Rebecca Connell - Told in Silence

One Wednesday I see the time display on my computer click on to six o’clock, and I don’t move. It’s late September, and the last of the light is fading outside. Autumn has come early this year and I can see the leaves falling darkly from the trees that flank his window. In two days I will pack up my things for the last time and walk out of his life to begin my own, at university, in Manchester. For these last few days, I don’t want to leave his office until he does. He is bent over the desk, writing notes on a pad of paper, lost to everything else. His lips move slightly, unfathomably, as he writes. I lean back in my chair and surrender myself to the pleasure of watching unobserved. I don’t know how much time passes; only that the room gradually shrinks and glows until it seems that we’re caught in the only pocket of light in the whole universe and the darkness outside has graded through to pitch black. This should feel strange, but it doesn’t. It feels as if I have come home.

Suddenly, he raises his head and I feel the force of his gaze on me. ‘Violet,’ he says. ‘Why are you still here?’

I straighten up in my seat. ‘What time is it?’ I ask.

‘Nine o’clock.’ He speaks with faint surprise. ‘I don’t know where the time’s gone tonight.’ He pauses, and I know I am supposed to fill the silence, but I am mute and frozen to my seat. ‘Why are you still here?’ he asks again.

‘I thought,’ I begin, and clear my throat to ease the tightness, ‘I thought you might want me to stay, in case you needed anything.’

He stands up abruptly, snatching his briefcase and stuffing the pad of paper into it. ‘God, I am sorry,’ he says briskly. ‘I had no idea – you should have said something. I meant to leave hours ago myself. Let’s get these lights off and lock up. I expect everyone else has already left.’

Hearing him say it makes it real. We’re alone here. I watch him click his desk lamp off, and want to scream for him to stop. I stand too, but I don’t move away from my desk. At the door he glances over at me, looks away, then back again. His brow creases in confusion, or indecision. After a few moments he comes across the room to stand in front of me. Close up, I can see the faint golden hairs pushing through around his mouth and chin, and a flash of how they would feel against my fingers comes to me so clearly that I can’t help making a small sound, deep in the back of my throat. He puts his hands palms down on the desk, leaning in slightly towards me.

‘Is there something wrong?’ he asks.

I can smell the dark spicy scent of his aftershave, and his fingers are just inches from mine, and suddenly a wildness overtakes me and I think, why the hell not, why shouldn’t I get what I want this time? I don’t reach out and touch him. I don’t tell him that I think I love him. I know, instinctively and deep in my gut, that the most brazen thing of all is not to say a word or move a muscle, and that’s exactly what I do. The realisation seems to come to him slowly, drip by drip, easing its way through his body and changing the expression on his face so subtly that I can’t pinpoint the moment it switches. All I know is that first he’s looking at me with detached concern, the way that any employer might see his secretary, and next he’s just a man staring at a woman.

‘I didn’t…’ he says slowly. He doesn’t finish the sentence, because he’s realising that of course he did know, he’s always known. I stare steadily back at him, and then I back away, inch by inch until my back is flat against the wall. I feel the silky fabric of my stockings catch against the cold plaster. He moves towards me in slow motion, never taking his eyes off mine. When he is as close as he can be without touching me, he puts one hand, flat and deliberate, against the wall above my shoulder – centimetres from my face, a knife just grazing my ear. I’m trembling, waiting, feeling the heat rising off him. He slides the other hand down the opposite side of the wall until it is level with my waist, then curves it swiftly inwards, slipping against the small of my back. I feel his touch on me like an electric shock. He pulls me towards him, roughly against his body, and suddenly I’m closing my eyes and giving myself up to it, kissing hard and fast. When he pulls back for a second, his face is dazed and surprised.

Later, much later, he whispers, ‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ and I say, ‘You won’t.’ At eighteen, I am filled with confidence and certainty, and I have no suspicion that I am wrong. When I’m lying in bed beside him, finally still and listening to him breathing, I pinch the back of my hand so hard that tears spring to my eyes. I don’t wake up. This is a dream from which I won’t surface for another two years, but when I do it will be with such violence – eyes streaming, limbs aching, throat straining for breath – that it will almost kill me.

The morning after Harvey’s return from Spain, I walked into town for my shift at the shop. Every Friday and Sunday for the past four months, I had done the same thing. Laura had been the one who had seen the job advertised in the shop window, had noted down its details on a scrap of notepaper and pushed it under my bedroom door without a word. I hadn’t thought it worth my while to argue. Even I could see that I couldn’t sit in the house for the rest of my life. It was a kind of rehabilitation, I supposed – an undemanding job designed to reintegrate me into society – and like all rehabilitations, it felt at once painfully repetitive and ridiculously daunting.

Finding my way to the shop was usually like sleepwalking, my feet blindly steering me on a course they knew by heart. That morning I made myself stop and look as I walked, forcing the blurred, remote shapes around me into reality. Trees, lampposts, buildings, people. It was a hot day, and I could feel the sweat trickling down the back of my neck and catching in my collar. Everything I saw seemed to have a kind of unexpected clarity to it, like bright flesh suddenly and shockingly revealed under a layer of skin ripped away. For months I had felt distant and separated from the world I walked through; a patient behind a smooth, impenetrable glass wall. That morning I felt that I could reach out and touch whatever I saw. I was acutely aware of the pavement underneath my feet, pressing up against the soles of my shoes. When I reached the shop and raised my head to look up at its purple painted sign, the letters flashed at me, winking crazily. I closed my eyes briefly, and I could still see them – Belle’s Boutique, written in luminous script across the darkness.

I pushed the door open, listening to the sharp tangle of sound that pealed from the bell above. Catherine was already there, her platinum head bent over a glossy magazine. As always, she was sipping from a huge mug of tea, cradled in her tiny hands with their vixen-painted fingernails. When she saw me she set it down and gave me a brief friendly nod of acknowledgement. Catherine was twenty-two and blessed with the prettiness of a pixie. She had been away from the village for the past three years at a London fashion college, and I suspected that she would soon be gone again. Today she was wearing a linen smock covered with green and crimson flowers and a pair of high-heeled, strappy emerald sandals. In my first few weeks she had tried her best to make friends, but I had been unable to rouse myself to reciprocate and as a result we had fallen into an uneasy truce, two strangers brought together by a common setting. That morning I tried to smile in a way that would tell her that something had changed, even if I wasn’t quite sure what, but her face gave no sign that she had understood.