Trunk or Tail?

Ten years on, and there I was, looking down on him again. At least I would have been had my gaze possessed the power of the scorn it contained, and had it been intent enough to bore through the various layers of dirt. Not that there would be much of the man left to see beyond the macabre, but the six-foot distance between us, for all it was indisputably vertical now, brought his rodent-like, bespectacled features so clearly to mind, I might as well have been back there in that flat we'd once shared, staring across the floor to where he’d slumped, groggy and unaware that while he’d slept, passed out from too much whiskey, I’d chained him by the ankle to the radiator pipe, tumbler on the floor beside him, bottle sideways on his lap, dregs soaking into his crotch…

Lipstick on – the brighter the better to emphasize my contempt – I’d raised my glass, cheers to me, and oh, how this bitch could snarl, how this cat could narrow her blacker-than-black-lashed eyes, and how this cow – this insensitive, unfeeling, fat eight-stone cow - knew how to wear her leather…

Crystalina… Besides the more derogatory names, those childish, uninspired playground insults he’d occasionally throw my way, only he would call me that, and how I despised him for it…

Crystalina, what have you done…? Such a slurred and whiney pleading. Still, a hint of the original fake Spanish charm which those who had gone before me had found so appealing, and which, like his tagging those extra syllables onto my name he’d deluded himself into thinking I’d find endearing, remained, so not on his knees as yet.

Crystalina, why? I thought we’d sorted things out. Come on, I gave you your key back, didn’t I?

Sure. After a fight. And only after I’d smashed that hideous table he’d bought – the mahogany veneer which didn’t match the black of the rest of my furniture, sending it crashing into the wall so hard it knocked the glass elephant from the shelf. A no-head elephant now, or a half one, for it still retained an inch of trunk. And we’d laughed about that – or rather he had. A couple of drinks and he was talking, not the ‘beast with two backs’ but one with two tails which, when sanded down and polished – artistically reconstructed – nobody from this day on would ever make head nor tail of again… or was it ‘tale’?’ And sure, I had the key again, so I could get into the wardrobe and dress as I’d wanted to all along, put my clothes out ready for the next day so I could go to my modelling job. But I wasn’t entirely convinced he wouldn’t try to stop me all over again. Oh, the jealousy. It did get tedious. And, oh, I thought, how he’d rue the day that he’d tried to wrap me up in chains like he had his two ex-wives and other women besides. All so simpering-keen to be handcuffed to his bedpost. Well, you won’t find any soft toys on my bed, mister, nor any accessible frames. And kisses and cuddles, fuck that! Get used to it, lover!

A notch that’s all he was, albeit a deep one, for I will give him this, he was good in the sack. I did, however, hug him once by accident – in my sleep. Had to explain that I’d been dreaming of someone else.

Crystalina, please… You’ve had your fun now… Chris…

Ah, that was better, he was learning… Learning, squirming. And reaching for his glass again. Aw, bottle nearly empty? Shame. And that wet patch – what a waste. I took a step towards him, and another. Toyed with the idea of spelling my name with a ‘k’. Might have done too, had it not been for that nauseating character in Dynasty – Krystal goody-two-shoes Carrington. Women like her, the sweet, compliant ones, the ones who fawned after men, deserved to have their name begin with a ‘c’. All curl-me-up-in-a-corner and cowering. The ‘k’ - the kicking ‘k’ – should have been mine.

Fuck sake, Chris, I need a drink, I need a piss. Just give me the fucking key…

No problem. I’d bring him another bottle. He could drink himself to death, piss in the empty one, fill the next one up as well if he survived long enough. I remembered him bragging about how he’d done it before, pissed in his ex-wife’s brandy after a row about how she wore her hair – and after she’d changed it to suit him too. Catherine, another ‘c’ who had never answered to Kate… Maureen had come after her. An ‘m’ which was probably worse – mild and mushy and grossly maternal. The mother of his children – all five of them daughters – and umpteen miscarriages between. Made her quite ill, almost killed her in the end. Not his fault, of course. A man like him have a vasectomy? No chance. Said he was sorry, regretted treating her the way he did, but ‘Henry the Eighth I am, I am’ sung loud and proud whenever he reached the equivalent number of alcoholic shots suggested otherwise.

You think you can keep me here, chained up like a dog? I’m warning you now, I’m going yell, I’m going to wake the whole bloody block up… A series of thumps as the heel of his shoe bashed the floor.

Ah well, that was downstairs alerted, and as expected, up they came. The long, hard pressure-ring on the doorbell… Chris, Chris, are you alright…? Linda’s voice, high and urgent. She’d have her husband with her, of course. Mitch. I’d known them both a while and they’d been worried – oh yes, extremely concerned that I’d taken up with this reputedly unsavory character, this control freak. I tossed the key across the room. It clanged against the heater as I went to open the door - just a crack to begin with, slowly, slowly, lipstick smudged by the back of my hand, a wetted finger to streak my mascara, my expression one of feigned timidity. Enough time for him to release himself from those chains, to rearrange his clothing to cover the damp, to think up a story to explain all the banging.

A moth, that’s what he told them. He’d had his shoe off to a moth. And I’d watched their eyes circle the room. Whatever happened to my lovely table? It was Linda who asked. Ah, well, she must have heard all the shouting and crashing earlier. My fault, I said, bit of a heated row, but all couples have them, don’t they? No way would she have come ringing the doorbell then, not while Mitch was still out. Such a frightened rabbit. Felt sorry for her in a way. Forever advising me to ‘get the hell out’ but never when he was there – and she saw the cuff and chain, they both did. An attempt had been made to cover it with a throw, but, drunk as my former prisoner was, he hadn't concealed it properly. Linda had hovered a while, hinting with her eyes and a pitifully coded word or two that she knew something was amiss… And if ever I needed anything…. Mitch, meanwhile said nothing. Clever man, highly observant. Calculating even. I liked Mitch, poured my cold little heart out to him many a time when Linda wasn’t around, and even before his own agenda was fully established, he coolly pretended to swallow the lies I'd sandwiched between my truths.

Oh, Crystalina, Crystalina, see what happens…? See what you do to me? You make me a wreck. A quivering wreck…

And so he was. Quite pathetic. It was me who opened that second bottle, watched him swallow and slowly be swallowed up. I can still see it now, exactly how I pictured it in my imagination, that dark amber haze of a wave and his little mousey face gasping for air in a gradually diminishing pocket. Like Jonah in the mouth of the whale, only this whale refused to spit him up on safe ground, and so had captured him all over again.

He was dead by the time I returned from my modelling job the next day. Mitch helped me lift him onto the sofa after I removed the chains… Alcoholic poisoning, accidental death, that’s what the coroners said, and Linda was keen to reiterate how he systematically controlled and abused me, and how there was nothing I could do to stop him drinking himself into oblivion… He had her chained to the heater, for God sake, and God knows what would have happened if she hadn’t pounded on the floor and we hadn’t come up. Next day she had to run out the flat practically naked to get to her work…

Yep, locking that wardrobe door, putting the key in his pocket and turning up to the studio in my dressing gown did the trick, even if it did prove a little embarrassing. More so to the photographer than me, I must admit, his being the type of introvert who hid his mettle behind a lens, and failed to even utter the words ‘dare I ask?’

Poor Linda. She was in quite a state when Mitch left her, and I guess he might have been in just as much of a state when I left him. Not that my new lover, Phil, knows anything about that. We don’t play the handcuff game yet. But give it time. It always happens, see, when the chains come out, when they start believing that they’re the ones in control, or else, like Mitch, when they start wanting, expecting - things like ‘putting a ring on it’. Rings were for pigeons, homing-birds. So dull and dowdy.

‘Strange thing to put on your ex's grave’, Phil said, that day at the cemetery. ‘What the hell is it anyway? Looks like some freaky beast with two tails.’

‘It’s crystal,' I told him. 'It was never the same after it got broken. Still, it was more his than mine.'