He found her long blonde hairs in the bathroom, trailing from the taps, twined around the neck of the shampoo bottle. Once, from the bottom of the bath, he picked up a crinkled pubic hair, softer and lighter than the ones that fell from him and his brother. Holding it in his pinched fingers, thinking about where it had come from, he pulsed and stiffened with blood.
He grew to savour the moments of standing in the doorway to her room, talking to Veronica as she lay curled cat-like on bed. The room smelled of perfume, warm female skin and the scent of the dying flowers drooping in the vase on the windowsill. Once or twice, he daringly went over and sat on the bed next to her, wondering what she would say if he lay down beside her. Wondering was about as far as he ever got. She had a battered old teddy bear that shared the pillow next to hers - whenever Jake sat next to her, he could see it staring accusingly at him with its black button eyes. When she sat in bed, she wore cream satin pyjamas that fell in luscious, shiny folds across her legs. Once, she wore a black nightgown with a tight lace bodice, through which her nipples protruded in tiny pink points. He’d masturbated furiously over that nightdress for nearly a fortnight.
Jake knew he wasn’t the best at facing reality. But after Veronica had been there two months, he had to reluctantly face the fact that he was getting worse, not better. Every evening was a struggle; the weekends were two days of sweet agony. He tried his own version of aversion therapy. He savoured the moments when she said something stupid (not often but they did occur) and repeated them to himself again and again. He tried to mentally freeze-frame a picture of her face when it was startled or screwed up in laughter and in anything other than its normal, beautiful repose. He tried to think of her in negative terms; he told himself that she was cold, skinny, flat-chested. He even tried deliberately listening when she was in the bathroom, straining his ears for the sound of a fart or the splash of a turd. Then he’d hide himself away when she flushed and left the bathroom, only to race back inside to take deep breaths of the fading pungency that remained, only half disguised by the odour of synthetic flowers. He hugged these moments to himself – it was as if he knew a secret about her that she didn’t, that he’d discovered something about her she was desperate to hide – the tell-tale fact of her own animal being.
It only partly worked. In some ways it made things worse. He was more aware of her than ever – she was more there in the house; more physical, more real. At times the whole house seemed full of her scent, the very rooms filled with her breath, the walls warmed by her skin and the ceilings lit up in the flickering golden light of her hair.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want a girlfriend, a proper girlfriend. Someone to come home too, someone to call up when you wanted to moan about your day, someone to read the papers with in bed, breaking off from the review section to indulge in sleepy Sunday sex. All the sort of things that single people thought a relationship was all about. Despite Veronica’s adherence to separate rooms and minimal public contact, there was still enough heat between her and Carl to make Jake sometimes feel superfluous to requirements. Sometimes they were curled cosily on the sofa when he came in from work and although they disentangled themselves fairly sharply, he could never see the dents in the sofa cushions without feeling it as a little blow to his heart.
As much as a girlfriend would have been nice, there just didn’t seem to be one in the offing. Perhaps it was his nurtured passion for Veronica that blunted his attraction to other girls – perhaps they could sense, in some dim feminine way, that he wasn’t playing the mating game with a full deck of cards. He was spending less and less time with his other friends, now that Fever Street was generating its own little club of three. He still caught up with Mark for the occasional drink but the cord of their friendship, woven back in college, was fraying ever more slightly every time they met up.
It was almost inevitable, what happened on that night. Looking back, Jake could see that – it stood out a mile, it was something waiting to happen. Not everything that happened that night, obviously, not the worst, the most awful thing that happened. But the other, the precursor to the horror – it was inevitable. Why do I see that now, thought Jake. Why couldn’t I have seen it then? Why can I only see now what a dangerous game we were all playing?
Chapter Twenty
It started innocuously – perhaps momentous days always did. Afterwards, Jake was to think back with a kind of incredulity to the complete and utter normality that had reigned all day, right up to the moment where Candice Stanton turned around and said ‘yes’. It was such a normal Friday night, such an average, everyday end of the week. At times, he still couldn’t quite believe what had happened later that evening. For morning after morning once that day had passed, he would wake up and in the first thirty seconds of consciousness, he would have forgotten. For thirty seconds every morning, it was as if it hadn’t happened. Then with full wakefulness, back would come the remembrance, crashing back into his skull, again and again, undulled in all its horror. It was unbearable. More than once he considered whether not waking up at all would be better in the long run. But he was scared. He’d always been a coward, that was his problem. If he hadn’t been such a coward then, he wouldn’t have fallen in with their plans and things would be very different now. He could scarcely bear to think of it, how his weakness had brought him to this moment. If he’d just said something then…. If he’d just stuck to his guns and stood up to his brother, for once…
The morning of that day had been so humdrum. It was a Friday, which always put a little bit of a spring in Jake’s step. It was early July, a beautiful morning, the sky pearled with cirrus clouds, the sunlight already warming up the streets. As Jake came down the stairs, buttoning his shirt, Carl was clattering irritably around the kitchen in search of his keys.
“Fucking keys, keys, keys…”
“Have you looked in the bowl?” Jake slung himself into one of the kitchen chairs and reached for the cereal packet.
“Of course I’ve looked in the fucking bowl, Jake, not having had a full frontal lobotomy overnight. Fuck’s sake…” Carl swept a copy of Maxim off the table and gave a cry of triumph as the glint of a car key was revealed.
Jake rolled his eyes.
“Man, you get tetchy when V’s got a day off.”
“What?”
Jake felt a sudden tiny lurch.
“Hasn’t she got the day off?” How am I going to explain remembering that when her boyfriend hasn’t?
Luckily Carl was too irritated to notice.
“I get tetchy when anyone in the world has got a day off. I never get days off. I never get minutes off.”
“Weighed against that, you do earn about a million quid a day.”
“Well, how come I’m always so broke then? Where does it all go? I think you steal it. I think you break into my bank account and salt it away slowly, note by note.”
He was grinning by now and Jake felt the tension in the room dissolve. He pushed past his brother to get to the kettle.
“Doing much tonight?” said Carl.
“Nah. Not much. You?”
“We’ve got some moribund party to go to. Wanna come?”
Jake kept his face turned to the slowly boiling kettle, if only to hide the grin that was struggling to make it onto his face. A whole evening with Veronica, and a party too – where Carl might find others to talk to and then he would get her to himself for almost all of the evening.
“Sure, why not?” he said, pleased at the casual tone of his voice. The kettle boiled, flicking its off button with a sharp, condemnatory click.