The entire long tail end of this chapter is back-story exposition for where I see Selina coming from and what persons and events may have shaped her into the girl we saw at the beginning of TDKR. I hinted at it in places, but figured that it might deserve a more extended mention. What got me wondering, and ultimately led to this reverse engineering effort, was a PM discussion with klcthebookworm waaay back when we registered a common dislike for seeing Selina portrayed as a hooker. Thanks for making me ponder her origins!
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xxx
Selina wakes up the following morning at a very leisurely 11:30 am... European time. Which happens to be 5:30 Gotham time. Bruce, of course, is fast asleep; she fidgets in bed for a quarter of an hour, hoping to doze off again, but no such luck. OK; when one door closes, another opens; she has lived long enough by that adage to recall it now. She picks up a change of clothes, sneaks off to the bathroom, and a quarter of an hour later, leaving her sleeping husband in the suite, she takes the elevator down to the lobby, asks for a parking valet, and hands him the keys.
It is a different man, one who is yet unaware of Bruce or his driving prowess.
"Here you are, ma'am." He holds the door open for her.
"Thank you, Andy," she smiles engagingly at him, reading his name off the tag. "If Mr Wainwright from the Presidential suite comes down looking for his car and thinking we forgot to pick up the keys yesterday, tell him his wife took it."
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She heads through the tunnel northeast of the city and out towards the ocean, but takes a left turn a couple of miles before reaching the shore and speeds through shady country lanes towards an imposing neo-Gothic building, its spires, gables, and fancy towers lit by the rising sun, poking through the trees. This is, she realises, the third time she finds herself at Wayne Manor, and this time neither Bruce nor Alfred is there to greet her.
Once she is at the gate, just after six AM, she finds Blake's number in her phone directory and presses the call button. When he answers, his voice is still sleepy, but even as she mutters a perfunctory apology for the early social call and assures him that both of them are OK, she thinks it fortunate that she woke up and showed up when she did. In a couple of hours, the place will be teeming with boisterous, running, tumbling kids, and now is her chance to spend an hours or so at the place undisturbed and unobserved. When her unwitting accomplice meets her, yawning, at the entrance door, she gives him a reprieve until seven, assuring him that she'll be able to find her way around the Manor on her own.
Seen in the bright morning light, the palatial building looks less gloomy than she remembers it. Part of the reason has to do with most of the monumental furniture having been replaced with cheerful modern pieces in light wood, the airy gauze curtains in the public rooms letting the sunlight in, the crayon drawings plastered on the whitewashed walls and the occasional toys left in corners: Wayne's will prohibited tampering with the building itself but sensibly allowed a change of contents. But back then, after Thomas and Martha's murder, devoid of people and lacking the warmth of a true home, it must have been a rather lonely and intimidating place to live in and especially to grow up in as an orphaned kid. No wonder Bruce ran off to China after Chill was shot.
Her stroll takes in both the Regency Room where Bruce was born, now a space for indoor games, and the East drawing room where they met, now a library; but try as she might, she cannot conjure up any scenes or spirits of the past. For that matter, she cannot even imagine the man she knows now living here, let alone imagine how he had allegedly spent eight years holed up in this Gothic enormity with only Alfred to watch over him. The sensation persists when she meets a more awake Blake at seven, as agreed, at a discreet passage where he activates the hidden spring that leads them to a crude elevator shaft and down into the cave; while she is awed by the cavernous space and impressed by the technical gimmicks it is bristling with, which her guide clearly takes pride in, she cannot really imagine Bruce as she knows him haunting this vast gloomy underworld as a modern-day hermit.
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She had not planned on visiting the graves, but ends up there anyway. Luckily, this time the grey stone saying Bruce Wayne only makes her smirk. But she sits down on a shady bench and stays there a long time looking at his parents' tombstones, wondering what they would have thought and said if they knew who their son had married and how his fate had shaped up, wondering what they had been like outside the public eye, if they were really the legendary loving couple they were said to have been.
Her parents' family was not exactly a perfect advertisement for married life.
As a kid, she grew up watching her mother, a beautiful, shallow and selfish woman, tempt and taunt and bully her father into becoming a criminal. Emily Kyle's life was devoted to keeping up as close and convincing an illusion of glamour as she could create. Far from being content with her stunningly good looks, she lived in a perpetual state of envy and yearning for the material luxuries to match them. A sales clerk at an upmarket department store, she spent her days like a modern-day Tantalus, surrounded by temptation that was out of her reach; and she vented her frustration on her husband, endlessly snapping about their squalid lifestyle that, strictly speaking, was anything but that. It was grossly unfair; between her wages and Frank's job as a locksmith, they had quite enough to live on, but it was never good enough for her – and he was too much in love with her to put her in her place.
Eventually she nagged and brainwashed him into a reckless scheme to rob the day safe at her department store, a scheme that, unfortunately, worked... until she started spending the money on designer clothes and the police followed the trail to them. She lost her job and Frank got a suspended sentence that cost him his business, but instead of learning her lesson, she became bitter and more frustrated until her poor stupid, infatuated husband came up with the idea of robbing a jewellery wholesaler in a doomed attempt to satisfy her appetite.
Once again, he got away with it to get caught later; but while he was hit with a ten-year prison term in view of his previous conviction, she managed to escape unscathed, letting Frank take all the blame in his chivalrous idiocy. Then, less than a month after he went to prison, Emily ran off with a travelling salesman who had called in at the fur traders where she was by then working as a secretary.
The first thing ten-year-old Selina knew of it was when she came back from school to an empty apartment, and discovered that her mother's clothes were missing. Later that day, Emily's older cousin, a dour woman in charge of a young and hungry gaggle of kids and an alcoholic husband, came to pick Selina up at Emily's request; she had not even bothered to speak to her daughter directly. Apparently Selina was to stay with them until things settled down; but she never heard from, or of, her mother again, except for her aunt's mention of another phone call a year later when Emily announced that she had obtained a divorce from her husband and was getting remarried.
Two days after Selina heard this, she packed up in secret and left her aunt's home in the middle of the night to live in the streets, in abandoned warehouses and basements that she could break into.
Frank had refused to see her in prison, convinced that Selina was in on his ex-wife's scheming. Left to her own devices, she stole what she could, picked what locks she managed to pry open with hairpins and plastic strips, and perfected the art of shoplifting for food, until she ended up joining a gang of teenage pickpockets operating on the fringe of the Narrows. She was lucky that her aunt's eldest son, her second cousin, had taught her to fight and showed her a few mean tricks to keep opponents at bay; it helped her hold her own and keep unwanted hands off her body, and she became good enough at stealing soon enough for fellow gang members to treat her with the respect that securing their collective meals was bound to earn.
She had dropped out of school when she ran away from her aunt; whatever she learned after that came from stolen library books and reading online and talking to fellow gang members – and, eventually, to marks. By the time she was sixteen, she had had enough of picking pockets and running small scams. She wanted to move on to greater things, which in practice meant higher-value theft: jewellery heists, cracking safes, stealing what everyone believed could not be stolen. She would succeed where her father had failed... in more ways than one. She would make enough money to live comfortably, and when her father got out of prison she might even retire from crime and convince him to start a business together.
If her parents' history had taught her anything, it was that beauty was a weapon and love was a weakness; loving someone made you trusting and vulnerable, a fool ripe for fleecing. Still, she was sufficiently disgusted with her mother's modus operandi to stop short of using feminine wiles as her main money-earning tactic. She was above all a cat burglar, an expert thief; she used her charms as a tool to help her get what she wanted, but she detested the idea of sleeping her way to money and trinkets and, if she could help it, would not bring matters to a point where her marks fell in love with her. Feelings were messy and dangerous; her best bet was cultivating a coolly sophisticated, aloof persona that men would yearn for and lust after but could never quite have.
It worked miracles pretty much from the outset; but she soon learned that there was no such thing as the great heist that would set her up for life. Between greedy fences, the need to lie low after successful hits, and the relative rarity of good opportunities in the first place, what she made was enough to live relatively well but never enough to think about retiring.
To add insult to injury, her father got out of prison a born-again Christian, converted by a visiting divorcee with a passion for preaching. He had been OK with Selina visiting him for the last couple of years of his term, but as soon as he found out what she did for a living, he gave her a stern sermon and drove off with his new bride to set up home on a farm somewhere in South Dakota.
If her mother's departure had given her what the school child psychologist had called abandonment issues, this multiplied them tenfold; but her only way of dealing with it was to harden her armour, shutting off any trace of emotion and presenting a cool and shallow pretty face to the world.
It worked. It even proved sustainable. Over time she learned to view her solitary life as an advantage, free from the burdens of commitment, seemingly free of emotional baggage, entirely under her own control. It made it easier for her to never trust anyone and always watch her back.
From time to time she picked up good accomplices, but whether male or female, she had managed to stay on professional terms with them. Jen was perhaps the closest that any of her partners-in-crime had come to a friend, but even then they had little in common despite their similar backgrounds. Jen was still in her teens, more of a surrogate little sister than an equal.
She would occasionally end up in bed with her marks – but then she would only bed the ones she felt some degree of attraction to – and with a few civilian strangers. Still, no matter how pleasant the liaisons were, be it for one night or for a dozen, she was never tempted by the prospect of long-term relationships. Being alone kept her safe; she eventually convinced herself that it did not hurt at all.
It was both sublimely ironic, and oddly fitting, that the first and only man she wanted to share her life with had been a loner playboy not unlike herself, and not unlike herself, one who had had to shut off his human side for other considerations.
The realisation, of course, could not have come at a more unfortunate moment. When she looked at herself in the mirror the day after his near-fatal encounter with Bane that she had lured him into, moments before she left for Gotham airport, and saw her mother's cold eyes looking back at her, for the first time in her life she was both scared and disgusted at what she had become.
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TBC