Chapter 3
I resigned myself to the fact that it was over. I had no other choice but resignation because dissecting what had just happened
inside me was too overwhelming. The lord had pulled out a knife, held it up to me, and I had closed my eyes. Earlier I had
done the same thing when Wulfric pulled his bow on me and all I could do was wince—that was the pinnacle of my instincts,
not to pull away, not to fight, but to in fact stifle those reactions in favor of something more compliant. I might as well
have presented my neck to him. Please kill me. Please kill me now. I thought about Ryley, the bichon frise I used to dog walk,
and how he would lie on his back, legs in the air, wiggling his body back and forth, ribs and abdomen exposed, expecting nothing
but belly rubs from the world. “Please kill me now, please kill me now,” I would sing, imagining a voice for his body language. “He’s so trusting, look at him, he doesn’t have a clue—you don’t
have a clue, do you? You just want your belly rubs. Please kill me, he says, please kill me now!”
My boyfriend would watch this and laugh from far across the room with one single, forlorn haaaaaaaaaaa like a circle drawn around a lonely, empty page.
I should have detected something wrong in that sound—no, I had detected something wrong.
What I should have done was do something about it, but again I was compliant, I was nothing.
I would appease the unappeased. When HR pulled me into a side
office at work and told me I was being let go—not fired, not made redundant, just “let go”—I smiled and nodded, I did what
wasn’t even asked. I let them let me go. It’s always “the needs of the business,” the current situation is always “untenable,”
and it always seems to make perfect sense to my pigeon brain. Yeah sure OK. Anything I am or have done is only ever alluded
to as a circumstance, a situation. There is discipline but there is also: let’s get this over with. Dowdy HR varmints I had
never seen before suddenly clinging to my every word like exhausting little pets. Please kill me.
Ryley was my first dog. His owner was a guy in North Greenwich who worked from home during the day and needed the dog out of the house for midday calls.
In those early, freshly unemployed days I was militant with the dog walking app—sharing my location at all times, sending photo updates, bringing along an extra battery to keep my phone charged.
I stuck to a prescribed walk up and down the river with Ryley, along the eastern edge of the peninsula, then a rest and a game of fetch in the park, then back to Dad’s.
“Back to your dad’s, c’mon let’s go,” I’d say, and I’d feel a pit open in my stomach, a depressive pang at the earnestness I too easily slipped into despite the job/gig paying next to nothing and the fact that not long ago I had been just like this dog’s yuppie dad, working/staring from home at my dinky plastic laptop, wiggling the mouse every twenty minutes to keep my chat status present, commuting to the office a few times a week to feel air con, lust for bankers, and purpose in an otherwise directionless morass all while the consequences of earlier transgressions grew wings and began to fan.
You don’t learn from your mistakes, you only learn to make them in easier, smaller ways.
It wasn’t long before I was more daring and took on more dogs, taking them for longer walks farther from their homes. One
day I walked Ryley and a gaggle of other small dogs all the way back to my flat and set them loose inside. I sat on the couch
and ate McDonald’s and fed them all one french fry each, two for Ryley. I wrestled and laughed with them on the floor. I rubbed
Ryley’s belly.
“Please kill me—is that what you’re saying? Please kill me, George, please kill me now!”
“Does he have to do that on the rug?” my boyfriend asked.
“It’s fine, bichons don’t shed.”
“It’s not the shedding I’m worried about. Don’t they only roll around on their backs when they’ve got shit on their fur and
they’re trying to rub it off on something?”
He never played with the dogs. He resolutely withdrew himself from any glee I was faking my way into feeling.
No, I wasn’t where I wanted to be in life, but I didn’t think I had to broadcast unhappiness for that to be clear.
I wasn’t going to be miserable. But my mind was vulnerable then and his obvious displeasure imprinted itself to devastating effect, beginning a self-policing inside me, when for every twee doggo-world charade I tried on, I would counter it with an invisible, deep hatred and anger, which I kept unfocused and vague to avoid confrontation.
The only problem was I misdirected the negative energy so far out into the universe that it could only circle back into my own orbit and darken my own light. Self-hatred.
“I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this,” I said, militantly carefree for my own sanity.
“I can’t believe it either,” my boyfriend said with a tone that stung through time itself.
I realized I had reverted to that same earnestness with Simon and Wulfric. Defense mechanism or not, I had sworn to God in
front of them, I had contemplated what that really meant—only to be rebutted with cruelty, sarcasm, and theft at the hand
of, well, at the hand of the lord himself. I felt my mind slipping just like it had before. I was so wayward and naive. I
had convinced myself I was going to escape and been swatted down so easily. Of course I had fallen in with Simon and Wulfric—we
were of the same crude, rudimentary mind, gutter slaves with enough pipe dreams to trick ourselves into keeping going. The
lord of the manor had spoken two different languages before he stopped on crude, glottal-clogged English when speaking to
me. His words and sentence structures had been difficult to understand and he had had to dumb himself down for my sake. I
was more than two steps below him; that was my place.
I was a prisoner. I was a servant. And maybe that’s what I had always been: exploitable by my own stupid trust in the world’s
sheen, in the mere idea of authority no matter who wielded it. I was one who could be swatted, that was all it took and all
that was needed, not worth the effort to convince or sway.
I didn’t know whether to gnash my teeth and beat on the wall or just sit there resigned to my own filth and eventual doom. The lord of the manor would give the order to dispose of me for good after the party and that would be it.
Once again I let the silences of the world carry me away—only this time they were smothered with a noise I had rarely heard
thus far: merriment. This is all a joke, you see, this cell you’re in, this tattered cloth, your dumbass mind. I listened
to rushing waters flowing, of wine or beer or whatever they drank here. Cutlery clattered—I hadn’t used cutlery in three months.
And I heard—again a first here—the most cauterizing decibel of alien sounds: music. Someone was playing a guitar, or probably
not a guitar but a lute or something, and it sounded beautiful, withering, vibrating through the air to my cell like pornography
pouring into my ear canal. I hated it. I hated them, whoever they were. It was the loudest party I had ever heard, like the
house itself was mashing its woody gums on me, suckling silliness, spilling out into the yard, drunks vomiting, shrieks and
dances, and the horses shifting around, snorting, flasks clinking together, songs, and in the midst of all that, a sliding
lock, a chain moving, barrier lifted, door opening. My heart lit one feeble last time.
Wulfric appeared in the darkened doorway, straddling the current of noise, barely able to keep himself upright. He held a
pair of keys.
“Let’s go party boy,” he said, slurring his words.
“Wulfric. Thank you. You have no idea. Thank you, thank you,” I repeated over and over as he unlocked and unbound my hands from the shackles and chains.
I stood up, immediately grateful and ready to go, snapped out of it.
“I won’t forget this, I promise.” Word was bond to these people, even though I had lost him the collar and he had nothing to gain.
Maybe it helped that he was drunk. I smiled and laughed and rubbed my sore wrists.
I had worked myself up into such a frenzy.
“No,” he said, slapping his hand on my shoulder to steady himself. “We’re staying right here, you and me. We’re gonna dance.
Come on. We’re. Dancing.” Drunk or not, his aim was squarely stable, and before I had a second to react, his fist smashed
against my skull. Warmth rang out—the pain wasn’t a quick sharpness, more like a woolen blanket thrown over me, and I fell
to the ground, tangled up in myself, double-visioned. Wulfric was immediately on top of me, kicking me in the stomach, cursing
me with words and phrases I could only assume translated in one way or another to motherfucker.
“Happy now, you Danish piece of shit?” He pummeled me. “Fucking scum.”
I held up my hands like a drowning victim. My spine felt wobbly, like it was about to come undone as I tried to worm myself
away and I hobbled onto my knees. Wulfric grabbed me by my tunic and threw me out of the cell. I crumbled against the wall
in the narrow hallway. I crawled, he grabbed again. I yelled but gargled blood. I felt myself fading into the pillowy warmth.
I felt nothing. I felt no more pummeling. It was as if I had left my body and was watching my beating from the side, but that
couldn’t be right, because the other man I saw was fighting back, the other man wasn’t me.
Simon threw a drunken, bloodied Wulfric into the cell and slammed the door. He turned to me.
“Get up,” he said.
“I can’t.”
“You can.”
And he was right, I could. I stood slowly and before I thought I was fully upright, we were running. We were outside. His
arm was around me. The wetness escaping me cooled in the night air, moon reflecting in it, inner warmth fading rapidly. We