Inside Out (A new beginning).

The door opened to my hesitant knock and I made my way inside, brushing a pile of papers aside as I made my way to the proffered seat. Kay was waiting as usual, her ample bosom straining the buttons of her navy-blue suit. It was still twenty minutes to twelve but already she had started on her lunch, a smattering of crumbs from her Danish pastry gathering on her short skirt.
‘How’s things?’ she asked, allowing me time to pull myself together.
‘Oh, you know, could be better, could be worse.’ I had adopted this standard answer some months back and it worked for solicitors and colleagues alike.
‘Ummph! ‘ the pastry vanished as she turned to the buff folder on her desk.
‘Any more trouble from that areswipe?’ she asked, the corners of her mouth lifting upwards in a smile or grimace, I still couldn’t tell.
‘Mike thought he glimpsed him outside the office, but you know how easily he can blend into the background,’ I replied, my palms already greasy with sweat.
‘Shit! I thought we had nailed him this time, but the bastard always gets away.’ She looked at the file again and made a few notes on her legal pad. ‘ Right. We’re going for the big one this time. I’ll get someone onto it straight away.’
She picked the phone up and spoke to her secretary in some form of legalise. I had already tuned out by now, my knees were still knocking from part fright and part fatigue. I wasn’t sleeping well and those stairs didn’t help either.
‘We’ll catch up with him sooner or later,’ she said, her voice full of conviction.
I had my doubts. Terry was a swine, but he knew how to charm people when he wanted to. Hadn’t he charmed me in the first place? But Kay was giving me that look which I’d grown used to by now.
‘Have you started back on the books again?’ she asked, her voice laced with an edge of real concern. She knew how much they meant to me.
I couldn’t get a word out. The very mention of the word was starting to spook me big time. There was no way I could dissociate the word without beatings and my fingers trapped inside a door or whatever new torture Terry had planned for me. If he had half the imagination that he used on mental and physical torture to put into his day job, then he would have been rich by now.
I didn’t need to answer, Kay’s look said she knew I was still having those nightmares.
‘You can manage work alright though?’
I shifted on my seat, my trousers starting to stick to me. I knew I was a wuss, but right now I couldn’t stop thinking about being trapped again in that small room. I felt the skin of my body riddled with Goosebumps as I remembered the extreme cold and then the heat inflicted on my naked body. God! If only I could scream just once, what a relief that would be. It’s just that he’d conditioned me to expect the worse if I as much as whimpered.
Kay passed a paper cup filled with water over to me. I accepted it gratefully and drunk it straight down. The minutes ticked by like limping beggars, but eventually I got the words out.
‘I’m managing with a bit of help from my minders,’ that was almost true. Sometimes I still disappeared into the Johns.
‘It’s important that you keep working you know that. If you give the bastard one more edge then you’re never going to nail him.’ Her hands folded over her body, she stared into my eyes, more or less waiting for me to flinch again.
I glanced at the clock and saw my time was up. Feeling a bit more relaxed now that the feeling of interrogation was over, I managed a ghost of a smile.
‘I’m trying Kay, really I am. The outside bruises fade quickly, you know that. The inner ones take longer. Christ Almighty, I was lucky to get away that last time when he smacked my head into the glass.’
‘I know. I’m on your side, remember? It’s just that you are the only witness that will testify.’
‘Yeah and I only hope I come out of it without another battering, or even worse. I’m relying on you, Kay, don’t let me down.’
She looked into her diary and made a note inside.
‘Next Tuesday okay for you?’ she asked.
‘Whatever. It has to be done. ‘ I wasn’t feeling very confident.
This time her eyes smiled as well as her lips. ‘We’ll get him this week, don’t you worry.’
‘Yeah and my glass if half full.’ I answered her in her own words.
I got up to leave, thinking that with a bit of luck I could grab a bit of lunch and a pint if Mike was still waiting outside. Suddenly she slipped something into my jacket pocket.
‘Read it,’ she ordered.
‘Bye Kay,’ I said.

*

I did read it and somehow managed to keep from gagging. It was the first time for nearly a year that I’d managed that much. It was okay in the office. I didn’t really have to touch another book, just use Word and sometimes delegate even that. I was escorted to work in the morning and back home at night. My minders were big fellows but I doubted if they had ever crossed anyone as evil as Terry. Inside my suit pocket I kept a very small flick-knife, just enough to protect myself. I still remembered the pain of being stitched up in hospital the last time I’d gone against his wishes. Somehow it was the psychological pain that was worse than the real pain though.
The first break came a few weeks later. I’d seen Kay again by then and she’d told me that her associate was getting ready to pounce. This was the real crisis point for me. What if he got away from the police again? She wanted me to act as bait. There would be plenty of people around, she said, and the police would be there. It seemed like finally another witness had come forward with a signed complaint.
To say that I was scared was underestimating my feeling that day I set out across the square. I could feel hundreds of eyes on me as I strolled along, a carrier bag swinging at my side. I knew without telling that he was around. It was like a pollutant in the air. I remember thinking that even the indomitable Kay would be sweating at this point. I even thought I saw her watching from her high window.
It was quick and neatly done in the end. He went down without a murmur, coward that he was. They say that men who beat women are basically cowards, I saw it that day.

I needn’t have gone to the court hearing. After violating two restraining orders and being picked up on the third one, Terry didn’t stand a chance in hell. A statement from one of his ex girlfriends helped as well. Seems like he was following her when he had me and my daughter locked up in the outside toilet of my property. I remember standing by Kay as she read out the various charges pertaining to both his arrest on the grounds of stalking, but also when my divorce from him was granted. She didn’t need to say much, but what she did say was damning. I guess that, like me, she couldn’t condone some things, even though the beating and keeping me awake all night by pouring cold and then hot water on me was enough in the eyes of any judge to put him away for a while.

In the long run it was the books that did it. Terry hated me reading books and would snatch them away from me, ripping them up and letting the scraps of pages fall in cascades of white snow around my feet. The first time I spoke to Kay as my divorce lawyer she was incensed by this outrage. Like me she loved reading and couldn’t imagine a life without books.
Neither could I. I put up with Terry’s silly bouts of jealousy. I bore the scars from his rages, I even allowed myself to become partly brain-washed into thinking that I deserved my punishments. But I couldn’t live without my books.

I saw Kay today eating one of her favourite pastries while I sipped my white wine and crunched my way through a packet of crisps. She had a slim line tonic on the bar beside her. I thanked her once again and put a question to her.
‘Why did you give me the Wind in the willows?’ I asked.
‘Why do you think?’ she threw it back at me.
I’d come to admire her and so I answered truthfully.
‘You can do most anything to a woman and take away her dignity,’ I said. ‘But you can’t respect a man that beats you and sooner or later you get to know what it’s like to feel nothing but contempt for him. I read the book. I laughed until my laughter turned to tears. He was even less than a toad, he was nothing.’
The barman came to wipe a bit of our bar then and involuntarily I flinched. I expect that will happen for a while yet but I’m gaining my courage back all the time.
‘You’ll recover, Lisa,’ she said to me as she got up from her perch, scattering crumbs as usual.
‘See you around,’ I said.
‘Love the skirt,’ she replied. ‘It suits you better than trousers.’
Like I said to Kay, it’s a new beginning.

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