by Lucy Foley
Cue: wry laughter. Cue: an ongoing discussion about privacy, and what we should submit ourselves to and where we should draw the line … and how privacy is the true battleground of the twenty-first century. Cue: an exchange of various weird experiences people have had: private messages from strangers on Instagram, trolling on Twitter, a creepy friend request on Facebook from someone they’ve never met. None of it, however, nearly as strange and special as my own experience.
I will sit back, feeling a little glow. As though I’ve just performed some well-practised routine, and pulled it off with even more sparkle than before. My own little social gymnastics display. Julien will probably be rolling his eyes at this point. He’s heard the whole thing – what, maybe fifty, a hundred, a thousand times before? And he’s never been able to see the interesting, or amusing side of it. He was the one who thought, all those years ago, that I should get the police involved. He used to look annoyed when I brought up the subject, because he thought I shouldn’t make light of something ‘so fucking creepy’, as he put it. Now I think he’s mainly just a bit bored of hearing it.
But the truth I don’t tell anyone, is that I was – am – frightened of my stalker. There are things the stalker knows about me, secret, shameful things, that I have told no one. Not even Katie, not even back then when we were thick as thieves, not Julien.
The stalker knew, for example, that every so often I liked to dabble in a bit of recreational shoplifting at Oxford. Only at times of high stress: exam season, or before a big paper had to be in. My therapist (the only one I’ve told about this little habit) thinks it was a control thing, a bit like my dieting and exercising: something I had power over, and was good at. She thinks it’s in the past, though – she doesn’t know that sometimes I’ll still snaffle the odd lipstick, a pair of cashmere gloves, a magazine. There’s the thrill of getting away with it, too; my therapist hasn’t worked that part out.
I stole a pair of earrings from the Oxford Topshop. Gold hoops with a little painted parrot sitting on each one. A few days after I’d lifted them they disappeared from my room. They were returned a few weeks later in my cubbyhole, with a note: ‘Miranda Adams: I’d have expected better from you. Sincerely, a concerned friend. xxx’ The kisses were the worst fucking part of it.
He must have been right next to me in the shop when I did it. It had been crowded, I remembered: and there had been men in there as well as women, trailing after girlfriends, or making their way down to Topman. No particular face stood out, though. I had no memory of anyone looking at me – more than normal – or acting weirdly.
While the earrings were missing I remember seeing a bespectacled girl in the Bodleian in that exact pair – and almost chased after her into Short Term Loans. Until I realised that anyone could have bought them. They were from Topshop, for Christ’s sake. There might have been twenty – fifty – girls in the city with them. This was how paranoid my stalker had made me, bringing me to the point of chasing down a complete stranger.
Then there was the essay that I bought from a student in the year above, with the intention of plagiarising it for my own. Both had been sitting on the desk in my room – the original, and my poorly disguised copy. I’d gone out for a drink at the pub and returned to find them both gone. I’d had to cobble something together, drunk, in the hours before the deadline, and ended up getting a bare pass, my worst mark yet – though not ever. A week later they were returned to me. The note: ‘I don’t think you want to go down that path, Miranda.’ And yet, a week later, when a few students got held up for their own acts of plagiarism, I was almost oddly grateful.
And there was the time, very early on with Julien, when I cheated on him. A drunken shag with a guy in my tutor group. As luck would have it, my period didn’t arrive that month. I took a pregnancy test – thankfully negative – which was returned a week later with a note that read, ‘Naughty, naughty, Manda. What would Julien say?’
The casual use of Manda, which is what only my closest friends call me.
I didn’t tell anyone of these particular communications. Not even Katie, or Samira. They revealed aspects of myself that I would have preferred no one know anything about. And I feared that if I did something to displease my stalker he would use all my secrets to destroy me.
Nevertheless, I did go to the police – though, again, I didn’t tell anyone. I took along a couple of the notes: the ones I could bring myself to show. I wasn’t taken very seriously. ‘Have there been any threats made in the notes, miss?’ the officer I spoke to asked.
‘Well, no.’
‘And you haven’t noticed anyone behaving in a threatening manner?’
‘… No.’
‘No signs of forced entry?’
‘No.’
‘It seems to me,’ he picked up one of the notes again and read it, ‘that one of your mates might be playing a prank on you, my dear.’ Patronising arse.
That was that. I regretted ever having gone – and not just because the police were no help. In doing so I had made myself into the victim I refused to be.
But it carried on in London for several years. He worked out where I was living. It’s one thing to access a student room on a relatively accessible corridor. It’s quite another to gain entry to a London property with three high-security locks on the door. And then we moved, and it kept happening. The items that went missing were always of a similar kind. On the surface, valueless, but all with some inner significance. The tiniest doll from the very inside of the beautiful painted matryoshka I was given by my beloved godmother, before she died from cancer. The batik scarf I bought in a Greek village on my first holiday with Julien – the summer of our second year. The woven friendship bracelet that Katie gave me in our first year of knowing each other.
I thought I’d always have my stalker. He had begun to feel like a part of my life, a part of me, even. But then, out of the blue, it stopped. A couple of years ago now. At least, I think it stopped. I’ve received no packages, no notes. But sometimes, when I misplace something, I have that old frisson of fear. There was that silver baby rattle I bought from Tiffany’s recently, on a whim as I was walking down Bond Street. I’m sure it will show up somewhere. I’m not the most organised person, after all. I tell myself that it’s just paranoia. But I haven’t ever shaken that feeling of being watched.
I haven’t told anyone – not even Julien, or Katie or Samira, say – of the feeling of creeping horror I get, sometimes. Moments when I am in the middle of a crowd and suddenly convinced that someone is standing right behind me, breathing on my neck … only to turn around and see that there is no one there. Or a sudden certainty that someone is watching me with an intensity that isn’t normal. You know … that prickling feeling you have when you know you are being looked at? It’s happened at music festivals and on shopping trips, in supermarkets and nightclubs. On the tube platform I sometimes find myself staggering back away from the edge, convinced that someone is standing right behind me, about to give me a shove.
No, I don’t tell anyone these fears. Not Katie, not Julien, certainly not my amused dinner party guests.
I have bad dreams, too. It’s worst when Julien is away on business trips. I have to double-check all the locks on the doors, and even then I’ll wake in pitch blackness convinced that someone is in the room with me. Similar to the sort of tricks your mind plays on you, if you’ve just watched a horror film. Suddenly you’ll see sinister shadows in every corner. Only this is a hundred times worse. Because some of those shadows might be real.
KATIE
Miranda’s finally coming to the end of her little repertoire. Just at this moment the wind chooses to do a long, melodramatic howl down the chimney. The fire seems to billow out, a scatter of sparks landing just inside the grate. It is perfect, horror-movie timing. Everyone laughs.
‘Reminds me of that house we stayed in in Wales,’ Giles says.
‘The one where we kept having blackouts?’ Nick asks. ‘And the heating kept going off at rand
om intervals?’
‘It was haunted,’ Miranda says, ‘that’s what the owner told us – remember. It was Jacobean.’ That place had been Miranda’s choice.
‘It was definitely old,’ says Mark, ‘but I’m not sure ghosts are an excuse for dodgy plumbing and electrical faults.’
‘But there had been plenty of sightings,’ Emma says, loyally. ‘The woman said they’d had people from Most Haunted come to visit them.’
‘Yes,’ Miranda says, pleased by this. ‘There was that story about a girl being thrown out of a window by her stepbrothers, because they’d realised she was going to inherit the property. And people had heard her, screaming at night.’
‘I certainly heard someone screaming at night,’ Giles says, grinning at her. There had been a lot of hilarity over the thinness of the walls, and certain ‘noises’ keeping everyone up at night. Miranda and Julien had been singled out as the main culprits.
‘Oh stop it,’ Miranda says, hitting Giles with a cushion. She’s laughing, but as the conversation moves on she stops and I see a new expression – wistful? – cross her features. I look away.
Giles’s mention of Wales has opened a conversation about other years past. It is a favourite hobby, raking over our shared history together. These are the experiences that have always bound us, that have given us a tribal sense of affiliation. For as long as we have known each other, we have always spent New Year’s Eve together. It’s a regathering of threads that have become a little looser over the years, as our jobs and lives take us in different directions. I wonder if the others experience the same thing that I do, on these occasions. That however much I think I have changed, however different I feel as a person at work, or with the few non-university friends I have, at times like this I somehow return to exactly the same person I was more than a decade ago.
‘I can’t believe I drank so much last year … while I was pregnant with Priya,’ says Samira, looking horrified.
‘You didn’t know at the time,’ Emma says.
‘No, but still – all those shots. I can’t even imagine drinking like that now. It just seems so … excessive. I feel like an old lady these days.’
She certainly doesn’t look like one. With her shining black hair and dewy, unlined skin, Samira looks like the same girl we knew at Oxford. Giles, on the other hand, who once sported a full head of hair, looks like a completely different person. But at the same time Samira has changed, perhaps more dramatically than Giles has. She used to be spiky, slightly intimidating, with that razor-sharp intellect and impeccable style. She was involved in everything at Oxford. The Union, several sports, theatre, the college orchestra – as well as being a notorious party girl. Somehow she seemed to fit ten times the normal amount of activity into her four years and still emerge with a high First.
She seems softer now, gentler. Perhaps it’s motherhood. Or things going so well with her career – apparently the consultancy firm where she works is desperate for her to return from maternity early; it’s not hard to imagine the place being on its knees without her. Perhaps it’s simply growing older. A sense that she doesn’t need to prove herself any longer, that she knows exactly who she is. I envy that.
Julien’s talking about a place we visited in Oxfordshire a couple of years ago – Emma’s first New Year’s Eve with us, I believe.
‘Ha!’ Mark takes a sip of his drink. ‘That was the one where I had to show those local oiks who was boss. Do you remember? One of them actually tried to beat me up?’
Not quite how I remember it.
This is what I recall. I remember the group was exactly the wrong size. Fifteen people – not big enough for a party, not small enough for intimacy. The plan was to go to the races on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve. I had been expecting something a bit more glamorous, scenes borrowed from My Fair Lady and Pretty Woman. Not so much. There were girls wearing skirts so short you could see their Ann Summers’ thongs, and boys in cheap shiny suits and bad haircuts and sun-bed tans, strutting around and getting more and more raucous as the evening went on. The food was less champagne and caviar, more steak and ale pies and bottles of WKD. And yet it was all a bit of fun. They were all just kids, really, those mini-skirted girls and those shiny-suited lads, preening and swaggering and hiding their self-consciousness beneath the haze of booze, just as we had all done before them.
And then Mark decided to make some comment about the place being ‘overrun with pikeys’.
Admittedly we were in a deserted bit of the stadium, drinking our alcopops – most people were down at the racetrack, cheering on their horses. But there were still a few people around. A group of youths, as the Daily Mail might label them. And Mark hadn’t made any effort to be quiet. He’s like that. Sometimes I think that if Emma weren’t so unobjectionable, so ready to muck in, people would tolerate him a lot less.
Two of the booze-fuelled teenagers heard him. Suddenly they were squaring up to him. But you could see that they didn’t really mean it. It was just something they felt they should do, to protect their slighted honour, like in a nature documentary when the smaller males of the pack can’t afford to show any fear, or risk being eaten. Quite understandable, really.
The foremost one was a short, thin guy, with the faintest whisper of teenagerish stubble about his chin, a particularly garish pinstripe number. ‘Say that again, mate.’ His voice had an unmistakable adolescent reediness to it; he couldn’t have been more than nineteen.
I waited for Mark to apologise, defuse the situation – make light of it somehow. Because that would have been the only sensible, adult thing to do. We were the grown-ups, after all. Mark stood a couple of heads taller than his pinstripe-suited aggressor.
But Mark punched him. Took two steps forwards, and punched him full in the face, with one of those meaty hands. So hard that the boy’s head snapped back. So hard that he fell like a toppled statue. There was a noise, a crack, a simulacrum of the racecourse starting gun; the way I had thought only really happened in films.
We all just stood there, stunned, including his little gaggle of mates. You might have thought his friends would fight back, try to avenge him. Not so. That was the quality of the violence. It was too sudden, too brutal. You could see: they were terrified.
They bent down to him, and, as he came round, asked if he was all right. He moaned like an animal in pain. There was a trail of bright red blood coming from his nose, and another – more worryingly, somehow – coming from his mouth. I’d never seen anyone bleed from their mouth before, either, apart from in films. It turned out that he had bitten off the tip of his tongue when his head hit the ground. I read that in an article online, in the local rag, a couple of weeks’ later. I read, too, that the police were looking for the perpetrator. But there was also some mention of the fact that the guy was a bit of a troublemaker – so perhaps it wasn’t a very serious hunt.
What was so odd, I thought, was that Emma didn’t even seem particularly shocked. I remember thinking that she must have seen this side of Mark before. She had a clear, immediate idea of what to do – as though she had been waiting for something like this to happen. All practicality. ‘We need to leave,’ she said, ‘now. Before anyone gets wind of this.’
‘But what if he’s not OK?’ I asked.
‘They’re just a load of drunk chavs,’ Emma said. ‘And they started it.’ She turned around to face us all. ‘Didn’t they? Didn’t they start it? He was just defending himself.’
She was so earnestly convincing – so convinced – that I think we all rather started to believe it. And no one mentioned it again, not for the whole duration of the three-day break. On New Year’s Eve, when Mark danced on the table wearing a silly wig and a big, goofy grin, it was even easier to believe that it had never happened. It’s almost impossible to imagine it now, looking at him pulling Emma onto his lap, ruffling her hair tenderly as he smiles down at her – the image of the caring boyfriend. Almost, but not quite. Because the truth is I have never quite been able to forge
t what I saw, and sometimes when I look at Mark I am jolted back to the memory of it, with a little shock of horror.
DOUG
Two a.m. When he lifts the curtain he can see light blazing from the Lodge, which seems brighter now, almost, a defiance against the darkness surrounding it. He has been lying awake for hours now, like an animal whose territory has been encroached upon, who cannot rest until the threat is gone. He can hear the guests even from here, the music thumping out, the occasional staccato of their laughter. He can even hear the low vibration of their voices. Or is he imagining that part? Difficult to be certain. For someone who was once told at school that he had ‘an unfortunate lack of imagination’ his brain seems to conjure a fair amount from thin air these days.
He chose this cottage specifically because it was the furthest from all the other buildings. The windows predominantly face the bleak greyish flank of the Munro; the loch can only be glimpsed through the window of the toilet, which is almost entirely overgrown with ivy. He can almost imagine himself completely alone here, most of the time. It would be best if he were completely alone. For his own sake, for that of others.
He vaguely recalls a man who was sociable, who enjoyed the company of others – who had (whisper it) friends. Who could hold court over pints, who had a bit of a rep as a comic, a raconteur. That man had a life before: a home, a girlfriend – who had waited for him through three long tours in Afghanistan. She stuck by him even when he came back from the last tour, broken. But then the thing happened – or rather he did the thing. And after that she left him.
‘I don’t know you any more,’ she had said, as she piled her things haphazardly into bin liners, like someone fleeing from a natural disaster. Her sister was waiting in the car, she said, as though he might try to do something unspeakable to stop her. ‘The man I loved—’ and there had been tears in her eyes as though she was grieving someone who had died, ‘wouldn’t do something like that.’