Nobody Knows (19 page)

“Get over yourself, Joel. It’s not about you and it’s not about me.”

“It’s always about you. You’re a selfish, manipulative whore, Gillian. And I’m not giving you a thing,” he stated matter-of-factly.

My heart was breaking. My neck was stinging and sore, but with each hateful word my heart broke a little more. The startling revelation was that I didn’t know there was anything left for Joel to break. I thought he had destroyed it years ago.

As the pain subsided and pure white-hot rage took over, I gave up trying to be nice and trying to stay alive. Reasoning with Joel wasn’t working, so it was time to speak the only language he knew. As he began to walk away from me, I followed him. When I reached out my hand and grabbed his shoulder roughly, spinning him around so once again he was facing me, I didn’t even recognize the fingers.

“We are not fucking finished, Joel. You need to get the fuck out of this house NOW,” I boomed. “Your kids won’t come home while you’re here and I won’t have them not here at home. They are not going to some foster home ’cause their dad is too much of a low life asshole to care about them. So get your shit and get out!”

I was stupid. I should have seen it coming, but I wasn’t myself. His hand collided with my cheek with such a force that I was knocked off my feet and my eye felt like it was going to explode out of its socket.

“You think you’re brave talking to me like that?” he slurred, standing over me as I tried to scramble up off the floor. “Stay there.” He pushed me back down. “I’m not leaving. If this life is so terrible for your precious kids, then you go. Take what you came with and get out.”

“You can’t think this is okay?” I queried.

“You are trash, Gillian. And if those kids can’t see it, then they are bigger morons than I ever was.” My tears were back. That was the beginning of the end.

Joel was violent and mean and cruel, and if he saw even one trace of weakness he exploited it to the fullest, and tears were the worst. Nothing could cause more trouble than a rogue tear on a soft cheek.

I didn’t see the kick coming. This time it was my knee that bore the brunt of it. An immediate pain consumed my body. I wriggled in agony; a distressed wail escaped my lips. Joel spat on me, leaving a large white spot on my shirt.

“Please, just get out,” I pleaded.

Joel began to walk away and I pulled myself unsteadily to my feet. Using the bench to steady my balance, I grabbed the nearest thing, a ceramic fruit bowl with one lonely green apple rolling about in the bottom, and hurled it with all my strength towards Joel’s head. It missed, just, and instead crashed into the wall only centimeters from him. That certainly got his attention.

“What the fuck?” He spun on his heel and came back at me.

For someone who was still drunk from the night before he was astonishingly quick on his feet. Grabbing my wrists, he twisted one backwards. I glanced down at my arms. I didn’t know how much longer I could hang on. The pain was running rampant through my body; he was going to break my wrist. At best it was already badly sprained, and if it was held at that unnatural angle for much longer I was going to be in more strife than I knew.

Pushing through the pain and the tears, I knew I would never have the courage and the tenacity—not to mention the stupidity—to put myself in this position again, so it was now or never. “For fuck’s sake, Joel. For once in your life be a man. I know your dad died and you never had the male role model you obviously needed, but what you’re doing to us, your family, is wrong. You know that. You can’t push me around and slap me and throw me on the floor and take all the money and leave us with nothing. Or cut your own children out of your life but still stay in the same house. How can you possibly think that this is all okay? I know you, or at least I used to, and that man I knew, he would never have let things turn out like this. What happened to him?”

Furious, Joel threw me across the room, watching as I fell backwards off the coffee table. My wrist was broken at best, shattered at worst. I tried to put some weight on it to help me up and yelped in agony.

“Gillian, stop threatening me. You know you don’t have the balls to do anything about it. This is my life. If you won’t leave, then deal with it. I’m not going to change for you. I’m not going to change for anyone.” He laughed a deep, tyrannical laugh.

He towered over me, leering as I clutched at my wrist. I wanted to kick him as hard as I could and put him in real physical pain. He disgusted me, standing over me, naked. I wanted nothing more than to vomit on the carpet.

“Now, Gillian, run over to my mother’s place and hide,” he sneered. I couldn’t conceal my terror. I had no idea that Joel knew where we went. “Oh, you didn’t think I knew about that, did you? Well, you might want to tell your big-mouthed children to keep your secrets a bit better. I know everything.”

He turned and walked away. The last thing I heard before his bedroom door slammed was, “We’re done. Get the hell out of my house and don’t come back. Go on, run to my Mummy and tell her that big bad mean Joel hurt you.” And he was gone.

The conversation was over. And I was a mess. My wrist hung limply in my lap. I was sure my neck was covered in deep, unexplainable red marks. Not to mention the cuts and scrapes on my back, legs, and hips. My face felt like it was on fire from the slap and my knee was barely able to hold my weight. Pitifully, I dragged my battered body up off the carpet and limped out the front door. I hadn’t even made it to my car when Heidi’s red Mazda came to a screeching halt beside me. At the sight of her I collapsed on the gravel and burst into a torrent of tears.

Chapter

Twenty-Four

Joel

In his room, Joel collapsed on the bed, exhausted. Another outburst with his wife had drained him of what little energy he had left. His head had still been pounding from the night before and then Gillian had come home carrying on like she was some kind of battered wife who knew what was best. Telling him that he had to get out of his own house. With his hands on his hips, Joel just shook his head. “Who does she think she is?” he asked himself repetitively.

For a long time Joel sat there, completely naked, and not even noticing. He looked around his room and saw what had become of his life. His room was his prison. The only difference was he could sneak out at night and find himself the next conjugal visitor. Everything he owned had been squirreled away. What was once the walk-in wardrobe filled with Armani and Versace suits, all immaculately pressed and lined up, was now filled with clothes tossed in piles and shoved wherever they fitted. In the en suite all traces of Gillian’s makeup and sweet smelling perfume were gone. Instead, on the vanity next to Joel’s cheap disposable razor, was a generic brand kettle and a tin of instant coffee. Even the sight of it made Joel want to scream. It was all just a painful reminder of how far he had fallen.

Last night’s conquest’s clothes littered his floor, along with a month’s worth of empty bourbon and vodka bottles. A few empty pizza boxes gave the room a peculiar odor which Joel hadn’t noticed before but now it was more overpowering and repugnant than hospital disinfectant. And then it hit him. This time he had gone too far.

Instantly regret flooded him and he wanted to know that Gillian was all right. Sobriety was immediate. In the past Joel had picked his battles well and he had possessed enough control not to go too far, not to hurt her too much. This had been the case since after the night when he had punched her in the stomach, causing all sorts of complications, not only with his mother, who had watched the whole thing, but also with Gillian’s pregnancy. He’d been fanatical about being able to hide the bruises. But not this time.

This time Gillian had come home looking for a fight. She was angry, agitated, and aggressive. For the first time in a decade, Joel saw that she was filled with the passion he once loved about her. This only helped things get even further out of hand. He now prayed feverishly that she had enough sense to hide what he could almost guarantee were going to be marks on her neck and her wrist. Surely she would need medical help with that one. Would she tell someone what had happened? She never had in the past, so maybe she would keep her mouth shut again. But maybe wasn’t enough to rely on. He had never gone that far either. Panicked, Joel didn’t know whether he had pushed her over the edge and the police would be knocking any moment.

Determined not to let this ruin his life, Joel jumped up with a renewed sense of responsibility. He couldn’t deny the bruising, and he knew he couldn’t lie his way out of a broken wrist and the scratches on her neck if the police came looking, but he could lie his way out of pretty much everything else. She had no proof. Gillian was too dumb, too worried about other people’s perceptions to cover her arse, and Joel resolved in that moment to cover his. He darted into the shower and washed away the filth, the whore from last night, the smell of Gillian’s vanilla perfume on his skin. For ten minutes he stood under the scalding water and scrubbed ferociously. He emerged a new man. Freshly shaven, he slipped on the only clean white shirt he owned and a pair of ill-fitting Calvin Klein jeans. His once lean frame hung over the waistband, reminding him that he hadn’t been for a run in years. Yet another thing that Gillian had caused to fall apart.

Once he was up and moving he worked like a crazed man. Haunted by an invisible force, Joel scooped up the piles of clothes from his bedroom floor, pausing only to pick out those clothes that weren’t his, and took them straight to the laundry. Even through all the trouble, Gillian had still washed his clothes. He would dump them in a pile on the floor, unsorted and without checking the pockets, and a day or two later a basket would be dumped outside his locked bedroom door full of fresh laundry. They weren’t ironed or folded like they had once been, but Joel never complained. He wasn’t the husband he once had been, so he considered any victory worth having. But today Gillian wouldn’t be doing it. It took him twenty minutes to locate the washing powder and the fabric softener, work out where it went, and how to start the machine, but as the gentle hum began, Joel felt like he had accomplished something.

Joel grabbed some garbage bags from the kitchen cupboards and returned to his room, realizing for the first time what he had done to his family. It was shocking and he suddenly felt violently ill. The cupboards were empty. And it wasn’t just food missing—it was everything. There were only a few mismatched glasses that looked as if they had once upon a time contained jam. There were no teaspoons at all. Foil was stacked in piles. It had obviously been used to wrap something, washed off, and hoarded to be used again. A solitary loaf of bread with the beginnings of mould accumulating on the end was the extent of the fresh food, and only three tins of generic brand spaghetti sat behind it.

Joel couldn’t control it any longer. He turned to the kitchen sink and purged. For a full five minutes Joel threw up everything in his stomach. When nothing was left, he stood there dry retching until his eyes watered. Completely exhausted, Joel pushed through the pain barrier. Grabbing the garbage bags, he slammed the pantry door closed in repugnance and retreated to his bedroom, where there were no surprises.

An hour later all the bottles and pizza boxes and trashy clothes were gone. Both the recycling and the normal rubbish bin were both overflowing and Joel had to put all his weight on them just to get them closed, but the mess was gone. The bedroom curtains were open, and for the first time in over twelve months Joel’s bedroom floor saw sunlight.

Once Joel was finished with the rubbish he just moved on and kept going. Soon the kitchen cabinets were once again restocked with all the things he had buried in his bedroom for the past couple of years. The dinner set was returned and placed in the cupboard, the crystal wine glasses were rinsed and lined up neatly in the cabinets, and the cutlery drawer was once again filled. Now there were teaspoons and dessert spoons. No longer would Gillian be forced to measure her coffee with a butter knife. But Joel still wasn’t satisfied. The reasoning behind his frantic efforts was simple and selfish—he was extremely worried that this time Gillian would tell someone what had happened and they would come to the house. He knew that he had done the wrong thing and that the years past would take a lot to make up, but he needed Gillian to stay. As much as he told her to get out and did everything in his power to drive her out, he needed her to stay, to give him the chance to make up for everything he had done to her.

Next thing Joel jumped in the car and took off to the nearest supermarket. He was going to stock the fridge and pantry, something he hadn’t done since the day Gillian moved in. Once she began living there it was one of those chores that just became hers. The difference was that for years she’d had access to the joint bank account and paid for the groceries from there. But then Joel had cut that off too, and pretty soon the lack of food, and especially fresh food, had been limited to what Gillian could afford on her meager salary.

Joel grabbed a trolley and began pushing it down the aisle. He was halfway down when he realized he had no idea what he was supposed to get. What did kids eat? What were they allergic to? He had absolutely no idea. But then he found one. A short frumpy woman in front of him had a long list and was throwing items into her own trolley with wild abandon. So he started following her, copying what she bought. It seemed normal enough. Muesli bars, juice boxes, single serving packets of chips, the list went on and on. Then Joel started to think. He remembered having all that sort of stuff in his lunch box when he was a kid, so surely that would be good enough to satisfy his own children.

By the time the sun was setting, Joel was exhausted. Not just physically from the cleaning and moving stuff about, but on edge emotionally too. He didn’t know who to expect to come storming through the front door and let him have it. His mother. Gillian’s girlfriends. The police. The Department of Community Services. He couldn’t shake the memory of the defeated look on Gillian’s face as she heard the snap in her wrist. The pained, terrified expression in her eyes.

But no one came. He sat there in the silence as night fell and just waited. His children never came home. Not even a text message to say where they were. And no sign of Gillian. Joel was beginning to wonder if he should try and track her down just to make sure she was okay, but thought better of it. After today’s effort she might think he was coming back for round two, and Joel knew she had every right to feel that way.

Instead, Joel just drifted off to sleep on the couch and waited for them to come home. He needn’t have bothered. They didn’t come home that night.