Watching You Read online

  ‘I’ve liked you for quite some time,’ he said by way of explanation.

  ‘That seems clear,’ she replied. And then she softened again, and she looked more gently at him and she said, ‘Freddie, are you an Aspie?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Have you got Asperger’s? Are you on the spectrum?’

  ‘What? No. No of course I’m not.’

  ‘I am,’ she said. ‘That’s why I asked you. Because some of the things you say and the way you say them and the way you stand and the way you look and lots of things about you seems like an Aspie.’

  ‘You’ve got Asperger’s?’ he said.

  ‘Yes. Mild. But …’

  He looked at her in awe and wonder as something rushed up through his core, something buried deep under years of denial. The little prep school in Manchester where they’d taken him out of class one day and he’d been observed by a woman with a clipboard and some weird toys and his parents had been called in and he’d sat in the office outside with the lady who worked at the front desk and he’d eaten an apple and they’d come out and they’d looked worried and they’d taken him out for tea and the atmosphere had been wrong and strange and then his mum had said, Your teacher thinks maybe you have a special brain. And his dad had said, No, Nicola, that’s not what she said. She said your brain works in a special way. And his mum said, That’s the same thing, surely. And he’d said, No, not quite. But here’s the thing. They want to give a name to the special way your brain works. They want to call it something. They want to call it Asperger’s, which is the name of an Austrian doctor who noticed lots of children with the same special way of dealing with the world. But Mummy and I, well, we don’t think you need a name for the way your brain works because your brain is just the most remarkable thing. All brains are remarkable, but yours is more remarkable than most and I think you should just focus on what that brain of yours is capable of and not get hung up on labels and names. So, you may hear people bandying words about over the years. You may see things on the TV about people with Asperger’s and think they’re talking about you and get worried. But you mustn’t worry. Because Mummy and I are not worried. We just love you and think you’re brilliant. And you will always be so much more than a label. OK?

  He remembered his dad stroking his hair and his cheek and under his chin and he remembered thinking that clearly names for things were to be avoided when you were clever, as he was. And he’d barely thought of it again. Until now. And now there was a beautiful girl standing in front of him who’d been given a name for the way she was and she was proud to use it.

  ‘I think I do,’ he found himself saying. ‘I’m fairly sure in fact that I do have Asperger’s. But I don’t really talk about it because it is probably the least interesting thing about me.’

  Romola laughed. ‘That’s funny,’ she said, ‘because it’s the most interesting thing about me.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes. Definitely.’

  ‘I’d love to find out more about your Asperger’s.’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  They both fell silent for a moment and then Romola put out her hands for the gift. ‘I’ll take this,’ she said. ‘And I’ll think about the dance. Think about if I want a date or a chaperone. And thank you for the skirt. It really suits me.’

  She didn’t wait for him to reply and she didn’t say goodbye. She simply turned and walked away.

  52

  Jenna saw Freddie Fitzwilliam about to turn up the hill to Melville Heights. Even from here she could see there was something different about him, something beyond the haircut. She crossed the road at the zebra and called out to him.

  He turned and put his hand up to her in some kind of greeting.

  ‘Are you busy?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I am.’ He looked at her and she saw for the first time in his eyes a glimmer of something commanding; something of his father.

  She said, ‘Can we talk somewhere?’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Yes. Now.’

  ‘Well, you can come to my house.’ He glanced up at the painted houses in the distance. ‘If you like?’

  ‘Will your dad be there?’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘He never gets home till eight. At the earliest.’

  ‘Will your mum mind?’

  ‘No. She’ll be pleased that I know someone well enough to ask them to our house. You know what mothers are like.’

  She looked up towards the houses, the pale, gold eyes of them in the afternoon gloom. She’d never been inside a Melville Heights house before. Her mother had; she’d had a best friend at primary school – the family had long since moved away – who’d lived in the pink house. Her mother had spent dozens of afternoons up there, she said, kneeling on a window seat and staring down into the village, making up stories about the people they saw below, small as dolls’ house figures.

  ‘If you’re sure?’ she said.

  ‘I’m sure,’ he replied.

  Freddie’s house was cold. She pulled her padded coat closer around her as she followed Freddie down a wide, tiled hallway towards a kitchen at the back.

  ‘Where’s your mum?’

  He shrugged and dropped his school bag and coat on to a settle. ‘Maybe in bed. She says she has flu.’

  ‘Oh,’ she replied. ‘Poor thing.’

  ‘She’s putting it on,’ he said, somewhat harshly. ‘Attention-seeking.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said again.

  ‘Do you want to take off your coat? I’ll make us some tea. If you like tea?’

  ‘I like tea.’

  ‘Cool.’

  She left her coat and bag next to his and followed him into the kitchen.

  ‘English Breakfast. Camomile. Peppermint. Earl Grey. Rooibos.’

  She had no idea what the last word he’d said was but nodded and said, ‘Just normal tea. Please.’

  He pulled an English Breakfast teabag from a box and dropped it in a mug. He asked her if she wanted milk. She said yes. Divested of her coat, she was even colder. She noticed a window in the glass extension at the back of the kitchen, held closed with string. She could see the tail of the string wagging from side to side in the draught.

  ‘You should get that window fixed,’ she said. ‘It’s freezing in here.’

  He glanced at her. ‘My father likes cold houses. He says it keeps the mind focused.’

  ‘Just keeps the mind focused on how cold it is,’ she said, tucking her hands into her jumper sleeves and shivering.

  She watched him make her tea. His movements were very measured, almost robotic. He took the brewed teabags from the mugs without squeezing them dry, leaving a trail of tea splashes in their wake as he transferred them to a bin.

  ‘Did you ask the girl?’ she started. ‘To the ball?’

  ‘I did ask her. Yes. I asked her just now. About thirty-five minutes ago. She didn’t say yes. But she didn’t say no. She has Asperger’s.’

  Jenna nodded politely and took the mug of tea from him. More tea splashed on to the table and she mopped it up with the cuffs of her jumper. She didn’t know what to say about the Asperger’s so she didn’t say anything. She wondered if Freddie had Asperger’s too, but decided it would be rude to ask.

  ‘So,’ he said, sitting alongside her, one thin leg crossed high upon the other. ‘What was it you wanted to talk to me about? Did you want to ask me something about boys?’

  She laughed, gently. ‘Er, no. Not exactly. No. It was …’ She paused. How could she broach this? In his house? With his mother upstairs, ill in bed? She sipped her tea and then put it down. In a very quiet voice she said, ‘I wanted to talk about your father.’

  His whole demeanour changed in a flash. He uncrossed his legs and leaned in towards her, his eyes wide with concern. ‘What about my father?’

  She shouldn’t do this. She should thank Freddie for the tea, collect her bag and coat from the hallway and go. But then she
thought of what she’d seen earlier: Mr Fitzwilliam’s hand on Bess’s arm, calling her his girl. She thought of the man in the black BMW who’d collected Bess from Jed’s house last week. She thought of Bess and Mr Fitzwilliam in the village, chatting in the dark of night, in the hotel in Seville, sitting on the landing. She thought of the love hearts Bess used to draw on Mr Fitzwilliam’s face, Bess crying in the toilets because she thought she was pregnant. She thought about the way that Mr Fitzwilliam sometimes looked at her, Jenna, the intensity of his gaze, the velvet of his voice, the softness of his jumpers, the well-placed box of tissues, the uninvited intimacy of their encounters. And then she thought, yet again, of the woman in the Lake District who had hated him so much and a voice screamed out somewhere deep inside her saying this is all wrong, wrong, wrong! And she looked straight into Freddie Fitzwilliam’s eyes and she said, ‘Do you think he likes young girls?’

  She watched for his reaction, her bottom lip pinched between her teeth. She prepared herself for anger, or hurt. But instead she saw his face open into an expression of intrigue and he said, ‘No. Do you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she whispered.

  Freddie got up then, walked across the kitchen and closed the door. Then he returned and sat next to her again. ‘Has he done something to you?’ he asked.

  ‘Me? No.’

  ‘Then who?’

  ‘My friend. Bess Ridley.’ And then she told him everything, right from the beginning. He nodded as she talked and looked oddly unsurprised, almost as though he knew what she was going to say before she said it. ‘I suspected’, he said, when she told him about the hotel-landing incident in Seville, ‘that there was an ulterior motive for him going on that trip.’

  When she’d finished talking he leaned back against the table and breathed out into his cheeks. ‘God,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘This must be really hard for you. I can see that. This is your dad we’re talking about.’

  ‘I love my father,’ said Freddie. ‘In many ways he’s one of the greatest men I know. But in many others …’

  Jenna waited for his next words, alarmed by the thought of what they might imply.

  ‘I have no idea if he likes young girls. But I think maybe he hurts my mother,’ he said.

  Jenna flinched.

  ‘Sometimes,’ he began slowly, very carefully, ‘I hear things at night. From their room. Really weird, like thumps, and hard whispering, and it suddenly goes really quiet and then sometimes I’ll hear something that sounds like someone throwing up and then the next day, quite often, my mum wears a polo neck or a scarf or has bruises on her wrists and looks really ill and then she stops running and stops smiling and this happened a few days ago and she has a huge bruise on her neck which she will not talk about. And so, although I think my father is a great man I also, at the exact same time, think he may be one of the worst men I know. And I want to know, in a way; I want to know a truth-based bad fact about him so that I can properly decide what I think. Because it’s hard having two opinions, two types of feeling, both at the same time. I would prefer just to have one.’

  Jenna thought suddenly of Bess wincing when she went to hug her in the toilets the other day.

  ‘Have you ever asked your mother?’ she asked. ‘Have you ever asked her about your dad? About the bruises?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Freddie. ‘But my mum thinks my dad’s perfect. He’s all she cares about. She loves me – but she cares more about him. All the food in our house is for him. It’s all just food that he likes. The heating is off for him, because he doesn’t like being warm. Even though I really like being warm. We never go on holiday, because he doesn’t like holidays. Even though I really do. But that doesn’t matter. He is the only person in our house that matters. My mum would never say anything bad about my dad. Ever.’

  Jenna suddenly wanted to hold his hand, put an arm across his shoulder. But she had no idea how he would react. She wondered if maybe he was going to cry, but instead he looked up at her and said, ‘So don’t worry about saying bad things about my dad. I can take it. I really can.’

  They fell silent for a moment and Jenna stared out towards the garden.

  ‘You know,’ Freddie said, ‘my mum was a student at my dad’s school. He was an English teacher there. He says they didn’t meet until my mum was nineteen, but it makes you wonder, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Do you think maybe there was something going on between them, then? When she was still a student?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘It’s possible. I sometimes think …’ He paused and rubbed his fingertips over his lips. ‘I sometimes think I don’t know either of them at all. And there’s another thing.’ He lowered his voice again. ‘My mum, the other day she said something interesting. I was asking her about the angry woman at the lake and she said …’ and then he broke into an incredibly convincing impersonation of what she assumed was his mother’s voice: ‘Maybe he had to expel her daughter or maybe she wasn’t pleased with her last report. You know how over-sensitive some parents can be. So obviously she knows more than she’s letting on about who she was and what was happening.’

  Jenna’s eyes widened. ‘Did she really say that?’

  ‘Yes. I swear.’

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I bet we could find something on the internet about it. Do you know the names of the schools your dad used to teach at?’

  ‘Er, yes. Kind of. At least I know the names of the places he’s lived and could probably remember the names of the schools if I saw them.’

  ‘Have you got a laptop?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. I’m going to get it right now. Wait there. Just wait there – and don’t move.’

  She smiled. ‘I won’t move,’ she said. ‘I promise.’

  He was gone for a minute or two. Jenna didn’t move a muscle, paralysed somehow by the strangeness of being in her head teacher’s kitchen. When he returned he plugged his laptop into the wall behind him and flipped it open.

  ‘Right,’ he said, opening his browser. ‘So, the first place he taught was Burton-on-Trent. That was where he met my mum. So, let’s look up schools there.’

  Jenna turned to face the screen and let Freddie scroll through the results.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘That’s the one. Robert Sutton High. I’ve heard them mention it before.’

  ‘OK. Now search for things about that school with your dad’s name in the search.’

  He did this and they found a long list of newsletters about clubs and awards, local news stories about trips and plays. But nothing to suggest that Mr Fitzwilliam had done anything to make a parent angry enough to hit him.

  ‘Add “Viva”,’ she said.

  He glanced at her. ‘Good thinking,’ he said. ‘Really good thinking.’

  He typed the word Viva into his search terms and pressed find. When they saw the first line of the first search result they both inhaled audibly. They turned to look at each other.

  ‘Oh my God,’ whispered Jenna.

  Freddie left the cursor blinking next to the result, his finger hovering over the trackpad.

  ‘Go on then,’ said Jenna. ‘Click on it.’

  ‘I’m scared to,’ he said.

  ‘Do you want me to?’

  He nodded and she moved the laptop towards her. She clicked on the link.

  53

  It was a warm afternoon. Warm for March, anyway. Joey unzipped her coat and crossed to the sunny side of the street. She’d just left work and was shopping for clothes. To wear tomorrow. For her appointment to have sex with Tom Fitzwilliam in a hotel room. Which may or may not happen. She hadn’t yet made up her mind. She might go to the hotel and have sex with Tom Fitzwilliam. She might go to the hotel and not have sex with Tom Fitzwilliam. Or she might not go to the hotel at all. A hundred voices shouted in her head all at the same time and all of them were saying something different.

  When her mother had died, the hurricane in Joey’s head had stopped. Stopped com
pletely. It had been there since she was a young girl. It was why she’d failed her GCSEs. It was why she’d been expelled from two schools. It was why she’d never managed monogamy, not even when she was madly in love. It was why her friendships didn’t last the distance. It was why her underwear was tatty and her bank account was empty and her job was shit and her roots were nearly an inch long. Because all the elements of her existence were constantly going round and round her head like a load in a laundrette, churning and turning and presenting themselves to her in a dozen different conflicting ways. Things that felt like a good idea at ten o’clock would seem like the worst idea in the world by ten thirty. Someone once said to her that the key to a happy life was making good decisions. But making good decisions was beyond her because she could always see an infinity of outcomes and all of them seemed good for at least a moment. Yes, she might think about an invitation to a holiday with people she knew she’d hate being on holiday with, yes, why not, maybe it will be OK. And she’d say yes and then it wouldn’t be OK. Because she had no idea how to pay attention to her own instincts, she was incapable of taking control of her own destiny.

  She was, as her mother always used to say to her with affection but also exhaustion, her own worst enemy.

  But after watching her mother die, seeing the last rasps of life leave her broken body, everything had cleared. Her head stopped spinning and everything seemed millpond smooth. She was nearly twenty-seven and it was time to take steps towards a more grown-up existence. She’d married Alfie and handed in her notice at the resort and pictured herself coming home to Bristol to do the sorts of things that grown-up women who lived in Bristol did. She would get a proper job, a nice flat, she’d cook meals, spend time with her father and her brother, go to the gym, make some friends, proper solid friends, not a scrappy, transient stream of gap-year cuties popping pills all night. Maybe she’d join a reading group, book regular appointments at the hairdresser’s, get a car, take the car to a car wash, get a pet, get two pets, buy plants, get manicures, eat salads, have a baby …

  And then she’d come home and realised she couldn’t afford a nice flat, and that without the nice flat there’d be no cooking nice meals, no fun reading group meetings with her fun friends. She’d realised that she wasn’t equipped for a proper job and she wasn’t ready for a baby and she couldn’t afford to go to the gym and she couldn’t afford a car and that making nice, fun, solid friends was harder than it looked. And slowly the hurricane inside her head had started up again. And then Tom Fitzwilliam had appeared above the maelstrom, looming tall and handsome, floodlight bright over the whirling and the wheeling of her thoughts, and it seemed that every minute she spent thinking about Tom was a minute not spent thinking about her crap job and her overgrown roots and her stultifying fear of taking the necessary steps towards a solid and fulfilling adulthood. As long as she was thinking about Tom and his hands at the back of her neck, his body hard against hers in the darkest corner of Melville Heights, as long as she was wondering what colour bra to buy for the sex appointment she may or may not attend tomorrow night, then she didn’t need to think about the baby Alfie wanted to have with her and the fact that she knew, deep down and without a shadow of a doubt, that she should never have married him and that one day, probably quite soon, she was going to take his perfect heart and break it clean in two.