I'm telling you, my whole life is in that movie (well, the last third of it, anyway): a young(ish), pretty housewife discovers she's been making a home for one of the living dead; intelligent life has invaded the suburbs and no one knows, no one understands or believes her when she tries to tell them.
‘It is within our power to transform ourselves to look like you.’ he informs her quite openly in the tense scene leading to the climax, so she can recoil in the wide-eyed, lip quivering horror of her close-up. Be serious, you think. It’s hardly a surprise and hardly what I would call horror; I’m no movie critic but I’d say both the acting and direction could use a little work. This was intelligence all right, but this was not super-intelligence: as soon as you saw the way he walked or heard him speak, you'd know the self-conscious, stiff-faced husband was an alien (or a B movie actor). There was nothing of the subtlety of real life, nothing to suggest how this thing could deceive and manipulate a smart young woman with a healthy IQ in order to ‘sleep’ undetected for years as her ‘husband’ in their small, suburban life until his ‘cell’ wakes him to do whatever. It takes someone a little more astute than a 50s Hollywood female lead, as well as a decade of study, to detect the real thing: the too-smooth swivel of those sleepless eyes, the local paralysis in back and jaw, the almost imperceptible drawl in the ‘casual’ low key voice, all concealed beneath a human (although slightly OCD) ‘personality’. So the film was unlikely to trouble the Richter scale. The only genuine shock was how it took the girl most of the ninety-three minutes of running time to find out. Can't she see, you think, can't she see? But you're not her, you have to see things through her eyes; love makes it hard to see, love and routine.
And Sex? Where we reveal ourselves completely? Where we can’t fake genuine feeling? (Really?) Forget it. Sex had been pared down to a passing brush of lips as he pushed out past her for another late-night, white coat session at 'the Plant’. This is really what tells her things, of course. Even her. Sleeping alone in a double bed, this is conscious-raising stuff; niggling and nagging her to enquire one morning, with her nervous, ingratiating smile, what he actually did at the Plant. ‘Work’ he tells her with his own stiff-faced smile, ‘Meetings. Projects. Important business’ (‘Man’s work’ he almost smirks). And this was true, in a way. Like all the rest, he had his work to get done, he had his ‘career’. But she had her feelings, her suspicions, although she still thought it was another woman. And it was; diners full of them, and all ending up dead. He was out there spreading his alien seed while she was tucked up with cocoa and late-night 50s movies. In the end she had seen too much, she had seen it in his eyes, and she could see what was waiting for her; unless she did something about it, which she did. Of course, this was a 50s movie and she had her part-time detective, hunk-lover to help.
It was a movie, I know. With actors and ‘expressionist’ lighting, a disturbing ’12-tone, Schoenberg-influenced’ soundtrack and a plot from ‘Creepy Worlds or Twilight Zone,’ and which, John told me (unnecessarily, over pizza and Pinot Grigio), has really nothing to do with ‘zombies’ or ‘aliens’ but ‘McCarthy’ and ‘Reds’ and ‘Cold War isolationism’. Of course. I’m not stupid, I do know these things. Just because I've lived with one of them doesn't mean there is anything wrong with my mind.
I knew what he was all right. I knew. It just took some time to see things as they were. How long had he been there: weeks? Months? Years? It frightens me to think. And I did think about it; all the time. Where he'd come from. Why he was there. Why he was there with me.
And what was he doing to me? Living with one of them is no fun, believe me. You feel something widening between you and the living world. There is a life out there and you are not living it, and that gap is widening each day. That's how it feels. When you see that then you can do something. You have to see it, however, before anything can happen. Only then can you do something; which you have to do. You can't live with it day to day like that. It's no life. It's just too empty. No one can live like that, you’d have to be dead.
I began to see things when I was home more often. I was out of work. There were problems all over: complications with cash flow in ‘the banks’, in the ‘the economy’ (nothing to do with my outburst in Jo’s office just two months earlier). They were tightening up and laying off at SureDwell; with the sudden descent into negative equity, no one was sure of dwelling anywhere anymore, and after nine years I had to adjust to something new. I didn't mind so much, I wasn't tearing my hair out, John's job was secure and we could cope until I found something else. It wasn't as if we had expensive tastes or habits or children. In fact, once I got used to the idea, I was looking forward to some time to myself. ‘Don't be a recluse’ said Jo. I'd been her assistant for less than a year but this was the only personal touch on my bumper 'Sorry You're Leaving' card, modestly tucked in among looping, lopsided Good Lucks and hurriedly murmured All the Bests and a hearty Wish it was me! Ho-Ho! Amazing, the people you don't know you don’t know. ‘Don't be a recluse’ she repeated with her business smile, kissing me on both cheeks as I was leaving the party (as though she’d said it all in the card and couldn’t think of any more to add). I haven't seen her since.
On my first day home, the first Monday, John didn't even ask what I'd do with my time. Packing his files, the hinges of his briefcase creaked a shrill 'Hah!' when I told him my plans for job hunting.
Time passed fairly painlessly at first. I lingered over coffee and Elle magazine for most of the morning (this part was much like work), I cleaned the house, I watched TV. In the afternoon, strangely tired, I lay down on the bed, shut my eyes and listened to the distant hum of traffic. There were thoughts I needed to block from my head. Later I trawled through the sites I could find on Google (‘Find a job today’), I read the classifieds, but my heart wasn't in it; temping, filing, typing, this is not an exciting life. This is not what you dream about when you leave school. Elle writers would call it a springboard, it's not something Elle readers expect to be doing for the rest of their lives.
After a few days I no longer woke with the alarm at 6.00am, I barely noticed John leave. Everything slowed down. I was no longer so guilty about spending so much time on myself (I was, after all, preparing for interviews): shaping and repainting my nails, dressing and undressing in front of the mirror; experimenting, reviving a talent for refreshing old outfits with long forgotten accessories, fixing my hair ‘glamorously’ up or ‘casually’ down just to visit the supermarket; where I sashayed briskly through the aisles looking busy, preoccupied, as if somehow those around me would think I still had an occupation. My main occupation, however, was catching up on myself, employing a more studious, academic study of Vogue and Elle, something I hadn't done since I was first married, scanning the clothes and then the models, trying to find which one was me.
‘Naive’? ‘Lame’? ‘Stupid’? I don’t think so. Models aren't real people, of course, but beneath the image they have their bodies, their poise, their lives ahead of them. I thought I still had mine until the solitary interview I was granted, for a position, like Jo’s (I still had ambition), showed me (even if I adopted the missionary position) exactly how a lack of skills, contacts and experience ensured I was destined for a life of fewer and fewer opportunities to change that life (Jo, ten years younger, was only just clinging on to hers). Despite all the Googled advice available, both bonding and badgering, I knew at heart, I was a decade of wear and tear too late to change my body. Reading about diets and gym regimes was exhausting enough; it was easier to change my reading.
Besides, there was the seductive pull of daytime TV; an addiction which begins with an innocent coffee ‘break’ and the need for some distraction from the building backlog of texts pinging nauseatingly into my phone (‘well wishers‘ or sadists demanding perky, positive replies). At some crucial point the search for diversion develops from curiosity to compulsion and the need to really know which contestant will win the golden gavel, the Tipping Point £10,000, the Deal’s £250,000; hoping it won’t be the smart-mouthed bitch with the running commentary on herself, who loves the attention and reminds you of Amy who (using her 3 children and probably the Ashley Madison lists as blackmail) somehow persuaded Jo to create a new role to keep her on during the cull.
Somehow I began to feel run down. The more time I had, it seemed, the less energy I had to do things and the fewer reasons I found to leave the house. The front room began to feel like an airport lounge (magazines lying lazily open at double page spreads of deserted Maldive islands or Mauritian beaches) with hours to kill but no destination at the end of it. My afternoon nap now began at 11.00am. I simply lay there in my clothes on the bed, drifting on the surface of sleep, on the surface of my life. I remember one afternoon looking at my hands and seeing them so clearly, in so much detail, as though I'd never seen them before: the wrinkled knuckles of my almost 40 year old fingers looked like a family of squashed faces, all sealed mouths and sealed eyes. Is this me? I thought, remembering the same fingers dancing across the keyboard in the front room of a forgotten childhood, not knowing quite what I meant and gazing at my vacant expression in the tiny, distorted reflection of my gold wedding ring, as my bunched fist shivered in front of my face.
I suppose I was waiting to be told what to do. In work I had my lists, my tasks to be ticked, at home I had John (responsible, organised, controlled). He'd sit up nights after I'd gone to bed, making up agendas for meetings, or whatever it was he did, as meticulously as he planned our holiday each year, studying everything about the countries he’d short-list before deciding when and where to go, a year in advance. He took care of everything.
With so much time to myself I slowly become aware of just how much care he did take (and most of it outside the house); how much time he spent with ‘clients’ or at ‘evening classes’ (studying French, for example: for some future tour of the vineyards of Provence) and how listless he looked when finally he came home, his key often failing to find the lock first time (as if drinking was an essential component of the preparation). He'd always been a conscientious worker but since the miscarriage he seemed to be aiming for a gold star in extracurrlcular obligations and we'd somehow eased off sex. It began, I thought, as a sort of tactful care for my feelings but went on long enough to become a routine; soon we seemed to have less and less time for anything more intimate than a passing brush of lips on the cheek. Mostly he just looked tired and irritable. One evening, late for the third time in a week (without even the usual 7pm text of cursory ‘apology’), I asked him about the clients he'd seen (‘tedious’, ‘corporate’, ‘men’), where he’d brought them (‘some bar in West London’), what had been on the menu (‘Oh, nothing, tapas’). His tone had been casual, complacent, dismissive and when I asked him about the lack of female clients (suddenly I was defending the Sisterhood) looking around at the disheveled lounge (I didn't seem to have time to clean), he just sighed, picked up one magazine after another as if tidying but holding them merely long enough to pronounce the title and the cover straplines before dropping them again. He then began interrogating me about Kim Kardashian and Victoria Beckham, current romances and divorce settlements, as if I should have been preparing for an exam; as though he really wanted to know. It was about that time we stopped talking.
The following night, Wednesday maybe, maybe even Saturday (it was hard to tell as we’d stopped going out, even to the cinema) I watched John on his end of the sofa, still drinking, the bottle beside him, a dinner tray resting on his lap, just staring at the screen, deliberately ignoring me, waiting for something (football, probably) with a drawn, tortured look he seemed to have cultivated as his lounge look: not suffering now, not just this minute, but as though he knew what suffering was all about and was relieved to be able to sit there in a quiet moment, not a good moment, but a moment at least between suffering. So, he might have to fix his own dinner once in a while. So what? Did that make me such a terrible wife?
I tucked myself up on my side, ready to endure the sulky silence of the evening ahead, noisily turning the sticky pages of the same magazine I'd been trying to read all day, the articles merging into a sickening deadness inside my head. I could feel the pointless of it all but went on fingering and flicking one page after another; if I stopped. I knew, I'd feel the pressure to break that silence. I’d restarted the short opening paragraph of a report called Men Who Kill for Lust for maybe the fifth time before my eyes again slid off the page when a teeth-grinding, foot scraping noise made me look up at the screen; it was a trailer for some late night zombie movie in which a ragged mob were staggering from the darkness of a warehouse or death camp with the usual concrete-shoe salsa, the hollow cheeks and mindless eyes of Aids victims. Suddenly lost in darkness and snarling whispers, the camera swooped in on a scuffle as the routine innocent expendable was caught and forced up against a wall. At that moment, however, I swear, John made some sort of sound, a lurching grunt, like a shock of recognition.
At first I thought it was just a short, humorless laugh directed at me, so because we weren't talking I kept my eyes on the screen. But he hadn't moved, not even to acknowledge the welcoming ping of a new text arriving in his phone as it sat (just out of reach) on the coffee table; he remained in the same position, upright and silent, as though controlling his breathing, one hand supporting the stem of the glass already balanced on the flat arm of the sofa. The text made its second admonishing ping and he just sipped his drink like a man still at work (if his job had been a sommelier), more tense than relaxed, like a guest in his own home. I realized, in that moment, I was looking at him. I mean looking at him, the way you'd see someone new. I couldn't remember the last time I'd looked at him this way, perhaps never, which was what he had counted on. I was watching him as though he was on film but this was not someone in a movie. He was real and he was there in the room beside me. He was aware of what I could see, I knew, and he went on pretending to watch the TV ads (as if they meant as much or no more than the staggering zombies), his forehead clenched in unconvincing concentration, his mind elsewhere: a dead man watching the TV with a dead man's eyes. He looked like John, all right, to the life but I could sense the difference, like the bars of an electric fire being turned off. I could feel the chill in the room and I knew, right there and then, I had no idea who he was.
The strained, empty expression never left his face just as his eyes never left the screen, taking in nothing. In an hour I saw him move only twice, I swear; shifting slightly during a Cadbury's Flake advert as the camera drew back slowly from the wide, red lips, the naked legs of the girl sitting in the window alcove, to the endlessly ringing phone she was content to ignore, her lips wrapped around the phallic finger of chocolate. This disturbed me. It disturbed me more when the photo-fit of the Notting Hill rapist shot up on the News (a Tyson lookalike with a vicious and retarded scowl): three separate rapes, in three separate flats in three consecutive weeks. They made it sound as though he was aiming for the Guinness Book of Records. In each case the girl had been subjected to a ‘violent and very brutal attack.’ How brutal is ‘very brutal’, just what did that mean? I suddenly wanted to know.
The camera sat at the end of a street (cars humped up on the pavement, pedestrians passing on the road) before cutting to the barred, uncurtained window of a basement flat where somehow he'd managed to squeeze in unnoticed for his latest attack. Incredibly, I heard the sound again, there was no doubt this time, something between a low growl and a concealing cough as if he was merely clearing his throat; and I could sense that tic, an almost indiscernible right-sided lurch of the chin, the lips creasing in a strange, bitter almost-smile. I knew what it was now, this was not my imagination, I knew exactly what it was. For me, looking back, it was everything.
Yes, it is unbelievable, but there it was, happening to me. My husband had gone. There was nothing behind that glazed look, nothing that was John. The thing was there in my own home, sitting on my sofa. I'd seen it in that nervous tension, in those moments of betrayal when it had escaped it's own control.
Everything was clearing at speed now, opening up in front of me. I could feel things opening inside me too, but I had to show it nothing. Calmly, at the end of the news I carried some plates to the kitchen while he went to the bathroom, still without a word. When I returned the phone had disappeared. A while later he settled back to watch the football while I went to bed (retaining a semblance of normality, buying some time to think) but I was still awake when he came into the room an hour later, watching him in the wardrobe mirror, his slow movements undressing him like a series of sighs, as though swinging into young girls bedrooms like the SAS was the last thing on his mind. He was a good actor all right, immersed, there was real depth to that passive performance, real Method. Only now I could feel the difference. He didn't try anything, however, just lay with his back to me, waiting. He thought he only had to wait.
Who knows if he slept? Who knows if he ever slept? I didn't. I closed my eyes and listened to the rhythm of his breathing, his too regular breathing, pretending he was dead to the world. Once, as he turned, his backside touched mine; quite deliberately, I was sure. The contact was warm, and very real. I flinched, I couldn't help myself, but he failed to notice, or if he did he showed no sign of it. A moment later I felt a brush of knuckles on my back, as though he was John wanting to touch me, to make contact, make up, and this leper touch was the best his righteous indignation could achieve. The contact on my spine remained, feeling almost human, then not human; chilling. There was a sound, a whisper that might have been my name or nothing, just heavy breathing. Jesus, this is it, I thought. Tonight he'll do it. What he would do I didn't dare think. The images of those Ladbroke Grove rapes were crushing me so hard I couldn't breathe. I fought to control myself, holding my whole body absolutely still while the thing remained where it was, making no further progress. It was just some object, I pretended, a stray tuck in the sheet or the corner of a magazine I couldn't be bothered, was too tired to throw off the bed. At some point it fell away and I lay as limp as I could in the heat of my own thoughts, listening to the noise of a party across the road until the monotonous thump of party music gave way to shrill, broken laughter in the street, the slamming of car doors; then a widening silence and the intermittent sound of cats living the loud, violent part of their cat lives until the false calm of a false dawn and the whispered ‘Shhh’ of early morning cars through the rain. Through slow, painful hours I watched the grey light turn the room from a dull, steel cell back into the bedroom again; and there, under the heavy, drifting weight of insomnia (God knows when) I fell asleep. I know I did because I woke sweating from a dream in which I was a little girl again talking to my Teddy, slowly explaining something to him in very careful, very precise language while he listened with dead, staring eyes. When I awoke back into my nightmare I was a fully grown woman and there was a naked alien body lying under the sheets beside me. I saw myself dreaming I was awake in the nightmare of a new life and I went on lying there. ‘I’m just lying here’ I thought, as if to activate myself; but what difference did it make? I could get up or I could lie there, either way this nightmare was not going to end.
I did nothing that day, nor the next and somehow we went on with our life. I mean, life went on around us. Nothing changed. Nothing on the outside. He left in the morning (while I 'slept'), came in around 8.00 (or 10.00 or 11.00) subdued, silent; we watched TV, he read, or pretended to read the paper. I made the TV dinners. Nothing happened to disturb the ‘intimacy’ of our life. This was the way we lived. This was why he thought I'd notice nothing. He was very careful. Very careful. He had everything so exactly right, he thought he was well concealed. He thought I was really stupid, too stupid to see that everything had changed. While the Notting Hill rapist went on and on with his violent and brutal career.
Why did I just go on letting it go on? Why didn't I do something? Inertia? Fear? I was, in fact, so listless now, I could feel his power already working on me; passivity was like an illness. I felt trapped. I had no money, no job, and without telling someone of my situation, really nowhere to go. I wasn't even a battered wife. Who would listen to me? My family? The Police? The newspapers? LBC? Yes, I need help: I'm living with an alien who has sucked the life from my husband and is now living comfortably inside his body, spreading his seed throughout Notting Hill. It's a Sunday Sport story, for Christ's sake; evidence for ‘commitment’. There are even websites with helpful advice: How to get someone committed to a mental hospital: ‘Someone you know has possibly become a threat to herself and others. This is the threshold of behaviour that once crossed, instigates the need for action.’
Maybe a different woman would have confronted him, brought it out into the open (if she hadn't already lived with him for ten years). Maybe another woman would have been just as frightened. I was frightened. You don't know what these aliens can do. In any case, what was I going to say? Where is John? Where is the man I married? Where is his mind? His genes? His life? These were all the questions I wanted to ask. Anyone would want to ask them? I didn't know how to begin, without sounding insane, or where it would end.
Already I'd begun searching his drawers, his wardrobe, the clothes he put in the wash. For what, I don't know: strange smells? Bloodstains? Who knows? Evidence. What that would be I'd no idea. However, the morning following an unusually agitated late night arrival (loose tie, sealed mouth), I thought I knew. Once he’d left the bed (a restless 5 rather than the usual 15 minutes after the alarm), I tracked him from kitchen to lounge (I’d developed the ears of a bat now) where he spent several minutes scanning first the channels of the TV, then the radio, searching, I knew, for an update on the rapist. Finding nothing but the same rehashed report, he wound back through a blur of white noise to an anonymous station of bland, soothing music as if this was his original intension, raising the volume and ‘forgetting’ to turn it off as he hurried, late, to the car. Moments later I stood in the lounge, holding his half empty coffee mug (for evidence? DNA? Who knows?) while a seamless, presenterless flow of a minimalist, ambient and acoustic mix worked on my helplessness daze of insomnia. As another bland acoustic bosa nova faded to inconclusion, a heavily distorted, ethereal voice interrupted the playlist: ‘Kill’ it seemed to say in a low, sensual drawl. ‘No fuss, no stress, jus kill...We’re here to help you kill.’ The hollow emptiness of reverb lingered into the next track of low key intensity and I thought I understood the climax of his mission. This sleeper was out there now and he was awake.
On Breakfast news two further rapes had been reported. There were so many single women living alone in Notting Hill (how could they afford it?) and they were growing in confidence. These two attacks, however, were from months back. Something in the photo-fit, in the media coverage, had given birth to recognition and courage. The bastard, however, was no nearer to being caught, witnesses were strong on emotion, weak on detail, mostly on account of the black leather gimp mask he sometimes wore. A thick-necked DI told us in a soft voice how much he was "convinced", there was ‘no question’ it was the work of one man. They thought he was Black, tall and athletic. They thought he was a man!
I’d never waited outside his office or followed him as he left, that would have been insane. However, I followed every bulletin throughout the day and a tense half hour after the early evening news, I phoned the number the Police had left on the screen but hung up when the first words stuck in my throat. Instead, I phoned his office and he was there (that night; the night no one was attacked). He didn't come to the phone, however, he was with a ‘client’. ‘Is it important?’ the young, methodical female voice enquired, as office-brusque as Jo (tight skirt, stockings, heels - still at her desk at 7). No, I told her, sensing a tightness she was disguising in her voice (as if surprised to hear mine); and no, I didn't want to leave a message. What could I say: what does he do all day? He sells insurance. Does he talk? What does he tell you? Possibly he didn't need to talk there either. He was quiet, authoritative, and his ‘colleagues’, whenever I met them, seemed to respect those qualities in him. They were all taken in.
Later, at 9, he hadn’t arrived and I was startled by a call from his mobile; reluctant to pick up, I braced myself and heard the voice of a woman. She was telling me something but, taken by surprise, all I could hear was her harsh, clipped delivery. ‘This is my husband’s mobile’ I said. ‘No,’ she replied, strangely sarcastically, ‘This is John’s mobile.’ She began to say more but was cut short at the start of a sentence. I rang back but heard only John’s cool, measured request to leave a message.
When, finally, his key found its way hesitantly into the lock, suspiciously late (as though trying me out) I heard a car screech off in the street but I said nothing. He looked at me, his eyes suddenly alert (perhaps surprised to see me dressed up for an evening out: skirt, stockings, heels) then sighed at the TV (as if I’d done something wrong) and sat down in front of it, his tie loose, collar open, his hair dishevelled and thin red marks across the left side of his jaw. He looked as if he'd just been through something, some moment of tension, some narrow escape. His shirt had been hurriedly tucked and there was mud smeared across the high polish of his shoes which could have meant something. Now what? I thought; what does he know? Does he know I know?
The news again, running through a repetition of the earlier agenda, the rapist now relegated to item three. Only a couple of weeks before this would have meant as much to me as another reprisal in Northern Ireland, another suicide bombing in Iran, Iraq or whereever; now the News was here in my own front room. I watched 'John' as the rhino-necked Inspector droned on again in his monotonous, low key listing of the dangers, providing advice and safety precautions for single women (‘ensure your windows are locked’). John watched as if he wasn’t watching. Nothing showed in his face. As the item ended, however, he looked over at me, his tic under control, his eyes unblinking, almost as if he was showing me his power, laughing at me with a straight face. I picked up the paper pretending to see what was on later (something called 'Brute Force' at 11.15).
When I looked again the eyes seemed merely empty, glazed. Maybe, I thought, maybe he doesn't really see me at all. I crossed my legs and leaned back on the sofa. Already, however, when I closed my eyes I could see a woman's white, naked body struggling from some violence in the darkness of a bedroom, slipping backwards down the slithering slope of the duvet, shoulders hard to the floor, ankles hooked up in the tangling sheets but kicking against the hoarse voice ordering her to do something (open up, open up, get those fucking legs open, you slag!)
What were those sick images doing in my head? It was his power. His tele-something, leaking his mind’s fevered images into mine. I tried shutting it out, keeping my eyes on the screen as the news was coming to a close with an item featuring an animal hospital and the face of baby hedgehog feeding from a syringe. The news reader’s warm, goodnight smile abandoned me to the credits.
I refused to let myself think as I watched him watching the sluts on the ads writhing under showers, pursing their lips to suck on straws, opening doors to strangers. He observed them coldly, as though they meant nothing, were mere advertisements, his face locked in the same fixed expression (Simon Cowell at judge’s houses) pretending to be unmoved but judging, assessing.
My eyes stung with colour, so vibrant it hurt. I could feel something contracting in the relentless pulse of pain. He was working through the TV now, through the seamless transmission, rotting my brain, fucking up my mind, turning me into one of him. Colour became a spectrum of green: the hard, crew-cut green of golf became the still, dead green of snooker, then the mottled green of tennis before settling into the heavy, swampy green of football in front of which a grey haired presenter was talking to a manager who we were supposed to have forgotten had been arrested for Kerb-crawling a year before and then an invisible northern voice started listing the teams over a long-range shot of the pitch. Tiny players flicked aimlessly here and there, 'warming up' beneath their names set out like a transparent tactics board.
If I moved now I knew he’d look up and speak, he'd want to know where I was going. Now I was afraid he would speak, I was afraid to hear his voice. I was stuck there, I couldn't move and I couldn't think. Think of something, I thought, but all I could focus on was the luminous green filling the screen which would be there for another hour of ‘highlights’. After another five minutes it began to seem like a lifetime of blank endurance; my lifetime. I wanted rid of him. I wanted a husband, a life. I shut my eyes and there was the '24 Hours - We Never Close' video showing 'Dogs Fuck Slags' on the inside of my lids I could feel myself suppressing the thing building inside me, struggling against the moist burning sensation in my eyes, the tightness across my chest, but before I had time to understand what was happening a scream broke from me with a frightening energy. I stood up, shaking. I wasn't myself, I can tell you. I don't know who I was.
Someone had knocked at the door, strangely failing to see the bell. The sound gripped his face but he made no move to acknowledge it. By the time I’d opened the door there was no one around, just John’s briefcase standing upright on the path like an abandoned child.
From the end of the hall he stood watching me carry it past him, into the kitchen. I don't know how he looked, I didn't look at him. I placed the case on the worktop and stood leaning on the fridge staring at it as if I’d never seen it before. I had no need to open it. There would be fingerprints on the handle, I remember thinking.
After a moment, rolling up the sleeves and pulling down the hem of my tight top, I thought I'd recovered myself and started to prepare a salad. Who was going to eat it, I had no idea. I sat two plump tomatoes in front of me and cut through the first, dividing it almost exactly in half; two hemispheres tipped onto their sides while the second sat plumply red on the woosey wood grain of the cutting board, little drops of moisture clinging to its too smooth skin, daring me to make the incision. The hand on my shoulder made me jump forward so sharply I almost sliced my thumb.
As I turned he was waiting there in front of me, his arms spread, the tips of his fingers touching my elbows, as if to catch me as I fell and draw me into him. He was trying to hold me. He was going to put his lips to mine and the contact of his hands on my bare elbows was so gentle I felt myself falling. I could hear the low hum of the crowd in the background, the measured, isolated voice of the commentator and there was a moment when I was just swaying: faint, limp, lifeless. Don't look at his eyes, I told myself, don't look at his eyes. Only when the kitchen knife sank in and I could feel the power of the first clean thrust in my fist did I find my voice.
‘Die, you fucker. Die.’ Even now, repeating these words leaves me with a tingling charge; at the time I felt the phrase vibrate with the blade through my whole system. It's not as easy as it looks on film, there are hard, frustrating chunks in the body where you feel too much resistance, as if the blade is just deflected by bone or gristle and doing so little damage you have to punch down again and again until you feel a softness giving way, letting the blade deep inside. The power you feel must be something like the power a man feels when he’s thrusting inside a woman and it is exciting. ‘Die, you fucker. Die.’ You don't have to say anything so melodramatic, of course, but it helps.
Just before the end, I was holding the knife above his face and he was down on his knees, a gross red stain spreading across his chest like the map of South America (another place I haven’t been), soaking the white shirt I’d laundered a week before. By the time the ragged coastline of Argentina reached the Falklands of his pants I could hear a hoarse, sucking sound bubbling in his throat like some pornographic soundtrack: ‘Ohsoshsosh (Blah, blah, blah) Ohsoshsosh’
What was he saying? Who knows? I can’t even say my transcript is accurate as memory is always influenced by mood; mostly it just sounds completely fucking alien.
DG 2015
‘It is within our power to transform ourselves to look like you.’ he informs her quite openly in the tense scene leading to the climax, so she can recoil in the wide-eyed, lip quivering horror of her close-up. Be serious, you think. It’s hardly a surprise and hardly what I would call horror; I’m no movie critic but I’d say both the acting and direction could use a little work. This was intelligence all right, but this was not super-intelligence: as soon as you saw the way he walked or heard him speak, you'd know the self-conscious, stiff-faced husband was an alien (or a B movie actor). There was nothing of the subtlety of real life, nothing to suggest how this thing could deceive and manipulate a smart young woman with a healthy IQ in order to ‘sleep’ undetected for years as her ‘husband’ in their small, suburban life until his ‘cell’ wakes him to do whatever. It takes someone a little more astute than a 50s Hollywood female lead, as well as a decade of study, to detect the real thing: the too-smooth swivel of those sleepless eyes, the local paralysis in back and jaw, the almost imperceptible drawl in the ‘casual’ low key voice, all concealed beneath a human (although slightly OCD) ‘personality’. So the film was unlikely to trouble the Richter scale. The only genuine shock was how it took the girl most of the ninety-three minutes of running time to find out. Can't she see, you think, can't she see? But you're not her, you have to see things through her eyes; love makes it hard to see, love and routine.
And Sex? Where we reveal ourselves completely? Where we can’t fake genuine feeling? (Really?) Forget it. Sex had been pared down to a passing brush of lips as he pushed out past her for another late-night, white coat session at 'the Plant’. This is really what tells her things, of course. Even her. Sleeping alone in a double bed, this is conscious-raising stuff; niggling and nagging her to enquire one morning, with her nervous, ingratiating smile, what he actually did at the Plant. ‘Work’ he tells her with his own stiff-faced smile, ‘Meetings. Projects. Important business’ (‘Man’s work’ he almost smirks). And this was true, in a way. Like all the rest, he had his work to get done, he had his ‘career’. But she had her feelings, her suspicions, although she still thought it was another woman. And it was; diners full of them, and all ending up dead. He was out there spreading his alien seed while she was tucked up with cocoa and late-night 50s movies. In the end she had seen too much, she had seen it in his eyes, and she could see what was waiting for her; unless she did something about it, which she did. Of course, this was a 50s movie and she had her part-time detective, hunk-lover to help.
It was a movie, I know. With actors and ‘expressionist’ lighting, a disturbing ’12-tone, Schoenberg-influenced’ soundtrack and a plot from ‘Creepy Worlds or Twilight Zone,’ and which, John told me (unnecessarily, over pizza and Pinot Grigio), has really nothing to do with ‘zombies’ or ‘aliens’ but ‘McCarthy’ and ‘Reds’ and ‘Cold War isolationism’. Of course. I’m not stupid, I do know these things. Just because I've lived with one of them doesn't mean there is anything wrong with my mind.
I knew what he was all right. I knew. It just took some time to see things as they were. How long had he been there: weeks? Months? Years? It frightens me to think. And I did think about it; all the time. Where he'd come from. Why he was there. Why he was there with me.
And what was he doing to me? Living with one of them is no fun, believe me. You feel something widening between you and the living world. There is a life out there and you are not living it, and that gap is widening each day. That's how it feels. When you see that then you can do something. You have to see it, however, before anything can happen. Only then can you do something; which you have to do. You can't live with it day to day like that. It's no life. It's just too empty. No one can live like that, you’d have to be dead.
I began to see things when I was home more often. I was out of work. There were problems all over: complications with cash flow in ‘the banks’, in the ‘the economy’ (nothing to do with my outburst in Jo’s office just two months earlier). They were tightening up and laying off at SureDwell; with the sudden descent into negative equity, no one was sure of dwelling anywhere anymore, and after nine years I had to adjust to something new. I didn't mind so much, I wasn't tearing my hair out, John's job was secure and we could cope until I found something else. It wasn't as if we had expensive tastes or habits or children. In fact, once I got used to the idea, I was looking forward to some time to myself. ‘Don't be a recluse’ said Jo. I'd been her assistant for less than a year but this was the only personal touch on my bumper 'Sorry You're Leaving' card, modestly tucked in among looping, lopsided Good Lucks and hurriedly murmured All the Bests and a hearty Wish it was me! Ho-Ho! Amazing, the people you don't know you don’t know. ‘Don't be a recluse’ she repeated with her business smile, kissing me on both cheeks as I was leaving the party (as though she’d said it all in the card and couldn’t think of any more to add). I haven't seen her since.
On my first day home, the first Monday, John didn't even ask what I'd do with my time. Packing his files, the hinges of his briefcase creaked a shrill 'Hah!' when I told him my plans for job hunting.
Time passed fairly painlessly at first. I lingered over coffee and Elle magazine for most of the morning (this part was much like work), I cleaned the house, I watched TV. In the afternoon, strangely tired, I lay down on the bed, shut my eyes and listened to the distant hum of traffic. There were thoughts I needed to block from my head. Later I trawled through the sites I could find on Google (‘Find a job today’), I read the classifieds, but my heart wasn't in it; temping, filing, typing, this is not an exciting life. This is not what you dream about when you leave school. Elle writers would call it a springboard, it's not something Elle readers expect to be doing for the rest of their lives.
After a few days I no longer woke with the alarm at 6.00am, I barely noticed John leave. Everything slowed down. I was no longer so guilty about spending so much time on myself (I was, after all, preparing for interviews): shaping and repainting my nails, dressing and undressing in front of the mirror; experimenting, reviving a talent for refreshing old outfits with long forgotten accessories, fixing my hair ‘glamorously’ up or ‘casually’ down just to visit the supermarket; where I sashayed briskly through the aisles looking busy, preoccupied, as if somehow those around me would think I still had an occupation. My main occupation, however, was catching up on myself, employing a more studious, academic study of Vogue and Elle, something I hadn't done since I was first married, scanning the clothes and then the models, trying to find which one was me.
‘Naive’? ‘Lame’? ‘Stupid’? I don’t think so. Models aren't real people, of course, but beneath the image they have their bodies, their poise, their lives ahead of them. I thought I still had mine until the solitary interview I was granted, for a position, like Jo’s (I still had ambition), showed me (even if I adopted the missionary position) exactly how a lack of skills, contacts and experience ensured I was destined for a life of fewer and fewer opportunities to change that life (Jo, ten years younger, was only just clinging on to hers). Despite all the Googled advice available, both bonding and badgering, I knew at heart, I was a decade of wear and tear too late to change my body. Reading about diets and gym regimes was exhausting enough; it was easier to change my reading.
Besides, there was the seductive pull of daytime TV; an addiction which begins with an innocent coffee ‘break’ and the need for some distraction from the building backlog of texts pinging nauseatingly into my phone (‘well wishers‘ or sadists demanding perky, positive replies). At some crucial point the search for diversion develops from curiosity to compulsion and the need to really know which contestant will win the golden gavel, the Tipping Point £10,000, the Deal’s £250,000; hoping it won’t be the smart-mouthed bitch with the running commentary on herself, who loves the attention and reminds you of Amy who (using her 3 children and probably the Ashley Madison lists as blackmail) somehow persuaded Jo to create a new role to keep her on during the cull.
Somehow I began to feel run down. The more time I had, it seemed, the less energy I had to do things and the fewer reasons I found to leave the house. The front room began to feel like an airport lounge (magazines lying lazily open at double page spreads of deserted Maldive islands or Mauritian beaches) with hours to kill but no destination at the end of it. My afternoon nap now began at 11.00am. I simply lay there in my clothes on the bed, drifting on the surface of sleep, on the surface of my life. I remember one afternoon looking at my hands and seeing them so clearly, in so much detail, as though I'd never seen them before: the wrinkled knuckles of my almost 40 year old fingers looked like a family of squashed faces, all sealed mouths and sealed eyes. Is this me? I thought, remembering the same fingers dancing across the keyboard in the front room of a forgotten childhood, not knowing quite what I meant and gazing at my vacant expression in the tiny, distorted reflection of my gold wedding ring, as my bunched fist shivered in front of my face.
I suppose I was waiting to be told what to do. In work I had my lists, my tasks to be ticked, at home I had John (responsible, organised, controlled). He'd sit up nights after I'd gone to bed, making up agendas for meetings, or whatever it was he did, as meticulously as he planned our holiday each year, studying everything about the countries he’d short-list before deciding when and where to go, a year in advance. He took care of everything.
With so much time to myself I slowly become aware of just how much care he did take (and most of it outside the house); how much time he spent with ‘clients’ or at ‘evening classes’ (studying French, for example: for some future tour of the vineyards of Provence) and how listless he looked when finally he came home, his key often failing to find the lock first time (as if drinking was an essential component of the preparation). He'd always been a conscientious worker but since the miscarriage he seemed to be aiming for a gold star in extracurrlcular obligations and we'd somehow eased off sex. It began, I thought, as a sort of tactful care for my feelings but went on long enough to become a routine; soon we seemed to have less and less time for anything more intimate than a passing brush of lips on the cheek. Mostly he just looked tired and irritable. One evening, late for the third time in a week (without even the usual 7pm text of cursory ‘apology’), I asked him about the clients he'd seen (‘tedious’, ‘corporate’, ‘men’), where he’d brought them (‘some bar in West London’), what had been on the menu (‘Oh, nothing, tapas’). His tone had been casual, complacent, dismissive and when I asked him about the lack of female clients (suddenly I was defending the Sisterhood) looking around at the disheveled lounge (I didn't seem to have time to clean), he just sighed, picked up one magazine after another as if tidying but holding them merely long enough to pronounce the title and the cover straplines before dropping them again. He then began interrogating me about Kim Kardashian and Victoria Beckham, current romances and divorce settlements, as if I should have been preparing for an exam; as though he really wanted to know. It was about that time we stopped talking.
The following night, Wednesday maybe, maybe even Saturday (it was hard to tell as we’d stopped going out, even to the cinema) I watched John on his end of the sofa, still drinking, the bottle beside him, a dinner tray resting on his lap, just staring at the screen, deliberately ignoring me, waiting for something (football, probably) with a drawn, tortured look he seemed to have cultivated as his lounge look: not suffering now, not just this minute, but as though he knew what suffering was all about and was relieved to be able to sit there in a quiet moment, not a good moment, but a moment at least between suffering. So, he might have to fix his own dinner once in a while. So what? Did that make me such a terrible wife?
I tucked myself up on my side, ready to endure the sulky silence of the evening ahead, noisily turning the sticky pages of the same magazine I'd been trying to read all day, the articles merging into a sickening deadness inside my head. I could feel the pointless of it all but went on fingering and flicking one page after another; if I stopped. I knew, I'd feel the pressure to break that silence. I’d restarted the short opening paragraph of a report called Men Who Kill for Lust for maybe the fifth time before my eyes again slid off the page when a teeth-grinding, foot scraping noise made me look up at the screen; it was a trailer for some late night zombie movie in which a ragged mob were staggering from the darkness of a warehouse or death camp with the usual concrete-shoe salsa, the hollow cheeks and mindless eyes of Aids victims. Suddenly lost in darkness and snarling whispers, the camera swooped in on a scuffle as the routine innocent expendable was caught and forced up against a wall. At that moment, however, I swear, John made some sort of sound, a lurching grunt, like a shock of recognition.
At first I thought it was just a short, humorless laugh directed at me, so because we weren't talking I kept my eyes on the screen. But he hadn't moved, not even to acknowledge the welcoming ping of a new text arriving in his phone as it sat (just out of reach) on the coffee table; he remained in the same position, upright and silent, as though controlling his breathing, one hand supporting the stem of the glass already balanced on the flat arm of the sofa. The text made its second admonishing ping and he just sipped his drink like a man still at work (if his job had been a sommelier), more tense than relaxed, like a guest in his own home. I realized, in that moment, I was looking at him. I mean looking at him, the way you'd see someone new. I couldn't remember the last time I'd looked at him this way, perhaps never, which was what he had counted on. I was watching him as though he was on film but this was not someone in a movie. He was real and he was there in the room beside me. He was aware of what I could see, I knew, and he went on pretending to watch the TV ads (as if they meant as much or no more than the staggering zombies), his forehead clenched in unconvincing concentration, his mind elsewhere: a dead man watching the TV with a dead man's eyes. He looked like John, all right, to the life but I could sense the difference, like the bars of an electric fire being turned off. I could feel the chill in the room and I knew, right there and then, I had no idea who he was.
The strained, empty expression never left his face just as his eyes never left the screen, taking in nothing. In an hour I saw him move only twice, I swear; shifting slightly during a Cadbury's Flake advert as the camera drew back slowly from the wide, red lips, the naked legs of the girl sitting in the window alcove, to the endlessly ringing phone she was content to ignore, her lips wrapped around the phallic finger of chocolate. This disturbed me. It disturbed me more when the photo-fit of the Notting Hill rapist shot up on the News (a Tyson lookalike with a vicious and retarded scowl): three separate rapes, in three separate flats in three consecutive weeks. They made it sound as though he was aiming for the Guinness Book of Records. In each case the girl had been subjected to a ‘violent and very brutal attack.’ How brutal is ‘very brutal’, just what did that mean? I suddenly wanted to know.
The camera sat at the end of a street (cars humped up on the pavement, pedestrians passing on the road) before cutting to the barred, uncurtained window of a basement flat where somehow he'd managed to squeeze in unnoticed for his latest attack. Incredibly, I heard the sound again, there was no doubt this time, something between a low growl and a concealing cough as if he was merely clearing his throat; and I could sense that tic, an almost indiscernible right-sided lurch of the chin, the lips creasing in a strange, bitter almost-smile. I knew what it was now, this was not my imagination, I knew exactly what it was. For me, looking back, it was everything.
Yes, it is unbelievable, but there it was, happening to me. My husband had gone. There was nothing behind that glazed look, nothing that was John. The thing was there in my own home, sitting on my sofa. I'd seen it in that nervous tension, in those moments of betrayal when it had escaped it's own control.
Everything was clearing at speed now, opening up in front of me. I could feel things opening inside me too, but I had to show it nothing. Calmly, at the end of the news I carried some plates to the kitchen while he went to the bathroom, still without a word. When I returned the phone had disappeared. A while later he settled back to watch the football while I went to bed (retaining a semblance of normality, buying some time to think) but I was still awake when he came into the room an hour later, watching him in the wardrobe mirror, his slow movements undressing him like a series of sighs, as though swinging into young girls bedrooms like the SAS was the last thing on his mind. He was a good actor all right, immersed, there was real depth to that passive performance, real Method. Only now I could feel the difference. He didn't try anything, however, just lay with his back to me, waiting. He thought he only had to wait.
Who knows if he slept? Who knows if he ever slept? I didn't. I closed my eyes and listened to the rhythm of his breathing, his too regular breathing, pretending he was dead to the world. Once, as he turned, his backside touched mine; quite deliberately, I was sure. The contact was warm, and very real. I flinched, I couldn't help myself, but he failed to notice, or if he did he showed no sign of it. A moment later I felt a brush of knuckles on my back, as though he was John wanting to touch me, to make contact, make up, and this leper touch was the best his righteous indignation could achieve. The contact on my spine remained, feeling almost human, then not human; chilling. There was a sound, a whisper that might have been my name or nothing, just heavy breathing. Jesus, this is it, I thought. Tonight he'll do it. What he would do I didn't dare think. The images of those Ladbroke Grove rapes were crushing me so hard I couldn't breathe. I fought to control myself, holding my whole body absolutely still while the thing remained where it was, making no further progress. It was just some object, I pretended, a stray tuck in the sheet or the corner of a magazine I couldn't be bothered, was too tired to throw off the bed. At some point it fell away and I lay as limp as I could in the heat of my own thoughts, listening to the noise of a party across the road until the monotonous thump of party music gave way to shrill, broken laughter in the street, the slamming of car doors; then a widening silence and the intermittent sound of cats living the loud, violent part of their cat lives until the false calm of a false dawn and the whispered ‘Shhh’ of early morning cars through the rain. Through slow, painful hours I watched the grey light turn the room from a dull, steel cell back into the bedroom again; and there, under the heavy, drifting weight of insomnia (God knows when) I fell asleep. I know I did because I woke sweating from a dream in which I was a little girl again talking to my Teddy, slowly explaining something to him in very careful, very precise language while he listened with dead, staring eyes. When I awoke back into my nightmare I was a fully grown woman and there was a naked alien body lying under the sheets beside me. I saw myself dreaming I was awake in the nightmare of a new life and I went on lying there. ‘I’m just lying here’ I thought, as if to activate myself; but what difference did it make? I could get up or I could lie there, either way this nightmare was not going to end.
I did nothing that day, nor the next and somehow we went on with our life. I mean, life went on around us. Nothing changed. Nothing on the outside. He left in the morning (while I 'slept'), came in around 8.00 (or 10.00 or 11.00) subdued, silent; we watched TV, he read, or pretended to read the paper. I made the TV dinners. Nothing happened to disturb the ‘intimacy’ of our life. This was the way we lived. This was why he thought I'd notice nothing. He was very careful. Very careful. He had everything so exactly right, he thought he was well concealed. He thought I was really stupid, too stupid to see that everything had changed. While the Notting Hill rapist went on and on with his violent and brutal career.
Why did I just go on letting it go on? Why didn't I do something? Inertia? Fear? I was, in fact, so listless now, I could feel his power already working on me; passivity was like an illness. I felt trapped. I had no money, no job, and without telling someone of my situation, really nowhere to go. I wasn't even a battered wife. Who would listen to me? My family? The Police? The newspapers? LBC? Yes, I need help: I'm living with an alien who has sucked the life from my husband and is now living comfortably inside his body, spreading his seed throughout Notting Hill. It's a Sunday Sport story, for Christ's sake; evidence for ‘commitment’. There are even websites with helpful advice: How to get someone committed to a mental hospital: ‘Someone you know has possibly become a threat to herself and others. This is the threshold of behaviour that once crossed, instigates the need for action.’
Maybe a different woman would have confronted him, brought it out into the open (if she hadn't already lived with him for ten years). Maybe another woman would have been just as frightened. I was frightened. You don't know what these aliens can do. In any case, what was I going to say? Where is John? Where is the man I married? Where is his mind? His genes? His life? These were all the questions I wanted to ask. Anyone would want to ask them? I didn't know how to begin, without sounding insane, or where it would end.
Already I'd begun searching his drawers, his wardrobe, the clothes he put in the wash. For what, I don't know: strange smells? Bloodstains? Who knows? Evidence. What that would be I'd no idea. However, the morning following an unusually agitated late night arrival (loose tie, sealed mouth), I thought I knew. Once he’d left the bed (a restless 5 rather than the usual 15 minutes after the alarm), I tracked him from kitchen to lounge (I’d developed the ears of a bat now) where he spent several minutes scanning first the channels of the TV, then the radio, searching, I knew, for an update on the rapist. Finding nothing but the same rehashed report, he wound back through a blur of white noise to an anonymous station of bland, soothing music as if this was his original intension, raising the volume and ‘forgetting’ to turn it off as he hurried, late, to the car. Moments later I stood in the lounge, holding his half empty coffee mug (for evidence? DNA? Who knows?) while a seamless, presenterless flow of a minimalist, ambient and acoustic mix worked on my helplessness daze of insomnia. As another bland acoustic bosa nova faded to inconclusion, a heavily distorted, ethereal voice interrupted the playlist: ‘Kill’ it seemed to say in a low, sensual drawl. ‘No fuss, no stress, jus kill...We’re here to help you kill.’ The hollow emptiness of reverb lingered into the next track of low key intensity and I thought I understood the climax of his mission. This sleeper was out there now and he was awake.
On Breakfast news two further rapes had been reported. There were so many single women living alone in Notting Hill (how could they afford it?) and they were growing in confidence. These two attacks, however, were from months back. Something in the photo-fit, in the media coverage, had given birth to recognition and courage. The bastard, however, was no nearer to being caught, witnesses were strong on emotion, weak on detail, mostly on account of the black leather gimp mask he sometimes wore. A thick-necked DI told us in a soft voice how much he was "convinced", there was ‘no question’ it was the work of one man. They thought he was Black, tall and athletic. They thought he was a man!
I’d never waited outside his office or followed him as he left, that would have been insane. However, I followed every bulletin throughout the day and a tense half hour after the early evening news, I phoned the number the Police had left on the screen but hung up when the first words stuck in my throat. Instead, I phoned his office and he was there (that night; the night no one was attacked). He didn't come to the phone, however, he was with a ‘client’. ‘Is it important?’ the young, methodical female voice enquired, as office-brusque as Jo (tight skirt, stockings, heels - still at her desk at 7). No, I told her, sensing a tightness she was disguising in her voice (as if surprised to hear mine); and no, I didn't want to leave a message. What could I say: what does he do all day? He sells insurance. Does he talk? What does he tell you? Possibly he didn't need to talk there either. He was quiet, authoritative, and his ‘colleagues’, whenever I met them, seemed to respect those qualities in him. They were all taken in.
Later, at 9, he hadn’t arrived and I was startled by a call from his mobile; reluctant to pick up, I braced myself and heard the voice of a woman. She was telling me something but, taken by surprise, all I could hear was her harsh, clipped delivery. ‘This is my husband’s mobile’ I said. ‘No,’ she replied, strangely sarcastically, ‘This is John’s mobile.’ She began to say more but was cut short at the start of a sentence. I rang back but heard only John’s cool, measured request to leave a message.
When, finally, his key found its way hesitantly into the lock, suspiciously late (as though trying me out) I heard a car screech off in the street but I said nothing. He looked at me, his eyes suddenly alert (perhaps surprised to see me dressed up for an evening out: skirt, stockings, heels) then sighed at the TV (as if I’d done something wrong) and sat down in front of it, his tie loose, collar open, his hair dishevelled and thin red marks across the left side of his jaw. He looked as if he'd just been through something, some moment of tension, some narrow escape. His shirt had been hurriedly tucked and there was mud smeared across the high polish of his shoes which could have meant something. Now what? I thought; what does he know? Does he know I know?
The news again, running through a repetition of the earlier agenda, the rapist now relegated to item three. Only a couple of weeks before this would have meant as much to me as another reprisal in Northern Ireland, another suicide bombing in Iran, Iraq or whereever; now the News was here in my own front room. I watched 'John' as the rhino-necked Inspector droned on again in his monotonous, low key listing of the dangers, providing advice and safety precautions for single women (‘ensure your windows are locked’). John watched as if he wasn’t watching. Nothing showed in his face. As the item ended, however, he looked over at me, his tic under control, his eyes unblinking, almost as if he was showing me his power, laughing at me with a straight face. I picked up the paper pretending to see what was on later (something called 'Brute Force' at 11.15).
When I looked again the eyes seemed merely empty, glazed. Maybe, I thought, maybe he doesn't really see me at all. I crossed my legs and leaned back on the sofa. Already, however, when I closed my eyes I could see a woman's white, naked body struggling from some violence in the darkness of a bedroom, slipping backwards down the slithering slope of the duvet, shoulders hard to the floor, ankles hooked up in the tangling sheets but kicking against the hoarse voice ordering her to do something (open up, open up, get those fucking legs open, you slag!)
What were those sick images doing in my head? It was his power. His tele-something, leaking his mind’s fevered images into mine. I tried shutting it out, keeping my eyes on the screen as the news was coming to a close with an item featuring an animal hospital and the face of baby hedgehog feeding from a syringe. The news reader’s warm, goodnight smile abandoned me to the credits.
I refused to let myself think as I watched him watching the sluts on the ads writhing under showers, pursing their lips to suck on straws, opening doors to strangers. He observed them coldly, as though they meant nothing, were mere advertisements, his face locked in the same fixed expression (Simon Cowell at judge’s houses) pretending to be unmoved but judging, assessing.
My eyes stung with colour, so vibrant it hurt. I could feel something contracting in the relentless pulse of pain. He was working through the TV now, through the seamless transmission, rotting my brain, fucking up my mind, turning me into one of him. Colour became a spectrum of green: the hard, crew-cut green of golf became the still, dead green of snooker, then the mottled green of tennis before settling into the heavy, swampy green of football in front of which a grey haired presenter was talking to a manager who we were supposed to have forgotten had been arrested for Kerb-crawling a year before and then an invisible northern voice started listing the teams over a long-range shot of the pitch. Tiny players flicked aimlessly here and there, 'warming up' beneath their names set out like a transparent tactics board.
If I moved now I knew he’d look up and speak, he'd want to know where I was going. Now I was afraid he would speak, I was afraid to hear his voice. I was stuck there, I couldn't move and I couldn't think. Think of something, I thought, but all I could focus on was the luminous green filling the screen which would be there for another hour of ‘highlights’. After another five minutes it began to seem like a lifetime of blank endurance; my lifetime. I wanted rid of him. I wanted a husband, a life. I shut my eyes and there was the '24 Hours - We Never Close' video showing 'Dogs Fuck Slags' on the inside of my lids I could feel myself suppressing the thing building inside me, struggling against the moist burning sensation in my eyes, the tightness across my chest, but before I had time to understand what was happening a scream broke from me with a frightening energy. I stood up, shaking. I wasn't myself, I can tell you. I don't know who I was.
Someone had knocked at the door, strangely failing to see the bell. The sound gripped his face but he made no move to acknowledge it. By the time I’d opened the door there was no one around, just John’s briefcase standing upright on the path like an abandoned child.
From the end of the hall he stood watching me carry it past him, into the kitchen. I don't know how he looked, I didn't look at him. I placed the case on the worktop and stood leaning on the fridge staring at it as if I’d never seen it before. I had no need to open it. There would be fingerprints on the handle, I remember thinking.
After a moment, rolling up the sleeves and pulling down the hem of my tight top, I thought I'd recovered myself and started to prepare a salad. Who was going to eat it, I had no idea. I sat two plump tomatoes in front of me and cut through the first, dividing it almost exactly in half; two hemispheres tipped onto their sides while the second sat plumply red on the woosey wood grain of the cutting board, little drops of moisture clinging to its too smooth skin, daring me to make the incision. The hand on my shoulder made me jump forward so sharply I almost sliced my thumb.
As I turned he was waiting there in front of me, his arms spread, the tips of his fingers touching my elbows, as if to catch me as I fell and draw me into him. He was trying to hold me. He was going to put his lips to mine and the contact of his hands on my bare elbows was so gentle I felt myself falling. I could hear the low hum of the crowd in the background, the measured, isolated voice of the commentator and there was a moment when I was just swaying: faint, limp, lifeless. Don't look at his eyes, I told myself, don't look at his eyes. Only when the kitchen knife sank in and I could feel the power of the first clean thrust in my fist did I find my voice.
‘Die, you fucker. Die.’ Even now, repeating these words leaves me with a tingling charge; at the time I felt the phrase vibrate with the blade through my whole system. It's not as easy as it looks on film, there are hard, frustrating chunks in the body where you feel too much resistance, as if the blade is just deflected by bone or gristle and doing so little damage you have to punch down again and again until you feel a softness giving way, letting the blade deep inside. The power you feel must be something like the power a man feels when he’s thrusting inside a woman and it is exciting. ‘Die, you fucker. Die.’ You don't have to say anything so melodramatic, of course, but it helps.
Just before the end, I was holding the knife above his face and he was down on his knees, a gross red stain spreading across his chest like the map of South America (another place I haven’t been), soaking the white shirt I’d laundered a week before. By the time the ragged coastline of Argentina reached the Falklands of his pants I could hear a hoarse, sucking sound bubbling in his throat like some pornographic soundtrack: ‘Ohsoshsosh (Blah, blah, blah) Ohsoshsosh’
What was he saying? Who knows? I can’t even say my transcript is accurate as memory is always influenced by mood; mostly it just sounds completely fucking alien.
DG 2015
