Behind Closed Doors: A Novel

Even though the days pass slowly for me, I’m always amazed at how quickly Sundays come round. Today though, I can’t help feeling depressed because there is no visit to Millie to look forward to. I don’t know this for sure, but it’s unlikely that Jack will take me to see her when we’ve been for the last two Sundays. Still, it could be that he’ll surprise me, so I’ve had my shower just in case, drying both myself and my hair on the small hand towel that he allows me. Bath sheets and hairdryers are luxuries of a past long gone, as are visits to the hairdresser’s. Although drying myself is a misery in the winter, it is not all bad. My hair, denied both heat and scissors, is long and shiny and, with a bit of ingenuity, I can manage to tie it in a knot so that it doesn’t annoy me.

It wasn’t always so bad. When we first arrived in the house, I had a much nicer bedroom, with all sorts of things to keep me amused, which Jack deprived me of with each attempt to escape. First the kettle went, then the radio, then the books. With nothing to distract me, I resorted to relieving the stultifying boredom of the days by playing around with the clothes in my wardrobe, mixing and matching different outfits just for the hell of it. But after another failed attempt to escape, Jack took me from that room and installed me in the box room next door, which he’d stripped of every comfort except for the bed. He even went to the trouble of adding bars to the window. Deprived of my wardrobe, it meant that I had to rely on him to bring me my clothes each morning. I soon forfeited that right too and now, unless we’re going out, I’m made to wear pyjamas day and night. Although he brings me clean ones three times a week, there is nothing to relieve the monotony of wearing the same thing day in, day out, especially when each pair is exactly the same as the last. They are all the same style and all the same colour—black—with nothing to distinguish one pair from another. Once, not very long ago, when I asked him if I could have a dress to wear during the day for a change, he brought me a curtain I’d had in my flat and told me to make one for myself. He thought himself funny, because he knew I had no scissors, or needle and thread, but when he found me wearing it the next day, wrapped around me like a sarong and a welcome change from pyjamas, he took it away again, annoyed by my ingenuity. Hence his little joke to Esther and the others about me being something of a seamstress and making my own clothes.

He loves to put me on the spot, to see how I’ll cope with something he’s thrown nonchalantly into the conversation, hoping I’ll mess up so he can punish me. But I’m getting quite good at making it up as I go along. Personally, I’m hoping Esther and the others will ask me again about starting a sewing circle because it’ll be Jack who’ll have to get me out of that one. Perhaps he’ll start by breaking my arm or mangling my fingers in a door. So far, he has never harmed me physically, although there are times when I think that he’d like to.

Sometime in the afternoon, I hear a ring at the gate so I jump off the bed and press my ear to the door. It’s the first bit of excitement I’ve had in a long time, as people never drop in uninvited. I wait to hear if Jack is going to let whoever it is in, or at least enquire what they want, but when the house remains silent I know he’s pretending that we’re not at home—fortunately for him, it’s impossible to see the car parked in the driveway through the black gates. When whoever it is rings again, this time more impatiently, my thoughts turn immediately to Esther.

I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately, mainly because of the way she repeated her mobile number in the restaurant last week. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced she understood that I needed to hear it again and I know that if there ever comes a time when I need to ask for help, it will be Esther I’ll turn to rather than Diane, who I’ve known for longer. I’ve lost all my own friends, even Kate and Emily, who I thought would always stand by me. But my irregular and very short emails to them—dictated by Jack—where I trilled about how wonderful married life was and said I was too busy to see them, ensured that theirs dried up quickly. I didn’t even get a birthday card from them this year.

Now that he’s got rid of my friends, Jack allows me to reply to other emails addressed specifically to me—from my parents or Diane, for example—rather than reply to them himself, but only to give them a more genuine flavour, although I’m not sure how genuine I manage to make them sound with him breathing down my neck as I write. On these occasions I am brought down to his study, and I welcome these moments where, with both a computer and a telephone within reach, the potential of alerting someone is greater than anywhere else.

My heart always starts beating faster as Jack sits me down, with the computer and telephone only inches away, because there is always the hope that he might be distracted long enough for me to be able to snatch up the phone, dial a quick 999 and scream my despair to the police. Or pound a quick plea for help on the keyboard to whoever I am writing to and press the send button before he can stop me. The temptation to do so is great, but Jack is always vigilant. He stands over me as I write and checks each message before he allows me to send it.

Once, I thought my chance had come when somebody rang at the gate as I was writing, but instead of going to the intercom to see who was there, Jack simply ignored it, as he does the telephone when it rings while I’m seated at the computer. Yet along with the frustration I feel when he escorts me back to my room, at another chance gone, there is also a feeling of near-contentment, especially after I’ve written to my parents. It’s almost as if I believe the lies I have told them, about weekends away that Jack and I have been on, or visits to beautiful gardens, to country houses, to places I have never been and where I will never go, yet am able to describe in such detail. But, as with all highs, the coming down is hard, and once the euphoria has gone I feel more depressed than ever.

There’s no third ring at the gate so I go back to the bed and lie down. I feel so restless that I decide to try a bit of meditation to relax me. I taught myself to meditate not long after Jack moved me into this room for fear I would go mad with nothing to do all day. I’ve become so good at it that sometimes I manage to drift off for what often seems like several hours but is probably a lot less. I usually start by picturing Millie and me sitting in a beautiful garden with a little dog at our feet. Not Molly though—to be able to lose myself, I need to think happy thoughts. Today, however, I’m unable to relax because the only picture I can bring to mind is that of Esther driving away from the house. In my isolation, I’ve become superstitious and I take it as a sign that I’ve got it all wrong, that Esther isn’t going to be the one to help me.

When I hear Jack coming up the stairs maybe an hour or so after the ring at the gate, I try to guess if he’s come to play some sort of game with me or if he’s simply bringing me a late lunch. He unlocks the door; there’s no tray in his hand so I prepare myself for one of his sadistic games, especially when I see that he is holding a book. The urge to pounce on it and snatch it out of his hand is powerful, but I keep my face impassive and do my best not to look at it, wondering what torment he has devised this time. He knows how I crave to have something to read—I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve pleaded with him to let me have a newspaper, just once a week even, to help me keep up-to-date with what is happening in the world so that I don’t appear a complete idiot when we go out to dinner. So I’m fully expecting him to offer me the book, only to withdraw his hand the moment I reach out to take it.

‘I have something for you,’ he begins.

‘What?’ I ask, as unenthusiastically as I can.

‘A book.’ He pauses. ‘Would you like it?’

Coming from Jack, it’s the question I hate most in the world as I’m damned if I say yes and damned if I say no. ‘It depends,’ I say, hating that I’m prolonging my agony by trying to keep him there as long as possible because at least he’s someone to talk to.

‘On what?’

‘Its title. If it’s called My Life with a Psychopath, I’m not interested.’

He smiles. ‘Actually, it’s the one that Esther recommended.’

‘And you decided to buy it for me?’

‘No, she dropped it off.’ He pauses again. ‘Under normal circumstances, I would have put it straight in the bin, but it came with a very charming invitation to dinner a week next Saturday, with a little post scriptum saying that she can’t wait to hear what you think of the book. So I suggest you make sure you’ve read it by then.’

‘I’m not sure I’ll have time, but I’ll do my best,’ I tell him.

‘Don’t get too smart,’ he warns. ‘You’ve become so adept at avoiding punishment that I only need the slightest excuse.’

He leaves, and unable to wait any longer, I open the book and read the first page to get an idea of what it’s about. I know instantly that I’m going to love it and I hate the thought that it’ll only take me a day or so to read it. I wonder if I should wait a while before starting it properly, and limit myself to a chapter a day, but because there’s always the possibility that Jack will take it back again before I’ve had a chance to finish it, I settle down on my bed, ready to spend the best few hours I’ve had for a long time. I’ve been reading for about an hour when I notice that one of the words I’ve just read, the word ‘alright’, stands out more than the others and, when I look closely, I see that it’s been lightly shaded in pencil.

Something about it jogs my memory and, going back a few pages, I find the word ‘thing’ highlighted in the same manner, but so lightly I’m not convinced I would have noticed had I not been looking for it. I flip back a few more pages and come across the word ‘every’, which I recognise as the word that had caught my attention earlier, although I had put its darker background down to a printing problem. Intrigued, I carry on turning back the pages and eventually find a tiny ‘is’ nearer the beginning of the book.

I run it together—‘Is everything alright’.

My heart starts beating faster as I consider the possibility that Esther has sent me a message. If she has, there has to be more. With a mounting sense of excitement, I scan the rest of the book for evidence of shading and find ‘do’, ‘you’, ‘need’ and, on the second to last page of the book, ‘help’.

The elation I feel, that she has recognised my predicament and wants to help, is short-lived, because how can I reply to Esther when I don’t have access to something as mundane as a pencil? Even if I had one, I’d be at a loss as to what to reply. A mere ‘yes’ wouldn’t be enough, a ‘yes, get the police’ would be futile, because, as I know to my cost, Jack has them in his pocket. Like the staff at the hotel in Thailand, they know me as a manic-depressive, given to accusing my devoted and brilliant lawyer husband of keeping me prisoner. Even if they arrived at the house without warning, Jack would have no trouble explaining away this room, or any other room in the house for that matter. Anyway, he would never let me return the book to Esther without checking it first, just as he always checks my bag before we go out to make sure it’s empty.

It suddenly occurs to me that he wouldn’t have let me have the book in the first place if he hadn’t gone through it thoroughly, which means he’s almost certainly seen the shading. It’s an appalling thought, not least because Esther could be in danger from him. It also means I’ll have to be careful what I say to her when we next meet as, knowing that I can’t get a message back to her in kind, Jack will be listening to every word I say. He’ll probably be expecting me to say something along the lines of ‘I thought the message the author was trying to get across was quite pertinent.’ But he’s going to be disappointed. I might have been that stupid once, but not anymore. It might be difficult to get a message back to Esther, but I refuse to feel downhearted. I’m so grateful that she has understood so quickly what nobody else ever has—not my parents or Diane or Janice or the police—that Jack controls everything I do.

I find myself frowning, because if she suspects that he controls me, surely she must guess that he also controls everything I come into contact with? If she’s realised that Jack is not someone to be trifled with, why would she risk discovery when she has nothing concrete to back up her suspicions?

I go back to reading, hoping to find something that will tell me how I can communicate with Esther without Jack finding out, because how can I let her down when she has reached out to me so amazingly?

Sometime in the evening, when I’m still trying to work out a way of getting a message back to her, I hear Jack coming up the stairs, so I close the book quickly and place it a little away from me on the bed.

‘Finished already?’ he remarks, nodding at the book.

‘Actually, I’m finding it hard to get into,’ I lie. ‘It’s not the sort of thing I’d normally read.’

‘How far have you got with it?’

‘Not very far.’

‘Well, make sure you finish it before we see her next week.’

He leaves, and I find myself frowning again. It’s the second time he’s insisted that I read it before we go to Esther’s for dinner, which tells me that he knows about the shading and is hoping I’m going to dig a grave for myself. After all, he as good as admitted, when he said earlier that I was getting too clever for my own good, that he misses punishing me, so I can imagine how happy he must have been to see Esther’s message—and how he must have laughed at her attempt to help me. But then, the more I think about it, the more I feel that I’ve missed something. It’s only when I remember the amount of time that passed between the ring on the doorbell and Jack bringing the book up to me that it dawns on me that the shading in the book is not Esther’s work, but Jack’s.