If You Love Me by Alice Keale

Author:Alice Keale
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2016-11-26T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

As well as sending me almost-home on the train at least three or four times a month, Joe often decided quite late in the evening that he couldn’t ‘take it any more’, and sent me to a hotel for the night. It seemed that, as long as I was with him, he wasn’t able to divert himself from his self-imposed, and ultimately pointless, task of discovering the truth. So when the anger, vomiting, dry retching and lack of sleep became too much for him to bear, he would tell me to phone for a taxi and go.

‘Just stay in a hotel for one night,’ he said the first time. ‘I need a break. We both do.’ Six months later, I’d stayed in the same hotel on at least forty different occasions, for at least part of the night, and Joe had long since stopped pretending that my doing so was for the benefit of ‘us’.

It was quite often one or two o’clock in the morning when Joe told me to leave, but whatever time it was, I always had to be back by 7 a.m., at the latest. Fortunately, the hotel was just a short taxi ride from the house. But it was expensive – particularly as I turned up every time without booking – and, on top of all the holidays and gifts I was buying for Joe, it was yet another cost that helped to deplete my rapidly dwindling savings.

I can remember the first time it happened how relieved I felt as I climbed into a taxi outside Joe’s house and closed the door behind me. Although there was always the worry at the back of my mind that he might hurt himself, it was far outweighed on that occasion by the prospect of spending a few hours asleep in a bed on my own, without anyone hurting me or demanding answers to unanswerable questions.

I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere or see anyone without Joe’s permission, not even my family or closest friends. So, except for the nights I spent travelling almost home on the train and then back to London, or the very rare occasions when I actually got all the way and slept for a few hours in my bedroom at my parents’ house, I was with him all the time. A few weeks earlier, that might have seemed like a dream come true. By now, though, I felt as though I was living in a nightmare. But as the taxi sped through the empty streets that first time, I knew that every turn of its wheels was taking me closer to the two things I craved more than anything else: peace and an empty bed.

When I arrived at the hotel Joe had stipulated and walked through the rotating doors into its spacious, high-ceilinged reception area, the night porter nodded and said ‘Good evening’. That night I was just like any other weary traveller, albeit one with just a handbag and no luggage. It did

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