Taming the Beast

  ‘Quiet,’ he told her, and she was. He pushed harder, deeper, faster. The muscles in his thighs were burning, and he was going to run out of breath soon, but he knew it was almost over. There was no pleasure in it, just a painful drive for it to be finished. And then it was. He collapsed on to her sharp little body.

  After a few minutes his breathing returned to normal, and he propped himself up on his elbows and opened his eyes. She was looking right at him.

  ‘Do you feel better now?’ she said.

  Jamie saw the creases around her eyes, the yellow tinge to her skin, the cracked lips and the jutting cheekbones as if for the first time. Her eyes were red and teary like they had been since she walked in, but now – oh, God, he was going to be sick – now, the tears were because of him. Now he was the arsehole, the abuser, the pitiless man who could not see that she needed help and protection, not more fucking. The last thing his poor little Sarah needed was another dick, another careless intruder.

  He climbed off her, forgetting he was on the desk and half falling, half stumbling to the floor. He sat with his arms around his knees, his hands pressed together. She was moving behind him but he couldn’t bring himself to look up. He didn’t want to see her bruised knees or her chewed over breasts or her resolute jaw. For the first time since he’d met her, he didn’t want to look at her, or speak to her or touch her. How could he, when the damage he would see was his?

  ‘Jamie?’

  He held his breath, focussed on his hands. He heard her sigh and then the click of her lighter. The smell of cigarettes was always the smell of Sarah to him. How many times had he inhaled second-hand smoke while his body recovered from making love to her? His brain had not yet rewired, for he felt the peace and gratefulness that came with the scent of smoke and sex.

  ‘I hurt you,’ Jamie said.

  ‘Yeah, well, I’ll live.’ Her hand closed on his shoulder. Cold, dry hand on his hot, wet skin. Hot and wet from the effort of abusing her. Her voice was unnaturally high. ‘I think on the balance of things you still come out on top. You’re still the best friend I ever had. I guess you owed me some hurt.’

  He couldn’t respond. He had nothing left. His shoulder was cold where her hand had been. The smoke was no longer drifting into his eyes. He stared at his hands for a few more seconds and then got up. He stood in the doorway and watched Sarah walking across the reception area. The lift took a long time but she didn’t turn and look at him or fidget or anything. She stared straight ahead. The lift came and she stepped inside, and for half a second she looked at him before the doors closed. Her face in that second contained her entire history and was too much to bear.

  6

  If she returned to Daniel he would know. He would know as soon as he saw her. Without her even getting close enough for him to smell the scent of another man on her skin, Daniel would know she had been touched. He would look at her, and she wouldn’t speak or breathe or cry, but he would know. And then he would find Jamie and rip his head off his body.

  She couldn’t go home, although she ached for him, and she was so, so, sorry – unbelievably sorry – that she’d gone to see Jamie in the first place. She couldn’t face Daniel’s hurt, and his demands and his questions. She couldn’t face lying to him. She couldn’t face the battle that would inevitably follow if she told him the truth. Couldn’t face his wrath. Couldn’t allow Jamie to be hurt any more than he already was.

  She was directionless. Aware of people and the soft rushing of the river and the busy whir of Church Street on a Friday night, but with no sense of being a part of it.

  She had nowhere to go.

  When Sarah had nowhere to go she went to Jamie.

  She had nowhere to go.

  She had been ambushed. Seeking out the safest place she knew she had walked straight into a trap. Jamie had – what? Round and round her head, while the wind whipped branches heavy with rain against the windows of the scungy flats in Sorrel Street. While kids on skateboards taunted her from a distance and a truck driver yelled at her to get out of the rain, she wondered what it was that Jamie had done to her. She buried the panic at being alone in the dark, wet night, and walked on, trying to figure out why she felt so destroyed.

  When Sarah was eighteen, she had a fling with an Alistair Crowley wanna-be who could only come if Sarah lay perfectly still, with unblinking eyes, pretending to be dead. This was exciting at first, quickly became frustrating, and by the fourth or fifth time, was just boring. It was kind of sick, and kind of degrading, but it never, ever, made her feel this bad. Neither did getting fingered by Mike while he talked to his wife on the phone, blowing Todd while he scored coke out the car window, or pulling off Jess’ Uncle Rodger under the dinner table.

  So many men and boys and faces and cocks and hands and lips and tongues. Gentle, rough, loving, impersonal, fast, slow, needy, indifferent, handsome, ugly, young, old, sober, wasted, sick, mean, go down, get up, against the wall, under, over, back, front, tied up, hair pulling, bed smashing, window breaking, face slapping, ear licking, eyelash kissing, whispers and shouts and love and hate and never did Sarah want to disappear because of how and why and where she had been touched. Because of who she’d been touched by.

  Jamie had not raped her. She had been raped before and knew what that was. It felt nothing like sex. Even the roughest, cruellest most violent sex, even Daniel sex, felt nothing like rape. Being raped and having sex were as different as being mugged at knifepoint and donating to your favourite feel-good charity. Sarah’s rape felt like being robbed and beaten up by a couple of street thugs who she would have given her money to of her own free will, if only they had asked nicely. She had never considered those two mongrels to be sex partners: they were armed bandits.

  She thought that what hurt so much about the thing with Jamie was how cold and controlled he had been, not caught up in furious passion at all. She had looked in his eyes, and where she expected to see friendship she saw coldness; where she remembered love, there was bitterness. Her body was unimportant; he had wrecked her inside, and no one else had ever done that to her before. Was there any hurt worse than this?

  She had been walking forever. There was a bus stop up ahead, and she sat for a while staring at the road, trying to work out what she should be doing. Part of her wanted to go back to Jamie’s office and look into his face and see that she had misread his coldness and his cruelty. Part of her wanted to die. She did not at all want Jamie to die, which is why she could not go home to Daniel.

  ‘Want a lift?’

  Sarah focussed on the blur in front of her. A man leant from a car window. Sarah shook her head at his shape. ‘Just come for a ride then, eh?’ Car doors opened, closed. There were two men, no, three, standing on the path.

  ‘No,’ she said, but as she said it she realised that the men were not listening. It was dark and wet, and she had nothing in her but the horror of being touched. It was enough: she ran and ran and ran. She kept running long after she was sure that the men had driven off to find an easier victim. She realised that if she stopped running she would fall down, and she doubted her ability to get back up again.

  Three streets away was Jess and Mike’s house. They did not like her, she knew, but if she fell down they would help her up. If she asked to stay safe inside until morning, to shower the smell of Jamie’s bitterness away before she returned home, they would not like it, but they would say yes.

  At the front door, she stopped running, banged three times with her fists and then she fell down.

  When Sarah opened her eyes she was looking at photo of Jess and Mike on their wedding day. She was in their bedroom, in their bed, naked. She had a moment of panic at what Daniel would do when he found out she was here, then she remembered everything that had happened and her panic turned to dull despair.

  ‘Jess?’ she called, surprised at the huskiness of her own voice. The rain, she remembered and the crying. ‘Mike?’ She climbed out of the bed and looked around for her clothes.

  ?
??At last.’ Mike stood in the doorway. ‘I thought you were going to sleep all day.’

  Sarah glanced at the bedside clock. Twelve past eleven. ‘My clothes?’

  Mike glanced down at her body and cringed. ‘In the wash. You’ll have to put something of mine on until they dry.’

  ‘Something of Jess’ would be–’

  ‘Jess moved out.’

  ‘Oh.’ Sarah wondered why Mike wouldn’t look at her for more than a second. Not that she minded; if he touched her sexually she would scream and never stop.

  ‘Have a shower,’ he said, handing her a towel. ‘Then we’ll sort you out.’

  She would have laughed if she’d had the energy. The lowest point of her life – rock fucking bottom – and this was who she had to help her out. Mike Leyton, professional cad. She walked past his down-turned eyes to reach the bathroom, and thought that life would never surprise her again.

  Sarah found Mike in the kitchen. She sat next to him and he filled a mug with steaming black coffee, looked into her eyes and took her hand. ‘What’s going on with you, Sarah? You got an eating disorder or something?’

  She closed her eyes and took a gulp of the coffee. It burnt her tongue and the roof of her mouth, but was soothing going down her throat. ‘Nothing as glamorous as that, unfortunately.’

  ‘What were you doing passed out on my front porch?’

  ‘Seeking asylum at the home of my oldest friend.’

  He looked at her over the top of his coffee mug. ‘Jess hasn’t lived here for months.’

  ‘She finally caught you, huh?’

  Mike nodded, lighting a cigarette. Sarah grabbed the pack from him and lit herself one. She didn’t know what had happened to her cigarettes. Probably got ruined in all the rain. Or maybe she’d left them in Jamie’s office. Yes, that was it. She could see them in her mind, the blue and white packet sitting on top of his blotter, the red lighter beside it.

  ‘It turns out that I really miss her. Don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone and all that.’

  ‘Ah, so that’s why you haven’t tried to ravage me. You’re lovesick.’

  Mike took a drag of his cigarette. He looked into her eyes, winced, and looked down at the table. The silence dragged on. Sarah felt icy fingers on her spine. If there was one thing she had liked about Mike back in the old days – apart from the sex – it was his straight talking. Evasiveness and awkward silences were not his style.

  ‘Heh,’ she said, showing him her palms, ‘I’m not having a go at you. I appreciate it that you haven’t tried to jump my bones, really I do, and I think it’s sweet that you have all this loyalty for Jess, even if it did take you–’

  ‘Sarah!’ Mike grabbed her wrists. ‘That isn’t it! Jesus!’ He swallowed hard, as though there was something stuck in his throat. His hands fell away from her wrists as he looked back into her eyes. Looked at her as though it hurt him. ‘Have you looked at yourself in a mirror lately?’

  She turned her head against his disgust. ‘Oh. I forgot you like curves.’

  ‘No, Sarah, that’s not…’ Mike covered his eyes and sighed. ‘I didn’t recognise you when I first saw you. I was about to call the police to come collect the bashed up ten-year old lying on my doorstep. I’m scared to touch you in case you break in two. I wouldn’t have undressed you except your clothes were soaked and filthy and I had to try and dry you… you were shivering and…’ Mike swallowed again, his eyes closing for a second. ‘What’s happened to you? Did that old man do this to you?’

  ‘No. Well, I don’t know. If you mean the bruises and stuff, then yeah, Daniel did that, but that’s not why I’m here. He’s not the reason I’m… I went to Jamie’s office.’

  Mike’s coffee cup crashed to the table. They watched in silence as the coffee soaked into the pale blue tablecloth. If Jess ever came back she would go off her head about the stain.

  ‘What happened?’ Mike leant across the mess to pick up his cigarettes.

  She pressed her knees together until it hurt. ‘It wasn’t good. He misunderstood me, he…’ Sarah took the smoke from Mike’s hand and drew back on it. ‘He seemed very confused.’

  Mike reclaimed his cigarette. ‘You do that to people, Sarah. You cross all these lines, and break all these boundaries and people don’t know what to do. And Jamie… God, the poor bugger has never been the same since you left. His brain probably short circuited when you appeared out of nowhere.’ Mike handed the smoke to Sarah. ‘Did he hurt you?’

  Sarah nodded.

  ‘Does he know he hurt you?’ he asked, and Sarah nodded again, wondering if she would ever be able to think of Jamie again without thinking of the pain when he ripped the yellow ribbon from her hair.

  The phone rang. Mike glanced at it, then shrugged and turned back to Sarah. He stroked her cheek with his fingertips. ‘Poor Sarah,’ he said over the insistent trilling. ‘Poor kid.’

  The phone stopped and Sarah realised her shoulders had been all tensed up. She relaxed them, closed her eyes, let her head rest against Mike’s arm, breathed in the scent of his aftershave. She had a crazy thought that the unanswered call had been Daniel, that he had somehow found out where she was and he was calling to tell her–

  The phone started up again.

  ‘God, alright!’ Mike carefully lifted Sarah’s head off his arm, patting her lightly as he stood up and reached for the phone. Sarah watched him and thought that surely it was Daniel, because only he would be so persistent calling and calling until he was answered. Only he could fill a room with tension and a sense of urgency without even being there.

  There was a crash, louder and denser sounding than when Mike had dropped his cup. Loud and dense like the sound of a ninety-kilogram adult male falling to his knees on timber floor-boards. Then a small clack as the phone receiver landed beside him. Then Mike was screaming the exact same words that had been screaming through Sarah’s brain since last night.

  ‘Jamie,’ Mike howled. ‘No, Jamie. No, no, no, no, no.’

  7

  She barely survived the funeral. Several times she fell and was sorry that Mike was there to catch her. There were animals scratching and clawing inside her; she wanted to smash herself open and let them out. When she saw the damn box he was in, she felt sure that she was supposed to break it open with her skull, but she was stopped by people who did not understand that Jamie would want her to do it. ‘Can’t you control her,’ someone said, and Mike held her tighter and kissed her forehead which made the scratching worse. Someone told Mike to take her home, which felt unfair because there was a kid howling much louder than she was, but she was too tired to struggle.

  Mike drove her back to his place, seated her at the kitchen table and went out for a couple of bottles of bourbon and some more cigarettes. When he returned, he told her he didn’t know what to do except get drunk and say what was true, and Sarah wondered why she had never noticed how wise Mike was.

  ‘A few years ago,’ she said, shortly after the second bottle was opened, ‘this bloke got carried away – it was New Year’s – we were both out of our minds, and he somehow managed to put my head through a shower screen. My face was all swollen, red, black, purple, for a week. Five days, I went to work like that. One eye closed over completely. Five fucking days and not one person asked if I was okay. Then another week with yellow bruising, weeping eyes. Nothing.’ She drank deeply from the bottle. ‘Jamie comes back from his family holiday. My face is almost totally better. He takes–’ She drank again. ‘He took one look at me. At this tiny little cut under my eye, this faint yellow bruise on my cheek… He fucking cried.’

  ‘I’ve never seen a bloke so soft on a girl as he was on you.’

  ‘Too soft.’ The stupid bastard.

  They drank to the point of illness and passed out together in Mike’s double bed. When they woke they lay side by side, holding hands and looking at the ceiling.

  ‘When are you going to go back to your old man?’ Mike asked.

  ‘Do you want me
gone?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘You can stay as long as you like, but I don’t think you should. Life goes on. You can’t just hide from it forever, no matter how sad you are.’

  She rolled on to her side and looked at him. His eyes were bloodshot from all the booze and crying. ‘I’ll go home soon,’ she said. ‘When I feel a bit stronger.’

  ‘I think you should at least call him. Let him know where you are, that you’re okay.’

  ‘If I tell him where I am, he’ll come here and he’ll kill you.’

  ‘This is who you want to spend your life with?’

  ‘Want to? No. I don’t want to spend my life with him anymore than Jamie wanted to… sometimes you’re fucked either way, it’s just a matter of how and how fast.’

  ‘God!’ Mike turned to her. His distress was clear; it bled out of the corners of his eyes and into the lines of his face. ‘You say these big, huge, heartbreaking things, and you’re so calm. Not a tear, not a quiver in your voice. Like everything that happens is as dull as everything else. You’re like a robot.’

  ‘Would you feel better if I cried? Would it make you happy?’

  A sigh. ‘What has my happiness ever had to do with you, Sarah?’

  Sarah almost did cry then. Instead, she pulled him to her and kissed him.

  Sex had always been her cure all, and even though Daniel chided her for it, and Jamie had catastrophically used it against her, she still felt there was value in it. Loneliness and fear and loss were not intellectual states that could be healed through talk or analysis. They were physical conditions and could only be soothed by physical means.

  The loss of Jamie manifested itself as a sensation of bareness. Even weighed down under blankets Sarah felt too exposed. There was too much air on her skin. Air that rushed in through the Jamie shaped hole in the world. Mike’s body shut off the air for a little while and made her feel something that wasn’t pain. It was good that it was Mike, because he knew why she could hardly move, why her legs and arms stayed locked around him, why she whimpered when he stopped cradling her neck. He knew without her having to explain, because he knew Jamie, and he knew what the cold, relentless wind of missing him was like.