Page 16 of The Six Murders of Daphne St Clair

Chapter Nine

DAPHNE:At first everything seemed tolerable. I woke up every morning and went out to clean. I liked walking through the city, liked how my neighborhood in the North End was full of people from around the world. It was working class but there was a real energy there—lots of communists.

RUTH:That’s interesting. Would you say you’re political? I know you have a politician as a son-in-law.

DAPHNE:No, I’m not political. Hell, coming out as either a Republican or a Democrat might be the only way I could get people to hate me more. And I don’t know much about my son-in-law’s work, but I will say that I would never vote for a man who likes his socks ironed and his wife silent.

RUTH:Tell me about your work.

DAPHNE:Well, it was cleaning, what’s to say? I realized pretty quick that most of the places I cleaned didn’t belong to Ted, that he was charging these people for my services. But I was excited to have my own place. If Ted wasn’t visiting, I’d spend my evenings curled up in bed with a library book. It had been years since I’d been in school but once I got to Winnipeg I resolved to become well-read. So, at first I was somewhat content.

RUTH:But you were dependent on a man again: first your father and now Ted. You’d been hoping for a paying job and independence.

DAPHNE:Well, we allhopefor things. What about you? You went to college right? When you graduated, what job were you hoping for?

RUTH:Journalist atSlate Magazine. OrThe Huffington Post.

DAPHNE:Whatever those are. And what did you get?

RUTH:Amazon delivery driver. . . and an unpaid internship atFlorida Horoscope Magazine. But then the magazine went under a couple weeks after I started.

DAPHNE:They didn’t see that one coming, huh? But there you go. Sure, my job was tiring, and I had to give Ted a meal and a feel every few days, but at first everything felt manageable.

I wasn’t surprised the first time Ted hit me. He was mad that a tenant had moved out in the dead of night to avoid paying rent. Then he began lecturing me on how I wasn’t grateful enough, how I didn’t understand how he’d saved me. The similarity between this drunken idiot and my father made me woozy and I made the mistake of turning away from Ted and staring out the window at the cold yellow night, trying to reassure myself that I wasn’t back in Saskatchewan. Ted, enraged that I had stopped listening to his sermon on the mount, shoved me against the window, smashing my head against the frame.

In that moment, I had the strangest reaction. It was as if I’d been waiting for this for weeks. My whole body was already tense in anticipation. When he finally hit me, I thought: ‘Ah. Yes. There it is.’ I felt a kind of grim relief that the universe was what I thought it was, that men didn’t just want to fuck me, they also wanted to hurt me.

After he finally stormed out, I crawled into bed and pulled the blanket up to my nose. I felt grateful to be alone. But I knew he would be back.

DAPHNE:If Lucan was the frying pan then Ted was the fire. It was funny. I’d left to find freedom and all I’d found was a new kind of cage.

RUTH:Yeah, it seems like it. Did you marry Ted?

DAPHNE:No, thank God. He was already married, with a wife and kids. So, I wasn’t even a battered wife, I was a battered mistress! I’m sure he beat her too, someone that hot on abuse doesn’t just do it as a part-time thing.

RUTH:Can I ask how you survived it all? How you coped with so much hardship?

DAPHNE:The words, the beatings, I just tried to block it all out. Over the years, I’ve had so many men try to convince me that I’m worthless. You either have to believe them completely or not at all. Even at that age, I was starting to realize that none of the men who abused me were prime examples of the human race. Ruth, a girl learns how men should treat her from her daddy. What’s your dad like?

RUTH:Oh, I. . . didn’t have one growing up.

DAPHNE:Not at all?

RUTH:Not really. My father was older and didn’t want anything serious. He already had kids and didn’t want any more. When I was a kid, my mom wouldn’t even talk about him. He did contact me as an adult though.

DAPHNE:Was he married? You know, when your mom was dating him?

RUTH:I’d prefer not to discuss this.

DAPHNE:Ah, so he was married! Well, these things happen. But a bad father teaches you to look for bad men. And every lesson I got from my dad sent me straight to Ted.

RUTH:But you were working, right?

DAPHNE:Yeah, but I was never paid a dime; it was all for my room and board. Which amounted to a room and the odd bag of groceries when Ted was feeling generous.

RUTH:Did you ever think about getting another job?

DAPHNE:Yeah, I thought about it. I knew I needed money to get out from under Ted. But I was just so bone-tired. I grew up on a farm; I can work. But there’s being tired in your body, and then there’s being tired in your soul. In Winnipeg, I once saw a plane with a faulty engine, sputtering and stalling, skimming over treetops, struggling to get altitude. And that’s what I felt like. There was no freedom, no money. There was just Ted. Ted Today, Ted Tomorrow, Ted Forever. At that time, all I could feel was tired and bitter.

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