by Alice Feeney
“Now, I know you’ve probably been told not to talk to strangers, and that there are some bad people in the world, and that’s good if you have, because it’s true. But that’s also why I can’t leave you here on your own. It’s getting late, the shops are closed, the streets are empty, and if something were to happen to you, well, I’d never forgive myself. My name is Maggie, what’s yours?”
“Ciara.”
“Hello, Ciara. It’s nice to meet you.” She shakes my hand. “There, now we’re not strangers anymore.” I smile; she’s funny and I like her. “So, why don’t you come with me, and if we can’t find your mummy, we can call the police and they can take you home. Does that sound all right with you?” I think about it. It’s an awful long walk back home, and it is getting dark already. I take the nice lady’s hand and walk beside her, even though I know home is back the other way.
Seven
London, 2017
Jack takes my hand in his. He stares at me across the hotel restaurant table, and it feels as though everyone in the room is watching us. It’s impossible not to form a relationship offscreen when you spend this many months filming together. I know he’s enjoying this moment, and his touch feels more intimate than it should. I’m scared of what is about to happen, but it’s far too late for that now, too late to pretend we both don’t know what happens next. I can see people staring in our direction, people who know who we are, and I think he senses my apprehension, gently squeezing my fingers in silent reassurance. There’s really no need. When I make my mind up about something, it’s almost impossible for anyone to change it, including me.
He pays the bill with cash, then stands, leaving the table without another word. I wipe my mouth with the napkin from my lap, even though I’ve hardly eaten a thing. I think about Ben for the briefest of moments, instantly wishing that I hadn’t, because the thought of him is hard to extinguish once inside my head. I can’t remember the last time Ben took me for a romantic meal or made me feel attractive. But then, the present is always a superior time; looking down its nose at the past, turning away from the temptations of the future. I ignore the fear trying to hold me back and follow Jack. Despite my hesitation, I always knew that I would when the time came.
He gets into the hotel lift up ahead of me. The doors start to close but I don’t run to catch up, I don’t need to. The metal jaws slide open again, right on time, to swallow me whole as I step inside. We don’t speak in the lift, just stand side by side. We’ve evolved as a species to hide our lust, like a dirty secret, even though finding other people attractive is exactly what we were designed to do. Still, I’ve never done anything like this before.
I’m aware of other people in the lift around us, aware of being watched. With each floor we pass I feel more anxious about our final destination. I always knew this was going to happen, even the first time we met. My heart changes speed inside my ears, I’m breathing too fast and I worry that he can tell how scared I am of what we’re about to do. His hand brushes mine as we step out onto the seventh floor, by accident I think. I wonder if he might hold it, but he doesn’t. He is not here to offer romance. That isn’t what this is and we both know that.
He slots the key card into the door, and for a moment I think it won’t work. Then I hope it won’t, something to buy me just a little bit more time. I don’t want to do this, which makes me wonder why I am. I seem to have spent my life doing things I don’t want to.
Inside the room, he takes off his jacket, flinging it onto the bed, as though he is angry with me, as though I have done something wrong. His handsome face turns to look in my direction, his features twisted into something resembling hate and disgust, as though he is mirroring my own thoughts about myself in this moment, in this room.
“I think we need to have a talk, don’t you? I’m married.” His final two words are like an accusation.
“I know,” I whisper.
He takes a step closer. “And I love my wife.”
“I know.” I’m not here for his love, she can keep that. I look away, but he takes my face in his hands and kisses me. I stand perfectly still, as though I don’t know what to do, and for a moment I worry that I can’t remember how. He is so gentle at first, careful, as though worried he might break me. I close my eyes—it’s easier to do this with them closed—and I kiss him back. He changes gear faster than I was anticipating, his hands sliding down from my cheeks, to my neck, to the dress covering my breasts, his fingertips tracing the outline of my bra beneath the thin cotton.
He stops and pulls away. “Fuck. What the fuck am I doing?”
I try to remember how to breathe. “I know, I’m sorry,” I reply, as though this were all my fault.
“It’s like you’re inside my head—”
“I’m sorry,” I say, again. “I think about you all the time. I know I shouldn’t, and I promise I’ve tried so hard not to, but I can’t help it—” My eyes fill with tears. He’s at least ten years older than me, and I feel like an inexperienced child.
“It’s okay. This, whatever this is, is not your fault. I think about you too.”
I stop crying when he says that, as though the latest sentence to have spilled from his mouth changes everything. He lifts my chin, turning my face to look up at his own, which my eyes search, trying to determine whether there is any truth in his words. Then I reach up to kiss him, my eyes offering an unspoken invitation, and this time he doesn’t hesitate. This time, our lives outside of this moment are buried and forgotten.
Jack’s hands move down to the front of my dress, expert fingers removing me from it, revealing the black lace of my bra underneath. He lifts me onto the desk, knocking the room-service menu and hotel phone to the floor. Before I know what is happening, he’s on top of me, pinning my arms down, forcing his body between my legs.
“And, cut,” says the director. “Thanks, guys, I think we got it.”
Eight
Galway, 1987
Maggie held my hand all the way back to the cottage on the seafront. She held it so tight, it hurt a little bit some of the time. I think she was just afraid I might run away again, and that a bad person might find me like she said. But the only running I did was to keep up with her walking. She’s a fast walker and I’m tired now. She kept looking around the whole time, as though she was scared, but we didn’t pass any other people at all along the back streets, good or bad.
The cottage is very pretty, just like Maggie. It has a smart blue door and white bricks; it’s nothing like our house at home. She doesn’t have much stuff, and when I ask why not, she says this is just a holiday cottage. I’ve never been on holiday, so that’s why I didn’t know about things like that. She’s busy putting clothes in a suitcase now, and just when I think she might call the police, she decides to make us some tea and a snack instead, which is nice. On the walk here I told her all about how my brother said we can’t afford to eat, so she probably thinks I’m hungry.
“Would you like a slice of gingerbread cake?” she asks from the little kitchen. I’m sitting in the biggest armchair I’ve ever seen. I had to climb it just to sit on it, like a mountain made of cushions.
“Yes,” I say, feeling pleased with myself, sitting in the nice chair about to eat cake with the nice lady.
She appears in the doorway. The smile that was always on her face before has vanished. “Yes, what?”
I don’t know what she means at first, but then have an idea. “Yes, please?”
Her smile comes back and I am glad.
She puts the cake down in front of me, along with a glass of milk, then puts on the television for me to watch while she goes to use the phone in the other room. I thought she had forgotten about calling the police, and now I feel sad. I like it here, and I want to stay a bit longer. I can’t hear what she is saying over the noise of Zig and Zag on the TV, she’s turned the volume up very loud. When I’ve finished the cake, I lick my fingers, then I drink the milk. It tastes chalky, but I’m thirsty, so I finish the whole gla
ss anyway.
I feel sleepy when she comes back in the room.
“Now then, I’ve spoken to your daddy, and I’m afraid he says that what your brother told you is true; there isn’t enough food for you at home anymore. I don’t want you to start your worrying again, so I’ve said to your daddy that you can stay here with me for a few days, and then I’ll take you back home once he’s sorted himself out. Does that sound grand?”
I think about the TV, and the cake, and the comfy chair. I think it might be nice to stay here for a little while, even though I will miss my brother a lot and my daddy a bit.
“Yes,” I say.
“Yes, what?”
“Yes … please … and thank you.”
Only when she leaves the room again do I wonder how she spoke to my daddy when we don’t have a phone at home.
Nine
London, 2017
I check my phone again before getting out of the car. I’ve tried to call my agent three times now, but it just keeps going to voice mail. I even called the office, but his assistant said Tony was unavailable, and she used that tone people reserve for when they know something you don’t. Or perhaps I’m just being paranoid. With everything else that is happening, I suppose that’s possible. I’ll try again tomorrow.
The house is in complete darkness as I trudge up the path. I keep thinking about Jack and the way he kissed me on set. It felt so … real. I wear the idea of him like a blanket, and it makes me feel safe and warm, the cloak of fantasy always more reliable than cold reality. But lust is only ever a temporary cure for loneliness. I close the front door behind me, leaving longing back in the shadows, out on the street. I switch on the lights of real life, finding them a little bright; they permit me to see more than I want to. The house is too quiet and too empty, like a discarded shell.
My husband is still gone.
I’m instantly dragged back in time, reliving the precise moment when his jealousy climaxed and my patience expired, generating the perfect marital storm.
I remember what he did to me. I remember everything that happened that night.
It’s a strange feeling when buried memories float to the surface without warning. Like having all the air sucked out of your lungs, then being dropped from a great height; the perpetual sense of falling combined with the unavoidable knowledge that you’re going to hit something hard.
I feel colder than I did a moment ago.
The silence seems to have grown louder, and I look around, my eyes frantically searching the empty space.
I feel like I’m being watched.
The sensation you get when someone is staring at you is inexplicable, but also very real. I feel frozen to the spot at first, trying, but failing, to reassure myself that it’s just my overactive imagination, understandably in overdrive after the last few days. Then adrenaline ignites my fight-or-flight response, and I hurry around the house, pulling all the curtains and blinds, as though they are fabric shields. Better safe than spied on.
The stalker first entered my life a couple of years ago, not long after Ben and I got together. It started with emails, but then she appeared outside our old house a few times, and delivered a series of handwritten cards when she thought nobody was home. Someone broke in when I was away in L.A., and Ben was convinced it was her. It was one of the main reasons I agreed to move here, to a house I hadn’t even seen, except online. Ben took care of everything, so that we could get away from her. What if she found me? Found us?
The stalker always wrote the same thing:
I know who you are.
I always pretended not to know what that meant.
I feel lost. I don’t know what to do, how to feel, or how to act.
Should I call the police again? Ask for an update and tell them the things I didn’t last time, or just sit here and wait? You can never predict how you will behave when life goes nonlinear; you don’t know until it happens to you. People are capable of all kinds of surprising things. I’m dealing with the situation as best I can, without letting others down any more than I already have. I know I must be missing something, not just my husband, but I don’t know what. What I do know is that the only person I can rely on to get me through this is me. I don’t have anyone left to hold my hand. The thought triggers a memory, and my mind rewinds to when I was a little girl; someone always liked to hold my hand back then.
Something very bad happened when I was a child.
I’ve never spoken about it with anyone, even after all these years; some secrets should never be shared. The series of childhood doctors I was made to see afterwards said that I had something called transient global amnesia. They explained that my brain had blocked out certain memories because it deemed them too stressful or upsetting to remember, and that the condition would most likely stay with me for life. I was just a child, and I didn’t take their diagnosis too seriously back then. I knew that I had only been pretending not to remember what happened. I haven’t given it too much thought in recent years. Until now.
I think I would remember if I had emptied and closed our bank account. I think a lot of things; the problem is that I don’t know.
I keep thinking about the stalker.
I can’t seem to stop my mind replaying the first time I saw her with my own eyes, standing outside our old home. I heard the letter box rattle and thought it was the postman. It wasn’t. A lonely-looking vintage postcard was facedown on the doormat. There was no stamp. It had been hand-delivered, and I remember picking it up, my hands trembling as I read the then-familiar spidery black handwriting scrawled across the back.
I know who you are.
I opened the door and she was right there, standing across the street, looking back at me. I thought I was going to throw up. I’d never seen her before. Ben had, but until that moment she was still little more than a phantom to me. A ghost I didn’t believe in. The previous emails, and then postcards, hadn’t scared me too much. But seeing her in the flesh was terrifying because I thought I recognized her. She was some distance away, her face mostly covered with a scarf and sunglasses, but she was dressed just like me, and in that moment, I thought it was her. It wasn’t. It can’t have been.
She ran away when she saw me. Ben came home early and we called the police.
I should be more worried than I am about my husband.
What is wrong with me? Am I losing my mind?
It feels as if something very bad is happening again, something a lot worse than before.
Ten
Galway, 1987
I feel lost when I wake up. I don’t know where I am.
It’s dark and cold. I have a tummyache and feel a bit sick, just like I do when my brother takes me out on Daddy’s fishing boat. I reach out into the darkness, my fingers expecting to meet my bedroom wall, or the little side table made out of driftwood from the bay, but my fingers don’t feel that. Instead they touch something cold, like metal, all around me. I start to panic, but I’m very tired, so tired I realize that I must be dreaming. I close my eyes and decide that if I still don’t know where I am when I’ve counted to fifty inside my head, then I’ll let myself cry. The last number I remember counting is forty-eight.
The next time I open my eyes, I’m in the back of a car. It’s not my father’s car, I know that without having to think about it too much because we don’t have one anymore. He sold it to pay the electricity bill when the lights went out. The seats of the car I’m in are made of red-colored leather, and my face and arms seem to be stuck to it when I first wake up—I have to peel them off.
I stare at the back of the head of the person driving, before remembering the nice lady called Maggie. Then I sit up properly and look out the window, but I still don’t know where I am.
“Where are we going?” I rub the sleep from my eyes, gifts the sandman left behind scratching my cheeks.
“Just a little drive,” says Maggie, smiling at me in the small mirror, which shows a rectangle of her face, even though she is facing the oth
er way.
“Are you taking me back to my daddy’s house?”
“You’re staying with me for a wee while, do you remember? There isn’t enough food for you at your house just now.”
I do remember her saying that; I’m just so tired I forgot.
“Why don’t you have another little sleep, not far to go now. I’ll wake you when we get where we’re going. I have a lovely surprise for you when we get there.”
I lie back down on the red leather seat and close my eyes, but I don’t sleep. Even though I do like surprises, I’m scared and excited all at once. Maggie seems nice, but everything I just saw out the window looked so strange: the houses, the walls, even the signs on the side of the road.
I might be wrong, but it feels like I am a long way from home.
Eleven
London, 2017
I think homes might be a little bit like children; maybe you need to establish a bond as soon as possible to achieve a lasting emotional attachment. Long days on set have meant that this house has been little more than somewhere to sleep at night. I’ve spent the evening searching it for a picture of the man I have been married to for almost two years. I should have been learning my lines for tomorrow, but how can I when everything feels so wrong? I’m left with more questions than concern, unanswered mainly because I daren’t ask them.
I stare down at the only photo of Ben I’ve managed to find: a framed black-and-white picture taken when he was a child. I hate it, I always have; it gives me the creeps. Five-year-old Ben is dressed in a formal suit that looks strange on a boy so young, but it isn’t that. The thing that upsets me is the haunting look on his face, the way his smiling eyes stare out of the picture as though they are following you around the room. The child in the photo doesn’t just look naughty or devious, he looks evil.