reach her arms out and go: ‘Oh, darling, I was worried when you didn’t come.’
And then something inside her, some instinctive reaction, made her pull back a fraction.
The man who was glaring down at her didn’t look like her husband. He didn’t have the warmth in his eyes, the smile on his face. No, this man was different. He was Antonio, and yet not him.
‘Where’s my dinner?’ he growled.
The words, It was ready at seven o’clock when you were supposed to come home, died on her lips. She knew that this would not be the correct thing to say. Faded memories of fear surfaced.
Danae moved carefully off the couch, sliding away from him, as if the slightest touch might somehow inflame him. Afterwards, she never knew where the instinct came from, the awareness that there was danger here.
‘I’ll get it ready for you, darling,’ she said.
She wished she’d bought a bottle of wine herself. Perhaps that might have calmed him. But judging by the smell of alcohol on his breath, he’d been drinking already. Maybe more would make him worse; she didn’t know.
She set the dish on the table. The edges were burnt. Carefully, she served it up, her hands shaking.
He hadn’t moved from the couch. He stood staring at her, following her every move.
‘There,’ she said, putting down a simple tomato salad drizzled with olive oil, the way his mother made it. ‘I hope you like it.’
The matches were on the table and she tried to light the candles, but her hand was shaking so much that she couldn’t quite do it.
‘Can’t you do anything right?’ he snapped.
And then Danae was frightened, a pure cold fear that started deep in her belly, turning her bowels to water, making her stomach clench, creeping up her chest so that every muscle in her tightened, every part of her was coiled, ready to escape.
‘Maybe you could do it, darling,’ she said, turning to him.
‘Don’t look at me,’ he hissed.
He moved so quickly that he was beside her in an instant. The first blow went to the side of her head, and the pain that immediately followed was mingled with the strangest ringing in her ear.
She couldn’t compute, her mind couldn’t make sense of this.
She’d been hit, but how? Not by Antonio, not the man who loved her, he couldn’t have done this. She must be wrong, this must be a nightmare and any minute she would wake up.
The second blow went to her stomach, felling her. He was taller than she and much more powerful. His fist in her stomach sent her flying backwards, against the cooker. As she fell to the floor, her head bashed against the oven. Collapsed on the floor, one leg straight, one leg bent beneath her, her stomach spasmed with pain. Her head was ringing with the strength of his blows. She still couldn’t make sense of what had happened. Then she looked up at him again and he started kicking her.
When she came to, she had no idea what time it was, although the moon was shining in the windows and the oven was humming away on low. She tried to lift herself off the floor, but it was impossible. Every part of her body felt sore. As if someone had stood on her, tried to squash her flat like an ant. Nausea overwhelmed her, greater than the headache pounding through her head. Summoning all her strength, she pulled herself up. One eye couldn’t seem to focus properly and she kept blinking. The rooms were dark, the only light came from the moon outside, but she knew she wasn’t alone in the apartment – she felt his presence.
When she had managed to drag herself to her feet she stumbled to the kitchen sink and splashed cold water on her face, hoping to revive herself, hoping that the coolness would make the pain go away.
She couldn’t move her left ankle properly and she didn’t know why until she realized it was swollen and there was a boot mark across it. Moving slowly so as not to wake him, she made it out of the kitchen and down the corridor into the tiny bathroom. Staring at her from the bathroom mirror was a horror story. Her face swollen on one side, lip split from something he must have done after she passed out. Gingerly she pulled up her blouse to see the beginnings of a huge bruise around her stomach, bruises on her arms, and in the bathroom light she could now see the marks on her legs too. Her ankles were swollen beyond belief.
Even with the bathroom door closed, she could hear Antonio snoring. It had always been a joke between them, how much he snored.
At the dinner to celebrate their engagement, his mother had announced: ‘My Antonio, always he snore! He wake us all up. Now he can wake you up.’
The family had laughed. It seemed like a million years ago. As if it had all been a dream. Or maybe this was the dream? But Danae knew this was no dream; this was her new, horrible reality and the fear possessed her, the fear of what would happen when he woke up. The fear of telling anyone.
And if she did tell, who would believe her? Antonio was the epitome of a hail fellow well met, a charmer. Everyone loved him. Nobody would believe he could do a thing like this. She could hardly believe it herself.
Wincing with the pain, she took a towel and a facecloth and tried to cool down her bruises and wipe the blood off her face. Apart from her face, he hadn’t hit her anywhere that would show. Shaking, she found the jar of aspirin she used when she had her monthlies and took two, fearful that she’d drop the glass of water, her hands were shaking so much.
Carrying the towels into the living room, she used them to make up a bed on the couch and laid herself down there, as comfortably as she could in her pain. Tomorrow, it would have to be different. Wouldn’t it?
In Avalon, Mara sat outside with the hens at her feet and Lady leaning against her, and struggled to make out the words through the tears in her eyes. Danae’s diary was the saddest thing she’d read in all her life.
The psychiatrist wanted me to write this. I don’t trust psychiatrists that much. I used to. They were doctors and doctors were gods.
Like I used to think anyone with a degree was brighter than me. I hadn’t been to university. I’d barely been to school, what with the way we moved when I was a child. My mother didn’t have much faith in education.
‘Life is the best university,’ she’d say, tapping the side of her nose.
The first psychiatrist was very young.
The last one was older, a man, kind and gentle, brains bursting out of him. He even had one of those big foreheads where it looked as though the brains needed more room than most people’s did. And yet, he didn’t really know. He said things to me, but I could tell from his eyes that he knew I was clever and that there were no absolutes. He said that once. Those exact words. ‘There are no absolutes.’
That was when I realized that nobody knew anything for sure. It was all guesswork. Guesswork made up of history and science, past cases and studies, but guesswork all the same.
Nobody knew what had been going on in my head or in Antonio’s head. They could postulate till the cows came home, but nobody knew for sure. That was when I began to realize that we were all clinging to the rock, hoping. Everyone was the
