by NJ Moss
I jogged, and then my jog broke into a run and I was speeding around the corner. I spotted him. He was striding past Primark, which would lead him left onto Union Street, and then he could disappear onto Nelson Street or loop back around to Broadmead. The idea occurred to me, as I ran through the city – muttering apologies – I was chasing a stranger for no apparent reason.
The man in the hat turned and glanced at me, far too quickly for me to make out his face. Who the fuck are you? He could’ve been looking at me or he could’ve been looking at something else. I couldn’t tell.
I pressed on.
The traffic lights betrayed me and a river of pedestrians crossed at the exact right time for this man. He blended into the crowd and I was forced to slow, panting, tracking the blackness of his baseball cap as he walked down Union Street, and then disappeared onto Nelson. I broke into a run again, heels clipping, breath coming far too quick.
Was it possible I’d been physically fit once, Yasmin and I sitting on horseback with my legs fine-honed, my core solid with maintaining my posture? I felt my chest banging as I tried to catch up. I turned onto Nelson.
I couldn’t see the man in the black hat, only a couple of teenagers smoking and leaning against the wall and the usual passage of pedestrians.
I stared, biting my bottom lip, chewing it until I felt blood prick and I forced myself to stop. There had been a man, hadn’t there? If I were to check the CCTV – which of course I had no way of doing – I would see a man. Yes, of course I would. What I wouldn’t see was a stressed overtired woman running through Bristol city centre chasing a phantom, nothing, the guilt that gnawed at her mind endlessly and the whisper at the edge of it all.
You know what you did. You don’t want to know. But you do.
This was ridiculous. If I’d had a stalker who’d been following me for over a decade, surely I would’ve seen him more than twice.
If he had been following me all this time, why? It didn’t make any sense. Perhaps my mind was conflating two separate incidents. The man at university had been waving at somebody else. And this man, this so-called watcher, he’d also been waving at somebody else and had happened to turn and walk away as I’d started to run. Perhaps I needed a good night’s sleep. Perhaps I needed to take a few deep breaths and get myself together.
Or perhaps it was him—
“No,” I muttered.
It wasn’t him. I didn’t even know who he was. Or even if he was a him to begin with. I’d had too much caffeine and not enough shut-eye and I’d made an embarrassing mistake, letting my nerves get the better of me.
I wasn’t my grandmother. I wasn’t mad.
“Excuse me,” I heard myself say, calling over to the smoking teenagers. One was a girl with dyed pink hair and fishnet stockings, and the other was a boy with swept green hair and skinny torn jeans. They turned to me sluggishly, bored, already uninterested in what I had to say. “Did you see a man walk through here? Um, regular height, wearing a black baseball hat?”
The boy smiled, but it seemed mean somehow, cruel, like he was tricking me. Like he was in on it.
Quiet, Grace.
“No.” He yawned. “I haven’t seen anybody.”
“Yeah, sorry,” the girl said, smirking. “There ain’t been any man. Why? You looking for someone?”
“You didn’t see a man in a black baseball hat walk through here?” I snapped, fiercer than I’d intended.
Lying little shits.
“Nope,” the boy said.
“I guess you missed him, then,” I said, turning away and walking back up the street.
Of course they’d missed him. He was just another pedestrian. Why would they pay him special attention? But then surely he’d been moving quite quickly to make the distance between the turning onto Nelson Street and his disappearing act. Into a shop? Around the corner? Surely he’d been at least jogging. Wouldn’t they have noticed that?
22
Clive strode into my office. He had a flustered look on his face and his shirt was loose around his hips and crinkled. He tried to smile at me, but I could sense the unhinged aura around him. “Grace,” he said, sitting down opposite me, another indicator he wasn’t his usual fake-faced self. He never normally sat down in my office; he’d loom over my desk, ever the CEO. “Sorry to barge in like this.”
“It’s fine.”
He must’ve seen me look at his crinkled shirt, because he drummed his fingers on the desk and then said, all in a long rush, “Well, what’re you going to do? I’ve never been much of a whizz with the iron and the lovely lady who’s currently handling it for me has decided to give me the silent treatment. And do you know why? Get this. Because I didn’t stand up to her ex-boyfriend, the father of her kid, which seems pretty fucking ridiculous to me. What does she want me to do, put on some boxing gloves and go at it with him? It’s none of my goddamned business.”
I watched and waited. He wasn’t really talking to me, more to himself, and I just happened to be here. He waved at the air as though banishing the thoughts and then leaned forward, gripping the edge of the desk.
“Anyway, I didn’t come in here to complain. I wanted to ask if you’d be open to receiving work-related texts and calls after hours. I know, I know, I’m a cheeky bugger for even asking. It wouldn’t be often. Maybe even ever. But when you tell your clients you’re a twenty-four-seven kind of bloke, they come to expect it. Okay?”
The way he said it, I knew it wasn’t a question. It was a formality. I wanted to tell him no, absolutely not, my time at home with my family was sacred. I wanted to shout at him for putting me in the position of having to say no. But Troy had been singing my praises more and more about the job lately, and I had to admit I did feel proud when Mia said I looked fierce in my work clothes. “Sort of like a lion, does that make sense, Mum?”
I enjoyed the battleground of Langdale Consulting, how it felt to stride into businesses around Bristol at Clive’s side, my face as much of a mask as his normally was. Smiling, shaking hands, feeling fit and young and capable. Feeling intellectual. Feeling like I graduated from university, I didn’t drop out after all, I could do it, do anything, ride up to the Houses of Parliament and be made Prime Minister if I wanted to. I was fucking doing it.
Before I knew it, Clive was moving on; he’d taken my silence as assent. I seethed. I was so damn good at silently seething.
“I’ve got another big ask,” he said. “More overtime. Probably only a few evenings here and there. But the client who you’re writing the reports for, well, he wants someone in the office in case he decides to ring.”
“Can’t he ring my mobile?”
“He’s a fucking weirdo, Grace,” Clive pushed on, as if I hadn’t spoken. “I don’t know what goes on in his head. But he’s told me he might ring the office and if he does, he wants somebody here to pick it up. If we don’t, he’ll take his business elsewhere. I think he might be screwing with me, honestly. He has enough money he could do that if he wanted. But the joke’s on him, right? He’s paying.”
“So I’d sit here and wait for a phone call that may or may not come?”
“Yeah. And get paid overtime money for doing it.” He snorted. “It’s a perfect job, right? I think I’ve told you before, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”
“Yes, you have said that before.” In my mind, the man in the black hat watched me, shadowed face smirking. I pushed him away. Two days earlier, and the faceless bastard wouldn’t leave me alone.
I tried to think of a reason to tell Clive no. But where was my leverage? There were hordes of beleaguered workers all over Bristol who would leap at the opportunity to sit in an empty office with their Kindle waiting for a phone that might ring. It was all absurd, but everybody here understood that; this client, whoever they were, was a Howard Hughes type, an eccentric with logic that only made sense to him.
“How long do you imagine we’ll be working with this client?” I asked, my voice sharp and cutting, the voice of a wom
an who was getting two to three hours of sleep a night. And then pouring a whole Boots’ counter on her face to hide the sleepless lines creeping into her skin. It was like having a newborn again, this sleep pattern, a perpetual exhausted haze. “Because although I am grateful for the overtime, I do find the whole arrangement rather strange.”
“You and me both.” I thought I saw rage flicker across his expression. Why would he be angry? For paying the overtime, maybe? “But he’s a rich asshole and rich assholes get what they want.”
So for two weeks it was that way: more overtime, more reports. I spotted three more references to car crashes and collisions in the reports I was hand-copying, but of course that was a coincidence, because there were several dozens of references I didn’t pay attention to. Once you get an Audi, Audis are everywhere. It was perception bias; I’d read about it in university. It was no big deal. The phone didn’t ring on the two evenings I sat in the office.
One cloudy morning, waiting for Olivia to return from the café with my blessed manna (“I’ll get the real stuff, I won’t be long, hon…”), I went to grab my phone to check if Troy had texted me. I normally kept it on the edge of my desk, next to the framed family photo. But it wasn’t there. I searched my office.
Nothing.
Olivia returned with the coffees and we drank, and still there was no phone. Part of me wondered if Derrick had stolen it, his revenge for the exchange we’d had in the break room my first week here. Since then the office had felt even more unwelcoming. It was fast becoming the norm to sense the vultures watching me from behind their desks, waiting for me to stumble and fall so they could pick apart my body. But it didn’t matter. I rarely had cause to set foot in the Pen. I was alone.
Later, I found my mobile on the floor. I was sure I’d thoroughly looked under my desk. But there it was. It made no sense. Why steal a phone and then secretly return it? Perhaps he’d tried to get into it and then realised it was password-protected. Or perhaps I’d missed it with my sleep-hungry eyes.
23
Returning home to find Troy beaming in his writer’s cubby filled me with warmth. It wasn’t often he looked so carefree these days, as though he’d fallen back ten years and was filled with the same unapologetic ambition that had first attracted me to him.
“What are you so happy about?” I dropped my handbag as I walked over. “Finally worked up the nerve to have an affair?”
“Ha, ha,” he grunted. “Nope. I do have some big news though.”
I nodded to the glass bottle on his desk, the air filled with its sweet scent. “It’s a cider kind of revelation, is it?”
He rarely drank when the children were here, but Russ and Mia were at his parents’ house in Weston-super-Mare, staying the evening as they did once or twice a month. We were lucky to have such a supportive network, I had to remind myself every so often; the steeliness with Mother sometimes blotted that from my mind.
“Well? Don’t keep me in suspense.”
He grabbed me and pulled me into his lap, his hand resting on my leg, sending shimmers up my thigh. “I’ve been emailed by a small independent publisher. They want to publish my novel, Grace.”
But your novel isn’t finished.
That was my first thought. Unfair, a reflex. I beat it down. Troy was an intelligent person and I doubted he’d make a mistake about something so important to him.
“They read my short stories online and they want a longer piece of work. They’re willing to pay an advance, small, but a show of good faith, a show they’re serious.”
“That’s great,” I said, chest blooming with pride.
Maybe this was it. His big break. He’d waited so long.
“So what happens next?” My voice was getting giddy as I thought about all the heartache and rejection he’d experienced over the years. “God, Troy, I’m so proud of you!”
“I wait for them to send over the advance, and then I start work. I haven’t got my head in the clouds here, my little worker bee—”
“Call me that again and I’ll chop your bollocks off.”
He wriggled against me, making my cheeks flush. “Noted. But until I see the moola, I’m not getting my hopes up.”
I prodded him playfully. “You’re getting your hopes up already, arsehole. I can tell. And why not? You’ve worked so hard.”
“Can you imagine?” he said wistfully, hugging me tighter, while beyond the closed curtains and the low lamplight, a soft wind purred. “I’m not saying I’ll do this straight away, obviously, but imagine, Grace, quitting my job, that goddamn hellhole. Writing for a living. It’d be… Jesus, I don’t even know what it’d be. Surreal.”
“You deserve it. I hate that you’ve had to put your dreams on hold for us.”
“No, it’s not like that.”
We both knew it was a lie. It was exactly like that. Having a baby at twenty had never been part of the plan. But life happened and I knew Troy didn’t regret Mia, not for a second.
“Anyway,” he said. “Getting this good news has made me realise I’ve been a bit of a selfish dick about work over the past few weeks. I’m running you a bath, the works. Candles, bubbles, music, everything. And you’re going to lie there with a glass of wine and do nothing but relax. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said, moving closer to him, breathing in my husband’s scent, feeling my heart pick up for an entirely different reason. “But first…”
We did it right there like savages, with the wild abandon we could only give into when the children were staying elsewhere. Bent over his desk, I pushed against him, savouring every shivering breath and groaning noise he made. We finished together, both of us shaking and roaring like mad.
Later, I lay in the bath, the warm water seeming to drag me down. Sleep came with difficulty these days, but that evening the water felt like it was weaving around me.
I slept, and I dreamed I was at the top of a hill in a lashing rainstorm, when the weatherman had promised sun, sun, fucking sun, and a little girl rode her bike down the hill and there was a crash, a whimper, and as I got to the bottom of the hill I turned and there was the car, and there was a figure stepping from the car, rain-silhouetted in the evening haze.
The figure raised a hand to the brim of his cap.
I awoke violently, lukewarm water spraying across the room.
It was just a nightmare, I assured myself immediately, banishing it from my memory. I’d never met the driver, never even seen a photograph. The devil’s leer I sometimes saw in my darkest dreams was a cousin to the guilt I felt for being there that evening. I should’ve done more. The driver was still out there, a nameless criminal, a faceless killer. The police had tried – so very hard – but unfortunately they’d failed.
I remembered how calmly they’d questioned me at first, asking me if I’d seen anything, anybody, and how their calm had turned to something else later on, a well-concealed frustration I could nonetheless detect behind the surface emotion of their eyes. It’s really important you tell us everything. It could mean the difference between catching the person responsible and them going free.
I climbed from the bath and stood there naked, shivering.
24
I sat on the bench in Queen’s Square, the sun shafting through the trees despite the nascent cold, a hint of true autumn with winter riding on its back. People passed me, somebody walking a gorgeous pointy-eared dog with a tail that seemed to be attached to a motor, and when their owner waved at me, I smiled, a true, genuine, not-faking-it smile.
Despite everything, today was a good day. Mother had asked me to meet her for lunch, something which rarely happened. And it was my first payday.
I looked down at the mobile banking app on my phone again, still amazed at the number on the most recent transaction. Langdale Consulting had paid me almost twice as much as Troy made in a month, and that was my probation wage; in six months’ time, it would increase. All the overtime, all the meetings, all the pretend smiling, all the small talk, it had paid off.
It might’ve been materialistic of me, fine, but I felt a whelming in my chest when I stared down at the number. I’d gone from earning nothing to earning more than Troy, and suddenly – perhaps selfishly – it all seemed worthwhile. I sat up straighter, wearing my blazer like chain mail.
I navigated to my internet app, went to my bookmarks, and opened the clothes website I’d been browsing a couple of months earlier. My basket was still saved. It was two hundred and ten pounds. I hovered my finger over the checkout button and felt giddiness running through me, as though I was doing something wrong.
You materialistic little bitch, a voice giggled in my head, drunk with sudden power, like a teenager after one too many cheap ciders.
I bought the clothes and then an art set for Mia. I bought Russ the trampoline he’d asked for the previous month. I bought Troy a voucher to a bookshop and then I forcibly shoved my phone into my handbag, reminding myself there were still bills and life to pay for.
“Oh, Grace.”
I turned to find Mother standing on the grass behind me, dressed in her jogging gear. She met with a couple of her lady friends a few times a month to power-walk through the city, and I supposed she’d slotted our lunch date around that. Which was fine, I told myself. It didn’t matter if I was an afterthought. At least I was a thought.
“It’s so funny,” she said. “I was thinking you must be an executive type, somebody important, you know, because you look so proper in your business attire. I didn’t even recognise you. It’s so refreshing to see you out of UGG boots.”