Watching You Page 15

  At ten fifty-five the little icon stopped on the high street and Jenna waited for it to show her best friend safely tucked up at home. She waited and waited but still the icon showed her on the high street, opposite the Melville. The time turned to five past eleven and Jenna uncurled herself and sat on the edge of her bed. Why wasn’t Bess at home? She refreshed the app to see if maybe it had frozen, but still the icon showed Bess where the taxi driver had dropped her. Suddenly Jenna pictured the doors of the taxi being locked, the windows steamed up, her little friend pinned on the back seat under some big sweaty man, frantically trying to get the attention of a passer-by. She jumped off the bed, ran down the stairs, pulled on her mum’s coat and old gardening shoes and dashed from the house.

  As she got to the end of her road she could see that there was no taxi with steamed-up windows parked across the street. She narrowed her eyes, searching for the pale blond dome of her friend’s head and when her eyes finally found it she stopped and caught her breath so hard it hurt. Because there, standing together in the doorway of the local pharmacy, deep in conversation, were Bess and Mr Fitzwilliam.

  37

  Freddie’s dad had left the house at gone eleven, walked down the escarpment to Lower Melville and come back fifteen minutes later with what looked like a box of cornflakes. But his father didn’t eat cereal. His mother didn’t eat breakfast. The only person in the house who might have had the slightest interest in cornflakes was him, Freddie. But even then, his interest in cornflakes was minimal and certainly not strong enough to precipitate a middle-of-the-night dash into the village. The whole evening had been unsettling. The incident with Jenna’s mum and the police, and then his dad taking him out and being really nice and allowing him to open up about the thing in the Lake District, and then Red Boots walking in with her mate and her dad being all flirty and weird with her. And there’d been a strange moment, just as he and his dad left a moment later, when he turned briefly to look at Red Boots and caught the eye of her pregnant friend and something in her gaze had sliced through him like a laser.

  He got out of bed and crept to his door. He could hear his mum and dad murmuring together in their bedroom across the landing. He heard the murmuring climb up the dial towards lively debate and then head rather quickly towards hushed shouting.

  His stomach clenched. He stood for a few more minutes listening to the shouting buck and reel. He could make out the odd word and the occasional phrase: ‘… that girl. Nothing to do with me. Never, ever, ever. How could I have known?’ But he could not string enough of them together to form a coherent thread. For a moment his parents fell silent and a blade of fear cut through him. He tensed his body and squeezed his eyes closed and waited and waited for it to come: the terrible slap of flesh against flesh, the muffled moans of pain, the thud of bodies being flung about. Nausea swept through him. How could a night that had started with a glass of ice-cold Coke at the Melville with his dad be ending like this? It couldn’t. It just couldn’t.

  But the silence continued and after a moment he opened his eyes again, unclenched his fists, let his breath out slow and steady. He heard the toilet in his parents’ en-suite shower room being flushed, the click of the light switch, the innocuous squeak of bedsprings. He moved away from his bedroom door and back towards his window.

  The village was closing down for the night: the last stragglers were leaving the Melville, the Thai restaurant was already locked up and switched off, the pavements virtually empty. And down there, out of sight, were Jenna Tripp and her mad mum. He wondered what they were both thinking tonight. He wondered how Jenna was feeling. He held his hand to the cold glass of his window until it left a ghostly, foggy imprint; then he drew his curtains again and climbed into bed.

  38

  11 March

  ‘You never told me that Rebecca had a sister who killed herself.’

  Jack glanced up from the pile of letters he’d just put on the kitchen table. He was in a T-shirt and pyjama bottoms, his dark hair awry and slightly pungent. He did not look like a man who had spent seven hours the day before performing open heart surgery. He looked like he’d been in the pub all night and had a kebab on the way home.

  ‘What?’

  She reached for a box of Weetabix. ‘Rebecca. Last night she told me she had a sister who killed herself when she was fourteen. Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘God,’ he said, ‘I don’t know. Probably because you weren’t here when I was at the finding-out-all-about-Rebecca stage of things.’

  ‘But she’s my sister-in-law. I live with her. It would have explained so much. It would have made me …’ Joey paused. She’d been about to say, It would have made me like her. ‘Understand her better,’ she finished.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘It didn’t occur to me. And besides, maybe I thought it was none of my business. You know, she’s very private.’

  ‘Yes. I do know that. But still. It’s such a huge thing not to know about someone.’

  ‘Well,’ Jack said, ‘now you know.’

  ‘Why …?’ Joey paused again. She didn’t want to sound as though she was being ghoulish. ‘Why did she do it? Rebecca said she didn’t really know.’

  Jack sighed. ‘No one knew. She didn’t leave a note and everyone blamed everyone else and the whole thing was a horrible mess. I think for a while they all thought it had been something to do with a teacher at her school. That there’d been some kind of inappropriate relationship. But it turned out that there was nothing to it. Just a schoolgirl crush. It turned out that she killed herself for nothing.’ He sighed. ‘Her dad ended up turning to drink, and her mother died a few years ago having never come to terms with it. It completely destroyed them.’

  ‘I just can’t imagine,’ Joey began. ‘I mean, God. If you’d done that when you were fourteen. If I’d lost you. And then Mum. I would just … I would never have been happy again. Fuck.’ She felt a tear start to form in her left eye and blinked it back.

  ‘Are you crying?’

  ‘Not really,’ she replied.

  He peered at her closely. ‘Oh, God,’ he said. ‘Triple bypass and crying women. It’s all too much. Come here.’ He opened up his arms to Joey and she stepped inside his embrace. He smelled of bed and unwashed hair. He smelled of home.

  ‘You’ll never die, will you?’ she sniffed into his T-shirt.

  ‘I’m going to try really hard not to.’

  ‘Good.’ She nodded. ‘That’s good. Because I don’t think I’d be able to live without you.’

  Alfie was lying across the bed, naked, in a post-coital tangle of sheets. She’d waited up for him to get back from his bar job until 1 a.m. the night before, then pounced on him. He’d been surprised and pleased and had then ruined it by suggesting towards the end, breathlessly and lovingly, that he not use a condom.

  ‘Fuck!’ she’d said, her eyes wide in the dark of their room. ‘No! We haven’t decided about that yet! We haven’t decided! You can’t just randomly suggest it in the middle of sex!’

  ‘No,’ he’d said gently. ‘No. You’re right. I’m sorry. I just thought. You seemed so …’

  ‘What, into having sex with you?

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘And why would that mean that I suddenly want to have a baby?’

  ‘It doesn’t. Not at all. It was just … I’m sorry, OK? Can we forget it?’

  They’d managed somehow to get back to the point where they’d left off and finish in a reasonable state of harmony. But as Alfie faded into a deep sleep, Joey unpinned his arm from around her torso, moved to her own side of the bed and then lay awake for an hour, trawling her psyche for the real underlying reasons why she didn’t want to have a baby with Alfie. Which inevitably redirected her thoughts to Tom Fitzwilliam. Her mind began replaying and replaying the journey into work that morning in Tom’s car, the intimacy of it, the way it had felt when he told her she had beautiful eyes, and then she’d moved on to the feeling of his hand against her arm in the Melville when he kiss
ed her hello. She’d finally fallen asleep at about two thirty and when she awoke six hours later she found she’d been dreaming of Tom Fitzwilliam.

  ‘Morning, lover,’ she said now, climbing on to the bed and sitting cross-legged.

  ‘Morning.’ Alfie rolled over and wrapped his arms around her knees.

  She dropped a kiss on to the crown of his head. ‘Fancy dim sum in town later with Jack and Rebecca?’

  ‘What’s that?’ he said. ‘Dumplings?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Dumplings. In little baskets. And noodles and things.’

  ‘Sounds fucking awesome,’ he said, nuzzling his face into her thigh. ‘Dumplings. Awesome.’

  39

  13 March

  Jenna sat outside Mr Fitzwilliam’s office. It was nine o’clock on Monday morning and this time she knew exactly why she’d been asked to come and see him. She pressed down the fabric of her pleated skirt and fiddled with the clasp of the fluffy pompom that hung from her school bag. She was missing physics. She hated physics. But she kind of wanted to be in physics today because it was one of the only classes she shared with Bess this term.

  She heard Mr Fitzwilliam finish a mumbled phone call, and then clear his throat before opening the door of his office and gesturing her through. ‘Good morning, Miss Tripp,’ he said.

  She wanted to say, Please don’t call me that. Just call me Jenna! But she didn’t. She smiled instead and said, ‘Morning.’

  ‘And how are you today?’

  She shrugged and said, ‘Good.’

  He led them to the same set of comfy chairs where they’d sat the week before.

  ‘Good,’ he said, pulling out a chair for her and then pulling one out for himself. ‘Good. Right, well, I suppose you know why you’re here?’

  ‘My mum,’ she mumbled.

  ‘Yes. Your mum. Although actually, really, mainly you, in fact. Because as much as I care about your mum, as a teacher at your school, your welfare is my primary concern. And really, I want to know how you are?’

  ‘I’m good,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I know you’re good, in that way that all children these days are good. And I know that’s just shorthand for I am a swirling whirlpool of insecurities and dark thoughts that I have zero interest in talking to you about, buddy.’

  Jenna shuddered inside at the word buddy. Who even said things like that?

  ‘But clearly there are things at home that you are having to deal with and I know it’s just you, that your father and your brother live twenty miles away. And after what happened on Friday night I’m getting a much clearer picture of how things are for you. Listen …’ He did that thing again, where he leaned right forward, so his face was just a few inches from her, and engaged her in such heavy-duty eye contact that it made her want to close her eyes. ‘I get that you’re months away from your GCSEs and that this is where your friends are and that you’re scared that if the social services get involved you might have to move. I totally understand that. But you need to know that you have options. Lots of options.’

  She blinked at him. She had no idea what he was talking about.

  ‘You wouldn’t have to go and live with your dad. I’d make sure of that. I’d make sure that you could stay in the area and stay at the Academy until the end of your exams. Or longer.’

  She wanted to say, How? but she kind of didn’t want to know. If she asked him he’d tell her and then she couldn’t help feeling she’d be dragged into something weird that she didn’t want to be involved with.

  ‘Does your dad know?’ he asked. ‘Does he know how unwell your mum is?’

  ‘Kind of,’ she said, staring into her lap. ‘Sort of. Most of it. I mean, that’s why they split up.’

  ‘Because of your mum’s illness?’

  ‘Yes. Well. It didn’t seem like an illness then. It just seemed like she was, you know, a bit paranoid. A bit scatty. It just seemed like they weren’t getting on.’

  ‘And this was how long ago?’

  She shrugged. ‘About four years ago, I suppose.’

  ‘And since then, things have got worse?’

  She wanted to shake her head and say, No, not really. But instead she found herself nodding, and then, to her absolute horror, she found a tear rolling first down one cheek and then the other.

  ‘Oh, Jenna.’ Mr Fitzwilliam leaned over to a small table behind him and grabbed a box of tissues. ‘Oh dear. Here,’ he said, pulling one out with a flourish and handing it to her. ‘Here.’

  She scrumpled it up between her hands and pressed it to her face. She breathed in hard to try to keep the tears at bay but she could feel them building tsunami-like at the base of her gullet, her whole head throbbed with them and then suddenly they were out and she was sobbing and she couldn’t stop it and she pressed the heels of her hands hard into her eye sockets but it made no difference, they kept coming.

  Mr Fitzwilliam didn’t say anything. He just sat, his hands held together and hanging between his knees, and he watched her cry. Once the tidal wave of tears had subsided slightly, she chanced a look up at him. She was surprised to notice that his eyes were green.

  ‘Sorry.’ She sniffed. ‘I’m really sorry.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Please don’t be sorry. Please just cry for as long as you need to cry.’

  ‘I’m done now,’ she said.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he said. ‘Because I’m free for another …’ He looked at the watch with the red and yellow strap. ‘Forty-eight minutes. So, you can keep crying for quite some time if you’d like.’

  She found herself smiling. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m good. Honestly.’

  He passed her a waste-paper bin for her to drop her used tissue into and then he passed her the box of tissues again so she could take a fresh one.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘Your mum’s got worse, has she?’

  She nodded. She could hardly deny it now. ‘Yeah, she has a bit. Since you arrived,’ she said.

  ‘And this is because, as you said before, she thinks she remembers me from a holiday some years ago?’

  She nodded and sniffed, rolling the new tissue around between her hands. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And why do you think she thinks she remembers me?’

  She sniffed again. ‘Because it’s true. We did meet you on holiday. I remember it too. I remember your watch.’ She nodded towards his wrist. His other hand went to it and touched it briefly.

  ‘You remember my watch?’

  ‘Mm-hm. It matched your shirt. That’s why I noticed it.’

  He looked at her askance. ‘Gosh,’ he said, ‘you’ve got a good memory. And where was it that our paths crossed? Exactly?’

  ‘On a coach trip. In the Lakes.’

  She looked straight into his eyes watching for his reaction and when it came he looked so horribly trapped that she had to look away again immediately. But within a split second the soft expression was back in place and he said, ‘Ah, yes. That coach trip. I assume you remember the episode with the lady.’

  She nodded.

  ‘You know, I never worked out what that was about,’ he said, twisting himself back into his seat. ‘Very odd. And for some reason, if I’m understanding you correctly, whatever it was that happened that day, your mother saw it and decided it had something to do with her?’

  She nodded again.

  ‘And now she thinks …? That I’m somehow stalking her?’

  ‘Kind of.’

  ‘And that I’m in charge of lots of other people who are also stalking her?’

  ‘It’s called gang-stalking,’ she said abruptly. She couldn’t bear the drip-feed of information and just wanted to get it out there now in one chunk. ‘It’s a psychotic delusional disorder. There are, like, thousands of people across the world who think it’s happening to them. They call themselves targeted individuals. TIs. And they all chat to each other on the internet all the time and the more they chat the more they believe it’s real and that’s what’s really made thin
gs worse. Not my mum’s illness, but her talking to loads of other mad people about it.’

  ‘So, really, if it hadn’t been me she’d fixated on, it might have been someone else?’

  ‘I guess.’

  He nodded and narrowed his eyes at her. Then he sighed. He looked vaguely relieved. ‘You can’t carry on like this on your own, Jenna, you know that, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘Seriously. It’s totally fine. I don’t need anything. I know how to handle it.’

  ‘What did the police say?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘They just asked a load of questions and went.’

  He nodded and held the knuckles of one hand briefly to his mouth while he formed his next comment.

  ‘Well, listen: for now, Jenna, at the very least, please, please will you tell your dad about what happened on Friday? Please?’

  ‘But there’s no reason for him to know. He’s got enough on his plate. He’s running a shop and looking after my brother.’

  Mr Fitzwilliam sighed. ‘You know, Jenna, I could just call him in. It would probably be the right thing to do. I can see that you’re a very capable young woman. And I can see that you are very keen to cope with this situation by yourself. But I want to know that someone else is looking out for you. And that person should be your father. Will you promise me, Jenna, that you’ll call him?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Today?’

  She nodded again. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I guess.’

  ‘Good.’ He smiled. ‘And meanwhile, remember: I’m here. Whatever you need. Whenever you need it. OK?’

  He threw her a look. It was supposed to be cosy and reassuring but it just looked creepy to her. She tugged her rucksack on to her lap and got quickly to her feet.