Chapter Eighteen

MY LIFE RUNS within narrow limits because I am a prisoner, but I am sane. The Lover is not sane. Our daughter lives with me and I protect her. The Lover and I wage a perpetual bargain. These are the facts of my existence.

He brought me here when the sun was shining brightly. I could feel it on my neck as I stepped inside. He had given me flowers from the garden (“Impractical,” he’d smiled, “but I want you to have them.”); he’d paid for my ticket. The ticket was tucked in my purse, in the cheerful red handbag swinging from my shoulder. He’d given in, understood that I must move on. My suitcase was in his car; he was ready to take me to the station. He just wanted me to see his new office, then we would leave. I crossed the threshold. He kissed me quickly as he closed the door behind us, heaving it shut with a clang. There were thick blinds at the windows, all of them tight shut.

I was afraid. I didn’t want him to close the door. I caught a glimpse of his face as he blotted out the sunlight. It was set, determined. No longer smiling. Then we were in total blackness.

“Put on the light,” I said. I was terrified. He knows I can’t bear the dark.

“In a minute,” he said soothingly, but I heard the metallic edginess of control in his voice. He stroked my cheek. I shied away.

“Put on the light!” I shouted.

“Later,” he said. His voice was harder now. Truculent, not wheedling. He pinched my arm. I shook him off, flung myself at the wall, scrabbling for a light switch. He grabbed me from behind, turned me round, hit my face with his open hand. His accuracy was uncanny. It was as if he could see me, even in the pitch black of this place. I covered my face with my hands.

“You stupid bitch! What do you think you’re doing?”

I tried to shout out. The noise that came from my mouth was a strangled croak.

“Shut up!” he said grimly. He put his hand over my mouth. “If you don’t shut your mouth, I’ll shut it for you. Are you going to stop now?”

I nodded.

“Are you going to stop?” I could hear the rage.

“Yes,” I said.

“Good. Give me your hands.”

I stretched out my hands to where I thought he was standing. One was sticky with blood. The blow had made my nose bleed. He tied them tight, fastened them to something above my head. He grabbed my neck roughly so that I was facing him: I could feel his breath on my cheek, smell the mint that he’d been sucking. He was squeezing my neck. I thought he was going to throttle me. I jerked my head away.

“Hold still if you don’t want me to hurt you. Then I’ll put on the light.”

I obeyed. I could cope if I could see.

He fastened something round my neck. It was made of rough leather. I heard a click, then a louder one. I could hear him cutting at something. My hands fell to my sides. He taped them behind my back. I heard him step away.

“I’m going now,” he said. “I’m going to leave you to think about what you’ve done. You haven’t been nice to me. You haven’t been good. Be nice and good and I will love you.”

“Put on the light!” I shrieked. “You promised me you’d put on the light!”

“All in good time.” He wasn’t trying to soothe me now. “Light is a privilege. It must be earned. You have to be good. Good and nice. Then I’ll love you.”

I heard him walk the few steps to the door. A narrow strip of sunlight glowed on my prison momentarily before it was extinguished. I was facing the wall. A smooth grey wall. It was featureless, except for a bracket that had been fastened to it at more or less the height of my neck. A chain was attached to the bracket and its other end to the halter around my neck.

Just before the door slammed shut I looked down at my feet and caught a glimpse of the scattered flowers and my red handbag lying beside them.

I don’t know how long I remained standing there. I remember flushing with shame when I could stop myself from peeing no longer, feeling the urine trickle down my legs.

I could not banish my fear of darkness, but I alleviated the panic by closing my eyes and thinking of daylight. The chain restricted me too much to allow me to sit down, but I could lean my head against the wall. I think I even slept in short bursts, like a horse standing in its stall.

He kept me there for a very long time. I don’t know how long, but it must have been for days. My terror at being in the darkness was eclipsed by the fierce certainty that I’d die of thirst. My lips swelled and my throat inside the halter felt like sandpaper. The halter chafed the skin on my neck until it was raw.

He came back when I could barely stand. I’d been thinking that if I fainted I would break my neck.

This time he turned on the light. As if I did not know who he was and he needed to protect his identity, he was wearing a balaclava and black leather gloves. I could see his eyes gleaming through the slits of the helmet. He pulled back my head by the hair so that my face was upturned and thrust a baby’s bottle between my lips. I sucked on the teat, drawing the water thirstily into my mouth. When I’d gulped a few mouthfuls he took it away again, pushing my head down so that the halter jarred my neck as he did so.

“Please!” I whispered, my voice hoarse and broken. “Please, more water!”

“Please, more water!” he mimicked in a little-girl voice. “Not yet. You’re not being nice to me. And you stink!”

He removed the teat from the bottle, poured the rest of the water on the ground, and replaced the teat, reversing it and wedging it into the neck of the bottle as tenderly as if he were a young mother meticulously obeying the rules of hygiene she’d been taught. He turned to leave.

“Please, don’t go!”

He shrugged and walked away, snapping off the light again as he went.

I had not cried until this point: I didn’t want to jeopardise my sanity by giving way to the fear and the hopelessness. But now I screamed and howled like a wild animal in the darkness. After I’d sobbed myself into a frenzy, I gradually managed to calm down. The sobs died in judders. It was at that moment that I took a grip on myself and vowed that this man would not win. I’d be patient and canny and I would escape, or he would have to let me go. People would come looking for me. He would not dare to keep me here for long. First I must assert myself.

Only a few hours later he came again, this time with soup, which he tried to feed to me from the baby’s bottle. I dashed it from his hand. He was still wearing the balaclava, but I saw his eyes register shock, even fear, before the anger eclipsed it. Without a word he abandoned me once more to the darkness. I felt triumphant that I’d made him retreat, but it didn’t last. I was hungry, cold, thirsty and filthy. He was trying to break me. I would have to find more intelligent ways of defying him if I wanted to survive.

More days yawned before he came back. He picked up the bottle from the floor, where it had lain many hours in the dirt and urine, and offered it to me. Obediently, I drank it. It was cold and fetid and made me vomit immediately. He told me that I disgusted him, abandoned me to the darkness again.

He returned sooner than I expected, switching on the light immediately. He was panicking about something. I knew the symptoms too well, could tell from his mannerisms, from his frenetic tone. What came next was a shock.

He undid the halter, shoving my head free. The raw skin on my neck bled as he drew the leather across it, but I barely noticed. I was jubilant. I was certain he was going to release me.

“I won’t tell anyone,” I said. “If you let me go, I promise never to say a word.”

He wasn’t wearing the balaclava. He cocked his head to one side, his eyes bright and amoral as a bird’s.

“Let you go?” he said. “But I love you. You are mine. This is where you belong. I have to keep you safe.”

He hadn’t unbound my hands. He left them tied behind my back, shoving me to one side while he fiddled with something on the wall. A panel in the wall slid open, allowing me to see the thickness of the masonry. The rough edge of stone at the opening must have been fifteen inches wide.

He pushed me through it and followed, fiddling with the wall on the other side. The panel slid back, ponderous but unstoppable. There was a dim light set up high, almost touching the ceiling. Shadowily, it revealed a steep staircase that seemed to descend into the ground forever.

“Walk down the stairs.”

I was dehydrated and weak from lack of food and sleep. It was hard to keep my balance with my hands tied behind my back.

“Move!”

I stumbled down the stairs as fast as I could. I tripped when I’d nearly reached the bottom and fell headlong, hitting my head on the ground.

“Get up!”

Dazed, I raised myself and pushed up on to my feet from a kneeling position. There was a door set in the wall next the staircase. The Lover brushed past me and tapped on a metal panel.

Another huge door swung open. Light came pouring from the room beyond. He turned to me. He was smiling. His eyes were moist with some sentiment I couldn’t read. I expected him to grab me again, hurl me into the room with a force made unnecessary by the fact that I could barely stand. Instead, he cut the ties and softly reached for one of my hands, which he held as he led me into the room like a husband introducing a bride to her new home.

The space beyond the door was large and sparsely but adequately furnished as a sitting room. There was a two-seater sofa and two wood-framed easy chairs, with a coffee table wedged between them. At the far end it narrowed into a passage, from which I could see other doors leading off. To the right of where I stood there was a small kitchenette, separated from the main room by a sort of breakfast bar. The place resembled a conventional flat, except for certain details: the ceiling was so low that I could barely stand upright and there were no windows. It was a prison.

Its significance burst upon me within seconds. I turned to him in panic. He was still clutching my hand. I tried to snatch it away, but he tightened his grip. I couldn’t stop my face twisting with fear.

“Let me go!” I said. “Please let me go! I’ll do whatever you ask. Please don’t leave me here.”

His anger was immediate. He hit me across the face again.

“Don’t you like it?” he said. “Ungrateful bitch! Do you know how long it’s taken me to build this for you? How much money I’ve spent to make it nice for you?”

“It’s . . . lovely. But I can’t stay here. Please, I can’t stay here. I need to be above ground. I need fresh air.” I could hear myself gibbering.

He was gentle again.

“You just need to get used to it. You haven’t seen it properly yet. Come with me and I’ll show you.”

 

He was nervous in those early days; his own fear made him volatile. I could smell it on him when he came. I thought they might be looking for me – or they might not. Either way, it was hopeless. No-one would find me here and I knew he’d kill me if I tried to escape and he caught me. They’d give up the search quite soon, too. I was an alien, a foreign national, in the country legally, but still part of the moving flotsam and jetsam of temporary workers. No roots. No friends. No privilege. No proper status.

What I most wanted, what above all I needed to keep my sanity, was not to be incarcerated in darkness. He’d tethered me like a beast again and the third time he returned he lifted my skirt and mounted me from behind as if I was an animal. I tried to resist him but he yanked the halter. I thought he’d abandon me to the darkness again or break my neck. He was yanking hard as he fucked me. I tried to think of the times when we’d been real lovers, when he’d been tender and I’d wanted him, had loved him. Even then, he’d sometimes frightened me. The sex had been gentle and violent by turns. He’d seemed sometimes to love me, to love our love, and sometimes to be disgusted by it.

Now I was disgusted by the Lover and his sweaty probing body, but even more by the dirtiness that he made me suffer. He subjected me to every kind of squalor. When finally he unloosed the halter, I’d been tethered for a month, unable to wash, unable to cleanse myself of the detritus from his couplings, unable to eat or drink without his help, rough and sparse as it was, obliged to urinate and defecate where I stood. I had been trapped like a beast in a stall.

He had humiliated me to the point of non-endurance: or so I persuaded him. There was still left in me a spark, a small glimmer of humanity, a small vestige of the same defiance that I’d summoned to stand up to my stepfather. The Lover feared that more shame would kill me. He thought he’d broken me in and so he let me go. Not to return to the world outside, no. I knew that could never happen now. I might plead and cajole and promise: in fact, I did none of these things, knowing that he would never believe that I would keep silent.

And so the bargaining began. When he allowed me the freedom of my prison his foresight astonished me. He’d thought of everything. There was a shower and a toilet, a bed and a sitting area, a stove and cooking utensils. There was a store-cupboard containing dry goods and a small fridge, which was empty when first he showed it to me (he’d fed me on bread while I was tethered). He promised to fill it for me ‘if you are good’. There was a suitcase containing my clothes and the other few possessions I’d brought to England. I almost laughed at his frugality. I suppose he had to get rid of this stuff somehow; and if he hadn’t brought it here, it would have gone to waste, and he’d have had to buy me new things. Yet even though I knew he had no plans to release me, the thought that he’d worked out a way of keeping me alive here day after day, month after month, year after year until the years turned into decades, still shocked me to the core. It was terrible to know that I might live out my life in this place until it ended.

Being good, being nice. That was what he continually exhorted, encouraged, pleaded for, demanded, shouted for, lashed out at me for, hurt me and left me in the dark for days for. Only he knew the rules for being good and nice. It was my duty to guess them – my duty to guess them, his right to have me guess. And so I bargained.

His headaches were bad. I’d massage his head. Someone had insulted him. I’d listen to the rigmarole, agree with him. This was risky: in the course of his narrative, he might see his own fault, take the other’s side, smack me with the flat of his hand for being slow to see it myself. But of course I could not criticise. He wanted sex, I’d provide it. I’d try to make it reciprocal, encourage him to love me as well as using me. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes I was his angel and his darling. Sometimes I was a fucking whore, to be used and punished as he pleased. The sex was violent then. And there was violence with no sex, visits when he just wanted to hurt me. He’d strike me across the face until it was swollen with bruises, make me lie on the floor so that he could stamp on my hands or knee me in the back. Worse were the times when he tried to destroy me by spitting his words of contempt, his handsome face hideously twisted, to make me despise myself, make me hate everything about me. He’d leave me then, often for several days. He hoped that I was writhing in the misery of self-loathing. His ultimate punishment was always the darkness.

Then he’d come back, perhaps with fresh food or books and, finally, the television. Then he’d be calmer, say that I wouldn’t be imprisoned forever, that it was just a halfway house until he could trust me to be with him, rely on me not to run away, consent to be his wife.

The wife business was a mirage right from the start. I’d refused to be his wife when I was free and he’d said this had insulted him so deeply he wouldn’t ask again. Not only did he not ask, but after some years I realised he’d probably married since he’d incarcerated me. I first suspected when his visits began to follow a more regular pattern. Then after the television came I knew the time and I saw that his visits were mostly during the day and rarely coincided with conventional meal-times. And once I caught a glimpse of a wedding ring, before he followed my gaze and hid his hand. He left precipitately.

I’ve said that my life is run as a bargain. It doesn’t sound as if the deal works well for me, I know. But within my limits, I succeed. He hasn’t withheld food for many months. He hasn’t left us in darkness for even longer. He rarely beats Ariadne. When he beats me, at my own request he takes me into the bedroom so that although she can hear, she can’t see what he is doing. We never have sex in front of her: I have insisted on that. And Ariadne and I are both still alive.

They may sound like small victories. Viewed by a free person, I suppose they are. But we are the ultimate captives. And our gaoler is a madman.