Watching You Read online

  JM: Josephine Louise Mullen.

  POLICE: And your address?

  JM: 14 Melville Heights, Bristol BS12 2GG.

  POLICE: Thank you. And can you tell us about your relationship with Tom Fitzwilliam?

  JM: He lives two doors down. He gave me a lift into work sometimes. We chatted if we bumped into each other on the street. He knew my brother and my sister-in-law.

  POLICE: Thank you. And could you now tell us where you were last night between approximately 7 p.m. and 9 p.m.

  JM: I was at the Bristol Harbour Hotel.

  POLICE: And were you there alone?

  JM: Mostly.

  POLICE: Mostly? Who else was there with you?

  JM: [Silence.]

  POLICE: Ms Mullen? Please could you tell us who else was there? At the Bristol Harbour Hotel?

  JM: But he was only there for a few minutes. Nothing happened. It was just …

  POLICE: Ms Mullen. The name of this person. Please.

  JM: It was … it was Tom Fitzwilliam.

  2

  6 January

  Joey saw Tom Fitzwilliam again a few days later. This time it was in the village. He was coming out of the bookshop, wearing a suit and talking to someone on the phone. He said goodbye to the person on the phone, pressed his finger to the screen to end the call and slid the phone into his jacket pocket. She saw his face as he turned left out of the shop. It held the residue of a smile. His upturned mouth made a different shape of his face. It turned up more on one side then the other. An eyebrow followed suit. A hand went to his silver-tipped hair as the wind blew it asunder. The smile turned to a grimace and made another shape of his face again. His jaw hardened. His forehead bunched. A slow blink of his eyes. And then he was walking towards his black car parked across the street, a blip blip of the locking system, a flash of lights, long legs folded away into the driver’s side. Gone.

  But a shadow of him lingered on in her consciousness.

  Alfie had been a crush. For months she’d watched him around the resort, made up stories about him based on tiny scraps of information she’d collected from people who’d interacted with him. No one knew where he was from. Someone thought he might have been a writer. Someone else said he was a vet. He’d had long hair then, dark red, tied back in a ponytail or sometimes a man-bun. He had a small red beard and a big fit body, a tattoo of a climbing rose all the way up his trunk, another of a pair of wings across his shoulders. He often had a guitar hanging from a strap around his chest. He rarely wore a top when he wasn’t working. He had a smile for everyone, a swagger and a cheek.

  In Joey’s imagination, Alfie Butter was kind of otherworldly; she ascribed to him a sort of supernatural persona, and tried to imagine what they would talk about if their paths were ever to cross. Then one day he’d stopped her at the back of the resort next to the laundry and his blue, blue eyes had locked on to hers and he’d smiled and said, ‘Joey, right?’

  She’d said yes, she was Joey.

  ‘Someone tells me you’re a Bristol girl. Is that right?’

  Yes, she’d said, yes, that was right.

  ‘Whereabouts?’

  ‘Frenchay?’

  He’d punched the air. ‘I knew it!’ he’d said. ‘I just knew it! You know when you get that feeling in your gut, and someone said you were from Bristol and I just thought Frenchay girl. Got to be. And I was right! I’m a Frenchay boy!’

  Wow, she’d said, wow. It was a small, small world, she’d told him. Which school did you go to?

  And Alfie had turned out to be neither supernatural nor otherworldly, a vet nor a poet, nor even very good at playing the guitar, but spectacularly good in bed and a very good hugger. He’d had her name tattooed on his ankle two weeks after their first encounter. He said he’d never felt like this about anyone, in his life, ever. He slung his heavy arm across her shoulder whenever they walked together. He pulled her on to his lap whenever she walked past him. He said he’d follow her to the ends of the earth. Then, when her mother died and she said she wanted to come home, he said he’d follow her back to Bristol. He’d proposed to her after she returned from her mother’s funeral. They’d married two weeks after that.

  But what do you do with an unattainable crush once it’s yours to keep? What does it become? Should there perhaps be a word to describe it? Because that’s the thing with getting what you want: all that yearning and dreaming and fantasising leaves a great big hole that can only be filled with more yearning and dreaming and fantasising. And maybe that’s what lay at the root of Joey’s sudden and unexpected obsession with Tom Fitzwilliam. Maybe he arrived at the precise moment that the hole in Joey’s interior fantasy life needed filling.

  And if it hadn’t been him, maybe it would have been someone else instead.

  3

  23 January

  Tom Fitzwilliam was fifty-one and he was, according to Jack, a lovely, lovely man.

  Not that Joey had asked her brother for his opinion of their neighbour – it had been offered, spontaneously, apropos of an article in the local newspaper about an award that the local school had just won.

  ‘Oh, look,’ he said, the paper spread open in front of him on the kitchen table. ‘That’s our neighbour, lives two doors down.’ He tapped a photo with his forefinger. ‘Tom Fitzwilliam. Lovely, lovely man.’

  Joey peered over Jack’s shoulder, a half-washed saucepan in one hand, a washing-up sponge in the other. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’ve seen him, I think. Black car?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. He’s the headmaster of our local state school. A “superhead”.’ He made quotes in the air with his fingers. ‘Brought in after a bad Ofsted. His school just won something and now everyone loves him.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ said Joey. ‘Do you know him, then?’

  ‘Yeah. Kind of. He and his wife were very helpful when we were having the building works done. They used to send us texts during the day to let us know what was happening and calmed down some other not-so-nice neighbours who were getting their knickers in a knot about dust and noise. Nice people.’

  Joey shrugged. Jack thought everyone was nice.

  ‘So.’ He closed the paper and folded it in half. ‘How did the interview go?’

  Joey slung the tea towel over the side of the sink. ‘It was OK.’

  She’d applied for a job at the Melville, the famous boutique hotel and bar in the village: front-of-house manager. The pleasant woman interviewing her could tell the moment she walked in that she was not fit for purpose and Joey had made no effort to convince her otherwise.

  ‘Glorified receptionist,’ she said now. ‘Plus four night shifts a week. No thank you.’

  She didn’t look at Jack, didn’t want to witness his reaction to yet more evidence that his little sister was a total loser. She had quite wanted the job; the hotel was beautiful, the owner was nice and the pay was good. The problem was that she couldn’t actually see herself in the job. The problem was … well, the problem was her. She was nearly twenty-seven. In three years’ time she would be thirty. She was a married woman. But for some reason, she still felt like a child.

  ‘Fair enough,’ he said, turning the pages of the newspaper mechanically. ‘I’m sure something will come up, eventually.’

  ‘Bound to,’ she said, her heart not reaching her words.

  Then, ‘Jack, are you OK about me and Alfie being here? Like, really?’

  She watched her brother roll his eyes good-naturedly. ‘Joey. For God’s sake. How many times do I have to tell you? I love having you here. And Alfie too. It’s a pleasure.’

  ‘What about Rebecca, though? Are you sure she’s not regretting it?’

  ‘She’s fine, Joey. We’re both fine. It’s all good.’

  ‘Do you promise?’

  ‘Yes, Joey. I promise.’

  Joey got a job three days later. It was a terrible, terrible job, but it was a job. She was now a party coordinator at a notoriously rough soft play centre in the city called Whackadoo. The unifor
m was an acid-yellow polo shirt with red pull-on trousers. The pay was reasonable and the hours were fine. The manager was a big, butch woman with a crew cut called Dawn to whom Joey had taken an instant liking. It could all have been worse, of course it could. Anything could always be worse. But not much.

  All employees of Whackadoo were required to spend their first week on the floor. ‘Nobody gets to sit in an office here until they’ve cleaned the toilets halfway through a party for thirty eight-year-old boys,’ Dawn had said, a grim twinkle in her eye.

  ‘Can’t be any worse than cleaning vomit and Jägerbombs off the bar after a fourteen-hour stag party,’ Joey had replied.

  ‘Probably not,’ Dawn had conceded. ‘Probably not. Can you start tomorrow?’

  Joey stopped in the village on her way home from the interview and ordered herself a large gin and tonic in the cosy bar of the Melville Hotel. It was early for gin and tonic. The man sitting two tables away was still having breakfast. She told herself it was celebratory but in reality, she needed something to blunt the edges of her terror and self-loathing.

  Whackadoo.

  Windowless cavern of unthinkable noise and bad smells. Breeze-block hellhole of spilt drinks and tantrums, where a child shat in the ball pond at least once a day apparently. She shuddered and knocked back another glug of gin. The man eating his breakfast looked at her curiously. She blinked at him imperiously.

  You could see the painted houses from down here, a bolt of running colour across the tops of the narrow Georgian windows. There was the cobalt blue of Jack and Rebecca’s house, the canary yellow of Tom Fitzwilliam’s. It was another world up there. Rarefied. And she, a half-formed woman working in a soft play centre: what on earth was she doing up there?

  She looked down at her bitten nails, her scuffed boots, her old chinos. She thought about the elderly pants she was wearing, the decrepit bra. She knew she was two months past a timely trip to the hairdresser. She was drinking gin alone in a hotel bar on a Thursday at not even midday. And then she thought of herself only five months ago, tanned and lean, clutching her bouquet, the talcum sand between her toes, the sun shining down from a vivid blue sky, standing at Alfie’s side; young, beautiful, in paradise, in love. ‘You are the loveliest thing I have ever seen,’ her boss had said, wiping a tear from her own cheek. ‘So young, so perfect, so pure.’

  She switched on her phone and scrolled through her gallery until she got to the wedding photos. For a few minutes she wallowed in the memories of the happiest day of her life, until she heard the bar door open and looked up.

  It was him.

  Tom Fitzwilliam.

  The head teacher.

  He pulled off his suit jacket and draped it across the back of a chair, resting a leather shoulder bag on the seat. Then, slowly, in a way that suggested either self-consciousness or a complete lack of self-consciousness, he sauntered to the bar. The barman appeared to know him. He made him a lime and soda, and told him he’d bring his food to the table when it was ready.

  Joey watched him walking back to his table. He wore a blue shirt with a subtle check. The bottom buttons, she noticed, strained very gently against a slight softness and Joey felt a strange wave of pleasure, a sense of excitement about the unapologetic contours of his body, the suggestion of meals enjoyed and worries forgotten about over a bottle of decent wine. She found herself wanting to slide her fingers between those tensed buttons, to touch, just for a moment, the soft flesh beneath.

  The thought shocked her, left her slightly winded. She turned her attention to her gin and tonic, aware that her glass was virtually empty, aware that it was time for her to leave. But she didn’t want to move. She couldn’t move. She was suddenly stultified by a terrible and unexpected longing. She turned slightly to catch a glimpse of his feet, his ankles, the rumpled cowl of grey cotton sock, the worn hide of black leather lace-up shoes, an inch of pale, bare flesh just there, between the sock and the hem of the trousers she’d been aware of him slowly tugging up before sitting down.

  She was in the hard grip of a shocking physical attraction. She turned her eyes away from his feet and back to her empty glass and then to the wedding photos on her phone, which had only 2 per cent charge left and was about to die. But she couldn’t, she simply couldn’t sit here staring into an empty gin glass. Not now. Not in front of this man.

  She was aware of him taking papers out of his shoulder bag, shuffling them around, pulling a pen from somewhere, holding it airily away from him in one hand, clicking and unclicking, clicking and unclicking, bringing it down to make a mark on the paper, putting it away from him again. Click, click. One foot bouncing slightly against the fulcrum of the other. She would leave when the waiter came with his food. That was what she’d do. When he was distracted.

  The screen of her phone turned black, finally giving up its ghost. She slipped it into her handbag and stared at the floor until finally the barman disappeared at the sound of a buzzer somewhere behind him and reappeared a moment later with some kind of sandwich on a wooden board arranged alongside a glossy hillock of herbs and curly leaves. She saw Tom move paperwork out of the way, smiling generously at the barman.

  ‘Thank you,’ she heard him say as she picked up her jacket and squeezed her way between her chair and the table, almost knocking it over in her keenness to leave without being noticed. ‘That looks lovely,’ he was saying as she crossed the bar, her heavy boots making a loud knocking sound against the dove-grey floor tiles, the strap of her shoulder bag refusing to sit properly against her shoulder, her trailing jacket knocking over a small display of leaflets about the village farmers’ market as she passed.

  The barman called over, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll pick them up.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  She wrenched open the door and threw herself out on to the street, but not before, for just one flickering second, her eyes had met his and something terrible had passed between them, something that she could only describe as a mutual fascination.

  4

  26 January

  Joey stared at Alfie sitting on the bed, cross-legged, the laptop open and balanced on his knees. His once flowing red locks were short now, growing back from the brutal number two he’d inflicted on himself when they got back to the UK that had made his head look suddenly slightly too small for his body. His lower face was covered in a mulch of four-day stubble. He was wearing a grey vest with deep-cut armholes that showed off most of his tattoos and a pair of elderly Gap underpants. He was huge. A solid brick wall of a man. Even sitting on a slightly fey bed he looked like a Celtic warrior. A Celtic warrior who’d forgotten to get dressed.

  She scrutinised his hard, young man’s body. And then she thought of Tom Fitzwilliam’s soft, grown-up body and she wondered what would happen to Alfie’s hard body as the years passed. Would he turn to fat or to sinew? Would he still be Alfie Butter, crap guitarist, brilliant hugger, hopeless painter and decorator, big-hearted romantic, attentive lover? Or would he be someone else? How could it be possible that she didn’t know? That no one could tell her? That she would just have to trust in the universe to bring everything to some kind of satisfactory conclusion? How could it be?

  Joey felt her brain swell and roil. She thought of her nasty Whackadoo uniform, the smell of fried nuggets and boys’ toilets. She thought of Tom Fitzwilliam, the click, click, click of his ballpoint pen. She thought of the feeling that had enveloped her when he was in the bar, the feeling that had taken her the most part of the afternoon and evening to purge. She thought of her mother, the lack of her, the loss and she felt, suddenly, dreadfully, out of control.

  ‘Are you OK?’ said Alfie, looking at her curiously.

  ‘Mhm.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, making herself smile. ‘Sure. Possibly having a tiny, baby, shit-job-missing-Ibiza crisis, but nothing worse than that.’

  ‘Come here,’ he said, big freckled arms spread apart, ‘I’ll hug it away for you.’

&nbs
p; She acquiesced although part of her wanted to shout, A hug is not always the right answer, you know. But as she felt his arms around her, his warm breath against the crown of her head, she thought that it might not be an answer, but it was certainly better than yet another question.

  She stopped at the corner shop on her way home the next day. It was the end of the first day of her new job and she felt rubbed raw by the rudeness of people, the loudness of children, the lack of sunlight, the sheer length of the day. She wanted to go home and shower and put on joggers and a hoodie and drink a cup of tea. But mainly she wanted wine. Lots of wine.

  As she turned into the booze aisle of the shop she saw Tom Fitzwilliam’s wife. What was her name again? Jack had told her but she couldn’t remember. Something beginning with an ‘N’, she thought. She had her hand in the chilled drinks cabinet, about to pull out a bottle of cold mineral water. She was flushed, her hair sweaty and tied back, wearing shiny black leggings and a black fitted top that revealed a slightly sinewy, over-worked-out physique. On her wrist was a lipstick-pink fitness tracker. On her feet were bright white trainers.

  She turned slightly as she became aware of Joey’s eyes upon her. She smiled coolly, then took the bottle to the till at the other side of the shop. Joey could hear her from here, chatting to the cashier. She was well spoken with a slightly northern slant to some of her words. She told the cashier that she’d just started running again, a new year’s resolution after a broken ankle the year before had put her out of action. It was wonderful, she said, to be pounding the tarmac again. She always felt out of sorts when she wasn’t running regularly. Two miles a day cleared out the cobwebs, she said, got the cogs turning.

  Joey peered around the corner of the cereal aisle to get a better look at the woman Tom Fitzwilliam had chosen to marry. She looked weightless, sprite-like. Everything about her was delicate, sinuous, as though she’d been drawn with sharpened pencils. Joey was small, but Tom’s wife was doll-like, with hair as fine as gossamer and a button nose. She imagined those tiny hands grasping his soft waist. She wondered if he’d ever been unfaithful to her. She wondered how often they had sex. She imagined, suddenly, this tiny child’s toy of a woman astride her big, handsome husband, her head tipped back.