‘Will you?’ He sounds doubtful.
‘If you want me to. It won’t be—It’s horrible. The words don’t even begin to describe it.’
‘I need to understand it. Then I’ll know how to stop him.’
So I turn out the library lights and lock the door. We are shadows, lit only by the bulb from the back office, and I tell him, ‘It started like this. It was closing time. I was about to lock up when he came in, and stood in the doorway. He told me to go into the back office and take my clothes off. He wanted me to lie down.’ It doesn’t sound right to me. My voice is different, strained, with a saw-edge of fear. It’s the memory of it, coming to life, taking me over. The edges of that night and this night are bleeding together.
David stands perfectly still. He says, ‘No. Right? You said no.’
I shake my head.
‘What did you say?’
‘I asked him not to hurt me.’
David pauses, swallows. ‘What then?’
‘Then I did as I was told.’
I lead the way into the back office. We stand together under the strip light.
‘I took off my clothes,’ I say. I don’t whisper, or shout. I am calmer now, emptier. This is the moment I have been dreading, fighting against, but now it’s here and I am ready for it.
‘All your clothes?’
‘Everything. I folded them and put them on the desk.’ My white knickers, folded, on top of the trousers, the waistcoat, the shirt, the bra, in order: so neat. I don’t look at David. I don’t want to get caught up in his emotions. It is so much easier if I pretend this is not something that happened to me. I, I, I. It helps if I picture this as a story. So I find myself changing into a different form of speech. ‘She took off her clothes,’ I tell David. ‘But that’s not where the story began.’
I am a distant measurer of words as I tell him:
There was once a man who was born evil.
He knew it from the first moment he knew himself. He was meant to do no good. He was certain of it. And that thought made him proud and excited and sad and lonely, all at the same time. But there was no way to express it, because the wrongness within him was palpable. Whenever he tried to talk to anyone about the evil inside him, even his own family, they refused to listen. They didn’t want to spend time with him, because they were afraid of what was inside him too.
So instead, when he was old enough, he bought himself a camera. It was a digital camera, small and easy to use, but he had opted for one with a very powerful zoom, so that he could sit in public places, like a park or a coffee shop, and take out his little camera, and pretend to be cleaning it or photographing ducks when really he was zooming into the face of a woman, right up into her eyes, her lashes, so close that every pore was captured. He didn’t just want their faces. He also took photographs of the soft skin at the back of their knees, the casual overlap of nail varnish onto the cuticles of their fingers; arms, legs, hair and cleavage and anything that wasn’t covered by clothes, he shot.
Then he took the camera home, laden with hundreds of images, and enjoyed each one in turn.
This is not a man you should feel sympathy for. He was not just lonely. He didn’t imagine these women were his friends or his lovers. He imagined they were his slaves, and that he was making them lie still under his gaze to pay them back for seeing his ugliness in return. He was not a man who could be fixed by a real relationship, and he did not want to be fixed. He wanted to get worse. He wanted his obsession to define him, and so he started to plan his escalation to a new level of evil. He came up with a way to make a real woman suffer the worst humiliation possible, and he looked for an opportunity to implement it.
The local library provided him with that opportunity.
He wasn’t a member of the library, but he passed it occasionally on his walk into town. It closed late on a Thursday, and from the darkness outside it was possible to see the lone woman who worked there. She would be shutting down the computers, and shelving the final returns of the day. What she looked like wasn’t important to him. All that mattered was her vulnerability. She was alone, a shining light in the black pit, as fragile as a candle.
He watched her for months before making his move, and it was much easier than he had ever dared to hope for. He simply stood up from his hiding place behind the hedge and walked into the library. She looked up with a welcoming smile, and he told her what he wanted from her, wondering what she would do.
To his delight, she simply obeyed him. It was as if he were a god and she was a mere mortal. He didn’t even need a weapon; his voice was enough. Her fear gave him power, and he had never felt so wonderful. The next ten minutes were the best of his life.
He made her undress, and lie down on her back. Then he took out his camera.
He started by taking headshots, then torso, keeping the delicate shell of her navel in the centre of the picture. He moved on to her limbs, trying to make sure the images would overlap so that he could piece her back together like a puzzle later, back in his flat. He wanted to make a complete map of her: her veins, the path of her arteries.
That was the beginning.
Then he told her to open her legs. He knelt between them, taking care not to touch her, and he photographed every fold of her labia, every line of her tight, puckered anus.
He told her to kneel, and to lift her arms. She had a small mole under her left armpit, from which three fine, barely visible hairs grew. He photographed them in an ecstasy of discovery.
Finally, he told her to open her mouth.
He photographed her tongue, her throat, her tonsils. He photographed the glistening droplet of her epiglottis, and the slippery descent that led to her stomach. Her teeth were creamy yellow; he thought maybe she drank too much coffee, and told her to drink more water in the future. She started to cry, making an ugly, desperate expression, and he photographed that too, and the slow trickle of tears into her open mouth.
Then he told her to stay still, and he left. He didn’t even bother to check if she obeyed him. What she did no longer mattered. He had captured the essence of her. He took it home, the purity of her, and downloaded it, and looked at it ceaselessly, remembering how it felt to be a god.
But soon his ability to remember that feeling wore off.
Within a matter of days he began to plan again.
I stop talking, and the room is silent.
I am serene. I have never felt relief like it. The words are out of me and I have claimed my mouth as my own once more.
‘Is it true?’ says David. He has collapsed inwards, and looks like a smaller man. I never thought I could feel so good as he stands opposite me, deflated.
‘Yes.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me? Don’t you know you can tell me anything? It wasn’t your fault, no matter how you reacted. There’s no reason to feel that you weren’t brave enough. There’s no shame in being a victim of somebody like that.’
I shake my head. ‘You don’t understand. There is no shame. I lied for your sake. Because I knew it would become all you would see when you looked at me. I knew you’d be consumed by it.’
‘You did it for me?’
I put my arms around him. The moment that I knew was coming is here. I had hoped it would not appear until after Christmas, so that I could have that memory, but it’s too late for that now. We have tasks to do, and I must tell him where his future lies. ‘You need to find him. You need to deal with him. And I need to go back to Skein Island.’