The Venus Trap Read online

  Insane? Criminal? The least likely way on earth to ever make me fall for him?

  ‘. . . not the right way to get me to love you.’

  He snorts derisively.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I knew you were going to say that,’ he says, glaring at me. ‘Next you’ll give me a load of bullshit about how the only way would be for us to get to know each other conventionally, go on more dates, more dinners—only you won’t mean it, will you, because you’ve already dumped me! It would just be a load of lies to try and fool me into letting you go, so save your breath because I’m not that fucking gullible.’

  It comes back to me in a flash: he’s right—I did dump him, last night. After our third date. Had he planned all this already, or was it a spur-of-the-moment idea? How did he know I’d have a bed that he could handcuff me to? I suppose he didn’t, and I’m fortunate not to have been chained to the radiator instead.

  I ask him a more obvious question: ‘But how do you really expect me to fall in love with you when you’ve drugged me and you’re keeping me a prisoner?’

  He tips his lumpy head to one side as if he’s contemplating the question. ‘You’ll never find anyone who loves you as much as I do, you know. You just need a few days to get to know me, and to know that I’m serious. Eat up now, before it gets cold.’

  It’s already cold. I put the fork down.

  ‘No? OK, let’s talk then. Let’s start with this—’

  He pulls a crumpled piece of paper out of his jeans pocket and smooths it out on his large lap. In the dim light I don’t at first see what it is—and then I do. It’s a page of my diary.

  ‘You’ve torn up my diary?’

  He frowns, offended. ‘No I haven’t! I just brought this page in so we could start a chat about it. It’s the first page. You can always sellotape it back in, if it’s all that important. But honestly, nothing happens! You won’t miss it.’

  Oh my God, I think. He’s insane, or really cruel, and I’m not yet sure which.

  To my horror, he starts reading out loud in a high, slightly mocking voice, squinting at the occasional word he can’t immediately make out in my tiny cramped handwriting:

  ‘ “19th December 1986. Horrible day. I hate my body. I spotted my reflection in the window of Snellers Music Shop, and the sight of it made me cringe. My shoulders were all hunched against the December air, bedraggled even though it wasn’t raining, red nose, watery eyes. My duffel coat makes me look like an Oxo cube.” An Oxo cube? Really? That’s a bit of a strange comparison, isn’t it? You reminded me of many things when you were sixteen, Jo, but I have to say that an Oxo cube wasn’t one of them.’

  He sniggers, as though he’s made a hilarious joke. I hate him.

  I can’t speak, and he seems to take this as encouragement to continue.

  ‘ “There was a bitterly cold wind cutting through my woolly tights and blowing up the front of my Laura Ashley dress. I hate that dress, too. It’s got a frilly yoke, like a nightie, and puffy sleeves, and I’ve had it since I was thirteen . . .” What’s a yoke? I thought that was an Irish word for a thingamajig?’

  I drop my head. My eyes are full of tears again. ‘Please go. Leave me alone.’

  He looks hurt. ‘I’m interested, Jo! Come on, talk to me.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  I don’t want to. Richard and I used to talk to each other for hours, recounting stories to help each other sleep, or just for the sheer pleasure of it. This feels like a twisted, horrible parody of something that I now realise was sacred to me. Something I hadn’t realised I missed so much.

  He stands up suddenly and throws the torn-out sheet of diary at me. ‘I asked you a question: what’s a yoke?’

  I have to bite the sides of my tongue to produce enough saliva to be able to speak; fear has dried me up and shrivelled me.

  ‘It’s a . . . I don’t know how to describe it. A panel across the front of a garment.’ I gesture with my hands across the top of my chest to indicate where, not meeting his eyes.

  ‘So why did you hate your body then? I always thought it was really nice. And where were you going that day? See—I haven’t even read it. I want you to tell me about it.’ Claudio settles back against the bedpost, crosses his legs, and folds his arms, ready for a story.

  Slowly, I set the tray with the almost-untouched food aside and smooth out the sheet of my diary. The sight of it gives me a pang. Even though I’ve not looked at it for years, it takes me right back, sitting writing it in my little attic bedroom in Brockhurst, my mother downstairs empty-eyed in front of the television, a huge gap in our lives where Dad had been. The gap had swelled and ballooned and pressed all the air out of the house until all that was left was stale, recycled grief.

  I read the two pages to myself, refusing to look at Claudio. The writing is really tiny. I remember doing this intentionally to put off potential snoopers—little could I have imagined who that snooper would end up being, more than a quarter of a century later.

  I don’t know anybody else that wears needlecord. I’ve been trying to persuade Mum to let me get rid of it for ages—apart from being horrible, it’s much too tight across my boobs now. Everyone else wears acid-wash jeans or baby doll dresses, while I’m still stuck with the prissy sprigged monstrosity. I’d die if any of my mates saw me in it.

  ‘That dress cost £30. It’s got heaps of wear left in it,’ is all Mum says whenever I whinge about it. She’s generally pretty good about letting me choose my own clothes, but the Laura Ashley’s a particular bone of contention because Dad bought it for me. I used to get embarrassed that my dad did spontaneous, un-male things like buying me clothes. He didn’t even mind putting on an apron and making the dinner. But Mum loved it.

  ‘I miss him, Jo,’ she sobs. ‘I miss him so much. Who’s going to look after me now?’

  I just hug her, but I’m thinking, ‘So who’s going to look after me?’ I don’t say it, though. There’s no point. If I can’t even get my own way over the stupid dress—even though Dad bought it for me, it doesn’t mean that I like it—then I might as well give up on asking for anything more ambitious, like security, or stability. That’s what Dad was to us, and now he’s gone, we’re left floating untethered across a vast sea of doubt and grief.

  Does that sound pretentious? I think it would be good in a poem. I’m going to underline it so I don’t forget. I said to Mum the other day, about the dress, ‘But it’s so babyish,’ and all she said was, ‘Yes, well, you’re my baby, aren’t you?’

  At least she smiled when she said it.

  I hate Christmas, too. Even before Dad died, I hated it. Why does Mum’s name have to be Carol Singer? It’s so embarrassing and you wouldn’t believe how much stick the swimming club boys gave me when they discovered.

  It would be so much better if I only had a boyfriend, one who had a huge welcoming house with a Christmas tree that touched the ceiling, and enough turkey to share with me and Mum. A boyfriend like John Barrington-Brown. He’s SO gorgeous. If John and I got married, then me and Donna would be sisters. How amazing to have your best friend as your sister too! Is sixteen too young to get engaged?

  And then there’s the small problem of John’s current girlfriend Gill. Cow.

  I’m still blushing from when I bumped into John on his lunch break from Safeways. Because I wasn’t wearing a slip, the bunchy fabric of that hateful dress kept crawling up inside my thighs, and every ten paces I had to stop and shake it out. I’d just extracted it for the umpteenth time, in a particularly unladylike fashion—knees bent outwards, bottom slightly sticking out, hand stuck up inside my duffel coat to reach the climbing dress.

  Naturally that was the moment when John emerged from the supermarket’s staff entrance, looking edible in those tight black trousers he wears for his job on the cheese counter. There’s a little stripy hat that goes with the uniform,
too (I know that from all the many hours I’ve spent lurking around Aisle 9 spying on him) but sensibly he’d removed that before venturing out in public. I hoped beyond hope he hadn’t spotted me fishing around in my duffel coat, but he was already smirking.

  ‘Well, look—it’s little Jo. What have you bought?’ Little Jo? How patronising! He tweaks the WHSmiths plastic bag dangling from my wrist. I’ve already forgiven him.

  I blurted out, ‘Oh, just Caravan of Love. I must be the last person in the country to buy it . . .’ and to my abject horror John yanks the bag off my arm and peers inside. I felt sooo humiliated, like he’d pulled down my pants or something—in fact, the way he did it made me imagine him undressing Gill. But it still gave me a shiver of something unexpected. Deep inside my needlecord folds.

  He cackled with laughter when the record was revealed instead to be Europe, The Final Countdown, and I hoped desperately that he wouldn’t tell all his mates.

  ‘The Housemartins? Yeah, right, pull the other one!’

  Then of course I made things worse by stammering, ‘Oh, um, silly me—that’s for my cousin’s Christmas present. She loves that song. I actually meant to buy Caravan of Love but they’d sold out . . . .’

  John looked at me, his tawny eyes with their spiky black fringes blinking dangerously. Then his gaze slid down across my massive, horrible chest.

  ‘Hmm,’ was all he said. ‘That’s a very—flowery dress.’

  I cringed and wished I’d done up the toggles on my duffel coat again after undoing them in WHSmiths, where the fevered muggy breath of the Christmas shoppers made me too warm.

  ‘I know. I really really hate it, only my jeans are in the wash.’

  I felt like I was being disloyal to Dad, by saying I hated the dress. But this was John. Dad would understand, I’m sure.

  Then bloody Claudio turned up. He’s such a weasel. I don’t know why John likes him so much. He once pinched my bum and offered me a fag in the park. I hated him even more than ever, for interrupting my precious time with John. John’s voice went all rough when he talked to Claudio:

  ‘All right, Cloud? Give us a fag, I’m gagging.’

  Wonder what John’s parents would think if they heard him talking like that? They’re seriously posh. They hate that Donna won’t answer to her real name, Donatella—they think that Donna is very infra-dig. But she’s insisted on it since she was seven.

  Then John and Claudio just started walking off! John did look back, though, so I opened my mouth to say ‘Bye,’ and ‘Send Donna my love,’ but he’d gone before I could get the words out.

  I watched him go. He always wears this really thin burgundy leather bomber jacket and he was pulling it closer to him, his cloudy winter breath huffing out around him. I half-expected him to blow smoke rings into the air, the way he had when I watched him smoking in the park. I wonder what it would feel like to have those beautiful curved lips pressed against mine?

  On the phone later I tried to tell Donna that I thought John was sexy, but she just snorted.

  ‘His feet smell worse than anything you could ever imagine,’ she said. ‘And he’s got mossy teeth.’

  I don’t care. I still love him.

  ‘So?’ Claudio asks eventually. ‘What’s it about?’

  It gave me a shock, seeing his name on the page. He must have known, he must have read it already.

  I grit my teeth. ‘It’s about my crush on John. A dress I didn’t like but kept wearing because my dad bought it for me. My mum, missing my dad. He’d only died a few months before then.’

  Claudio doesn’t express any sort of sympathy. There was clearly only one point of interest for him, and he’s probably pissed off that I didn’t mention that he featured. ‘You were mad about John, weren’t you?’ he says, sulkily.

  ‘Yeah.’ No point in denying it.

  He sighs, long, heavy and bitter. ‘John always got the girls.’

  Then he stands up, picks up the tray, and walks to the door, unlocking it and backing out.

  ‘I’m tired. I’m going to watch TV in bed.’

  Thank God he’s not planning to sleep in my room, or Megan’s. I would rip his throat out if he slept in Megan’s room. I grit my teeth as I imagine his malodorous body sullying the purity and softness of her floral cotton sheets. But he is far too tall to fit into her three-quarter-size cabin bed that you have to climb a ladder to get to, even if he wanted to. His fat arse would never fit down the attached slide. And the thought of his head on her pillow, seeing what she sees before she goes to sleep—the whirling lions and zebras on her magic lantern, the butterfly stickers on her wall—makes me feel murderous. I’d almost rather he slept with me.

  I feel heady with relief that he’s finally going. The air in my room stinks of him. I don’t tell him that the TV in the spare room doesn’t work—he’s probably got an iPad anyway. I suppose I’d better give him the wifi code if he asks; otherwise he might come back in here to watch whatever it is he wants to watch . . .

  ‘But I’m going to leave you with a clearer answer to your question from earlier: it’s incentivisation.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ A new trickle of fear snakes its way up inside me. I’m not even sure if incentivisation is a word—but it’s not the semantics that are scaring me.

  ‘It’s just over a week until your daughter comes back. So you have seven days to tell me you love me, in a way that I believe you really mean it. No bullshitting.’

  I shake my head incredulously. He’s crazy.

  ‘How do I do that?’

  He shrugs. ‘You can do it. Tell me your memories of all the other men you’ve known, then cleanse yourself of them. Photos, reminders, gifts. Help me plan our future. It can happen, if you let it. I have a lot to offer you—you’ll see. We could be great together. But you have to let me in.’

  Never.

  ‘And if you don’t,’ he says almost casually, leaving the room but not quite closing the door behind him so that there is just a crack through which he speaks, like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. ‘If you don’t convince me that you love me within seven days, I will kill you.’

  Chapter Six

  Day 2

  When I wake up at five in the morning, my head feels less muzzy and painful, but panic immediately surfaces, spurting in like water through the walls of a cracked viaduct: when will people start looking for me? Who knows what will have happened by the time anyone realises I’m missing? Perhaps nobody will realise, not until Richard gets back. I’m a freelance medical writer, no office to go into, no colleagues to miss me—I used to share an office with my journalist friend Steph but we gave it up just last week, because of the cost. I’m not due to see Steph or Donna and I don’t speak to them that often on the phone these days. There’s no reason for them to call me. Mum only rings me once a month from Scotland. Megan is unlikely to call me—she rarely does when she’s on holiday with Richard, and that’s fine with me because I know that it means she’s having a good time.

  Usually fine with me, I should say. Right now I’m wishing they called me religiously once a day because surely, after a day or two of my phone being switched off or unanswered, Richard would start getting worried? I never turn off my phone. I’m having a repeated fantasy in which he rings Donna and asks her to get hold of me, and then she can’t, and she calls the police, and I’m rescued . . . but it’s just a fantasy.

  Fear rises in my stomach like a twister, ripping my insides apart like roofs being torn off barns.

  Slow down.

  Calm down.

  Breathe.

  I’m amazed I got any sleep at all last night. As it was, I lay awake for hours, turning Claudio’s parting words over and over in my head. He wouldn’t . . . He said he wouldn’t hurt me . . . Would he . . . ? Surely he couldn’t actually kill me! How would he do it?

  How could I ever fool him into believing
I love him when I don’t? I’ve always been a useless liar: he’d see through me in a second—although, if he wanted to believe it badly enough, perhaps he might overlook my body language. Or could I rehearse a scenario in which I managed to convince him by practising declarations of adoration, lingering eye contact, little touches, all the things that besotted lovers do?

  I doubt it.

  Panic fluttered in my throat like a trapped bird all night and now exhaustion is giving me double vision. I switch on the radio and listen to low breakfast voices but they don’t soothe me. How could they, when someone threatened to kill me last night?

  All is quiet outside my room for some time. Then I hear the spare room door open and hear Claudio’s ponderous footsteps past my room into the kitchen. Nausea rises inside me and I brace myself, wondering which Claudio I’ll get today—the aggressive, snide one or the other one, the one who strikes me as someone who’s bitten off more than he can chew.

  It’s the latter. When he brings me in some toast for breakfast he has the same expression as the cat has when it tries to stuff a live pigeon through the cat-flap or swallow a still-wriggling mouse. I wonder if he’s regretting it already, realising that you can’t possibly force someone to love you if they don’t. Particularly if you’ve already drugged and imprisoned them . . .

  ‘Good morning, beautiful.’ He hands me the toast, a diffident smile on his face. To my utter revulsion, he’s still in his pyjamas, brown old-man PJs with more than a hint of nylon in their composition. The thought of all his skin so perilously close to the surface, just a thin layer of man-made fabric between us . . . I swallow hard.

  ‘Did you sleep well?’

  ‘No.’

  There is an awkward silence.

  ‘OK. I’m going to go and get dressed. I suggest you do the same. Then I’m coming back, and we’ll talk again. I want to hear about your divorce.’

  It sounds so blunt. I have to bite my tongue not to say, ‘Mind your own bloody business.’ I don’t talk to anyone about my divorce, except my counsellor and my friends—not all of them, just my best friends. Just Donna and Stephanie.