∞ 20 ∞
DEPRIVATION
On the morning of the 29th the odd Muggle girl would be involved in an unusual drama of her own...
It was still very dark out. Valentina hadn't been able to sleep the night before. She was worried sick about her goat Lysander. She was also terrified of Jerremee coming back. Jerremee had been acting so unhinged in the lead up to his departure that the notion had taken root in her mind that he might decide to come back and hurt her physically, or even kill her because he was so sick in the head. She imagined that he might convince himself her not going back to him was a perfectly justifiable reason to do such a thing in order to save himself from the shame, because his little boy's ego hadn't grown into manhood along with his body and the immature ego wouldn't allow him to accept he was being left without having yet secured an appropriate replacement. She also imagined that because she had proof he was a deviant, rather than the saint-like character he pretended to be (and might tell people) with his warped sense of reason he might view getting rid of her as an acceptable solution. It wouldn't occur to him simply sorting himself out was an option. (It also wouldn't occur to him that there were scores of people in his past that already knew what he was really like without her having to tell anyone.)
He would go on the news lamenting the loss of 'HIS GIRLFRIEND, his queen, the light of his life!' while crying his dry eyes out and gaining sympathy. (He would of course be very excited at the prospect of being on television and meeting a new girlfriend through all of the publicity.) He would implore the public for 'any information, any information at all!' so that the 'burglar' who committed the most heinous crime could be 'brought to justice' so that he could at least rest a little easier knowing the evil murderer had been 'brought to justice!' Someone had to be 'brought to justice!'... It was just the sort of situation that would make him feel quite important (and the fact that he committed a mortal sin? Well, he'd know it was wrong, but "doesn't everyone have a few small failings? Doesn't everyone do naughty little things now and again? Nobody's perfect," he'd say looking sheepish with his shoulders hunched up and smearing his hair in front of his eyes. That is until one of the other Jerremees in his head would decide it was far less burdensome simply to convince 'himselves' that he hadn't actually done it... She kept hearing sounds: Was that Lysander choking?! Was that a car door?!
She went to bed very late and laid there awake most nights worrying, usually unable to fall asleep properly until 6am or 7am at the earliest, after Martin Martin's dog finally stopped barking, then slept till 10 or 11. But on this day, she rose at dawn because she couldn't sleep thinking about Lysander and the creep.
She hadn't had a full night's peaceful sleep in two and a half years, but the past few weeks had been particularly tough: Lysander's illness and waning health was crushing. She had recipes for special holistic feeds and the vet left a variety of oral emulsions, all of which she tried in vain to get Lysander to swallow. He had twice daily injections, which to his credit, the poor thing accepted without complaint. The vet had come several times with various expensive scanner machines they ordinarily used on racehorses. Valentina couldn't help but feel responsible that she should be doing more to help him. He looked so ill and it seemed like nothing she did helped to improve his condition. She felt guilty that she didn't have him put down to end his suffering, but then thought it was wrong to put him down. Who was she to decide that? She had been dreadfully ill when she was a kid and nobody had put her down! He was so weak. She wished Lysander could communicate with her, to tell her what to do. She worried that he would fall over in some terrible position, or tragically fall head first into his water bucket and drown while she wasn't there. As confirmation of her worry, every time she left for more than a little bit, something bad DID happen. The only thing she could think to do was stay with him all the time.
The other goat had died the previous week of what clearly seemed to be the same illness. She had stayed with her round the clock for two weeks, but she couldn't be saved. Valentina felt wracked with guilt just the same. She couldn't bring herself let the vet take the dead goat to incinerate her, but it was hard digging the deep hole in the rocky soil to bury her (especially because she was cut open from the autopsy and there were organs and fluids spilling out everywhere). The wheelbarrow was broken. Valentina's chest and shoulders hurt from digging and from heaving the poor animal, who weighed at least as much as she did.
Notwithstanding the agricultural classification they needed to make a living from the gîtes, as with everything regarding Jerremee, Valentina had no real explanation of how she had allowed herself into the extraordinarily stupid situation with keeping goats. She felt as though she had been put under a spell (or a curse rather). Now the poor animals were paying for her stupidity... But there was something else... something terrible: she was convinced Lysander had something called 'Enterotoxaemia', which was deadly and could have been prevented with the booster tetanus vaccination the animals normally had each year. She was responsible, because six months earlier she had not given the herd the prophylactic injections that might have protected them from the Enterotoxaemia and a heap of other awful diseases.
During the months leading up to the injections' scheduled date, it had become clear even to Jerremee that Valentina was immovable in her desire to end the relationship with him and life at the little cottage had started to climb towards the unbearably volatile level that it resided at until his recent 'permanent' departure. By the time the injections were due Valentina had turned from simply being an unhappy and drained person into a barely functioning, nervous wreck, existing in a state bounding constantly between chaos and hysteria. Prior to that, the goats had had all the best food and vitamin supplements and veterinary care.
By the time she remembered the booster injections were due, they were five weeks late. By that time, the vet was already chasing three month old invoices that couldn't be paid and there wasn't enough money in any of the bank accounts to even consider getting a different vet out on cash. Jerremee's increasing habit of sudden, unexpected, apoplectic tantrums to mask the truths of his financial impotency, mixed with his mounting craziness and chaos to mask all his other nasty little secrets that he was ashamed of (and Valentina's mounting revulsion verging on panic every time she had to have even a very small amount of contact with him – much less face one of his explosions) caused her to take the chance and not give the animals the preventative injection. She could not face the asking, the waiting and the begging, or his lying and tantrum that would likely follow, to get the money. So, she didn't ask – which is just what Jerremee wanted.
Her view was that the result would have been the same: there was no money, which meant there would be no vet... Still it was her fault. She should have demanded the money and let him feel shamed into finding it from somewhere. She should have tried with his credit card and not worried about it, the way a normal person would have. She could have begged the vet or convinced another vet to come out. (The vet eventually chased Jerremee directly from his end anyway and Jerremee paid it immediately to save face, so it was all for nothing.) She had been selfish (selfish and weak) in not facing Jerremee, because she just couldn't take the drama. She had let Lysander and the others down horribly. Their short lives were in her hands and she had betrayed them!
Many small hobby farms never gave their flocks injections, without consequence. Valentina and the little herd were not to be so lucky. It was an unfortunate mistake she would not be able to get over.
Then there was the new burden with Jerremee... The thing was, he was SUPPOSED to have left permanently. They (or he) had finally agreed he would leave for good, ending all contact, after a month straight of hideous rows. The lead up to him leaving had been intensely rough and now, even though it was supposed to be over and he had moved out and supposedly moved on, in actuality he still refused to acknowledge that the chance of any relationship on any level had been irreparably damaged. Therefore he refused to stop showing up, or stop having an imaginary dialogue with her through his incessant, delusional –or perhaps cunningly orchestrated– texts and e-mails. Conversely, he hadn't paid anything toward the animals in quite some time, which he alternated between refusing to acknowledge was true and making up stories to justify why it was Valentina's fault, when he would have 'gladly paid if he knew they needed food.' Although he should have paid, Valentina was too glad to be rid of Jerremee and too proud to insist that he settle his responsibilities, which he was well aware of. She was glad to be free of the aggravation of relying on him and being let down.
He had already showed up for a couple days at a time, twice since 'to get his things'. Jerremee used a promise that Valentina had made to him when they moved there: that he could live there as long as he needed to if he had no where else to live. Because they still jointly owned the land of the field 'that he had generously paid for out of his hard earned money', he claimed that he could insist she buy him out, or stop the animals from grazing it. His threats didn't make sense, but with Jerremee being a solicitor, she knew he had the upper hand. As with Martin Martin, he also had legal access to the dirt lane next to the little cottage to get to the field and a building permit that she herself had garnered early on. The last thing she needed was for him to show up and start building a house right next to her to spite her; it would be typical of him. (And somehow he would be able to find the money to do it.) She had to keep quiet.
She prayed he wouldn't turn up. The previous week when he was there, he looked sweaty and shaky. His hair was standing on end, rather than simply sticking up as usual and he had an extreme, crazy, even more inhuman than usual look in his eyes that was much worse than his ordinary put-on, crazy, inhuman look. The new, extra crazy mood seemed not to dissipate as convincingly as usual. Even when he resumed his honest gentleman act, the crazy would be back rapidly, as if someone pushed a switch as soon as he got off the phone, or as if he were practicing for a part in a play as a madman.
He hadn't brought back any food, or lifted a shovelful of soil, to help with the goat's burial, but instead waited until Valentina had finished the arduous task, to surface from his room, claiming he had a fever. She had long lost any ability to have positive expectations of him, so didn't care that he hadn't helped her. She actually detested him so much, she was relieved he didn't try to help, because that would have required him to be near her. She accepted that he didn't understand feelings of true love, or sorrow but she had no patience left for his obnoxious irreverence, or equally sickening, over-the-top unctuous mimicry of being terribly emotionally distraught. All of this made Valentina react bitterly towards him in the extreme, which he secretly relished, because her being nasty (which had no worrying effect on him whatsoever, no matter what he pretended) only weakened her further and gave him the attention he craved.
The split personalities that she thought he had (or rather thought that he pretended to have, in order to exculpate himself of any guilt for his actions) were all coming out in force. For the sake of her own sanity and physical health, Valentina finally decided to ignore him altogether, no matter what he said whether it was annoying or entirely ordinary. He would just go into holier-than-thou saintly sermon –or alternatively his little boy display– bemoaning how unfair she was while he was such a good person. A half an hour or so later, the reasonable, trustworthy businessman would turn up for a couple hours while he made phone calls. But in between, he would explode into an apoplectic rage about something minor (nearly always because he had tripped himself up on something he was inwardly ashamed of. He would then spend several hours chatting to prospective 'clients' (i.e. lonely women in chat rooms) where he faked being kind, emotionally solvent, charming and wealthy too. Then he would imagine himself as a dominant alpha male character while he watched porn for a few hours (or else it would be documentaries on how experts caught sociopaths – presumably so he could fine tune his skills) before finally passing-out in his underwear, in the foetal position, full of dried cereal and vodka... It was his usual behaviour, but it was all escalated and occurring in much shorter, more extreme intervals.
He was supposed to be gone!
Supposedly unaware of what had happened, or that Valentina had been digging the large, metre deep hole in the hard, rocky earth over two days, he rushed to her concernedly: 'What had she been doing?! Why was she dirty?... If he had only had the SLIGHTEST SUSPICION that an animal had been ill! A woman shouldn't be doing such work!... Why hadn't she informed him???' Then he followed her around, impeding her from doing other work to get his attention fix. He was like one of those fast, unswattable summer flies that just couldn't understand there was nothing for him there – oblivious to the fact that hostile attention was actually a bad thing.
His current focus of obsession –even though they had long since split up as lovers even before he moved out– was that Valentina was sleeping with a priest they had met eight or nine months previous and also the vet. Jerremee's proof was: the priest had sent a card for Easter, months earlier and she and the vet had been in the barn for longer than he thought necessary.
It must have stuck in his head as suspect for a Catholic priest to make such a typical gesture of good will on a holy holiday, toward another human (another Catholic) who was obviously having a very hard time. Otherwise, in his total lack of ability to understand normal human behaviour, Jerremee didn't realise if he was going to falsely accuse someone of something just to make them look bad, the accusation should at least be plausible. Apart from the all facts: that they had met the priest together in the market (and only briefly); that his parish was in Languedoc about 500 miles away; that Catholic priests were sworn to celibacy (although, neither actually keeping a solemn promise, nor the ability of actually having a modicum of sexual self-control when one claimed they did, computed in Jerremee's head, so it was to be expected he didn't notice those points were also relevant reasons Valentina might not be sleeping with the priest); that she didn't have a past of sleeping with every person she met in order to boost her diminishing self esteem... and finally, most of all, abstinent or not, as far as Valentina could tell the priest's sexual preference –if he indeed had any such feelings to deny– would not have been for a female. (Which didn't matter and was none of anyone else's business, but surely it proved there was nothing going on!)
As for the vet (actually the accusation involved two vets: the head vet Monsieur Lemoine and one of his junior vets Mademoiselle Poisson, who had come along once) he was mentioned less. This was because, out of the lot, he was the only one Valentina wasn't sickened by and might have considered. Ultimately she refused to continue denying any of the supposed encounters with the vets or the priest (or Martin Martin, or the mailman, or the guy who delivered the animal feed, or some guy who had once helped her get her jammed ticket out of the machine at the pay and display parking lot in town). Since she formally owed him no explanation, she didn't see the point in tiring herself out arguing and trying to make him see reason that would have been glaringly obvious to an ordinary person. Jerremee classed this refusal to continue to defend herself as proof of her 'whoring and disloyalty.' In the lead up to his departure he had gone on and on and on about her debauchery, making up more and more extravagant stories of what he was certain she had done while he was: "at home, sober and chaste and devoted to you, working hard to make your dreams come true."
Valentina thought she must surely be the stupidest harlot in all of France, considering that after all her supposed gross sexual activity with some exceedingly unappealing lovers, she was still receiving bills (and threats) from the vet's practice, still receiving antagonism from Martin, still paying full price for her animal feed...
The real truth was Jerremee knew Valentina wasn't sleeping with the priest, or the vet and the others. He did it not only because of his extreme insecurities that he didn't deserve a woman's attention, but because he knew the accusations frustrated and angered Valentina immensely and he found that deeply satisfying – plus it had the added benefit of causing further chaos in her mind, undermining her from doing what was necessary to move on with her life.
When he wasn't actually in front of her, he had started the habit of sending barrages of text messages – even while he was still on the property only several metres away. The theme of these texts alternated between the usual accusations of sexual debauchery, not living up to her side of their agreement, and not doing her part to validate him as a man... and then, begging her to come back to him, pledging he would "change and get better," threatening that his own safety was at risk if she didn't take him back and that he would "never let go, no matter what."
Although she had stopped opening the texts soon after they had started, something was happening to Valentina that was worse than before – another stage. She felt like his craziness had infected her; it was like a disease was growing inside of her. She felt scared and hateful and angry every day. She distrusted all of the people who lived around her. She felt as if no one liked her and no one told the truth. She suddenly felt awkward and ugly. She felt like a totally different person. It was as if she had become Jerremee, or at least part of him had rubbed off on her.
Her new habit of swearing like a gangster reinforced the new persona. She SOUNDED like a totally different person. Looked and thought like a different person. The day that he supposedly left for good a few weeks earlier, she told Jerremee: "I HATE YOU!" She had never, ever, used the phrase with anyone before that in her life. The creeping advancements in feeling and looking ill were marked... For the past three or four weeks, her previously aching stomach had felt like there was fireball inside of it (all the time). More worryingly, her chest, which had been a little sore intermittently was also aching all the time. She had also wrenched her shoulders from manhandling sacks of goat feed and the like. She had gone from frequent, ordinary headaches since she had moved there, to suffering from migraines with increasing regularity and a couple her molars were aching so that it was difficult to chew, although the dentist could find no decay. At the same time, she felt so manic in her head, she couldn't think straight and therefore felt helpless and terribly incompetent – feelings which felt completely foreign and therefore terrifying to her.
The severe sleep deprivation she had suffered for so long was intensifying and her nerves were at their peak. Between the constant onslaught of mental and sexual predation from the creep –as well as Martin Martin's dog barking until the wee hours– the sick animals, a newly mounting vet bill and the pitiful lack of money (and what little money she had to feed them and herself diminishing, mixed with the prospect of the delayed sale of her flat in London and no work in sight)... it all amounted to Valentina's wellbeing being seriously compromised.
She felt like she was locked inside a living Hell. She thought about trying to get a restraining order against Jerremee, but relations with the police had been strained since they moved there due to the havoc he cleverly orchestrated more or less the first week with Martin Martin and various other neighbours. In any case, he would just put on the completely fake, yet highly convincing: completely-normal-kind-and-quiet-long-suffering-English-gentleman role when anyone new turned up and then say just the right, calculated things to make Valentina seem unreasonable and ill willed, as soon as she turned her back... She could feel the desperation in him. She didn't dare tell him he couldn't come, since telling him not to do something was the surest way of him doing it. She couldn't risk the animals' grazing, or worse, even if he didn't start building a house there, having him pull up a caravan and begin living in the field! (He claimed he had a three year permit to do it!) She would have to deal with Jerremee later, when Lysander was better and she was feeling a bit stronger.
Fortunately she didn't have to keep letting him back anymore! She didn't have to hold her breath every month and accept the small amount that barely covered the bills (the main ones anyway). The sale on her flat would be finalised in a few days and she could pay everything off and catch her breath – for a little while. She could then start to regain her mind and rebuild her health and her life. She would soon be out of the traps she had walked into and the huge mistakes would soon be behind her. Free.