cleavage, wearing short skirts and bending over when he was standing behind me so that he could see my underwear. I wanted him to know what he was missing.
By this point, I was too involved to see the difference between love and an unhealthy obsession. It was a battle between good and evil as far as I was concerned: I was good and she was evil, and I had to win if I wanted to save him. I played dirty without giving it a second thought, trying to bribe him, bringing money into it. I told him how much I earned-more than a primary school teacher-and that financially he’d be better off with me than with her, all the while congratulating myself on my virtue for refusing to have sex with him. Guessing that she either couldn’t have children or didn’t want them in case they disturbed her perfect white living room, I told him I wanted to have his children. That didn’t make him leave her but it made him cry. ‘I can’t,’ he kept saying. ‘I just can’t.’
The garden was finished one day while they were both at work. It looked dreadful, but it was exactly what she’d ordered: regimented pink flowers, purple slate, gravel crossroads, eastern deity. They owed me twenty-three thousand pounds, give or take some small change. She got back from work first, saw it and burst into tears. ‘I hate it,’ she said. ‘It’s disgusting.’
That I had not been expecting. When I asked her what the problem was, she said, ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t look like I imagined it would. I hope you don’t think I’m paying for this!’ She started weeping, got back into her car and drove away. I had no choice but to wait for him. When I told him what had happened, he raised his eyebrows, as if at a minor inconvenience, and said, ‘She’ll come round. Don’t worry, you’ll get your money.’
‘Damn right I will,’ I said. ‘You signed the contract.’
‘What will I do when you’ve gone?’ he said. He took me in his arms and clamped his lips on mine.
I pulled away and said, ‘We need to talk. Properly.’ Finally, I thought, he’s realised he needs to leave her.
He was the blushing boy again. I hadn’t mentioned my religious upbringing to him so far; now I was going to use it to my advantage. I’d suffered eighteen years of it, so the least it could do was help me now, I thought. I told him I was a Christian, that I was gagging to go to bed with him, but I couldn’t persuade myself it was all right to go to bed with someone who had a partner. I wittered on about marriage being sacrosanct, adultery an unforgivable sin, all the things I’d heard my parents say. He wasn’t married to her, but they lived together as man and wife-I told him that from my point of view it amounted to the same thing.
I didn’t mean a word of it. I was using sex, or rather the promise of sex, as leverage to make him leave her for me.
‘Are you saying you want to marry me?’ he asked, looking as if the idea was hurting him, scorching his brain. I hadn’t been, but only because it hadn’t occurred to me. I read the truth in his eyes and I knew I was right: he’d proposed to her, perhaps several times, and she’d said no.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I want to marry you.’
He gritted his teeth, grabbed his hair with his hands and closed his eyes. ‘I
I went home, defeated. Three days later a cheque arrived for the money they owed me. Two weeks after that he rang me. I said, ‘Hello?’ and heard only silence, but I knew it was him. I said his name-a common, popular name, one that gives me a jolt of shock every time I hear it, even all these years later.
He asked me to come round. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘Please.’
‘Have you left her? Are you going to leave her?’ I asked.
He said yes.
I didn’t believe him, but I got into my car and drove to Cherub Cottage because I wanted it to be true. He was alone when I arrived. He gave me a glass of red wine. It tasted funny but I drank it anyway. He told me she had gone, that she wouldn’t be back, and tried to persuade me to go upstairs with him. I refused. Her possessions were still all over the house-her dog slippers, her magazines, her diary. I knew he was lying to me. ‘Give me a cuddle, then,’ he said. It seemed like a harmless request, and my desire to touch him after not having seen him for a fortnight was stronger than ever before. We lay down on one of the white sofas in the lounge. I didn’t care, as I fell asleep with his arms around me, that he hadn’t told me the truth. I could well understand why he wanted to pretend, and I assumed he knew she wouldn’t be back any time soon. Perhaps she’d gone to stay with a friend, I thought. I kidded myself that he might still leave her, that he’d obviously found he couldn’t go on without me, since he’d summoned me so urgently.
I didn’t resist the sleepy feeling when it came. If I thought about it at all, I probably put it down to the wine, or to feeling happy and relaxed with him. I didn’t find out until later that he’d drugged me-crushed four two- milligramme Clonazepam pills and put them in my wine.
When I woke up, or came round, I was tied to the stone plinth in the back garden. My arms were tied against my sides so that I couldn’t move them, and there was something in my mouth, which had been taped shut with the thing inside it. I know now that it was a pink bath sponge. A lot of the detail I only found out later from the police, or in court.
I couldn’t scream or move, or understand what had happened to me or why, which was the worst thing of all. At first I was alone in the garden, alone with my terror. Then she came out of the house. She laughed when she saw me, and told me she’d take the gag out of my mouth if I promised not to scream or cry out. I nodded, because I’d been crying and my nose was starting to block up-I was afraid I’d suffocate.
She took the sponge out of my mouth. ‘You’ve been fucking my partner, and thinking you could get away with it,’ she said.
I told her it wasn’t true.
‘Yes, you have. Don’t lie.’
I swore to her that I hadn’t, begged her to untie me.
‘You told him to leave me, didn’t you?’
That I couldn’t deny. She stuffed the sponge back in my mouth, taped it shut again and went back into the house.
The next time she came outside, it was almost dark. She reached down and picked up a handful of gravel from one of the new paths. She threw a small pebble at me from a distance of about a metre, and it hit my cheek. It hurt more than I’d have thought a tiny stone could. ‘In some parts of the world, they stone you to death for fucking another woman’s man,’ she said. That was when it got worse. I couldn’t speak to defend myself. She kept throwing the stones, some from further away, some from right in front of my face-at my head, my chest, my arms and legs. It went on for hours. After a while, the pain became unbearable.
She brought a table and chair out into the garden, then a bottle of wine, a corkscrew and a glass. All night she drank wine-two more bottles after the first one-and threw stones at me, stones I’d ordered for her. I’d brought samples in two sizes for her to look at, and she’d chosen the smaller ones, thank goodness. If they’d been any larger I’d have died-that’s what I was told later. She didn’t throw them constantly. Sometimes she stopped and sat down, drank, lectured me. She said I was lucky I lived in England and not lots of other places, because this was nothing compared to what would happen to me in some countries.
The next morning it got worse. She took the sponge out of my mouth and pushed in a handful of gravel. She told me to eat it. I spat it out but she forced more in and tried to push it down my throat. In the end I swallowed and she did it again, kept doing it. She preferred making me eat the stones to throwing them at me, once she’d tried it.
After that, my memories are blurred. I started to pass out and come round, so that I was never sure how long I’d been there, whether this night was the same night or a new one. I found out later that I spent seventy-two hours tied to the stone plinth. At one point she ripped the tape off my mouth and I vomited blood all over her. That made her angry, and she slapped me across the face.
After a while my chest and stomach filled with a burning pain that seemed to radiate through to my back. I felt unbearably thirsty. Sometimes when she took the tape off, I asked for a drink, and she laughed at me. I expected to die of thirst if I didn’t suffocate. I began to vomit clear liquid-it seeped out around the tape. She sneered, ‘You say you’re thirsty, but you’re puking water. Swallow it instead and you won’t be thirsty any more.’
I lost my grip on my mind, became incoherent, and when she let me speak, it didn’t make sense. I was aware of what she was saying, but couldn’t think straight. Everything seemed remote apart from the pain. Waves of it started to pour through me: powerful, uncontrollable spasms in my stomach, which were worse even than the thirst. Then I started to pass the stones I’d eaten. I couldn’t help it. That was the worst agony of all.
Later, the doctors told me the names of all the injuries I’d suffered. My throat and oesophagus were badly cut, which had caused something called mediastinitis. I needed surgery to sew up the cuts, an endoscopy to inject the
