

‘Yes. Thank you. I’m quite hungry. But I’ll save the apple f
or later.’

I decide at that moment that I will stockpile food whenever I can. I’ll keep anything non-perishable under my bed, if I can get away with it, in case he decides to stop feeding me. Or drops dead while I’m still locked in here.

He hovers beside my bed like he’s visiting me in hospital, and we regard one another warily. I pick up the spoon—also plastic; for heaven’s sake, what does he imagine I’d do with a regular spoon? Although once I start thinking about it, a few things spring to mind: stick the handle up his nose. Jab it into his eyes. Ram it hard into his testicles.

The thought of his testicles makes me lose my appetite, but I force down a spoonful of lukewarm cream of chicken.

He leans forward to watch me, planting his large hands on his thighs. ‘I think you should have another afternoon in bed. You were so sick yesterday, you must still be feeling pretty weak.’

He’s stalling, I can tell. I suppose he doesn’t know what else to do with me.

‘Do I have a choice?’ I try not to sound testy. I’m torn between actually wanting to rest—as I do feel very dodgy still and I need to build up my strength, mental and physical—and dying to get out of this room already.

‘Doctor Cavelli knows best,’ he says, with what he probably imagines is a cheeky grin. ‘But you could always just carry on
pottering
around clearing this lot up.’ He gestures towards the remaining mess on the floor, now mostly books, shoes, old birthday cards, and board games, their contents spilled out and mixed up, a Scottie dog and a top hat lying next to Chinese Checkers and the components of Mousetrap. He spots it too and picks up the plastic trap.

‘Mousetrap! I love that game. Hey, we could play later—how about that?’

‘No!’ I look down and meekly add, ‘Thank you.’

‘Oh. Right. OK then. I’ll leave you to it. I’m going to cook a nice dinner for tonight. Is there anything you don’t eat?’

‘Um, no. Only anchovies. Can we eat at the table?’ The thought of getting out of the bedroom into the kitchen lifts my spirits immeasurably. If I can just get out of this room, surely I can find something to hit him over the head with and escape?

Claudio hesitates. ‘Let’s see,’ he says.

‘Claudio, I can’t stay in here forever!’

‘You’ve been ill. I’m looking after you,’ he replies stubbornly, not meeting my eyes.

‘I haven’t been ill. You drugged me and chained me to my bedpost.’ I’m trying not to sound petulant but it’s not working.

Claudio suddenly leaps up and thrusts his face in mine, roaring at me so loudly that my bowels turn to liquid and I almost soil myself. My knees jerk instinctively up and the tray with the bowl of soup and the lukewarm tea on it flips over and it all goes everywhere, soaking into the duvet.

‘YOU WILL STAY HERE UNTIL I SAY YOU CAN LEAVE!’

I bite my tongue so hard I’m worried that I’ve actually bitten a bit off. But it’s better than crying in front of him again. The scariest thing is that, for the first time, I truly believe he really is completely insane.

‘Don’t try my patience, Jo. I don’t think you realise the sort of stress I’m under at the moment.’

I try to take deep breaths but they come out as shallow and
fearful
puffs. My tongue is agony.

‘Sorry to hear it, Claudio. What is it? It is your work?’

I’ve been wondering why he’s not at work—I’m sure he told me on one of our dates that he worked for a pharmaceutical company, in IT. No, wait, it’s still only Sunday . . . I think . . .

‘I’ve got the week off,’ he says. ‘To spend it with you. No, it’s not that.’ He opens his mouth as though he’s about to say something else, then abruptly leans across and picks up the tray in one hand, then uses the empty plastic bowl to scoop up the
dollops
of soup sitting on the duvet like cat sick.

‘Can you get me some clean sheets, please?’ I ask him. ‘They’re in the cupboard in the spare room.’

He salutes with his free hand. ‘Your wish is my command.’

‘Let me go, then.’

There is a long, tense moment in which I immediately regret what I’ve said in case it provokes more aggression.

‘Not until you love me,’ he eventually replies, and heads towards the bedroom door. When he reaches it he turns back. ‘By the way, if you even consider making a run for it when I open this door, or hiding behind it to leap out and bash me when I come in—I
will
keep you handcuffed to the bedstead. You will have to piss in a pot. I mean it.’

I nod submissively and he’s gone, the now-familiar sound of the bolt shooting closed echoing in his wake.
Nice way to show you love me
, I think to myself.

Like an old, old lady, I push aside my wet bedclothes, climb out of bed, and plod over to my chest of drawers to get dressed. My legs are shaking violently and I still feel as weak as a newborn lamb. The thought makes me yearn to be in a field, frisking on fresh, green buttercup-studded grass in the morning sunshine. The sky would be the clearest blue and the sun would feel hot on my soft wool. At this moment, in the sickly yellowy light of my energy-saving light bulb, I feel more as though I’ve just been ushered into the slaughterhouse. I’d give anything to be in natural light and fresh air.

Will he really kill me if I can’t prove I love him in a week?

Chapter Nine
Day 2

I
must have still been feeling the effects of the drug because I did actually drift off to sleep again after Claudio brought in the clean sheets and I changed the bed. I felt exhausted after just that small exertion and the stress of Claudio yelling at me.

I fell into a vivid dream about Richard, Megan and I going on holiday to Balamory, the venue of the kids’ TV show that Megan had a DVD box set of when she was three or four. Balamory is in reality Tobermory on the island of Mull, and we’d had a lovely week there about three years ago. In my dream we were back in our hotel, rain hammering on the windows and a grey sea boiling outside as Richard and I played Scrabble in the lounge, a room so grim and unwelcoming—gas fire, the sort of sofas you have to sit bolt upright in—that we christened it Suicide Lounge. Richard said there was nothing for it but to steal the Scrabble, play it in our room, and then take it home with us. They didn’t deserve it, he said.

‘But how will we take it without anyone noticing?’ I asked, in my dream. I’ve never stolen anything in my life—too worried about getting caught.

Richard had grinned evilly. ‘Tile by tile,’ he said, tapping the side of his nose. ‘Like in
The Great Escape
. Into the turn-ups when no-one’s looking, then back to the room where we . . .’ He mimed shaking the tiles out of his trouser legs and Miss Hoolie, a
character
from
Balamory
, called the police to have us arrested. I shouted, ‘Good, yes! Call 999—I’ve been kidnapped!’ Richard morphed into Claudio, and I woke up in a cold sweat.

The Scrabble in the lounge part of the dream had been true—Megan had mentioned it the other day, the last day before she left for her holiday, so it must have been on my mind. She had climbed into my bed—as usual, half an hour before she was allowed to—and said without preamble, ‘Do you remember that time in Balamory when Daddy wanted us to steal the Scrabble?’

I hadn’t remembered, but as soon as she said it, I did. My eyes immediately flooded with tears and I had to discreetly wipe them on the duvet cover while Megan played with the cat, wiggling her feet under the covers for him to pounce on. Just before the Scrabble incident we’d been out for a long, alcoholic lunch to escape the rain. Not that we even particularly cared that it was raining—our shared bi-annual holidays were sacrosanct to us both, a chance for uninterrupted family time, Richard banned from switching on his phone more than once a day so that work couldn’t intrude.
Sunshine
would just have been an added bonus. Megan, aged four, had sat happily colouring and chatting to her felt-tips, while Richard and I polished off two bottles of wine and freshly caught sea bass.

I haven’t thought about that for years, the holiday or the
Scrabble
. We used to play loads of Scrabble on holiday, and I can’t see a Scrabble board now without imagining the accompaniment of a backdrop of sea and a chilled glass of wine.

There is so much I’ve forgotten about our lives together—I
genuinely
cannot understand how that could have happened. It’s as if some evil scientist has wiped my brain clean of all our shared jokes, stories, anecdotes, rituals. It was only three years ago, for heaven’s sake.

I’d forgotten them all, when the remembering would have saved us.

I’d forgotten how we both knew all the words to
Cool for Cats
and
Sultans of Swing
, and would bellow them, loudly and tunelessly,
whenever
either song came on the car radio, like that scene in
Wayne’s World
where they’re all head-banging to
Bohemian Rhapsody
, even though we were both in junior school when those songs first came out.

I’d forgotten how frequently we used to sing together, back in the old days. Neither of us can sing very well, but when we first became a couple, we used to lie in bed singing David Essex songs in Mockney accents, giggling and hamming: ‘
’Old
me close, don’ let me go, no-oh
naw
!’ Our mums had loved David Essex and one of the things we had in common was that we’d both grown up with his music in the background of our lives.

The bed was one of those tiny little doubles with a slightly rusty iron frame and a saggy mattress, which the vicar at Richard’s mum’s church had given us free of charge. Glad to get rid of it,
probably
. That was in the days before we had any money, in the mid-
nineties
. When Richard took me out to dinner for the first time, I was appalled that the bill came to twenty-seven pounds. It seemed the height of extravagance. How many thousands of dinners did we have, over all the years since, I sometimes wonder?

I can’t do anything for a long time. I just lie there missing
Richard
and thinking about how I wish I had never set eyes on Sean, the catalyst for my disaster. My own personal marriage-wrecker. And now,
six month
s after it’s all over with Sean, I get
Claudio?
Give me a break!

Self-pity threatens to swamp me, so I make a conscious effort to rally. I remember when I was a kid my mum saying, ‘If you’re upset, go and clean out a cupboard.’ Although ‘upset’ is an understatement in this situation, I take her point and decide to attack the remaining chaos on my bedroom floor.

As I’m sitting cross-legged on the carpet separating tiny components from board games into piles, there’s a scratching at my door, and a tentative mew. Lester! Claudio must have left the kitchen door open. I crawl across to the door—it seems easier than standing up and walking—and lie down on my belly, whispering to him through the gap at the bottom.

‘Hey, baby, how are you? Is he feeding you? Are you OK? Can you go raise the alarm for me, eh?
Mew once if you’re in Cincinnati
.’ I’m paraphrasing a line from
Anchorman
that Ron Burgundy says to his dog on the phone, and it almost makes me giggle. Not quite, though.

Richard and I love that movie.

In response, Lester slides a paw beneath the door and scrapes at the carpet by my face. I stroke the top of his soft foot and hear the low rumble of his purr, followed by a gentle flopping sound as he collapses onto the floor, pushing his front leg as far as he can through the gap. It is so comforting that it makes me cry. We lie like that for a long time.

Some time later I hear Claudio’s footsteps coming out of the kitchen and down the hall.

‘Hello, cat,’ he says. Lester’s foot vanishes from my view and I sit up, feeling light-headed. ‘Jo, I’ve been Googling recipes for tonight. I’m just popping out to Sainsbury’s. I thought I’d got everything I needed yesterday but I’m missing a few ingredients and you don’t have them.’ He says this like an accusation. ‘Do you need anything?’

‘Can you let Lester in here?’

There is a pause.

‘Please?’

Another pause. ‘Well, I don’t see why not,’ Claudio says, unbolting the door and opening it just enough for Lester to squeeze his narrow tabby body through. I’m so happy to see him that for the first time my heart doesn’t sink when Claudio locks me in again.

‘Hello, my baby, my darling,’ I croon like the mad cat-lady I’m bound to end up as—assuming I even make it out of here alive. I gather him into my arms and press his dusty warm fur into my face. He struggles and protests so I let him go; he is happier to weave around my legs until he flops down again, on top of an Aran sweater which in turn is covering up most of a manila A4 envelope that I hadn’t noticed before in all the mess. I pull it out from underneath him and open it curiously, to find several typed sheets of paper. When I realise what it is, I make a sound that is half-sob, half-laugh. It’s the copy I made of the printout of every single text that Sean ever sent me, over the course of our eleven-month relationship. I typed them up myself on my laptop, painstakingly transcribing all those emotions because I couldn’t bear the thought of losing them.

Claudio’s gone out. I hear the front door close then, faintly, the door to the street. I’m going to have another go at screaming. I don’t think it will do much good but I have to try. My bedroom and bathroom are at the back looking down over a few small squares of unloved gardens, and the front of the building is on a busy road where there’s a lot of traffic noise.

This flat was only ever meant to be a temporary base for me and Megan after the divorce, and one good thing about this situation is that now I am definitely going to move. I don’t want to spend another night longer than I have to here, and I don’t want Megan back here now that Claudio has sullied it for us with his sweaty hands and crazy delusions.

I wait five minutes and then go and stand by the boarded-up window, take a massive deep breath, and scream as loudly as I can, for as long as I can. I imagine a little huddle of concerned bystanders congregating in someone’s back garden and it helps. They’ll be listening intently:
‘Did you hear that? That’s a woman screaming. Doesn’t sound good to me. Shall we ring the police?’

‘Yes, let’s. Better safe than sorry . . .’

After a few minutes my throat is raw and my ears are ringing. I pause for breath and listen hard for the sound of sirens. But there is nothing. I try screaming ‘FIRE!’—I heard once that this brings people faster than if you just shout for help because there’s more of a potential threat to their own safety and possessions. Still nothing.

‘Richard,’ I scream instead in desperation. ‘Help me! Richard!’

I will him to appear as if by magic in my bedroom. I feel his warm arms around me, and his lips against my ear, whispering soothing words.

‘Oh thank God you’re here! I knew you’d come!’

When I find myself saying the words out loud, I think that perhaps I have gone completely mad.

Richard is the man I loved more deeply than I’ve ever loved anybody else. But not more passionately. There have only been two men in my life I’ve loved with real passion, one of whom was John. That all ended in tears, and no-one else came close to inspiring that intensity of feeling in me, until I met Sean.

Sean is the reason that Richard and I didn’t get back together. Sean is the reason I’m on my own now. Sean is the reason that I can’t believe I will ever love anybody again. I sit down on the bed, exhausted and upset and beyond caring at the bitter, melodramatic turn my thoughts have taken. The vision of Richard has vanished from my mind, and I feel consumed with resentment for Sean. If I’d never met him, I wouldn’t be in this situation now. If he materialised in my room right now I think I’d slap him.

I think of Richard rubbing my back when I was ill, and before I know it I’m crying again.

Even before Claudio weaselled his way onto the scene, this was not how I wanted my life to be.

When I get out of here, I’m going to have to do something to change things. I can’t go on like this. I don’t like this person I have turned into: she is not me. All I want is a family again. Security, stability, a future. I made a mistake and I want to put it right in any way I can, given that going back is not an option. Not too much to ask—is it?