I especially like to talk to you about our home. The garden will be spectacular this spring, but it will be perfect when we return. Anna told me that all gardens need three years to properly settle and become the spaces they are meant to be. I lie on my bunk and think of this and it is like we planned it. You will be amazed at the cleverness of the planting and I can see you there, sitting amongst the swaying flowers as I cook us supper on the barbeque. We can lie on the hot stones and look up at the clouds and you can teach me again to see pictures. We will make love in every room of the house and I will show you the numbers of the women in the cupboard in the kitchen, which I have decided we can’t paint over. We will tell each other their stories; we will give them their proper endings.
We will get on aeroplanes, V, and lie on deserted beaches where the breeze kisses our skin. We will drink cocktails in strange hotel rooms where no one knows our names and swim in seas deeper than our imagination. We will hold each other tight every night, our bodies wrapping around one another, our heads resting against each other. We will sleep peacefully, our breaths in union, warm and deep. And I won’t wake in the night and want to uncoil your brain because I will know what is there. You will put your hand on my chest and feel my heartbeat and I will kiss every inch of your body. We, my darling, are creatures of perfection held in a state of waiting, our anticipation making our reunion all the better in the end.
V, we have managed what all other lovers yearn but fail to do. We have eclipsed the world and exist only within our hearts. We have almost reached a state of perfection, a state in which our communication is all that matters. I shut my eyes and think about all the wonderful days and weeks and months and years of togetherness stretching on before us, in sickness and in health, forsaking all others, till death do us part, forever and ever, amen.
Oh God, V, you made me wait, but I have finally received a reply to all the letters I have written. It was a postcard on which you had written three words in capital letters: ‘YOU ARE NOT.’
I turned the card over and on the front was a photograph of an eagle, soaring high in the sky over snow-capped mountains. I laid the card on my bunk, its four corners in perfect line with each other, and then sat cross-legged in front of it. I stayed very still like that for a long time, just savouring the moment.
I shut my eyes because I had to process everything. I had to allow the eagle to soar into my brain and show me the way, just as you always intended. My darling, I know what others will think you mean with these words, but I also know you would never be crass and obvious. I love how you used our three-word code and the way you make me work, that nothing is straightforward with you. I know what you really mean. But I don’t need you to tell me that I am not guilty.
The Crave I know is over. We don’t need it any more. We are beyond that now. Beyond anything outside of ourselves. But for old times’ sake, I crossed out your three words and replaced them with the ones which will always mean something just to us: ‘I CRAVE YOU.’ I readdressed it and put it into the prison mail system, so you should receive it tomorrow.
You, V, are the only person who has ever known what I need to survive in this world. I know Elaine and Barry, even my mother, tried their best, but you are the only person who has ever seen deep inside me, who has touched my soul.
We are humans, flailing and mistaken, but that doesn’t matter. Because we love, we can forgive. We know the truth. We know what love is: the kindest and the cruellest emotion.
I am coming for you, V. I am coming.
Afterword
For me a true ‘psychological thriller’ is propelled not by plot but by psychology. And within this, the possibilities for suspense and twists and intrigue are of course endless – after all, there is nothing more complex than the human mind and human emotion. This is precisely why I love the novels of Carol Shields, Margaret Atwood, Patricia Highsmith and Iris Murdoch, in which the thrills derive from the fascinating momentum of the characters’ internal lives. This realisation, more than anything, unlocked what I wanted to achieve with this book.
I already knew I wanted to write about obsessive love.
And it quickly became apparent that I wanted to occupy a male voice; I wanted to change the perspective away from all the brilliant damaged women I’d read in the last few years, and reveal a damaged man. I like flawed characters – in fact I only believe in flawed characters. I don’t believe in goodness or badness per se, I believe in rounded, whole humans, battered and bruised by circumstance and inheritance. So, my protagonist couldn’t be bad or good, he couldn’t possibly know everything or understand much, but at the same time I wanted him to believe in all that he did. I wanted someone who both repelled and attracted us, who made us uncomfortable and yet with whom we sympathised. It became obvious that I had to write the book in the first person and that I could not deviate from Mike’s viewpoint in any way.
Then, by chance, I watched the Netflix documentary on Amanda Knox. Naturally I knew about the case and had been appalled by the screaming tabloid headlines and the incompetence of the police. But, until I watched that documentary, I hadn’t appreciated how truly terrifying that case had been for women. How no one actually cared about the fact that a young girl had been murdered or who had done it: how the only story which held any traction was that of Amanda and the fact that she liked sex. The trial, I realised, had not been about who killed Meredith, but about how sexualised Amanda Knox was and how she needed to be punished for this.
I decided to write a book about a man obsessed with his idea of what he perceives to be the perfect woman. But more than obsessed, I wanted him to be properly in love, with all the accompanying madness. As such, I knew this woman had to be someone with whom he shared a long history, not simply a fantasy figure. I gave them a sexual game they played, in which they were both complicit and which they both enjoyed. I wanted two dubious, but harmless characters. Two flawed humans enjoying their space in the world, oblivious almost as to what anyone else thought of them.
I knew however that Mike needed to have reason behind his obsession. I remembered a documentary I heard on the radio a few years ago in which a psychologist said that if we have a very damaged relationship with our parents we can get stuck in our emotional development. Our parents are the only people who ever truly love us unconditionally and we need this in order to be able to go into adulthood unencumbered by this need, which gives us the ability to have healthy relationships. It’s an idea which has always stuck with me and makes complete sense and I knew Mike needed a past which made his ability to become obsessed realistic.
I wondered as I finished the novel if I’d gone a bit far in this idea that women are always judged more harshly than men. If maybe I’d over-egged the idea that women still have to be perfect, that if we don’t conform we’re seen as mad or aggressive or different? This was in October 2016 and the American election was ratcheting up to its final crescendo. I watched, open-mouthed, for a month as a competent, intelligent, powerful woman was eroded by a bumbling, inarticulate, pantomime villain of a bully. He can’t possibly win, I kept telling myself, still believing we had come this far, we couldn’t spin the wheel all the way back. Now, terrifyingly, I’m not sure there is a ‘too far’.
It is undeniable right now that we live in a world in which women and men are judged in completely different ways. Women must be perfect, men are allowed to get away with murder. Equality is still a far-off dream and all of our pasts have spun round to again slap us in the face. It seems like we can’t escape who we are both personally or as a collective. We keep taking small, faltering steps, but often we are pushed backwards. It is once again a frightening time to be a woman, to be different, to be other.