“OK,” I say. “That would be nice.”
She smiles, squeezes my wrist. “I’ll be right back. I’ll bring you something nice to eat too.”
Then she gets up and leaves the room, and as the door shuts behind her, I hear her turning the key in the lock.
When I close my eyes I remember the flash of the small knife in Jessamine’s hand, her hard words through tight lips: “I’ll cut off your other fucking ear.” I try to shake the image, the words from my mind. I try to rest. But then I think about the au pair, the one whose departure had brought about the blocking off of a whole room. The air in here feels sour. It feels violated.
Jessamine returns.
“Why did you lock the door?”
“Did I?”
“Yes. You know you did.”
She waves her hands around vaguely, then busies herself with dunking soft washcloths into the bowl of hot soapy water she brought up with her.
“And the knife. What was with the knife?”
“What knife?”
“The one you had in your hand when you came up before. When you threatened to cut off my other ear.”
“Oh, don’t be silly. I was only joking. It was just a bloody butter knife.”
She squeezes out the washcloth and then helps me pull off my T-shirt. “Oh,” she says. “Stuart’s lovely chest. I haven’t seen your lovely chest for a while.”
It’s true. We haven’t had sex in months. I’m always clothed in her presence nowadays.
“Arms up,” she says.
I do as I’m told. I’m so tired. I let her clean under my arms, behind my bandages, the back of my neck. I pull down my underpants and let her clean my penis. I don’t respond to her touch. It just feels nice. She puts my feet into the bowl and cleans them too. I stare down at the top of her head, at her greasy parting, the tips of her ears, the bony clavicles at the top of her loose-fitting sweater. I feel a surge of affection for her, for this scrappy, stupid, broken woman. I put out a hand to touch her crown and give it a gentle squeeze.
“Thank you,” I say.
chapter fifty-six
I’ve been stuck in this room for four days and I can’t take the quiet anymore. I want to go for a walk, hang out with Daisy in the kitchen, cook nice food, go for a pint in the village with Hugo. I want to watch TV.
Jessamine likes having me up here, trapped behind a locked door, but I’m working on her.
“You know,” I say, “we should go out for dinner. You and me. We’ve never done that.”
She throws me a sideways look. “I don’t think you should be going out. Not yet. You’re still in a bad way.”
I am in a bad way. My ear throbs and burns. Annie has redressed it a couple of times, but I think I need antibiotics. I want to see my GP. I already know what I’ll say, how I’ll word it, how I’ll swerve the inevitable “why didn’t you go straight to hospital?” I just need to get it sorted. I need to talk to Blaise. I need to make sure she got back to Oz OK. It’s my brother’s birthday next week. I need to send him a card, give him a ring on the day, like I always do. I need to start getting the garden ready for spring. I need to check Daisy’s got enough clean uniforms, that there’s enough decent food in the fridge. I want to wash my hair, shave. But Jessamine,she’s on edge, her sobriety is killing her. She shakes. She’s down. Gloomy. No wild mood swings, just one flat line.
I have to get out of this fucking room.
“I’m feeling so much better,” I say. “Honestly. I just want to get back to normal. And I want to spend some quality time with you.” I give her a hopeful smile. It’s fake as fuck. There is no “quality time” with Jessamine. Any time spent with her is fraught, brittle, frustrating, infuriating, terrifying, depressing.
“I don’t want to go out for dinner if I can’t have a drink. And I can’t have a drink. So there goes that.” She makes a puffing noise and shrugs.
“Well,” I say, “a walk, then. Around the village. Or I could try and get your mum’s car running; we could go for a drive. Maybe into the countryside. It’s just, you and I, we got into a bad place, I think. A rut. We forgot that we’re great together. Remember,” I say, taking one of her dry hands into mine, “when we first met? When we laughed? When we had sex, all the time? When we really enjoyed each other. Remember that?”
It’s a horrible exaggeration of the truth. We were drunk all the time; we had a lot of sex, but it was weird and meaningless, Jessamine taking me through the paces of some kind of quasi-BDSM litany of weird positions and stage directions that it never felt like she was really enjoying, rather that she was enjoyingpretendingto enjoy.
I see her face soften; a giddy giggle erupts from her. “Feels like a long time ago.”
