The Rabbit Girls(80)

She shakes her head. ‘I’m sorry, Axel.’

‘I know you are.’

Her tears don’t fall, the sorrow is too deep. With dry eyes her tears fall from her heart.





32





MIRIAM


Axel walks away from her, leaving her adrift like a buoy without an anchor.

She looks down at her half-nakedness. And places her hands on her stomach, the way she did when she was growing a child. The way she did when it was empty again, and her hands were full of grief that her arms were not heavy.

She remains standing as she hears him bashing around. Waiting for his return with acceptance, he’ll tell her what to do, she’ll do it and then he’ll leave.

When he returns, he sits in front of her and eats nuts, he offers the bowl out to her, she declines. And bends to collect her blouse.

‘Just remember, Miriam . . .’ He picks up the pen and takes it over to the papers hovering over what Miriam can see is a dotted line.

She can endure this, she thinks, for freedom. She thinks of Eugenia and Wanda, both in agony, carrying Bunny on a chair, the guards watching and laughing. They did it one step at a time, she can do this. Just let him do what he wants, then it’ll be over, then he will leave. He folds the paper up and places it with the pen in his breast pocket.

‘You used to be so beautiful. But now look.’ He points to his lap. ‘I can’t seem to get it up for you, keep it up, I’m not sure what you’ve done. I’d never hurt you, old girl, you know that, right?’ She nods. ‘But at the hospital, well, it’s the only way, you see.’

She doesn’t see.

‘I’m sorry, love. Miriam!’ he shouts and she flicks back to him. ‘Sorry it has to come to this.’ He takes an envelope out of his trouser pocket.

‘Turn around,’ he says.

‘Axel . . .’

‘On your knees. Lie down.’

She does.

She hears a zip undoing, his belt unbuckling, she waits for him.

Just as she always has. Just as she always will.

The night she left him, he had made her pay for asking to go to her father. After getting the call that he was in hospital.

Axel had made her beg and he took another polaroid, another damn picture to prove to her she was weak and disgusting and a whore. Begging him just so it would be over.

She knew it was the end, that moment of knowing, it would end. He would kill her, and if he didn’t she would do it herself.

In an instant, the past seemed to have cleared and she realises she is on the floor. She changed the locks, she has filed for a divorce, and yet here she is again, exactly where she left.

‘No,’ she says, thinking of Eva. Fight back. Miriam stands abruptly, so he is on the back foot.

‘I thought this might make you reconsider.’ He opens the envelope and tips paper over her. She shrinks away from it, unsure what it is. But when the paper flies past her vision she knows, familiar yet broken.

‘What is this?’

‘This is what happens when you leave. I had no choice, Miriam, just know there was no choice. Your psychosis comes from this. This destruction.’ But his words fade as she realises what is in front of her.

Her only picture, the footprints on pale blue paper. The photograph from the hospital too, scattered around her.

‘You needed to cleanse the house of all the pain. The memory that broke us. You took too much medication, and . . . well, it’s lucky I found you, right?’

Suddenly he is too close to her, surrounding her like a swarm of bees, she cannot hear what he is saying or understand any of it.

‘Come back to me, my love,’ he whispers. ‘It’s not too late to try again. A new baby, what do you say? You’re not too old yet, right?’ She looks at all the paper on the floor and up at the man in front of her. He’s played his hand, he looks euphoric.

‘After Michael,’ she says, hushed and calm. ‘I couldn’t do that twice. There will never be another baby for us,’ she says.

He looks confused. ‘But we tried for years.’

‘I got pregnant six months after Michael. I had an abortion. I had my tubes tied. I was never going through that again.’ She cries. ‘I couldn’t do it again.’

He looks at her. ‘Oh, my Mim, what did you do?’ He wipes away Miriam’s tears with his thumb. He bends and kisses her softly; it’s a kiss from the past. She kisses him back, full of passion and pain and loss of their child. Longing for a life she had hoped for.

He kisses her long and slow and deep and moves into her open body, he removes her trousers and she steps out of them. She moves closer in to him trying to sink into a touch she hasn’t felt in years; into the love of the man she married; into her own dreams.

He breaks away and slaps her across the face. She steps back, stunned, but he hits her again so hard she falls to the floor.

‘You disgust me,’ he says. ‘You liar. Did you murder him too?’

‘Who?’ She touches her cheek, the skin tingling like shards of glass.

‘Michael. Did you murder him like the other one? Abortion.’

‘No! I loved Michael, and you know it.’

‘Couldn’t have kept him till his time though, you gave birth too soon.’

‘It wasn’t my fault, I tried. But you remember, before we lost him, that night, what you did to me? You hurt me.’