Who Are You? (13 page)

Feel free to rant away. That’s what this site’s for. Ranting and support.
Posted by FightbackGirl on 26-Dec-13 00.08 GMT

Thanks for listening. It may sound stupid, but when we moved here to our new house, the house of our own after he left the Army, I thought everything would be OK, like we’d have this great new life, but he just wants to fuck it all up. Upsetting the neighbours – I can’t even tell you what he did to one of the women. It’s like he just wants to wreck everything I set up. You know sometimes I feel like I want to kill him. Is that bad? LOL
Posted by Sparrowhawk on 25-Dec-13 00.13 GMT

Normal. But I’d say: be careful. And I know it’s hard, but you really do have to try and be a bit understanding. I know this. Believe me I do. My brother was in the Army, and he didn’t talk to anybody. He didn’t get any help at all.
Posted by FightbackGirl on 26-Dec-13 00.16 GMT

So what happened?
Posted by Sparrowhawk on 26-Dec-13 00.18 GMT

He took himself off into some woods and hanged himself. So you want to make sure your husband doesn’t do the same.
Posted by FightbackGirl on 26-Dec-13 00.21 GMT

God. I’m so sorry … Your poor family. I can see now where you are coming from. Forgive me if I haven’t been understanding enough. I didn’t realize … I should have asked … Another thing Alex accuses me of … being self-centred, everything’s all about me. So here I am, ‘guilty’ as charged.
Posted by Sparrowhawk on 26-Dec-13 00.24 GMT

No. Honestly … It’s OK. Don’t worry. You weren’t to know.
Posted by FightbackGirl on 26-Dec-13 00.21 GMT

I feel so sorry for you – I just keep thinking of what it must have been like, when he was found, and I want to cry for you.
Posted by Sparrowhawk on 26-Dec-13 00.24 GMT

It’s OK … Please don’t cry … Look I have to go now. I hope you get your life sorted. Good luck.
Posted by FightbackGirl on 26-Dec-13 00.26 GMT

These cyber conversations are Juliet’s life line. Without them she doesn’t know how she’d survive. She can tell the truth without fear because online it doesn’t matter who you are or what you say. These faceless individuals make her feel safe, so she can say anything at all. In fact online interaction has been far more helpful to her than all the years of counselling, the psychiatric in-patient sessions, the detox clinics, all the psychobabble that she’s had to listen to in the past. All she’d learned was that more often than not people chose not to believe her. The truth seemed just too uncomfortable for them. They made out she was a fantasist who invented everything – a view encouraged by her mother, obviously. When she told the counsellors that the Sad Fuck referred to her as his little nymphet and also threw in other allusions to Humbert Humbert’s narrative, she wondered if they took a certain prurient fascination in the scenes and the experiences she described, a real life Lolita sitting in front of them. Not that the actual story wasn’t dramatic enough. Christ, a 54-year-old man and an eleven-year- old girl – isn’t that drama enough for anyone? Clearly so dramatic that it was unbelievable. It just confirmed to an adolescent Juliet that there was much in life that made no sense at all; the people who were supposed to protect you didn’t protect you, so all you could do was try and protect yourself, walk away. And if you couldn’t walk away all you could do was try and fucking ignore them. Detach. Crush your feelings. Disguise and protect yourself by assuming pretend feelings in order to act like the person you needed to be, a person who didn’t care, who couldn’t be hurt. But if you hide your feelings for too long you run the risk of never being able to find them again.

The funny thing was, Alex had been one of the few people in her life who’d been able to break through her barriers. Perhaps he recognized something in her that mirrored himself. They say that opposites attract, but in their case while they appeared on the outside to be polar opposites, internally they were identical, and so it was perhaps inevitable that their two damaged souls would seek refuge in each other.

After they’d met at the wedding, he’d been clever, like a true stalker, leaving it just long enough to make her think she wouldn’t hear from him. She didn’t want to hear from him, she’d told herself. Yet the longer she didn’t hear from him the more she realized that she was irritated by the fact that she didn’t. It was one thing for her to call the shots, to be the cool one, for her to be the one using
him
, but this wasn’t good. He wasn’t playing her game. The more time passed the more time, maddeningly, she found herself wondering about him, and thinking back to the amazing sex, and the way the world had stood still when he kissed her. It was exactly six weeks and three days since the wedding that her doorbell rang. A Tuesday evening. She wasn’t expecting anyone. She didn’t recognize the male voice on the end of the entryphone. But as soon as he said his name she felt her stomach lurch. She didn’t know what else to say other than: ‘Come on up.’

She stood aside to let him in, conscious of her messy hair, her loose vest T-shirt and her torn jeans, her bare feet with the chipped nail varnish on her toes. He was carrying a large wicker picnic basket and a carrier bag swinging from his right wrist. ‘Give me a hand,’ he said.

He looked different out of uniform; older, leaner and taller but still wearing impossibly short hair. She took one side of the basket. It was heavy and stamped with Fortnum & Mason on the top.

‘Christ, what have you got?’

‘I take it you do eat sometimes?’

‘Sometimes. And what are you doing here?’

‘What does it look like?’

She laughed. ‘I honestly haven’t a clue. For all I know you might have a pet snake stashed in there. Or a week’s worth of dirty laundry.’

Her flat, he later told her, was what he would call bohemian, and basically showed that she was completely deranged. But he said it was ‘in a nice way’, as if deranged could ever be considered ‘nice’. She’d been going through her Indian phase, and the walls were draped with candy-coloured, gossamer-thin sari fabric, printed and edged with gold. In the corner was a life-sized stuffed bear dressed in a pink ballet tutu, which she’d rescued from some junk shop and somehow managed to get up the stairs. It didn’t fit the theme, but it was whacky enough to warrant a large space. There were candles everywhere because she didn’t much like stark lighting, and joss sticks scenting the air with patchouli, which Alex said he loathed. There was also a large sofa draped with leopard skins, and on the wall behind a gilt-framed mirror with more candles held in dainty little sconces. There were lots of books everywhere – in piles in bookcases at either side of the chimney breast – and giant damson-coloured velvet cushions spread around the floor. Juliet watched him taking it all in, and guessed that by the very nature of her flat, this visual extension of her character, this man would recognize that their worlds were a million miles apart.

‘Got any champagne glasses?’

She fetched a couple of Moroccan tea glasses from the pine dresser. ‘Only these.’

‘Camden market, or Marrakech?’ he asked.

‘The latter, of course.’

‘Bet you went on a dope-fest with your junky mates, didn’t you?’

‘Why are you here?’

‘Because you fascinate me.’

‘I don’t like Army officers, you know. I find them boring.’

‘Then I’ll just have to re-educate you. Next weekend, what are you doing?’

‘Drugs, of course. What else would you expect?’

‘Want to come away with me?’

‘Not remotely.’

‘It’s a house party, in Northumberland. Smart. Shooting and partying. I’ll drive you up. You’ll need warm clothes and a pair of wellington boots. I suppose you have a pair?’

‘No. Of course I don’t.’

‘What size are your feet?’

‘Four.’

‘God, that’s almost a child size. Perhaps your eating disorder stunted then.’

‘I didn’t … Oh what the fuck. How do you
know
I had an eating disorder? Oh yeah, I remember, my mother. You did your research, didn’t you?’

‘Not nearly well enough. You can tell me all about yourself over supper.’ He opened up the Fortnum’s basket. ‘Do you eat foie gras? I suppose I should say, do you eat at all?’ She was tempted to say no, just to spite him, but the truth was she loved it, so she nodded. ‘And smoked duck breasts?’

‘OK.’

‘And Scottish raspberries?’

‘Maybe …’

‘Well that’s a start. But I don’t really suppose the way to your heart is through food.’

‘Has anyone told you just how rude you are?’

‘I’m not rude, I’m direct.’

They ate their way through the contents of the hamper – well, Alex ate his way through most of it. Juliet rather gave up after the pots of chocolate mousse and the pistachio macaroons. But she had happily accepted a glass or two of pudding wine. She sat, cross-legged, on one of the velvet cushions and rolled up a Rizla paper and some loose tobacco into a cigarette. Alex stuck with his Marlboros. It was probably mostly the alcohol, but possibly the fact that she was warming towards Alex, ever so slightly, that made Juliet open up to him. Yes, she had suffered from anorexia, but then so did everyone, pretty much.

‘The psychologist at the Priory said it was a way of avoiding growing up, a fear of being mature, of sex and all that. You know, wanting to stay a little girl, cos that way you’re probably going to be more protected. But I said that was a laugh. I told him he was a prat to think that little girls were more protected. He only had to listen to my story.’

‘Your story? There’s more?’

‘I mean … no. There isn’t any more. That’s what I meant.’ Stupid of her to say so much. Alex tried to draw her out, but she just sat with her knees up under her chin, wishing she could take it back. Alex knelt down on the floor in front of her, and put his face reasonably close, but not too close, to hers.

‘Sorry. Please don’t think I was prying, because I wasn’t. Now, I’m going to pack up the hamper, and then I shall come and pick you up at 3 p.m. on Friday. That OK?’

Juliet surprised herself by nodding.

‘Excellent. Bring something slinky for Saturday night. Otherwise jeans and warm jerseys.’

*    *    *    *    *

The following morning Juliet awoke with an almighty hangover and, initially, no recollection of Alex’s weekend proposal. When she
did
remember, her first instinct was to telephone him and tell him it was all a mistake and she had no intention of going. But then she realized he had cleverly not given her his telephone number. So she was left over the next few days in an agony of wondering what she should do, but the nearer Friday came, the fuller her suitcase grew, just in case she decided to go.

Why she found herself with her bag packed and nails freshly painted at 3 o’clock on Friday afternoon was a question she would spend much of the rest of her life trying to answer but, up until then, she’d lived mostly thinking any new experience was a good experience, no matter how weird.

Cars didn’t impress Juliet, but Alex’s BMW convertible was at least comfortable, and the sound system wasn’t too shoddy either. She imagined that he would have dodgy taste in music, but it was pretty decent. The Who, AC/DC, U2, a bit of Springsteen for the retro feel, Simple Minds and the Stones. But his clothes, for fuck’s sake. Here was a 29-year-old guy dressed like a 60-year-old. On the way there he told her about himself, about his mother and sister, about his father who died when he was fifteen, about his Army career and about his ambitions, while she listened and gave little of herself away.

When they arrived at Alex’s chum’s stately pile in Northumberland she was whisked off, with her suitcase carried by their host, up two staircases, along three corridors and into a twin- bedded room with a fridge-like temperature. Someone had kindly left the window open so that any heat coming from the rusting radiator was seen off. The lighting was inadequate, the furniture dark and imposing, and when she tested the bed, it had a mattress the depth of a fingernail covered by a worn linen sheet, scratchy to the touch, a blanket and a dust-scented eiderdown. The bathroom was a two-hundred-yard hike – or so it seemed – along two more corridors where there was a loo with a pull chain which needed at least ten tugs, and a huge enamel bath covered in brown stains and telephone taps coughing and spluttering with emphysema.

Having unpacked her bags and put a brush through her hair, she got lost countless times before following the sound of a load of braying hoorays into the library. At least there was a blazing fire in the grate, which she headed for. Alex was at her side straight away, pressing a glass of champagne into her hand. ‘OK? Everything all right?’

‘Just as I imagined it would be,’ she said.

She was offered around the room like an unappetizing canapé, and all that she could think to herself was, What the fuck am I doing here? Juliet hoped she was actually, deep down, a well- mannered girl and she wasn’t an unkind person, at least not then. Life hadn’t always been exactly normal. She’d chosen to spend much of it with the sort of people her mother would never approve of – junkies, nutters, thieves – and she liked to think she was capable of mixing with anyone, no matter what their background. The fact that these were the very type of people her mother would have killed for her to mix with could have brought out the very worst in her, but there was something that stopped her from getting out her Rizlas and rolling a joint, something that stopped her from going up to Leo Millington-Parkes and reminding him that he still owed her for a line of coke. Or from contradicting Melanie Wellings when she said they’d never met before, when Juliet had been there in the club on the night that Melanie performed a simulated blowjob on the dance floor, and then threw up on the pavement before begging Juliet for some money for a taxi, seeing as she’d had her handbag nicked because she was so off her face. Oh, the stories she could tell. But she didn’t. For some reason she behaved. The expected night foray by Alex failed to materialize – which she found mildly disappointing – and she made it down to breakfast on time and even donned the new Wellington boots that Alex had bought for her and borrowed a tweed coat from the house and watched while the guns laid waste to the wildlife.