The Book of You: A Novel (16 page)

“You like your tea weak with no milk, don’t you, Clarissa dear?” Miss Norton calls.

Is the pose really just modeled? I try to tell myself it must be. This cannot really be a captured woman. That table cannot really be real. But her terror looks entirely real to me.

This is what you like to see.

“Clarissa?” Miss Norton calls again. “Is that right?”

“Yes, Miss Norton,” I manage to say, not knowing what I’m agreeing to.

The article titles are jumping out at me.

Shivering Slave Girl Confesses: Fear Makes Me Wet.

This is what you like to read.

“Biscuits?” asks Miss Norton.

Straitjacket Seduction: Keep Her Helpless.

This is what you like to do.

I think of my arms pinned behind my back in the park. Your hand squeezing my neck, holding me in place. The dreadful things I had to let you say, as if I yearned to hear them, and how you loved my responses—all those yeses—as your glove moved over me. Yes, yes, yes.

“I baked them this morning,” Miss Norton says. “I’d so hoped to run into you. I wanted you to have a treat. And you were so kind to buy me those wonderful chocolates. You chose all my favorites.”

Enema Ecstasy and Home Operations.

“Clarissa? Did you hear me?”

Realms of Torture: Inside Our Readers’ Forbidden Rooms.

Do you have such a room?

“That sounds lovely, Miss Norton,” I somehow say.

“I’m glad to hear it, Clarissa. You’re much too thin, dear.”

Bound Beauties Stretched and Plugged to the Limit.

Again I think of that November night. And the marks on my body the next morning.

That photo. Should I actually be grateful it is nothing like what this magazine must contain?

“Clarissa?” Miss Norton appears in the doorway.

In a panic, I shove the magazine back into the envelope, struggling with my stiff fingers, still swaddled in the NHS bandages, so that I tear the thick brown paper.

I’ve looked at it long enough. Even with the magazine out of sight the other article titles are popping in my head. The titles are absurdly bad. Annie would laugh at them in disdain. She would tell me it’s all one bad fake. She would smack you, hard, across your horrible face. But I can’t laugh. It isn’t funny. You don’t mean anything about this to be funny. The magazine’s cover photo is the most frightening and ugly and grotesque thing I’ve ever seen.

Tied Twist: Rough Roped and Ridden Raw.

I hurry across the room to take the beautiful old china plate from Miss Norton. It is yellowing and cracked with age. The biscuits are golden. “They look delicious,” I say, though nothing in the world could look delicious to me right now. I try to set the plate onto the coffee table gently, but my fingers don’t seem able to grip properly and it crashes onto the wood. I’m astonished that I haven’t shattered it.

Animal Positions: Restraints for the Farmyard.

“Will you help me with the tea tray?” Miss Norton calls, oblivious to my spectacular clumsiness. It is a lucky thing that Miss Norton’s usually infallible ability to notice absolutely everything is entirely derailed by the all-consuming attention she gives to her role as hostess.

I lurch into the kitchen, which is a pristine 1970s time warp of brown and tan.

Painful Pleasures to Keep Her Captive: Picture-Perfect Punishment.

I’ll punish you for this.
That was what you said in the park. Is this what you meant?

“I can’t find my tea strainer, dear,” Miss Norton says.

I rummage blindly in Miss Norton’s overcrowded drawers.

Obedience School: Lock Me Down and Whip Me Hard.

I think of your theory about why Bluebeard murdered his first wife.
The worst form of disobedience,
you said. I remember the alarm bells going off when you used that word.
Disobedience.
Even as your wine made its way through my veins I could still see what an ugly part of your vocabulary it was, an ugly part of your outlook on what men and women could be to each other.

You need to do what I tell you.
You said that in the park, too.

The terrible titles may differ, but they all come down to the same thing.

“What’s wrong with you, Clarissa?” Miss Norton laughs fondly. “It’s right by your hand.” She takes the tea strainer and places it beside her dainty rose-covered cups and teapot. Steam curls from the spout, and I nearly burn my other fingers as I take the tray, then stagger into the living room and set it on the table, china clattering.

Fill Every Hole: Lessons She Won’t Forget.

“Sit down, Clarissa,” Miss Norton says.

I sit down.

Taboo Tortures and Training Torments She Can’t Possibly Resist.

“Take a biscuit, Clarissa.”

I pick up a biscuit, bite off a tiny piece, and try to chew. I think I may choke. I force myself to swallow, and when Miss Norton concentrates on pouring the tea, I slip the remainder of the biscuit in my bag.

Workout Equipment for All Parts: Forcing Her into the Shapes and Sizes You Crave.

Miss Norton chatters happily, excited to have me in her territory, but I am hardly taking it in. “It is so lovely, having you here. You must visit me more often, Clarissa,” she says, and I promise that I will.

My hands are shaking. As I pick up my cup, I spill tea over Miss Norton’s antique green carpet. I rise to get a towel, apologizing, but my balance is off and I knock into the coffee table hard, bruising the bony front of my shin and letting out a cry as I slosh more tea onto her rosy Axminster flowers. Miss Norton waves me down, telling me not to worry; she can see how tired I am, and anybody would be reeling at the end of a gruesome day in a criminal courtroom; she’ll go herself; I must rest and not even think about moving.

Shamed Slave Suspended and Flogged in Dungeon of Discipline.

While Miss Norton is out of the room, I examine the envelope. There is no subscription company name or other identifying detail. There is a stamp. There is a sticky label typed with my name and address. That is all. Did you buy it from the back room of a sex shop, where only their special customers are invited? Order it online from a website that can’t be found through any normal search engine? Maybe you belong to a secret club of men with access to such things. The worst possibility of all is that you made it yourself. But there must be a chance that the police will be able to find out who sent it and somehow trace it to you.

Quickly, I look again at the front of the magazine itself.

No glossy airbrush has been used on the cover model; there was nobody to ask any awkward postproduction questions. Her mascara is smeared by what look like real tears; they didn’t hire a makeup artist who could be a witness to what they were recording. Could it be Laura Betterton? The lighting is poor, as if the whole thing was set up in somebody’s soundproofed and windowless garage; they didn’t use a studio where the model could be seen entering and could then freely exit.

I put your magazine away for the second and last time, knowing that I will never take it out of the brown envelope again. There is something about its amateurishness that makes it more sinister and real. Something that makes me ask again how clear the line is between actuality and pose. I cannot stop wondering who the woman is on the front of the March issue, and how she came to be photographed like that, and who could think up such things, and where she is now. I do not wonder if you have done such things yourself. I am certain that you have.

Tuesday

T
HE WITNESS WAS
slumped in her chair, eyes half closed. Dorcas Wykes. The one whose little-old-lady mother didn’t say bad words. Dorcas wasn’t hiding behind her bedroom curtains anymore; a prison guard sat close by.

Clarissa realized that she was slumped, too, and made herself sit up straighter.

“I know it was almost two years ago, but I need to talk about something very upsetting that happened to you then.” Mr. Morden spoke gently. Dorcas glared at him.

“Do you recall traveling by car from Bath to London on Saturday, May fifth?” Mr. Morden asked. “You were driven there by people you know.”

Dorcas twisted to look behind her. Moved her head from side to side slowly, glaring and insistent. “No,” she said. She shook her head violently. “No.” She wrapped her arms tightly around herself and began to rock. She pulled her blond hair in front of her jail-pallid face, a curtain to hide behind. She began to sob. Her breathing grew labored.

“I need to ask the jury to retire for a short break,” the judge said, “to allow Miss Wykes to collect herself.”

T
HE DOOR BETWEEN
Court 12 and the intensely lit waiting room hadn’t even closed before the boy with the purple-tipped hair spoke. “Crazy woman. Good-looking, though.”

He looked like a male pixie, though in fact he was an apprentice locksmith. What marked him out for Clarissa was that he seemed always to be plugged into earphones, and they were the same shade of purple as his hair. He’d once walked into the jury box still wearing them, though Robert gave him a discreet nudge to take them out before the judge noticed.

“Shhhhh.” Several of them said it at once.

Annie actually elbowed him and told him to put a lock on his mouth. But then she rolled her eyes. “She’s wasting my time. I don’t like people who waste my time. How dare she waste my time?”

“I’m sorry for her,” Clarissa said, deflated. “This case is a contest. Who’s the saddest of them all.” She was rummaging in the main section of her anti-stalker bag for lip balm, digging deeper, moving things around, puzzled when her fingers came across something silky. She pulled it out to look. Immediately, she scrunched it into her fist.

Tuesday, February 24, 11:45 a.m.

I try to smooth my face into a composed expression, but I haven’t released my grip on what I found in my bag.

What I found is a piece of slashed lavender jersey. What I found is the underwear I wore the night I spent with you in November. You must have slipped them into my bag when I fainted in the station tunnel.

You altered them after you took the photo. You slit them at both hips, at the side seams. You cut away the crotch, which is not in my bag. When did you do this? Was I still wearing them when you did? Did the scissors touch my skin when they sliced the fabric? I can see the photograph as clearly as if I held it before my eyes. Your words are playing over and over in my head. The missing piece.
I have the missing piece, Clarissa.

C
LARISSA WAS BACK
in her seat in the jury box. People’s mouths were moving, but no words were coming out. Mr. Morden appeared far away and much smaller, as if he were standing at the other end of a long tunnel and she was looking at him through a shrinking glass instead of a magnifier. After a few minutes, the noises started to return, and Mr. Morden began to grow until he was the right size again, like Alice. She wasn’t sure how much she’d missed, but at least she hadn’t fainted, and even Annie hadn’t noticed. Clarissa deliberately pricked the pad of her thumb with the lead of her pencil. Concentrate, she told herself.

“You voluntarily went to the police station on Monday, May seventh. You spent two days there, Miss Wykes, as a witness.”

“Don’t remember goin’ there.”

Annie’s head was moving from side to side in disgust. That could be me, Clarissa thought, understanding the woman’s terror and degradation when faced with talking in public about whatever had happened to her. Clarissa, too, could become a person who filled someone like Annie with revulsion.

O
VER LUNCH
, C
LARISSA
moved numbly from the women’s cloakroom, where she threw up, to the café, where she got a bottle of sparkling water, to the quiet area, where she held a book she didn’t read; then she repeated the circuit.

When they returned to Court 12, she pricked herself with the pencil again, not realizing what she’d done until Annie reached over and plucked it out of her hand, shaking her head no and looking appalled as she pointed to a tiny pearl of blood.

Clarissa’s ears were buzzing. Mr. Morden’s voice wasn’t making sense. She pressed her hands to her temples, looking down at her pile of notes, thinking her own handwriting looked like indecipherable hieroglyphics. All she could see were chains and belts and ropes. The woman’s terrified eyes above the gag. The gloved hand and the shining instrument. The horrible titles describing the magazine’s contents.

Mr. Morden adjusted his wristwatch, straightened his papers, rocked back and forth on his feet, visibly struggling to form his next question. “Did you visit a London park on Sunday, May sixth, just before you journeyed home?”

Dorcas nearly jumped from the chair but glanced at the blue screen and remained where she was, still under cover but even more agitated. “No.”

As a little girl, parks had been places of delight to Clarissa. In parks, she and her parents ate the picnic feasts her mother carefully prepared and packed. In parks, her father helped her to build castles and mermaids out of damp sand. Parks were not dangerous places.

She thought of her local park, the place she once had loved. Now that park was a pair of gloved hands gripping her wrist, leather pressed between her legs, words to humiliate her, a car she had to stop herself being dragged to. Now she hated that park. She never wanted to go there again, even though she knew she’d been lucky.

There’d been no computer geek to rescue Dorcas from that London park. No Bruce with his silky black head.

Mr. Morden changed tack. “Miss Wykes, your mother appeared before this jury. She—”

“The jury can fuck themselves.”

The judge looked furious. “This court is suspended until tomorrow.”

I
T WAS AN
unasked-for gift, finding herself sitting with Robert in a café near the bridge, a whim of his to stop there, to drink something hot before they got a later train.

She took a small sip of the tea he’d bought her. The nausea hadn’t left her since she’d touched that magazine; it had deepened since discovering the underwear; it had become a kind of poison since the aborted hints of what Dorcas had suffered and the visual spectacle of the wrecked woman in the witness box. Though being with Robert was such powerful happiness that the sickness eased, at least for a few minutes.

“One time,” he was saying, “not on my watch, a woman was crying outside the house, ‘My babies, my babies, somebody save my babies.’ I told you we always go in in pairs, didn’t I?”

She nodded, wondering how she could be fooling him into thinking she was normal.

“Two firefighters went in for her babies,” he said. “Both men died.”

“And her babies?”

“Turned out her babies were budgies.”

Clarissa shook her head. “You wouldn’t ever go back in, Robert, would you?”

“I don’t take unnecessary risks.” He took a bite of the lemon cake he’d bought himself, looking like a young boy who’d stolen a forbidden treat, chewing and swallowing with exaggerated pleasure, sighing out his appreciation. He pushed the plate toward her. “Except when it comes to dessert.” There was one fork. “Share with me?”

She felt herself smiling so much it made her jaw ache. She picked up the fork and scooped up some buttercream sprinkled with citrus zest, though she barely tasted it.

“Don’t think I didn’t notice that you only ate the frosting.”

“I always do that. Now you really have discovered my darkest secret.”

“And you know mine,” he said. “I never talk about the work stuff. My wife—she never wants—never wanted—to hear it. I worry that it’s boring.”

“Nobody could think it’s boring.” She knew she was flattering him with interest and attention and admiration, and that it was working, but she meant it, too, all of it.

Was her infatuation with Robert as dangerous as Rafe’s was with her? Of course not, she told herself. They weren’t comparable at all. She tried not to think of the eviscerated underwear in her bag.

She lifted a hand, stretched it toward him, let it hover. He squinted at her, encouraging but quizzical, until she reached the rest of the way to brush a yellow crumb from his chin, making them both freeze for a few seconds afterward.

She was startled by a memory of Henry wiping a smear of chocolate from her lips with his finger, then kissing her.

She shook her head, shaking Henry away at the same time, and spoke lightly. “Are all firemen like you?”

“Yep. Simple needs. Plenty of meat and potatoes and we’re happy. We’re all the same.”

“I don’t believe that.”

He laughed. “I think you haven’t met many firemen . . .”

She laughed, too. “You’re definitely my first.”

“ . . .  or many people.”

“I fear you’re right. I’ll have to enlarge my lists of acquaintances by asking Grant to join me for coffee tomorrow. And you must ask Sophie.” Grant and Sophie were their least favorite jurors.

“There’s one thing I’m certain about,” he said.

“What?”

“I will not be inviting Sophie to join me here.”

“Well, I’ll still be asking Grant,” she said.

Tuesday, February 24, 7:00 p.m.

This time, there is only my name on the brown envelope. My full name. Typed. No note. No message. Just the photograph. Just the one.

In my own room, almost naked, limbs pulled taut so my body is like an X, my wrists and ankles bound to the bedstead, a black blindfold over my eyes and a black scarf tied over my mouth. I am still wearing the underwear, but you have cut out the crotch. The stockings and bra have not been moved, but now there’s a pair of scissors next to them. You’ve also added a whip, coiled beside me on the bed.

All of your deluded talk of love. But the real truth is here in this photo. How you’ve always seen me, how you’ve imagined me from the beginning, what you’ve always wanted to do. Trapping and controlling and hurting. It’s what you are doing to me every day, literalized. It’s how you want me. A blow-up doll who can’t speak or move, whose face is barely visible, who isn’t even conscious—you can do whatever you want with her.

She can’t possibly say no. As much as you love to hear the word yes, you don’t need to. It makes no difference. You’ll do as you please with or without yes if you can get away with it.

I see also that you might have covered my face so you can use the photo. I think of the section of one of my sewing magazines where readers send in snapshots of what they’ve been making. These are accompanied by stories about the occasion the garment was made for, how they went about sewing it, the specialist tools they’ve used or the ordinary household things they’ve improvised with or adapted. Your magazine must have a readers’ section akin to this.

Maybe that photo was your contribution to your own special community of freaks, with a narrative of all the things you did to me. Should I actually be glad that I can’t easily be recognized?

I try to tell myself that that thing on the bed is not me, that it’s only my shell, but it doesn’t work.

I think again of the passage you underlined in “The Robber Bridegroom.” The glasses of wine and the burst heart, the display of the woman’s naked body, the salt in the wounds. That is what you did to me. What you are still doing.

How long did you spend posing me and taking your pictures? I remember your overstuffed briefcase with its locked catch. Now I know exactly what props you carried with you that night. I know where the marks on my body came from.

I never doubted we had intercourse. The pain between my legs the next morning, and the bladder infection, made that clear. I know now that I must have been tied up when it happened. I only just make it to the bathroom sink to vomit.

You had the photo all this time, and I never knew, never remembered such a violation. How can I not have remembered? There is only one explanation: there is no longer even the tiniest sliver of doubt in my mind that you drugged the wine.

I splash my face with cold water and brush my teeth. I shove your disgusting trophy into the bottom of my wardrobe. Not in the cupboard with the rest of the evidence. I know better than to destroy it, but you’re shrewd enough to know that I could never bear to let anyone else see it. Your other photo seems harmless by comparison.

I turn on my laptop and order a new mattress and bed. I’d been meaning to, but now I must. It helps, doing something. The headboard and footboard are solid. No slats. No posts. I pay extra for them to take away the old one. I will continue to sleep on the sofa until my new bed arrives in four weeks.

Each morning I will pile up the blankets and pillows and put them in the old cedar trunk that had been one of my parents’ wedding presents. Doing this will remind me that the arrangement is temporary, and for nighttime only. My bedroom will be my bedroom again. But I can never again sleep in my old bed, where you did those things to me, that place of nightmares you won’t let me forget.