thethemeis: Deception
theauthoris: LiamD
She once told me that her biggest strength was her ability to deceive others.
It wasn't something I immediately agreed with; as madly infatuated as I was back then, I didn't think her capable of lying to anyone. Yet once the shroud of infatuation began to diminish and a deeper rooted, more rational love began to grow, I started to understand what she had meant.
When we were first dating she would never agree to come out on weekends in favour of tending to her father, whom she said was in ill health. Of course, I found this to be yet another endearing trait of somebody so kind and innocent as her and thought little else of it. She was also unkeen to rush into any sexual activity at first and our physical relationship moved very slowly because of it. But at the time I put this down to her innocent and chaste nature. In my eyes she was perfect. Any expression or action of mine that upset her was always a fault of my own and never an intolerance on her part. Some might say I was a fool in love, that I was safely under her thumb as it were. But the simple truth is she was the only person left alive that I felt strongly for - and how dearly I loved her.
We met shortly after I had finished university. Entering the freshers' year immediately after attending the sixth form college of my secondary school, I was easily entranced by my fellow student's cultures of excess drinking, drug abuse and promiscuity. I lived unashamedly; I was a single, open-minded adult with a lot of sorrows to drown and bad memories to forget. I'm sure by the time somebody reads this, that latter point will be old ground re-trodden upon. Suffice to say if you are unaware, my parents died when I was in the peak of my adolescence. If you wish to know any more on that subject, the information will no doubt be easy to find (and I daresay largely blown out of all original proportions by the tabloids) but it is not a topic I wish to go into now.
Of course, the excessive lifestyle eventually wore thin. By the beginning of the final year of the course I felt so unfulfilled with the disjointed mess my life had become that I came home from the university of Portsmouth without graduating. I returned home to work wherever I could be needed and after a few months of temporary jobs in exceedingly dull factories, I was offered a full-time position at the local branch of Starbucks. It was hardly the most glamorous work in the city but it certainly beat canning Coca-Cola for minimum wage. After serving all morning I would sometimes sit down and drink a coffee (an Americano, with cream and two sugars) myself before making my way home. It was on one of these afternoons during my third month of working there that she walked in and ordered her favourite Hazelnut Mochaccino and a regular Macchiato. If she hadn't sat down at one of the few tables in front of me, I may never have spoken to her at all. But surely enough, she sat just where I could see her and my aforementioned infatuation began in earnest, captivated as I was by her hypnotic green eyes and lusciously smooth black hair. I started conversation with her, most likely about her delightfully unusual drink. She was shy at first, but my desire to get to know this beautiful creature was stronger than any reluctance on her part. The rest, as they say, is history.
She came by the coffee house once a day to buy her poorly father the Macchiato he enjoyed so dearly. I marveled at how we had never seen each other before but she explained how she used to visit the neighbouring Costa before it closed down. Compared with the scantily clad females I had been used to fraternising with during my 'studies', she was a breath of fresh air and our early relationship blossomed quickly. She didn't like her father having visitors due to his condition, and that was a wish of hers I respected, if not fully understood. She didn't like to go into specifics regarding her father's illness and I could only assume he suffered from some form of mental illness with anti-social tendencies. It upset her when I asked her more details so I mostly refrained from doing so.
It took me six months to realise the full extent of her troubles.
When my birthday came around on January 14th, I begged her to come out to our local public house for a drink to celebrate. I am generally not a man of many friends, presumably because most of the people I have met feel an overwhelming responsibility when they discover my past. Similarly, I have always struggled to stay in touch with the few friends I kept from school and university. Thus, she was the only person in my life I wanted to celebrate my birthday with and ultimately she gave the impression I had made her feel so much pity for my lack of company that she was forced to obliged to come out for a drink just this once.
What followed that night was mostly harmless fun until we retired back to my flat for the evening. I admittedly drank more than I had done in the best part of a year that night and may have been slightly forceful with her when she told me (as per usual) that she wanted to wait until marriage before going further with our physical relationship. But any shame I felt later about unzipping her dress against her harshest protests would be immediately dispelled by the evidence I found upon her bare skin which documented her rich years of domestic abuse. The sight of the deep wounds in her back immediately sobered me and I, perhaps coldly, pressed her with questions about the origins of her hidden scars. She proceeded to tell me the whole story, between intense bouts of weeping. About how her father had been sexually abusing her for the majority of her life. About how he had beaten her mother to death. About how he had skilfully forged a document that told the world his raving daughter was insane when she attempted to report him to the police. She had now been covering for her abomination of a father for fifteen years, lying to everyone she met about how he was ill and needed her constant attention.
'No more!' I exclaimed to her, amid tears of my own. 'You're not going back there, we're moving away from this place for good!'. She gave me no response, but I could see from her face what she was thinking. She was psychologically bound to this man. She would never feel safe if she knew he was still around, still able to find us, I had to make sure he would leave her alone.
'Okay,' I said, after we had both calmed down. 'Take this, just in case...' I handed her my flick knife, more of an heirloom than a weapon in my mind, but it was large and still sharp and could seriously wound an aggressor if needed. After showing her how to extend the blade safely, we made our plans for the morrow and rested for the long day ahead.
The neighbourhood was quiet as we walked towards the door of her familial house that morning. I slid her key into the lock as quietly as I could before slowly edging it open. We attempted to stay silent but as we crept through the yellow-walled hallway a loud creak of the decaying floorboards betrayed our presence.
'Uurrrrrh,' A wheezy, aged groan emanated from the living room. I gave in to the rage that had been slowly building into a crescendo of hate for this monster who had ruined my beloved's life and I charged into the room to meet him. What I saw sitting on the chair checked most of the boxes against the perverted child abuser I had imagined him to be. Her father was thin, lank and though his greying hair was combed over, hewas clearly balding. His teeth were mostly yellow, in some cases completely brown, and protruded at various angles from a mouth that constantly drooled. The upper half of his body was covered by an old green jumper that was riddled with holes and questionable stains. Above the blue slippers upon his feet were grey trousers also stained around the thighs and groins with a deep unsightly brown colour. I was pondering on this and all the disgusting things he had put his family through when he noticed me. His eyes widened and he attempted to thrust himself towards me..
'You... CA-!' I interrupted him mid-sentence with a hard punch to his face. It connected well and I felt his brittle jaw crack as a necessary pain flared in my balled fist; I had never learned throw a punch properly.
'You are disgusting!' I was screaming at him, throwing more punches, barely restraining myself from beating him to death. 'How could you do it, to your own family? You SICKEN me!'
I finally stopped, in fear of killing him. The old man was sobbing in his chair, quivering like a small, frightened animal. I suddenly felt an uncomfortable mix of satisfaction and guilt, but remembered my reasons and what this monster had done.
'You will leave her alone, do you understand?' I had managed to calm myself down by this point and spoke to the old man in calmer, more reasonable tones. 'We are leaving and if you ever try to come and find us, I will kill you'. He nodded between his mucus-filled sobs and once I was satisfied he had understood, I briefly entered the kitchen to wash my hands of the old man's blood. I had barely dried them on their dog-themed tea-towel when I heard her scream.
Running back into the living room, thinking myself a fool for leaving him alive, expecting the worst, I found her standing over her father's chair with my bloody flick-knife, her face white in shock.
'He lunged at me... I didn't know what to do...' Her father sat dead in his chair with a glazed look in his eye, a profusely leaking wound around the area his heart would be.
We had cleaned the place as best we could. We had to stay another day before we were satisfied there was no evidence of any bloodshed or our being there at all. Driving away from London on the M3 I felt like a complete fool, having found nowhere to effectively hide the body but the boot of the car. I still think it a miracle that we were not caught that day. Once a safe distance, we stopped at the most obscure, unmarked wood we could find and I buried her father using a shovel we had taken from his own shed. We drove on, unsure of ourselves, praying he would never be found, that we could live happily thereafter, no questions asked.
I drove us to the apartment I was still renting in Portsmouth by the canal in the Gunwharf Quays - it was the only place I could think of to go to and I could only hope it would put us far enough away from the crime scene. Once we had arrived at the flat, we collapsed onto the double bed, exhausted. I looked into her green eyes and in spite of everything that had happened, couldn't help but smile. She smiled back at me and pulled my head towards her. Suddenly she was kissing me confidently, intimately. I pulled back, startled and confused.
'It's ok,' she said calmly. 'I think I'm ready now'. This time, when I attempted to take her clothes off, she gave no resistance. Sometimes I still wonder what she thought at the time but for myself there is only one word that can describe the love we made that night: perfection.
The next day I awoke in a state of confusion. I was sitting in the living room with no recollection of getting out of bed. I was acutely aware of a dull pain in my legs and arms.
'Good morning darling!' A familiar, yet somehow strange voice greeted me. I looked up to meet her eyes, shuddering as I realised the implications of what she held in her hand.
'I gave you some pain killers, quite a few in fact, and they'll help for a while, but I wouldn't try to stand if I were you.' I looked down to my thighs and recoiled in horror at the deep red stains below them slowly turning an off-brown.
'Why?!... I saved you...' my voice was hoarse, I was stunned, reeling from the situation I had not expected to find myself in. Of all the things I had expected today - the police sirens, an interrogation, a prison sentence - this certainly wasn't one of them. 'Why would you do this...'
'Oh darling, can't you see? It's because I love you! I've always loved you.
'Daddy never understood, he killed Mummy and thought that would be the end of it, but he didn't know Mummy had shown me how to look after him.' She took off the t-shirt of mine she had slept in and turned around as she blindly scraped the dripping knife across her back. She moaned with pleasure as the blade punctured the surface. 'One for me...'
Guessing what would come next, I tried to move but my legs seared with pain and I unhappily realised I would be rooted in this position for some time. I tried to covered my face with my arms as the knife cut deeply into my right cheek but they too were immobile and I screamed out in agony.
'There, I knew you'd like it, we can do this every night. Now, I'm going out to get us some coffee, don't go anywhere will you?'
She skipped out of the apartment and left me in the chair, trying to figure out how I could get away.
That was twelve years ago. I have long since given up hope of escape. I don't know how she's keeping me alive, and I sometimes wish she wouldn't, but I'm always far too weak to attempt to move, even if she didn't insist on cutting the tendons. I feel too weak to even call for help. There is no telephone; I didn't use a landline when I lived here all those years ago and I even if my mobile's SIM still works, she has hidden or destroyed it.
So no, I no longer dream of escape, I now dream only of death. Sometimes I think of her father sitting in his old blood-stained chair. I think of the disgusting green jumper he wore, and of the ones just like it that she has bought for me over the years. I wonder if he was happy when she finally killed him, if he still harboured thoughts of escape or if he had been driven too mad by his deranged family to care.
She came back with the coffee, it has become a regular occurrence. The skin on the right side of my face is blistered badly from where she pours the hot liquid directly onto me. Sometimes she is unhappy with the results and boils the kettle for another round. I cherish the days that she doesn't. She has taken to working in the local hospital. Sometimes I wonder if the document proving her insanity was real or, alternatively, if it even existed at all.
Recently she has started seeing somebody else. He's young and handsome, and she sometimes meets him outside the Quays by the canal. She looks shy but comforted around him and I'm not sure what she has told him about me, but from the way he looks concernedly toward the window I can only guess. I wonder if he will be the one to put me out of my misery, or if he will be too chivalrous to reveal her scars.
Most of all, I wonder if she has warned him in the covert way that she warned me, I wonder if she has given him any clue at all. For over the past thirteen years, one thought has recurred to me again and again.
She once told me that her biggest strength was her ability to deceive others. I wish I had believed her.
We met shortly after I had finished university. Entering the freshers' year immediately after attending the sixth form college of my secondary school, I was easily entranced by my fellow student's cultures of excess drinking, drug abuse and promiscuity. I lived unashamedly; I was a single, open-minded adult with a lot of sorrows to drown and bad memories to forget. I'm sure by the time somebody reads this, that latter point will be old ground re-trodden upon. Suffice to say if you are unaware, my parents died when I was in the peak of my adolescence. If you wish to know any more on that subject, the information will no doubt be easy to find (and I daresay largely blown out of all original proportions by the tabloids) but it is not a topic I wish to go into now.
Of course, the excessive lifestyle eventually wore thin. By the beginning of the final year of the course I felt so unfulfilled with the disjointed mess my life had become that I came home from the university of Portsmouth without graduating. I returned home to work wherever I could be needed and after a few months of temporary jobs in exceedingly dull factories, I was offered a full-time position at the local branch of Starbucks. It was hardly the most glamorous work in the city but it certainly beat canning Coca-Cola for minimum wage. After serving all morning I would sometimes sit down and drink a coffee (an Americano, with cream and two sugars) myself before making my way home. It was on one of these afternoons during my third month of working there that she walked in and ordered her favourite Hazelnut Mochaccino and a regular Macchiato. If she hadn't sat down at one of the few tables in front of me, I may never have spoken to her at all. But surely enough, she sat just where I could see her and my aforementioned infatuation began in earnest, captivated as I was by her hypnotic green eyes and lusciously smooth black hair. I started conversation with her, most likely about her delightfully unusual drink. She was shy at first, but my desire to get to know this beautiful creature was stronger than any reluctance on her part. The rest, as they say, is history.
She came by the coffee house once a day to buy her poorly father the Macchiato he enjoyed so dearly. I marveled at how we had never seen each other before but she explained how she used to visit the neighbouring Costa before it closed down. Compared with the scantily clad females I had been used to fraternising with during my 'studies', she was a breath of fresh air and our early relationship blossomed quickly. She didn't like her father having visitors due to his condition, and that was a wish of hers I respected, if not fully understood. She didn't like to go into specifics regarding her father's illness and I could only assume he suffered from some form of mental illness with anti-social tendencies. It upset her when I asked her more details so I mostly refrained from doing so.
It took me six months to realise the full extent of her troubles.
When my birthday came around on January 14th, I begged her to come out to our local public house for a drink to celebrate. I am generally not a man of many friends, presumably because most of the people I have met feel an overwhelming responsibility when they discover my past. Similarly, I have always struggled to stay in touch with the few friends I kept from school and university. Thus, she was the only person in my life I wanted to celebrate my birthday with and ultimately she gave the impression I had made her feel so much pity for my lack of company that she was forced to obliged to come out for a drink just this once.
What followed that night was mostly harmless fun until we retired back to my flat for the evening. I admittedly drank more than I had done in the best part of a year that night and may have been slightly forceful with her when she told me (as per usual) that she wanted to wait until marriage before going further with our physical relationship. But any shame I felt later about unzipping her dress against her harshest protests would be immediately dispelled by the evidence I found upon her bare skin which documented her rich years of domestic abuse. The sight of the deep wounds in her back immediately sobered me and I, perhaps coldly, pressed her with questions about the origins of her hidden scars. She proceeded to tell me the whole story, between intense bouts of weeping. About how her father had been sexually abusing her for the majority of her life. About how he had beaten her mother to death. About how he had skilfully forged a document that told the world his raving daughter was insane when she attempted to report him to the police. She had now been covering for her abomination of a father for fifteen years, lying to everyone she met about how he was ill and needed her constant attention.
'No more!' I exclaimed to her, amid tears of my own. 'You're not going back there, we're moving away from this place for good!'. She gave me no response, but I could see from her face what she was thinking. She was psychologically bound to this man. She would never feel safe if she knew he was still around, still able to find us, I had to make sure he would leave her alone.
'Okay,' I said, after we had both calmed down. 'Take this, just in case...' I handed her my flick knife, more of an heirloom than a weapon in my mind, but it was large and still sharp and could seriously wound an aggressor if needed. After showing her how to extend the blade safely, we made our plans for the morrow and rested for the long day ahead.
The neighbourhood was quiet as we walked towards the door of her familial house that morning. I slid her key into the lock as quietly as I could before slowly edging it open. We attempted to stay silent but as we crept through the yellow-walled hallway a loud creak of the decaying floorboards betrayed our presence.
'Uurrrrrh,' A wheezy, aged groan emanated from the living room. I gave in to the rage that had been slowly building into a crescendo of hate for this monster who had ruined my beloved's life and I charged into the room to meet him. What I saw sitting on the chair checked most of the boxes against the perverted child abuser I had imagined him to be. Her father was thin, lank and though his greying hair was combed over, hewas clearly balding. His teeth were mostly yellow, in some cases completely brown, and protruded at various angles from a mouth that constantly drooled. The upper half of his body was covered by an old green jumper that was riddled with holes and questionable stains. Above the blue slippers upon his feet were grey trousers also stained around the thighs and groins with a deep unsightly brown colour. I was pondering on this and all the disgusting things he had put his family through when he noticed me. His eyes widened and he attempted to thrust himself towards me..
'You... CA-!' I interrupted him mid-sentence with a hard punch to his face. It connected well and I felt his brittle jaw crack as a necessary pain flared in my balled fist; I had never learned throw a punch properly.
'You are disgusting!' I was screaming at him, throwing more punches, barely restraining myself from beating him to death. 'How could you do it, to your own family? You SICKEN me!'
I finally stopped, in fear of killing him. The old man was sobbing in his chair, quivering like a small, frightened animal. I suddenly felt an uncomfortable mix of satisfaction and guilt, but remembered my reasons and what this monster had done.
'You will leave her alone, do you understand?' I had managed to calm myself down by this point and spoke to the old man in calmer, more reasonable tones. 'We are leaving and if you ever try to come and find us, I will kill you'. He nodded between his mucus-filled sobs and once I was satisfied he had understood, I briefly entered the kitchen to wash my hands of the old man's blood. I had barely dried them on their dog-themed tea-towel when I heard her scream.
Running back into the living room, thinking myself a fool for leaving him alive, expecting the worst, I found her standing over her father's chair with my bloody flick-knife, her face white in shock.
'He lunged at me... I didn't know what to do...' Her father sat dead in his chair with a glazed look in his eye, a profusely leaking wound around the area his heart would be.
We had cleaned the place as best we could. We had to stay another day before we were satisfied there was no evidence of any bloodshed or our being there at all. Driving away from London on the M3 I felt like a complete fool, having found nowhere to effectively hide the body but the boot of the car. I still think it a miracle that we were not caught that day. Once a safe distance, we stopped at the most obscure, unmarked wood we could find and I buried her father using a shovel we had taken from his own shed. We drove on, unsure of ourselves, praying he would never be found, that we could live happily thereafter, no questions asked.
I drove us to the apartment I was still renting in Portsmouth by the canal in the Gunwharf Quays - it was the only place I could think of to go to and I could only hope it would put us far enough away from the crime scene. Once we had arrived at the flat, we collapsed onto the double bed, exhausted. I looked into her green eyes and in spite of everything that had happened, couldn't help but smile. She smiled back at me and pulled my head towards her. Suddenly she was kissing me confidently, intimately. I pulled back, startled and confused.
'It's ok,' she said calmly. 'I think I'm ready now'. This time, when I attempted to take her clothes off, she gave no resistance. Sometimes I still wonder what she thought at the time but for myself there is only one word that can describe the love we made that night: perfection.
The next day I awoke in a state of confusion. I was sitting in the living room with no recollection of getting out of bed. I was acutely aware of a dull pain in my legs and arms.
'Good morning darling!' A familiar, yet somehow strange voice greeted me. I looked up to meet her eyes, shuddering as I realised the implications of what she held in her hand.
'I gave you some pain killers, quite a few in fact, and they'll help for a while, but I wouldn't try to stand if I were you.' I looked down to my thighs and recoiled in horror at the deep red stains below them slowly turning an off-brown.
'Why?!... I saved you...' my voice was hoarse, I was stunned, reeling from the situation I had not expected to find myself in. Of all the things I had expected today - the police sirens, an interrogation, a prison sentence - this certainly wasn't one of them. 'Why would you do this...'
'Oh darling, can't you see? It's because I love you! I've always loved you.
'Daddy never understood, he killed Mummy and thought that would be the end of it, but he didn't know Mummy had shown me how to look after him.' She took off the t-shirt of mine she had slept in and turned around as she blindly scraped the dripping knife across her back. She moaned with pleasure as the blade punctured the surface. 'One for me...'
Guessing what would come next, I tried to move but my legs seared with pain and I unhappily realised I would be rooted in this position for some time. I tried to covered my face with my arms as the knife cut deeply into my right cheek but they too were immobile and I screamed out in agony.
'There, I knew you'd like it, we can do this every night. Now, I'm going out to get us some coffee, don't go anywhere will you?'
She skipped out of the apartment and left me in the chair, trying to figure out how I could get away.
That was twelve years ago. I have long since given up hope of escape. I don't know how she's keeping me alive, and I sometimes wish she wouldn't, but I'm always far too weak to attempt to move, even if she didn't insist on cutting the tendons. I feel too weak to even call for help. There is no telephone; I didn't use a landline when I lived here all those years ago and I even if my mobile's SIM still works, she has hidden or destroyed it.
So no, I no longer dream of escape, I now dream only of death. Sometimes I think of her father sitting in his old blood-stained chair. I think of the disgusting green jumper he wore, and of the ones just like it that she has bought for me over the years. I wonder if he was happy when she finally killed him, if he still harboured thoughts of escape or if he had been driven too mad by his deranged family to care.
She came back with the coffee, it has become a regular occurrence. The skin on the right side of my face is blistered badly from where she pours the hot liquid directly onto me. Sometimes she is unhappy with the results and boils the kettle for another round. I cherish the days that she doesn't. She has taken to working in the local hospital. Sometimes I wonder if the document proving her insanity was real or, alternatively, if it even existed at all.
Recently she has started seeing somebody else. He's young and handsome, and she sometimes meets him outside the Quays by the canal. She looks shy but comforted around him and I'm not sure what she has told him about me, but from the way he looks concernedly toward the window I can only guess. I wonder if he will be the one to put me out of my misery, or if he will be too chivalrous to reveal her scars.
Most of all, I wonder if she has warned him in the covert way that she warned me, I wonder if she has given him any clue at all. For over the past thirteen years, one thought has recurred to me again and again.
She once told me that her biggest strength was her ability to deceive others. I wish I had believed her.
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