PSYCHOPHILIA: A Disturbing Psychological Thriller (26 page)

“Well,
it took me a few days to get over it.  Fainting really takes it out of you.”  I
can’t believe that I have said this, but he nods along with me.  He is very agreeable. 
He brings his tea up to his lips and sips at it.  He has great big hands, like
a giant, and the small pink cup that he is drinking from appears quite
ridiculous nestled between his fingers.  There is nothing delicate about them. 
In fact there is nothing delicate about this man at all.  Everything about him
is oversized.  Oversized hands, jaw, head, and shoulders.  He is a man in
supersize, and I like it.  I think his hands would feel heavy on my skin.  He
couldn’t tend my wounds, or lightly dab at Ishiko’s cuts, but he could hold me
and make me feel safe.  The only thing about him that is soft is his voice.  It
is rich and warm, like hot coffee cream.  He is looking out at the garden
dressed in its winter clothes.  He gazes out at the plants and trees which have
taken on a dazzling brilliance against the backdrop of an almost transparent
blue sky, so much so that I wonder if I might be able to see the beginnings of
heaven beyond.

“I
am just glad that you are alright.  Honestly, that’s all I want for you.”

“Well,”
I say smiling, presenting myself to him, “as you can see I am fine.”  We sit in
silence for a few minutes, maybe more, looking out to the garden.

“So,
Charlotte, tell me.  Honestly.  Are we going to see you again at work, or is
this it?”

“What
do you mean?”  I am just trying to buy time here.  I know there is only one
answer, but my reaction is instinctive, my last attempt to hang on to my life,
the one that I had created, in which I think at one point I might have been
happy.  In which I was me.  The real one.  No drugs or falsehood.  At least I
think.

“Charlotte,”
he smiles, laughing in a way that makes me feel sorry for both him and me as he
looks down at his cup.  “We both know what I mean.  Gregory called me.  Told me
to stop bothering you.  Told me you had resigned.”  I feel like a child with
her hand in the cookie jar.  “I can’t say it wasn’t a surprise when he called
me, I’ll tell you that.”

“I’m
sorry I didn’t tell you,” I say, so quiet it is almost a whisper.

“It’s
alright.  I think I already knew.  Just had to hear it for myself.  To know
that it was what
you
wanted.  It is what you want isn’t it, Charlotte?”
he says as he turns to look at me, the corners of his eyes turning down like
almonds.

“Yes,”
I say, not really knowing if either of us is convinced.  He nods his head and
his shoulders drop.  Breath rushing out of him as if he might actually
deflate.  There is no weight lifted with my answer.  He didn’t come here to
learn the truth, he already knew it.  He came here to accept it.  I shift about
in my seat looking for a more comfortable position but I don’t find it.  With
each shift in my position I can feel the fresh wounds opening up, and the bits
that had sucked the fabric of my clothes into the healing process snapped at me
as the material tore away.  I can feel myself wincing and the cushion begins to
feel like a rock with sharp edges, and eventually I am forced to pull it out
from underneath me.

“It’s
very beautiful here, you know?” he says.  He gets up and peers outside for a
better look.  “Without having seen upstairs, I bet this place would go for well
over a million.  Maybe a million two?”  I am very grateful to him because I
know that he has shifted the conversation on purpose.  I might teeter on the
edge of insanity in his eyes, but he still believes I feel the same things that
he does, like shame and regret.  He still believes I feel.

“At
least.”  I surprise myself by fitting back into the inane chatter about house
prices with ease.  He is standing at the door, facing the garden.  It is as if
he has never seen something of such beauty before in his life. Like a man on
death row looking at the natural world for the last time, eyes pressed up
against a tiny window that doesn’t open, drinking in the view as if he could
smell the damp of the early morning dew only meters away.  Right before I
slipped from the boat, I took no such memory.  I made no attempt to remember
the world that had betrayed me, sent me away, shut me out.  I didn’t want
memories of something I had never been a part of.

Without
looking back to me, Stephen says, “I am not surprised you never wanted to leave
this place, Charlotte.”

“Why
would she ever want to leave?”  I hadn't heard Gregory arrive behind me.  He joins
me at the table, his fingers tickling at my shoulder like a bug that I would
normally bat away, just like I had tried to do with Stephen’s questions.  His
fingers fidget, rather than touch.  His fingers are embarrassed to touch and
instead apologetically wriggle across whatever surface they contact.  I hear
Ishiko behind us and remember how he held her that night in her bedroom.  He
didn’t fidget then.  I remember him in the shower when he touched himself.  No
delicacy there.  Just me then.  I warrant it.  I am breakable.

“You
have a wonderful home, Gregory," Stephen says.  "You should look
after it.”

“I
have Ishiko for that.”  His smile is more a leer as I look up at his face.  I
can sense in his tone that he wants to belittle Stephen, make him seem poorer,
make him not fit into this life.  His way of being important.  He looks down at
me.  “Oh Charlotte, you are bleeding.”  My eyes dart across my body as I wonder
where from, excited for a second that the blood might be seeping through my
clothes.  They settle on my hand as Gregory picks it up and fusses over it,
pulling the small plaster away that has failed in its duty to stem the flow of
blood.  “She has eczema.”  He says, looking at Stephen.  “Terrible infliction. 
Always breaking and cracking, especially in this weather.”

Stephen
finishes his tea and I sit lifelessly whilst I allow Gregory to bandage my
fingers in an over elaborate display of affection.  He has Stephen hold the pin
after sending Ishiko away.  I can feel Stephen staring at me.  I look up at
him, his face above me, his jaw square and dark hair falling foppishly over his
right eye as he looks down pretending to watch the dressing of the wound.  He
watches as if he is waiting for me.  Waiting for anything.  Anything besides
apathy.

“That’s
it,” says Gregory, holding up my hand for an inspection of his bandaging
technique.  “Much better.  What shall I do with you?” he jokes as he pinches
the tip of my nose.  I force out an appreciative smile and take a look at my
over elaborate wound dressing that is more suitable, I think, for an amputee. 
“Don’t I look after you properly?”

“If
you don’t, you should, Gregory.  She is a lucky find,” Stephen says, still, I
think, looking at me before his gaze shifts to Gregory.

“Oh
I will, especially now.”

“Oh,”
Stephen says, more out of politeness than anything. 

“Now
that she is pregnant.”  As my chin drops and I stare up at Gregory’s smug face
it was as if I had just found out the news myself.  As if I am nothing but a
vessel with no clue about my fate until now. 

“Pregnant?” 
Stephen looks back at me.  I sit in stunned silence.  Of all the times he
chooses to announce it, it is now.  I have waited for this moment, the chance
to become the woman who is with child.  The woman who is something other than
crazy.  I have encouraged and hoped that Gregory might accept our impending
parenthood, and yet now as he does so it hits me like a brick in the face. 
Square, sudden, and painful.  I would have liked some warning, some
preparation.  I would have liked it not to be on the back of a conversation
that made me feel like I was still covering up the crazy that lurks beneath my
swelling surface.  Dr. Abrams told me to avoid surprises.  How can I when I
live with them?  The scored lines that adorn my body pulsate as if they
themselves are breathing life into me as living entities.  They are screaming
crazy,
crazy, crazy,
and I feel my hands wrapping themselves against my stomach to
quieten them.  My head is throbbing and I want to release the blood flow from
it, fearful of another seizure.

"Yes,
that's right," says Gregory.

“You
never mentioned it,” says Stephen looking at me, but Gregory is already guiding
him out and there is no requirement on my part to answer and for this is am
grateful.  I can hear Gregory opening the front door, walking Stephen through
it.  He mutters a goodbye and I too say the same but it gets lost within the
first seconds after leaving my lips and I know it will never find its way to
Stephen.  I get up and walk through the hallway, joining Gregory just as
Stephen is closing his car door.  They are both looking at me, but I pay them
no attention.  My mind is already on the car parked outside the Wexley’s house. 
It is Marianne’s, and she is sat in it.

Gregory
has closed the door on the winter temperature and has no interest in the
activities of our neighbours, as indifferent to their actions as the frost to
the surface which it covers.  I’m not even sure that he registered Marianne’s
presence.  He turns to me and pulls me in a bit closer, shaking off the chill
of the cold like a wet dog might shake himself dry.  He is all smiles, but I
cannot think straight because there is a swirling mass of unanswered questions
that fill my mind like the scattered fragments of an immature solar system,
colliding without purpose.

“Well,
it is official now,” he says, his sickly grin instigating a wave of deep nausea
from my stomach.  It is as if he believes in this moment of honesty that only
now something has changed in our lives, now that he has decided to speak about
it.  Forget the conception, the morning sickness which had passed, or the
growth of my stomach which he knows nothing about or has any interest in
documenting.  Yeah, he told my ex boss.  Now it’s real.  Big fucking deal.  “Listen,"
he says as he pulls my hips towards him.  "Today I have a treat for you. 
No more secrets, no more lies.  Just us and the future, and this little thing
growing inside of you.”  His words were much sweeter than they might sound
here.  When he said
this little thing,
it was with a twinkle in his eye
that no amount of lies could muster.  It was as if he finally caught up and now
sees the beauty in what we have created.  “Get your coat on.”

“Can’t
we just have a nice day together at home?” I say as I finger the hairs at the
side of his temple next to the pulsating vein with my un-bandaged left hand.  I
am trying to feel something for him so that my words sound genuine and
unscripted.

“But
I had made plans.”  His head drops to his chest and his words sound babyish. 
“I thought that we could go to the hotel, have a nice lunch, maybe,” he pauses,
rocks his body left and right, “go up to one of the rooms.”  He might as well
nudge me, flash me a wink.  “I want to scatter rose petals on the bed.”  So he
got Ishiko to cut the roses for him to scatter on the same bed where he wants
to do things to me.  No wonder she looked angry.  She must have known what she
was cutting them for.  Maybe the last time she was the one lying on the rose
petals.  But this time it is me.  He plans to create a scene of romance, a post-orgasmic
daze, so that I don't think about dying or get caught up on his mistakes.  He
thinks he can fumble his way around my body in a way that will make everything better
and that I won’t need anything else.  That on this day he will stick his
fingers inside me in a way that I have never yet been able to describe as
pleasurable, and that it will make up for the fact that only last week he was doing
the same to Ishiko.  Instead of feeling treated, I feel like I have become the
one he has to get out of the house, like my presence here makes life harder for
him.  He wants to take me to a restaurant, a hotel, a rented bed.  Like a
couple on a dirty weekend who leave behind an unsuspecting wife.  I bet there
was a time he took Ishiko to the hotel and did the same things to her as he now
wants to do to me, but now instead it’s her that he argues with in the kitchen
before he leaves for work.  Now she is the one putting up, gritting her teeth,
waiting for answers.  Beware the truth, that’s what she told me.

His
incredulous suggestions push me to the window and my breath starts fogging up
the glass.  Gregory joins me, perturbed that his idea for a romantic escape up
the road didn’t render me weak and speechless like a 1940’s movie heroine.

“You
know, we really shouldn’t be watching this,” he says as we both glare out of
the window in the direction of Marianne’s car.  Gregory chooses to walk away,
puts on some music, and I hear the light strumming of violins that signify the
beginning of a concerto.  He sits down on the settee where we sat yesterday and
picks up the newspaper, pretends to read it.  It was from last Sunday.  I see
Dana walking up the road, huffing and puffing her way up the pavement in
Everest sized strides.  When she sees Marianne’s car she stops for a few
seconds.  She crouches down on her good knee the best it would permit her and leans
into the car to speak to Marianne.  She doesn’t hang around though, and within
minutes she is knocking on the Wexley’s door.  I lean in closer and Gregory can
sense something has changed.  “What?  What happened?” I hear him say, walking
over to me through a crackle of ruffled broadsheet.  I knew he wasn’t really reading
the newspaper.

Gregory
joins me at the window in time to see John Wexley stepping out of the house, Mary
just behind him.  Dana soon joins Mary at her side and offers a supportive
arm.  Mary latches on to the offer and holds her like a walking frame.  Wexley
taps the driver’s window and speaks to Marianne.  Eventually Marianne gets out,
takes his hand in hers, perhaps gives him a gentle pull, but I could have made
that up to suit my own desires.  He extends his other hand in Mary’s direction,
who is holding her head in her hands, shaking uncontrollably, unable to look at
what was unravelling before her.  He looks like a referee about to start a
boxing match, or split one up because of unfair play.  I guess all isn’t fair
in love and war, after all.  I look at Gregory who is shaking his head like he
can’t quite believe it.

Voices
were raised and tears were shed.  Mary’s, and then Marianne’s, but the words remained
inaudible.  Whatever was said, the finale was Marianne driving away, Dana
helping Mary back in the house, and Wexley following them like a sad child who
had been scolded by his parents, his head hanging low, his shoulders hunched
and with one hand on his forehead like it was just all too much to bear. 

“Oh
dear,” Gregory said.  “I wonder what happened?”

“Honestly,
are you surprised?”  It was much more rhetorical than he had hoped for.  I
didn’t give him any time to answer.  “This is what happens, you know.  This is
what happens when you mess around and shit on your own doorstep.”  He is
standing there with his first taste of consequence thick on his tongue.  Both
Wexley and Gregory have now seen what hurt and betrayal leads to.  I left him
there next to the table that still had my birthday presents on and which we
both seem to have forgotten about.  I went to get my coat so that he could take
me out and so that I could get his planned day of treats over and done with.