Joe Victim: A Thriller

She puts her hand up to stop me. “Listen to me, Joe. You’re misunderstanding me. Your auntie was abusing you. You were an innocent kid and she took advantage of a bad decision you had made. What I want to know is how long had she been abusing you for before the cat died, and how much longer after that did the abuse continue.”


“Oh,” I say, and yes, that makes more sense. Only . . . the abuse? Is that what it was? “Oh,” I repeat, relieved that she’s on my side. Everybody is on my side once they get to know me a little. But really—once you start throwing that abuse term around, it makes me sound like a *. “It was halfway in, I suppose. A year into the . . . into the . . . abuse, then a year of abuse after the cat died.”

“How did it stop?”

“She just said that she was done with me. I didn’t understand it. Just like that. I should have seen it coming. I was going around there less and less near the end. I felt . . . I don’t know. I felt something.”

“Rejected?”

“No. Relief,” I say, only she’s right, I did feel rejected, then I realize that’s just the kind of thing that might be worth sharing, the kind of thing that will make me look more fucked-up than the stable person I really am. “I mean, of course I felt rejected. I didn’t want to be having sex with my auntie, but I didn’t understand why it just stopped. Was I not good enough for her?”

“It’s not about that,” she says.

“Then what is it about?”

“You were the victim,” she says. “It was about power. It was about finding somebody she could dominate. She probably found you were becoming too confident, too grown-up. What kind of relationship did you have after that?”

“We didn’t. I actually never saw her again.”

“Not at Christmas, or other family events?”

“My dad’s funeral,” I tell her. “I guess that’s the only other time. We didn’t speak to each other. I mean, I tried, but she didn’t have time for me. She was hanging around with Gregory, who’s one of my cousins, five years younger than me. It was weird. In some way, I missed her.”

“That makes sense,” she says.

“What does?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she says, and she’s right, really. None of this matters. It’s just filling in time in a room slightly more pleasant than my cell until Melissa rescues me. Killing time in a room with a very pretty lady. Life should have more of those killing moments.

“It wasn’t your fault what she did to you, Joe.”

“Yes it was. If I hadn’t broken into her house—”

“She took advantage of you, Joe. She was an adult and you were a kid.”

“I know that,” I tell her. “But if I hadn’t broken into her house, then none of it would have happened. Who knows where I’d be now?”

“What do you mean by that?” she asks, leaning forward, and I sense a red flag on the horizon.

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do.”

“I mean, maybe that was the start of everything.”

She taps her pen against her pad. “Everything? It sounds like you’re self-analyzing, Joe.”

“I don’t mean it like that,” I say. “I just mean, you know, maybe that path led to another, which led to another.”

“Are you sure you never considered killing her?”

“No. No, of course not.”

“Most people in that situation would think of it.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t,” I say, but the truth is I did. I wanted to wrap my hands around her throat every time I had to look down at her face when she was beneath me. Hell, I wanted to wrap my hands around my own throat and squeeze. And yet I missed her.

“When was the first time you killed somebody, Joe?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t remember killing anybody, and if I did, well, I don’t know when it began.”

She reaches for the recorder and switches it off. “Okay, I think that’s enough for today.”

“What’s wrong?”

“You’ve just started lying again. I’ll tell you what. You think about what it is you’re trying to achieve here, and I’ll come back tomorrow and we’ll talk again. Okay?”

“Wait.”

“We still have time tomorrow,” she says, and she stands up and knocks on the door.

“I just want to be helped,” I tell her.

“Good.”

The guard opens the door and leans in to get a good look at me. I smile back at him, the full Joe smile with all the teeth. My eyelid stretches a little and hurts. Then I show Ali the full smile too. She walks out. The guard closes the door and I stare at the walls and my eyelid sticks and I have to manually pull it down. I let the smile fall from my face and I hang my head and rest it on my arms, my face only an inch from the table, my breath forming a thin film of condensation on the surface. I haven’t thought about my auntie in a long time, and Ali is the first person I’ve ever told. I always thought therapy was about unloading burdens and sharing pain, but all it’s done is open up a lot of old wounds. I don’t want anybody to know about it.