Czytaj książkę: «If You Love Me: Part 2 of 3: True love. True terror. True story.»

Chapter 6

One day, Joe told me to write a list of things I could do for him and gifts I could buy that would prove how much I loved him. ‘They have to be unusual and original,’ he said. ‘It shouldn’t be difficult to think of things, unless, of course, you don’t really know me at all.’ But it was difficult, as it always is to come up with ideas for imaginative presents for anyone, even someone you know well. And it was particularly stressful trying to do it under pressure.

In the brief happy weeks of our relationship before the discovery, Joe and I often talked about countries we’d never been to and would like to visit, and others we wanted to go to again, together. One of the places that fell into the former category was Mexico, and taking Joe on holiday there was one of the few items on that first list of which he approved.

Joe’s constant, remorseless questioning, which kept us awake for up to twenty hours every day, wasn’t just driving me to the limits of my mental and physical endurance. It was making him ill too. There didn’t seem to be any answer I could give to any question he asked me that would satisfy him. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, I think he was searching for something he was never going to find, something that probably didn’t really have anything to do with me specifically, with the affair I’d had with a married man, or with the fact that I wasn’t ‘the perfect woman’ he’d told himself I was when we first started seeing each other.

Without the prospect of any other source of light at the end of the long, dark tunnel my deceit had forced us into, it did seem possible that a holiday might be a good idea. I paid for it, for our flights to Mexico City, the hotel we stayed in for the next ten nights, almost every meal we ate and every taxi we took. Using the money I’d saved for a deposit on a flat to try to make Joe happy was all part of proving I loved him and that I was prepared to do anything to make our relationship work. I paid it willingly too, because I was desperate not to lose him and because any price seemed a small one to pay for something that might make him realise how sorry I truly was. What I didn’t realise, however, was that eventually, as my own savings were depleted, I would become financially, as well as emotionally, dependent on Joe, and then his control over me would be complete.

On the flight from London to Mexico City, I almost dared to believe that it was going to work. Joe talked about normal things in a normal voice, the way he used to do when we fell in love. But then, for no apparent reason, he suddenly started firing questions at me that would have been embarrassing even if they hadn’t been asked loudly enough for the people around us to hear. He did lower his voice a bit when some of the other passengers began to look in our direction, although no one actually told him to pipe down when he shouted at me or asked if I was all right, not even any of the cabin crew.

It was a non-stop flight, which took about twelve hours, but seemed to last for an eternity, and although we did sleep for a few hours when we got to our hotel it wasn’t long enough to make anything seem any better.

It was stupid to have hoped things might be better if we went on holiday: it was like leaving London with a broken leg and hoping to arrive in Mexico City to find that the shattered bone was whole again. There were times during the ten days we were there when we’d be in a beautiful old square or an art gallery or museum – places I’d read about and had always wanted to visit – and I’d think, ‘I ought to be happy here.’ But the reality was that, wherever we’d gone and whatever we’d been doing, I would have been too exhausted to take anything in, and Joe would still have been standing beside me, asking me questions about the past that made it impossible to focus on the present.

While we were there, Joe never left the hotel without me and I wasn’t allowed to leave it without him, although I wouldn’t have done so anyway, because all I wanted to do was sleep. I longed for Joe to fall asleep. When he was awake, so was I, and barely ten minutes ever passed when he wasn’t berating or questioning me. I know that sounds crazy: it seems impossible that anyone could maintain such an intense barrage of verbal abuse for hour after hour, day after day – or that anyone would continue to put up with it. But I seemed to have lost the ability to think for myself. Perhaps that’s what happens when people are subjected to brainwashing or to the sort of torture that keeps them awake for hours on end and then fills their head with illogical ideas that they no longer have the ability to process. Maybe only people who have been involved in abusive relationships themselves can really imagine what it was like.

There were several occasions while we were in Mexico City when Joe opened the window of our hotel room and threatened to jump out. And although part of me knew he wouldn’t do it, I still loved him and was terrified in case he did.

One evening, Joe and I stumbled across a cobbled square with stone steps along one side of it and a crumbling but still beautiful church on the other. It was still quite early, but the square was already thronged with people, almost all of them local Mexicans, who were either dancing or engaged in lively conversation while they waited to be served at the makeshift bar that was doing a roaring trade in beer and tequila.

‘Have you ever been anywhere like this before?’ Joe put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me close to him, so that I could hear what he said above the sound of the music that was being played by a band of four men who were standing on the steps in the opposite corner of the square.

‘No, never,’ I said. ‘It’s incredible. Everything’s so … alive.’

There were no street lamps in the square, or apparently on any of the streets around it. So there was no electric light to pollute the brilliance of the stars that filled the sky above our heads as we walked across the cobbles, found a small space on the stone steps and squeezed ourselves into it. Then we sat there, side by side, sipping the drinks Joe had bought for us and watching the dancers, some of whom seemed to move with the music as easily as breathing, while others laughed and stumbled and rarely hit a beat. There was one thing they all had in common, though – they were having fun. And so, miraculously, were Joe and I.

‘Let’s dance,’ Joe said suddenly, grabbing my arm and pulling me to my feet.

‘I’m a rubbish dancer,’ I told him, following close behind him as he pushed through the crowds and on to the makeshift dance floor in the middle of the square.

‘So am I,’ he laughed. ‘But it doesn’t matter. I love you, Alice. Come on, let’s have some fun.’

We were standing almost directly in front of the band, whose energy surpassed even that of the dancing crowd as they strummed and slapped their instruments and the man playing the double bass spun it around, as double-bass players always seem to do in films.

Joe put his arms around me as we danced and, for once, his body was relaxed and his eyes were full of fun and love, not angry and half-crazed as they normally were whenever he looked at me. I’d just realised that I was actually feeling happy, for the first time in weeks, when the singer in the band tapped Joe on the shoulder, shouted something in his ear and then pointed at me.

I could feel my body tense again, in anticipation of whatever new disaster was about to occur. Then I saw Joe smile and nod, and before I knew what was happening I was being whisked away by the Mexican singer, who twirled and swirled me across the cobblestones and didn’t seem to mind any more than Joe had done that my feet were following some rhythm that apparently only I could hear.

When I looked across the square and saw Joe standing by the steps, still smiling, it was as if all the misery and despair of the last few weeks had simply evaporated and I wished that time would stand still, so that we could remain in the moment forever. I remember thinking as I watched him, ‘We can get back to the way things used to be. Why did I ever doubt that we could? I made a horrible mistake, but Joe gave me a second chance, because he knows, as I do, that we are meant to be together.’