The Book of You: A Novel (3 page)

No other man can do to you what I can. No other man will love you like I do.

For once, I want your predictions to come true.

Wednesday

Wednesday, February 4, 8:00 a.m.

When I open my front door, you are standing so close I breathe in the scent of your soap and shampoo. You smell fresh and clean. You smell of apples and lavender and bergamot—smells I would like if they weren’t your smells.

“Are you better, Clarissa?”

Fairness is not something you understand. It is not something you deserve. But I will be fair by talking to you one final time before refusing ever to talk to you again. This morning will be very different from Monday.

I speak calmly to you, in a polite voice. It is far from the first time I say it. “I don’t want you near me. I don’t want to see you. I don’t want anything to do with you. No form of contact. No letters. No gifts. No calls. No visits. Don’t come to my house again.”

My speech is perfect. Just as I rehearsed. I move away quickly, not looking at you, though you are clear enough in my head to provide an exact witness description.

You are six feet tall and large boned. Your belly used to be flat, but you must be drinking more because it isn’t now. Your hips have widened, too, over the last month. Your nose is ordinary in the blur of your puffy round face, which has lost its definition.

More than anything else, you are pale. Pale in mind. Pale in soul. Pale in body. Your skin is so pale you flush easily, going from white to ruddy in a flash. Your pale-brown hair is straight and short, not at all thinning. It is unusually soft and silky for a man’s. Your brows are pale brown. Your eyes are pale, watery blue. They are small. Your lips are thin. They are pale too.

You touch my arm and I shake you off, walking down the path to the waiting taxi.

“I was coming to check on you,” you say, as if I haven’t spoken at all. “Your phone’s still not on,” you say. “I worry when I can’t get hold of you,” you say.

With you beside me it seems a long walk through the path of Miss Norton’s wintering rosebushes, but I am at the taxi and must have reached it quickly.

I open the rear door and get in, trying to pull it closed behind me, but you catch it before I can.

“Move over, Clarissa. I’ll come with you.” You are bending over. Your head and torso are inside. I can smell your toothpaste. The mint is strong. You’ve probably used mouthwash, too.

The composure I have practiced so carefully dissolves. “This man isn’t with me,” I say to the driver, the same one who picked me up yesterday morning. “I don’t want him getting in.”

“Stop bothering her. Get the fuck out of my car or I’m calling the police,” the driver says.

My mother has told me all of my adult life that taxi drivers see it as part of their job to be protective; they know that’s why women pay for taxis. My mother is often right, and I am lucky with this driver. In my mother’s visions of taxi drivers as heroic saviors, they are always big and burly men.

This one is a woman, middle-aged and short, but stout and tough and fearless-seeming, with beautiful cropped spiky gray hair that I am certain she would never dream of dyeing. She wears jeans and a fuzzy orange wool sweater. She does not show you the warmth and joviality that filled her car during yesterday’s brief journey. She is opening her own door, showing you she’s prepared to enforce her words.

You withdraw your head and torso and stand just inches from the door as I slam it closed and the driver slams hers.

You bang a fist on the roof. “How can you treat me like this, Clarissa?”

The driver presses the button to lower the front passenger window, shouts threateningly at you, and moves off.
“Clarissa? Clarissa! I don’t deserve this, Clarissa.”

I still refuse to look at you. I’m trying so hard to stick to the advice, to do this right. I can see in my peripheral vision that you are running beside the taxi to the end of the street, slapping the trees and lampposts as you pass them. I can hear you calling my name. The driver is muttering under her breath about what a fucking crazy idiot you are. She is apologizing for her language, and I am apologizing for being so troublesome. We each tell the other that no apology is needed, though I know she is just being nice and mine is. I thank her for being so kind.

Before I get out of the taxi, I take her card: she is a potential witness against you.

Despite the film of sweat on my back and brow even in the cold of the morning, it has been a fairly successful start to the day in terms of managing you.

As I move in a daze through the station, my new phone bleeps, announcing that I have an email. I look at the screen like a little girl daring herself to stare into a mirror in the dark, frightened that the face of a monster will appear. To my astonishment, the email is from the long-silent Rowena. She’s visiting Bath tonight, and she’s commanding my presence at a French restaurant I’ve never been to but Henry once said was gruesome. I email back,
I’ll be there,
and two kisses. Then I switch off my phone and step onto the train to Bristol.

C
LEARLY, THE WITNESS
box was placed so its occupant would directly face the jury. But still the woman seemed so far away. In front of the jurors was an orchestra pit of twelve barristers in their wigs and black robes. Clarissa had to look over them all to get the witness in view.

She was extremely thin, almost worryingly frail. High cheekbones. Small straight nose. Rosebud lips. Delicate chin. Softly arched brows. Tiny seashell ears that belonged on a fairy. Her dark-blond hair was in a short ponytail.

But the closer Clarissa looked, the more she saw that the woman’s ethereal beauty was damaged. Her skin was too thin, too transparent. The firm set to her mouth and the lines etched around her huge green eyes were at odds with Clarissa’s guess that she was in her late twenties. Something had taken an unnatural toll on her.

“She looks like you,” Annie whispered. “She just needs to grow her hair longer and you’d pass for twins. But she’s the mean version. She’s hard.”

And probably ten years younger than I am, Clarissa thought.

The woman sipped from the glass of water that the usher poured for her, giving him a weak nod of thanks. Her skin was so drained of blood it was hardly darker than the white gauze of the top she was wearing. The top wasn’t warm enough; she probably had goose bumps. Her hands were shaking as she held the Bible. Her voice was trembling as she took the oath.

The judge spoke. “You are not to infer anything about the defendants from the presence of the blue screen blocking Miss Lockyer from their view. That is a very usual sight in court, simply to make witnesses feel more comfortable. That is all it means.”

Clarissa nodded agreement up at his high bench. She could see that the others had turned their heads to the left to do the same. She wasn’t sure she believed him, though.

“This witness will need a break every forty-five minutes,” the judge said.

The woman nodded gratefully at him, and then it really began. Carlotta Lockyer seemed to be the only person in the room. And though Mr. Morden was speaking, too, and asking questions, he and everyone else seemed to disappear. There was only Miss Lockyer’s voice.

I started dealing for Isaac Sparkle the summer before last, to fund my habit. Within a week I’d smoked it all myself and was money down. I thought if I ignored it, tried to avoid him, it would disappear.

On Saturday, July twenty-eighth, I was walking home. I’d gone out to shoplift, but hadn’t managed to get anything. There was a white van on my street, partly on the pavement. When I was level with it, one of Sparkle’s couriers, Antony Tomlinson, got out the front. Sparkle got out the back with one of his dealers, Thomas Godfrey.

Sparkle said, “Get her in the fucking van.” They picked me up and forced me in.

Sally was in the backseat. She’s a working girl, another user. The van stopped after about five minutes. Godfrey said to Sally, “Get the fuck out.” There weren’t no door handles in back. Sally had to climb between the front seats, over Tomlinson, then out the front passenger door. I was screaming, begging them to let me out, too, but they drove up to the motorway.

Godfrey told me to shut up. He smacked the side of my head. Then he took out one of those green disposable lighters. The flame was on high. He put it to my right earring. I could feel the hoop getting hot, really burning. I was crying. I was pleading with him to leave off.

We stopped on the way to pick up another man. He got in the van and said, “You got her. Good.” The van driver, Doleman, said, “Someone should fuck her up the ass. Teach her a lesson.”

They took me to a flat in a poor part of London. No electricity. So cold. The only light was from a street lamp outside the lounge window. The boy they’d picked up played music from his phone. They were yelling, “Strip off and dance.” I begged them not to make me. Godfrey punched me in the stomach. “Do it.” I was crying but not proper crying—he’d knocked the wind from me.

I took my clothes off, and I danced. I can’t describe how humiliated I felt. Like I was an animal performing for them. “She ain’t doin’ nothin’ for me,” Godfrey said.

“We’re gonna teach you some discipline, like my father taught me,” Sparkle said.

I had to stand on one leg with my arms out. I was still naked. They was cheering like they was at a football match. “Look at her tits wobble. Look at her hairy cunt.” I wanted to cover myself, to lean over, but if my arms drooped or I put my leg down, I’d be whacked with a broom.

I wanted my clothes so bad. To stop them looking at me. And also ’cause I’d gone longer than usual without any heroin or crack cocaine, and withdrawing makes you get even colder.

They said I had to earn the clothes back by doing naked press-ups. For every ten press-ups I’d get one thing, but only ten seconds to put it on. They were counting together, shouting numbers. I had to start more press-ups as soon as they got to ten. I got my bra and my knickers, my top and my jeans. I didn’t have time to put any of them on properly.

Tomlinson and Doleman went off clubbing. I was sat in a chair. Godfrey and the boy they’d picked up went to sleep on the couch, Sparkle on the other chair. The door was locked. I didn’t dare move.

It was about three in the morning when Tomlinson and Doleman came back. Tomlinson grabbed me under the arms and Doleman took my legs and they carried me into the bedroom. They threw me onto the mattress and Tomlinson held my chest and arms down while Doleman pulled my jeans and knickers off. I kept saying no and begging them to stop. But they didn’t stop. They raped me.

Doleman in my vagina and Tomlinson in my mouth. Then they switched places. Doleman said he’d use a knife on my face if I bit him; he made me swallow it when he came. All the time they were forcing me, holding me down.

When they were done, I said I needed the toilet and Tomlinson said fine, go. Tomlinson had come in my face. I wiped it on my jeans and on my T-shirt—they hadn’t taken the shirt off me. It burned when I peed. There weren’t any hot water or soap or towel. I washed my vagina in cold water and dried it on my jeans.

My knickers got sticky and wet as soon as I put them on. It was too dark to see, but I was scared it was blood and if they made me strip again and saw it they’d take the piss out of me. There was a freestanding cupboard, so I hid my knickers behind it. I put on my jeans and hoped there’d be no more blood for them to see.

M
ISS
L
OCKYER COVERED
her face with her hands. Her shoulders were shaking. Not a sound came out of her.

The judge sent them home for the rest of the day. “Please remove the defendants from the dock so this witness can leave,” he said.

Clarissa’s heart was beating very fast, as if she’d just watched an unbearably tense scene in a horror film. She knew her face must be red. Tears had been welling in her eyes, but she’d resisted wiping them, not wanting anyone to notice.

She went straight to the cloakroom to blow her nose, grabbed her coat from the locker, and hurried down the stairs and out of the revolving doors, holding her face up to the blast of freezing air. She’d walked only a few feet before a car slowly drove out from beneath the court building. It paused, blocking the pavement as the driver waited until it was clear to turn left into the street.

Something made Clarissa peer inside. Slumped against the window in the rear passenger seat was Carlotta Lockyer, weeping. She met Clarissa’s eyes with her own, seemed, briefly, to register a kind of puzzled recognition, and the car smoothly moved on.

Wednesday, February 4, 8:00 p.m.

When I hug Rowena just inside the restaurant’s entrance, her breasts bounce against me without squishing at all. They are improbably high and seem to have grown two cup sizes.

Her first words to me are an answer to my unvoiced question. “Yes. I had a boob job.” Her chest is shimmering, dusted with sparkling powder. “You wear your body every day. You’ve got to be happy in it.”

Rowena runs her own one-woman company. She is a discourse analyst. She looks at every mission statement, advertisement, and logo a business produces. Then she tells them what messages they’re really giving out. Maybe Rowena worked for a plastic surgeon and got seduced by the brochures she was supposed to critique.

“Just because we are thirty-eight doesn’t mean we have to look thirty-eight.” She is examining her face in her compact mirror, looking so worried it makes me think of the queen in “Snow White” with her terrible looking glass. Rowena’s forehead is shiny smooth. It is out of sync with her jaw and cheeks.

I want Rowena to look less sad and strained, so I ask how she gets that dewy-fresh glow, a little teasingly but affectionately, too.

“I have a strong will not to raise my eyebrows at all, and to limit my expressions. Movement gives you lines.”

She’s not intelligent,
Henry said.

There are different kinds of intelligence,
I said.