"You taught me a great deal. I can control myself now."
"Lyndon's death was controlled, was it?"
"Certainly."
"It looked a little excessive to me."
"He got everything he deserved."
"Give me what I deserve, then, in my turn. I've locked you up. I've rejected you when you needed me. Punish me for it."
"I survived."
"J!"
Even in this extremity he couldn't call her by her full name.
"Please to God. Please to God. I need only this one thing from you. Do it out of whatever motive you have in you. Compassion, or contempt, or love. But do it, please do it."
"No," she said.
He crossed the room suddenly, and slapped her, very hard.
"Lyndon said you were a whore. He was right; you are. Gutter slut, nothing better."
He walked away, turned, walked back, hit her again, faster, harder, and again, six or seven times, backwards and forwards.
Then he stopped, panting.
"You want money?" Bargains now. Blows, then bargains. She was seeing him twisted through tears of shock, which she was unable to prevent.
"Do you want money?" he said again.
"What do you think?"
He didn't hear her sarcasm, and began to scatter notes around her feet, dozens and dozens of them, like offerings around the Statue of the Virgin.
"Anything you want," he said, "Jacqueline."
In her belly she felt something close to pain as the urge to kill him found birth, but she resisted it. It was playing into his hands, becoming the instrument of his wilclass="underline" powerless. Usage again; that's all she ever got. She had been bred like a cow, to give a certain supply. Of care to husbands, of milk to babies, of death to old men. And, like a cow, she was expected to be compliant with every demand made of her, when ever the call came. Well, not this time.
She went to the door.
"Where are you going?"
She reached for the key. "Your death is your own business, not mine," she said.
He ran at her before she could unlock the door, and the blow — in its force, in its malice — was totally unexpected.
"Bitch!" he shrieked, a hail of blows coming fast upon the first.
In her stomach, the thing that wanted to kill grew a little larger.
He had his fingers tangled in her hair, and pulled her back into the room, shouting obscenities at her, an endless stream of them, as though he'd opened a dam full of sewer-water on her. This was just another way for him to get what he wanted she told herself, if you succumb to this you've lost: he's just manipulating you. Still the words came: the same dirty words that had been thrown at generations of unsubmissive women. Whore; heretic; cunt; bitch; monster.
Yes, she was that.
Yes, she thought: monster I am.
The thought made it easy. She turned. He knew what she intended even before she looked at him. He dropped his hands from her head. Her anger was already in her throat coming out of her — crossing the air between them.
Monster he calls me: monster I am.
I do this for myself, not for him. Never for him. For myself!
He gasped as her will touched him, and the glittering eyes stopped glittering for a moment, the will to die became the will to survive, all too late of course, and he roared. She heard answering shouts, steps, threats on the stairs. They would be in the room in a matter of moments.
"You are an animal," she said.
"No," he said, certain even now that his place was in command.
"You don't exist," she said, advancing on him. "They'll never find the part that was Titus. Titus is gone. The rest is just —"
The pain was terrible. It stopped even a voice coming out from him. Or was that her again, changing his throat, his palate, his very head? She was unlocking the plates of his skull, and reorganizing him.
No, he wanted to say, this isn't the subtle ritual I had planned. I wanted to die folded into you, I wanted to go with my mouth clamped to yours, cooling in you as I died. This is not the way I want it.
No. No. No.
They were at the door, the men who'd kept her here, beating on it. She had no fear of them, of course, except that they might spoil her handiwork before the final touches were added to it.
Someone was hurling themselves at the door now. Wood splintered: the door was flung open. The two men were both armed. They pointed their weapons at her, steady-handed.
"Mr Pettifer?" said the younger man. In the corner of the room, under the table, Pettifer's eyes shone.
"Mr Pettifer?" he said again, forgetting the woman. Pettifer shook his snouted head. Don't come any closer, please, he thought.
The man crouched down and stared under the table at the disgusting beast that was squatting there; bloody from its transformation, but alive. She had killed his nerves: he felt no pain. He just survived, his hands knotted into paws, his legs scooped up around his back, knees broken so he had the look of a four-legged crab, his brain exposed, his eyes lidless, lower jaw broken and swept up over his top jaw like a bulldog, ears torn off, spine snapped, humanity bewitched into another state.
"You are an animal," she'd said. It wasn't a bad facsimile of beast hood.
The man with the gun gagged as he recognized fragments of his master. He stood up, greasy-chinned, and glanced around at the woman.
Jacqueline shrugged.
"You did this?" Awe mingled with the revulsion.
She nodded.
"Come Titus," she said, clicking her fingers.
The beast shook its head, sobbing.
"Come Titus," she said more forcefully, and Titus Pettifer waddled out of his hiding place, leaving a trail like a punctured meat-sack.
The man fired at Pettifer's remains out of sheer instinct. Anything, anything at all to prevent this disgusting creature from approaching him.
Titus stumbled two steps back on his bloody paws, shook himself as if to dislodge the death in him, and failing, died.
"Content?" she asked.
The gunman looked up from the execution. Was the power talking to him? No; Jacqueline was staring at Pettifer's corpse, asking the question of him.
Content?
The gunman dropped his weapon. The other man did the same.
"How did this happen?" asked the man at the door. A simple question: a child's question.
"He asked," said Jacqueline. "It was all I could give him."
The gunman nodded, and fell to his knees.
Vassi's Testimony (final part)
"Chance has played a worryingly large part in my romance with Jacqueline Ess. Sometimes it's seemed I've been subject to every tide that passes through the world, spun around by the merest flick of accident's wrist. Other times I've had the suspicion that she was masterminding my life, as she was the lives of a hundred others, a thousand others, arranging every fluke meeting, choreographing my victories and my defeats, escorting me, blindly, towards this last encounter.
I found her without knowing I'd found her, that was the irony of it. I'd traced her first to a house in Surrey, a house that had a year previous seen the murder of one Titus Pettifer, a billionaire shot by one of his own bodyguards. In the upstairs room, where the murder had taken place, all was serenity. If she had been there, they had removed any sign. But the house, now in virtual ruin, was prey to all manner of graffiti; and on the stained plaster wall of that room someone had scrawled a woman. She was obscenely over-endowed, her gaping sex blazing with what looked like lightning. And at her feet there was a creature of indeterminate species. Perhaps a crab, perhaps a dog, perhaps even a man. Whatever it was it had no power over itself. It sat in the light of her agonizing presence and counted itself amongst the fortunate. Looking at that wizened creature, with its eyes turned up to gaze on the burning Madonna, I knew the picture was a portrait of Jacqueline.