The Book of You. Claire Kendal

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СКАЧАТЬ occupied the building: the first-floor flat was always empty, an investment property owned by a rich Australian who seldom used it.

      ‘Miss Lockyer, evidently, is not at home. Sadly for her, Mr Doleman and his friends don’t give up easily.’

      The same could be said of Rafe. She tasted her morning coffee, soured.

      ‘They searched for her. They found her. They stalked her. They pounced. They dragged her onto a terrifying journey from Bath to London, into the darkness of their sadistic world.’

      Yet again, she imagined going to the police to complain about him. Yet again, she saw all too clearly what would happen if she did: they’d end up thinking she’d brought it on herself.

      He’d say she liked attention. He’d say she went to his party and wanted to sleep with him. He’d say she invited him home. There was probably CCTV footage of the two of them walking up the hill that night, with his arm around her.

      She thought again of the leaflets’ warnings. If there is any doubt that you are being truthful, it may harm your case and credibility. But when it came to the truth, it was her word against his.

      She was remembering something she usually kept buried. Walking home from school with Rowena when she was fifteen. That strange girl on the seafront who’d punched her in the stomach, grabbed her bag and knocked her to the ground before running off. It had all seemed to happen at once. The only thing Clarissa could do was gasp for breath as Rowena crouched beside her, her arms around her.

      Her parents took her to the police station and made her report the incident, but the sour-faced policewoman clearly thought it was a schoolgirl argument that wasn’t worth her time and kept asking what Clarissa might have done to provoke it. Had she been showing off? Flashing valuables at a girl who was less fortunate? Arguing over a boy? Clarissa left the station with her cheeks bright red and her face burning hot, feeling like a criminal.

      A random act of violence. That was what Rowena had called it, holding her hand afterwards. But Clarissa wasn’t sure. There must have been something about her to draw that girl’s attention. And something about her to draw Rafe’s too. There was certainly nothing random about him.

      Her eyes ached; briefly, she squeezed them shut. Her shoulders were stiff. The man sitting in front of her was annoyingly tall, well over six feet; she’d had to crane her neck to see over his close-cropped brown head and keep Mr Morden’s face in view; it had been like that yesterday, too. After seven weeks of this she’d need a chiropractor.

      The man rose and gave her a small nod, waiting for her to precede him out of the courtroom. It was his stance that she noticed: standing solidly, feet a foot and a half apart and exactly parallel, weight back on his heels, arms crossed over his chest. She’d never seen anybody look so straight but so relaxed at once.

      Any expression of thanks could only be muted in the theatre of Court 12, but it seemed important to cling to small habits of courtesy in such company. She stepped ahead of him with a slight nod and almost-smile, answering his public display of good manners with her own.

       Tuesday, 3 February, 6.00 p.m.

      It doesn’t last. Of course it doesn’t last. It is amazing enough that the lie about being sick bought me even one day of not being under your eye. It’s only been thirty-four hours, but it’s still the longest break from you I’ve had in weeks.

      You would say it’s a love letter. I call it hate mail. Whatever its name, it is propped on the shelf in an innocuous brown envelope, neatly arranged by the ever alert Miss Norton.

       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, 4 February, 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 rose bushes, 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 practised 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 saviours, 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 grey 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 СКАЧАТЬ