Katerina Diamond - The Promise

As he lay there, he heard mutterings through the wall, coming from the house next door. It was a low sound, an almost drone-like murmur. He realised that any kind of volume would most definitely have been heard through the walls. He exhaled deeply, embarrassed that his neighbours might know what kind of a man his father was, what kind of a coward he was. He couldn’t think about it right now.

He closed his eyes and thought instead about the home he had left behind. The home that wasn’t really a home anymore, not to him anyway. He thought about his old friends and how he wished he was back there with them. Occasionally, on nights like this, he would try and remember to feel fortunate. He had been told time and time again how lucky he was. He thought about a girl in his old class called Marianne; they had been in school together for seven years. He remembered the last time he saw her vividly – she had been hanging a banner for the end of year summer prom. Standing on a ladder in the cafeteria, obscuring the clock with it. The thing he remembered most about Marianne was that she had always worn yellow shoes in all the time he had known her. He tried to push her out of his mind as he recalled the image of one yellow shoe in the school gym … He didn’t want to think about Marianne anymore. Sleep. He wanted to sleep and forget, wake up in a new day and deal with that rather than with this.

It was a long time before he kissed me again, but I wanted it every single day. Whenever I went out to the bins I half expected him to be there but he wasn’t. I could tell he was taunting me with it, trying to make me want him even more. It was working; I wanted him more than anything. He was playing a long game and winning.

On my nineteenth birthday I was offered the day off work but I said no – I wanted to go in, I wanted to see him. On that day he came in late, and he was alone. He was holding a bunch of flowers and he told me that Caroline, the girl who worked with me behind the counter, had told him that it was my birthday. That was when he asked me out. A week later we had our first date.

He took me to an Indian restaurant, the nicest one in town, and after we finished our meal he walked me home. The route took us through an alleyway and before I knew it I was pinned against the wall, his body pressed against mine. I couldn’t have gotten away even if I had wanted to, which I didn’t. We kissed for what seemed like forever and I was flying. I straightened myself out before I got home, before he politely handed me back to my father, who couldn’t have been oblivious to what had just passed between us. If he knew though, he didn’t show it. It might have been easier for everyone if he had just put his foot down and forbade me from leaving the house again.

I didn’t sleep that night; I was so full of excitement, I wasn’t sure I would ever sleep again. I could tell in the following days how disappointed my father was in me, but he let me live my own life. He didn’t want to be the overbearing parent, he didn’t want me to run away again.

Rocket and I became lovers, stealing moments at work and spending every other minute that we could together. He would drive me to work in the mornings – JD would sit in the back seat and say nothing – he never said anything. On Saturday afternoons, we would go to the reservoir and dip our toes in the water until one day I saw a stoat or something in the undergrowth and freaked out. After that we would drive out to the little villages that surrounded the city, each time getting slightly further and further away until eventually we would drive for over an hour before we would stop, looking for that perfect spot for us to hide.

Eventually we found a small town with a river running through it. There was a bend there where the pool of water was bigger, like our own private Garden of Eden. Rocket would lie at the side of the river and watch me swimming in the water, sheltered from the sun by a willow tree that hung over the riverbank. We were hidden from the rest of the world. We never ran into anyone else and this became our special place. I would be frozen when I got out of the water, my skin cold and wet, but he would still throw me down on the grass and make love to me, not caring about his own clothes or the fact that I was numb to his touch.

Those days by the river I felt invincible, as though no one could ever shatter the woman I was becoming. I was stronger for him, or at least I thought I was. I had been so preoccupied with being free that I hadn’t noticed my isolation from everyone else. The only world I knew was Rocket. My friends had given up on me. Laughing my absence off at the fact that I was in love and that life never gets better than this honeymoon period. They were right about one thing. Life never did get any better, it only got worse. I was totally complicit in my own demise and I wasn’t even aware of it until it was far too late.

It wasn’t for a full year that I began to really notice what was happening. Rocket had asked me to move in with him and I’d said yes. He and JD shared a house but JD worked a lot and was never home. My parents helped me move my things, and then we said our goodbyes. I assumed I would see them a week or so later, but I didn’t see them again for two months, and the time after that it had almost been half a year since we’d met up. In fact, I didn’t really see anyone from before I’d met Rocket – this man that I was so blindly in love with that I accepted everything he did or said without question.

JD started dating a bottle blonde and moved in with her; she was pretty but she talked so much. It was hard to imagine him being with a girl like her. Maybe her constant noise took the pressure of talking away from him. Sometimes I caught him looking at me across the room when we were all together. He didn’t make me feel nervous or bad though. I couldn’t put my finger on it at the time, but I realise now he was checking that I was OK, looking for outward signs of stress or distress. He knew where this was going; he had been here before. But still he didn’t warn me.

Rocket would sit next to me wherever we went, his arm always around me, or if he couldn’t do that then his hand would be on my knee or my shoulder. I thought this was affection, but I now know that it was possession. I belonged to him, he had plucked me straight from my parents’ arms and put his hooks in me. He had never mistreated me, but I had never stepped out of line, I had never done anything unexpected or out of the ordinary. Until then I had never done anything that he saw as questionable. He had moulded me into the girlfriend he wanted – adoring, loyal and fiercely in love.

He got a promotion at work and so he told me I could stop working if I wanted to, but I didn’t want to, I enjoyed my job. It wasn’t the most glamorous of jobs admittedly, but I liked the hours. I started at 5 a.m., worked for eight hours a day and still had half the day to enjoy myself. I think, looking back, this was part of the problem. Those few hours between when I finished work and Rocket came home from his shifts at the hospital. He didn’t know what I had been doing and that bothered him.

His friend owned the camera shop SNAPPO’S and Rocket got me a job there so we could meet for lunch every day as it was near the hospital. I left my waitressing job and started working in the camera shop. I had talked to him before about how much I had always wanted to be a photographer and so he bought me a camera. It wasn’t an expensive one, it was an old Russian camera that I had mentioned; it produced imperfect images and that was the kind of art I wanted to create, maybe because I had always felt imperfect myself. I thought Rocket was supporting my love of photography by finding me a job more suited to my interests. Although I missed having my free afternoons, it was good to be doing something different. The manager paid my wages in cash to Rocket, but at least I got my films developed for free as a perk of the job.