A Deep Deceit

One

The first blow split my lip and loosened my front teeth. I tasted the salt of my own blood filling my mouth. Somehow I managed to turn and run from the bedroom out on to the landing but I wasn’t nearly fast enough. He was after me at once. The second blow flattened my nose. I felt the bone turn into mush and more warm blood spurt from my torn nostrils. The next blow sliced my face open and cracked a cheekbone. Pain filled my head. I fell heavily on to the floor, clutching at my ruined face, struggling to catch my breath, desperate to escape.

He stood above me, quite calm it seemed. Then he drew back his right leg and kicked me with all his might. He was wearing leather lace-up shoes with hard toes, the heavy old-fashioned kind. The kick caught me fully in the ribs with such force that I was half lifted off the ground and sent spiralling crazily down the stairs. I bounced my way down, stair by stair, the sharp edges digging into my already shattered rib cage, my arms and legs twisting impossibly beneath me, and landed with a sickening thump at the bottom.

My wrist felt broken and I had twisted my ankle so badly that I knew, without trying, I would not be able to walk.

I was aware of him standing at the top of the stairs. Quite still, silently watching.

Tears mingled with the blood running down my smashed face. I half crawled, half dragged myself across the hall, and reached out with my one good arm in an attempt to open the front door. I grasped the handle and managed somehow to turn it, but the door didn’t budge. I assumed it must be locked. In defeat, I slumped into a heap again.

Suddenly I realised he must have come down the stairs. He had an ability to move very quietly, uncannily so, even at the height of his furies. He was like a cat stalking his prey and I could feel his shadow looming over me. I could hear the rasp of his breath. I whimpered. I hated myself for my weakness but I had no defence against him. I didn’t look up. I couldn’t bear to look up. I knew what I would see.

Instead, I summoned my strength to make my tortured way into the dining room, still half crawling, half dragging myself using my one good arm.

I made it to the table and crawled underneath. I curled myself into a tight ball, desperate not to be hurt any more, hearing the tread of his feet as he followed me, without hurry, into the room. I knew that he had been drinking heavily again, alcohol and his abuse always went together, and maybe this slowed him a little, but there was, in any case, no urgency for him. He had total command of my very existence.

He rested one hand on the table top and I could hear his fingers drumming. Tap tap tap, tappity tap. A rhythmic drumming. Then, quite abruptly, he lifted the table and tipped it so that it turned on to its side and I was revealed cowering there on the polished wooden floor, a frightened, whimpering thing.

I was certain I was going to die. There had been other terrible frightening times. But this was the worst, the very worst.

I could not run and I could not fight him. He was physically indomitable. It was not that he was a particularly big or strong man. It was more that his rages were so violent they gave him an almost unnatural power. And, of course, he believed he was God on Earth. Really, he did.

He stood above me, laughing. There was a hammer in his right hand, a heavy lump hammer which I didn’t remember seeing before. It occurred to me that maybe he had acquired it specifically to kill me. He carried it loosely, letting it swing with his arm as if it were a cricket bat. He was still laughing. This really is the end, I thought. He could crush my skull with one blow from that. Eventually he raised his right arm. My terrified gaze rose with him, following the arc of the hammer, and I could no longer avoid looking into his face. My eyes were drawn there as if by a magnetic force.

Except, of course, that he had no face. I knew that already. But the shock of seeing it was always just as great as the first time. That was what I dreaded most of all, more even than the very worst of the violence. The horror of his facelessness was somehow greater than the pain he inflicted. I gazed into the empty black hole where his face should have been, and I could not look away. My eyes were riveted on the awful nothingness of him...

I heard myself screaming – terrible, frantic, piercing screams. And then it was all over.

I woke in Carl’s arms, as I always did. I woke to the soothing sound of his lovely gentle voice and he held me close to him, even though I was a screaming, hysterical thing, pummelling his broad chest with my fists, kicking out desperately.

Slowly my hysteria lessened. Eventually I stopped punching and kicking, but it was a while before I could stop screaming. It always was.

‘Shh, shh, my darling,’ he soothed, in that soft American accent I had fallen in love with all those years before. ‘It’s all right, Suzanne,’ he said. ‘You’re at home with me. It was just a dream, honey. Everything’s fine. I won’t let anybody hurt you.’

As I listened to his reassurances I felt the awful tension drift from my body. The pain had been so real. Cautiously I touched my lip and my nose. They were both undamaged. I was not bleeding. I did not have cracked ribs, a broken wrist or a twisted ankle, but I checked each part of my body carefully, just as I did every time.

Carl stroked my hair, then my face with one hand, and kept the other arm wrapped round me. He knew so well how to calm me.

The tears still poured down my face. He touched them, tenderly, and then he kissed them, still whispering reassurance. It was several minutes before I was able to stop crying. Carl carried on kissing my eyes and stroking me.

He knew my nightmares as well as I did. He was so vividly aware of them that it was almost as if he too suffered what I suffered. Sometimes I could feel his body trembling as he comforted me. He understood completely how to help me recover, how to help us both recover.

He would not try to make love to me, he never did at these times, because he knew as well as I did myself that I just couldn’t, much as I adored him, not then. At any other time I responded to Carl’s touch with the same loving arousal that he had first excited in me almost seven years previously. I loved him to pieces and we were blissfully happy together. Our home was a tiny cottage high above St Ives harbour and I had grown to love the little Cornish seaside town almost as much as I loved Carl.

Yet I could not stop the nightmares. Nothing could. Not even Carl. He could help me overcome them, but he could not stop them happening. At first I had been afraid to go to bed and had worn myself out pacing our tiny house, unable to bear the thought of sleep. They were not so frequent now. In the last year there had been just five. And always I prayed, as I knew Carl did, that this one would be the last.

‘Will they ever stop?’ I asked him for the umpteenth time. They were my first coherent words. They were invariably my first coherent words.

‘One day,’ he whispered, his lips very close to my ear. ‘One day, I promise you.’

He was so kind. I knew he would not let himself sleep now. He never did. He realised that I needed him awake and loving me. And he knew that for at least the next week, maybe two weeks, the fear would be all around me again. And that some nights I would not dare to sleep. He would stay up with me until exhaustion overcame me. He always did.

He was my rock.