She rose silently. She didn’t wake,
because she hadn’t been asleep; sleep was almost an unknown condition
for her these nights. Careful not to make the slightest sound, trying
not to disturb even the sheets between which she lay, she slipped out of
the bed.
She
was naked. It wasn’t by her choice that she was; although she had no
personal hang-ups about nudity, this nudity had been imposed on her and
she found it degrading and hateful. Briefly, she debated whether she
should slip on the nightgown that lay over the back of the chair, then
decided not to. The rustle of fabric might disturb him, and, besides, it
would make no difference anyway. In the darkness, she smiled bitterly.
Her nakedness might even be a statement.
Her
bare feet were silent on the carpet as she walked over to the dresser.
She used her mobile phone’s little blue glow as a torch, illuminating
just enough of the dresser top so she could find what she had hidden
there the previous evening, without knocking anything over. It was all
the mobile was good for; the talktime had expired long ago and she had
no money to renew it.
As
her fingers encountered the object, she took a quick look over at the
bed. The sheet covered shape there was silent, the silhouette only
rising and falling slightly to the rhythm of regular breathing. She
sighed with relief. It would not happen that she would be thwarted at
the last moment. The chance would probably never come again.
The knife was big and sharp. She had found it the previous afternoon at the bottom of a closet. He had forgotten all about it, if he had ever known; or else he would have removed it long ago.
Her
breasts were still sore with his bites, and as she walked back to the
bed she felt the sliminess of his spend running down her thighs. She
hated her femininity at that moment; the weakness, physical and
conditioned, of the woman, which made her utter and absolute chattel of
this man whom she must honour as her master.
She
hated him. Even as she hated him, she told herself again that she
needed him; she could not get away from him, and after all these years
with him the thought of loneliness was terrifying.
In
any case, she could not get away. She had nothing; he had taken
everything from her, her papers, her money, every last piece of her
jewellery. If ever she went out, he claimed that he was having her
followed – and she couldn’t know if he wasn’t.
The
knife was heavy in her hands as she stood at the bedside and held it up
to her throat. She had planned how she should do it, amateur as she was
– the knife held at right angles to the throat and slashed back and up,
so she would sever her windpipe and the arteries to the brain in one
go. She wanted to do it by his bedside so he would know, without her
having to tell him, that he was responsible for what had
happened to her. It might give him a bad moment at night once in a
while, when he imagined her blood all over him again.
He stirred just as the knife touched her skin, put out an arm, and reached for the lamp.
She
reacted instinctively. She had psyched herself up for this moment,
prepared for it so thoroughly that it would be intolerable to be baulked
of it now. She had to stop his arm reaching the lamp, just long enough
to let her cut her throat.
Reversing the grip on the knife, she stabbed down through the sheet.
He
squealed then, a high appalling sound like a stuck pig, and she stabbed
again, to stop stop stop that sound than anything, slash stab again and
again, in a frenzy now, the knife rising and falling through the
darkness, stabbing until he no longer squealed or convulsed, until at
last he lay still, and still she went on stabbing.Copyright B Purkayastha 2008
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