The reverie must have connected with some deep wish or fantasy. I was so lost in it that it took several attempts for the voice I was hearing beside me to get through.
‘Ma’am, we’re ready to leave now. Ma’am?’
I turned and saw that the voice belonged to the bus driver, and that she was addressing me.
‘I’m sorry,’ I murmured.
‘Oh no problem.’ She smiled at me, her eye lingering a moment on my hurt cheek.
I followed her back to the bus, checking the hang of my skirt as I crossed the forecourt through the rain.
Two hours later we came to a small city on a plain under jagged hills. A water-tower in the form of a giant, inverted tear-drop bore the legend ‘CORINTH’.
At the bus station, a short, overweight man with a mustache paused by my seat as I reached for my suitcase.
‘Want help there, lady?’
I thought I would make myself less conspicuous by accepting than refusing.
‘Oh… Thank you.’
He lifted the suitcase down and insisted on carrying it out of the bus for me.
‘Where’re you headed?’
I opened my umbrella, wondering if there was some special way women did this.
‘To my girlfriend’s house,’ I said.
‘What part of town? I’ll give you a ride.’
‘That’s all right, thanks.’
‘Really – it’d be no trouble.’
‘That’s all right, thank you. I’ll get a cab.’ I turned from him.
‘Hey, wait -’
He was wagging his finger at me, his small eyes twinkling roguishly. I thought he must have seen through my disguise, and that I was now going to have to publicly prove I was a woman.
But ‘You’re British, right?’ was all he said.
Relieved, I confessed that I was.
‘I have a cousin in Dorsetshire.’
‘Oh.’
‘Do you know that area?’
‘A little.’
‘He’s a mechanic, Russell Thorpe. Russ Thorpe?’
‘I don’t… I haven’t met him.’
‘Too bad, I think you’d like him. Listen, you want a drink? Just, you know, go to a bar, have a couple cocktails?’
He was friendly enough, even quite jolly, with his fat man’s awareness of his own slightly comical ungainliness. But the mere fact of his presumption that he could talk to me, make suggestions bearing on the disposition of my own person, was startlingly hard to take.
‘Oh… No… I have to get to my friend’s house.’
I smiled appeasingly at him and hurried away.
‘What’s the matter, I’m too skinny for you?’ I heard him call with a chuckle as I went off in search of a taxi.
The shelter was on a quiet street of rundown old mansions. It was in better repair than most of them, with a new-looking red roof and warm, mustard-colored clapboard walls. A tall fence jutted from either side of it, enclosing a back yard from which I could hear the voices of children playing in the drizzle. There was nothing to tell you the place was a shelter until you climbed the porch steps to the front door and saw a security camera in a steel cage, staring down at you.
I pressed the buzzer, showing my face to the camera. The heavy door clicked open and I carried my suitcase into a warm, light-filled vestibule that smelled of clean laundry and floor polish.
Strollers and outdoor boots were lined neatly against the walls, and over the stairway was a children’s collage of a rainbow with the word welcome dangling from it in foil letters.
A woman was smiling at me from the top of the stairs.
‘Marlene?’
I nodded. I had given my name as Marlene Winters in the brief conversation I had had with the woman who’d returned my call the previous day.
‘C’mon up. We’ve been expecting you. I’m Josephine.’
I climbed the stairs and Josephine gave me a light hug, looking over my bruises with a brief sympathetic wince that dissolved back into a smile.
‘You need something for that, honey? A ice pack maybe? You sure? Be no trouble to fix you one…’
She led me into an office where I filled out a form with false information and signed an agreement not to disclose the address of the shelter to anyone I knew.
‘We have all kind of counseling and legal services for you when you’re good and ready,’ Josephine said, ‘but I’m guessing right now you probably could use a good rest more than anything else. Am I right?’
I nodded. Though I had practiced using a higher-pitched voice than normal, I had thought it would be wise to minimise speaking altogether.
‘I’ll show you your room.’
She led me through a communal area where half a dozen bruised and battered faces raised themselves toward my own. My courage almost failed me then. The reasoning behind my coming here seemed threatened with obliteration by the engulfing reality of the place itself. I kept my head down, shrinking inward, as if I could make myself invisible.
We went up another flight of stairs and along a corridor.
‘This is where the residents without children sleep. We call it the peace zone. The other place we call the combat zone. Just so you know what people are sayin’ when you hear that!’
She opened the door on to a small room with a narrow bed and a window looking on to the back yard where I could see the children I’d heard before, playing on a swing-set.
‘It ain’t much, but…’
‘It’s perfect,’ I said.
‘Sister Cathy will be here later on. She’s the director. Tonight’s Group Night. We all have a meal together, then after… Well you’ll see. It’s special.’
She showed me the bathroom I was to share with the other childless women.
‘Don’t be afraid to holler if there’s anything else you need,’ she said, leaving with a kindly smile. She was fifty, perhaps; a motherly woman with an air of having made a conscious decision to ply her way through life under the flag of absolute trust and faith. I could have turned up here with a thick beard and hair billowing out of my ears and nostrils, I felt, and still been welcomed by her with the same unsuspecting warmth.
Alone, I realised I was exhausted. I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes, but at once my heart started racing and I knew I would be unable to sleep.
On a shelf by the bed were a number of pamphlets. I picked them up and looked through them. There was information on how to get a Personal Protection Order, a PPO. There was a Domestic Abuse Handbook with a ‘Violence Wheel’ on it, showing eight stages in the escalation from emotional abuse to physical violence. There was a Police Department questionnaire: Does your partner embarrass you in front of other people? belittle your accomplishments? constantly contradict himself to confuse you? use money as a way of controlling you? hold you to keep you from leaving after an argument? physically force you to do what you don’t want to do? There was a booklet entitled You Are Not Alone, with case histories of domestic abuse survivors. Melinda was beaten unconscious when her husband found dirty dishes in the sink. Janice was kicked in the stomach after an old boyfriend came by for a visit. Meekah’s arm was broken when her fiance´ disagreed with her about their wedding plans.
I put the pamphlets back on the table. I felt sickened: aware, suddenly, of the scale of my trespass in coming here. My plan, which had seemed to me entirely reasonable, now struck me as a piece of insane folly. Among other things, it was dawning on me that even finding out which of the women here was the one Trumilcik had called from my office, let alone inveigling myself sufficiently into her confidence to find out anything about him, was going to involve considerably more than the few cunning, casually dropped remarks I had blithely allowed myself to imagine it would take.
I began to wonder whether this trip, far from demonstrating my ability to take the initiative against Trumilcik, wasn’t after all evidence that I had fallen entirely under his control. If nothing else, that would account for the odd sense I had had since setting out, of being under duress; of submitting to a kind of strange ritual humiliation.