Chapter 8

So the time drops by you like blood then eddies with uncertainty and after days of waiting you still wait, discovering the way this feels cannot be unbearable because you bear it. You are not yet fully prepared, you have to remember that. This final interval is here to make you ready and complete.

Praying becomes all you do, it ribbons around you while you move in the world and tells your life out and up to that Watching, that anatomising Stare. You step from daily fear to fear until the sun sets and the house begins to move in time with the nasty itch in your husband’s hands. Not long now.

Friday night. Twenty-two hours gone out of the twenty-four and you’re kneeling, again kneeling, in the room he’s given you and you hear him on the staircase and in the corridor and this time, like every other time, something important tears up under your ribs when he passes your door without coming in.

Your husband doesn’t come in, but you know that tonight isn’t over because you’ve changed; there’s nothing left of you to say; you’ve let God see it all. Not that you could have believed He didn’t fully know about every layer of tissue He’s asked you to peel away. The point is, you had to tell Him and He had to hear. This was your part of the Process and your Father who art in Heaven, but who is also much nearer and much more terrible than that; He will forgive you now.

Forgiveness. Feel it pick you back down to the child, take you off your hinges and clean you to the bone. He’s here, your Father who is tender like a furnace and who will hold you for eternity, if you would only ask and He can make you ask. He can make you go through fear into somewhere else entirely.

It is something like half-past ten when you go to Mr. Brindle’s room, the bedroom you at one time shared. You are aware of a lightness in your hands and limbs, the tiny noise of your feet and the press of black air against your flesh, your cleaned and uncovered self. Second-hand illumination seeps out around the door-frame. To be at this point already, so quickly, you hadn’t expected that.

Turn the handle, open the door, absurdly prepared for it to be locked or for the bogey man ghost to leap out and take you at once. Walk in, gently, because you are standing at the edge of nothing and you don’t want to slip. Mr. Brindle is sitting up in bed, staring at a paperback which you have the time to recognise as one of the detective stories that he likes. Crime: nothing else caught his interest as intensely, and what does that say about why he married you?

Magically slowly, he lifts his head.

He does not make a sound.

There is a slither of confusion in his eyes and he glances away but has to, in the end, come back to you. Your body is balanced, naked, and breathes fast from the top of its ribcage, as anxious as any discovered animal, and Mr. Brindle’s mouth thins to a stroke while he reaches your eyes and you offer look for look and beat him. Then you feel the precise ignition of his anger, just as he helps himself to the rest of you in a long, falling glance and sees what you need him to see.

You are not as he remembers, not quite. He moves his head a scrap to the left and examines again. Not the same. He is finding out what Edward has done to you and what you wanted Edward to do to you and enjoyed, and you can think of Edward now, very clearly and with love. There is nothing to stop you thinking whatever you like.

Now Mr. Brindle understands. You have been sheared in tight to yourself, to your nothing-but-sex, and each of the questions he chose not to ask you and the hardest assumptions he most liked to make are proving inadequate.

You are turning and walking back out at an even pace when you hear Mr. Brindle rip himself up from the bed.

The knowledge of him behind you and on his way scalds from the back of your neck to your heels, but you will not run or even rush. There is a bang of complaint as the door cracks round against the wall and shudders in again. Mr. Brindle beats it away. He’s in the corridor.

You have nearly reached the boxroom. He is closing on you very fast and now makes a sound which swipes you off balance as if it were a blow. You have never heard a noise like this from a person before: a high, long howling that jars with every impact of his running feet.

You make the room, halt and enjoy for an instant the impression of being safe, of an objective successfully reached. Then Mr. Brindle hits you, the whole of him hits you, drives the use out of your lungs, and you fall with one hand reaching down ahead of you to shield your face.