by Lisa Jewell
She grabbed a bottle of something cheap with a screw-top lid and took it quickly to the till. As she walked back up the hill towards the painted houses she saw Tom’s wife just ahead of her, a matchstick silhouette clutching a bottle of water, shoulders hunched against the bitter January wind.
And there, high above, in the pale backlight of a top-floor window in the Fitzwilliams’ house, she saw a small beam of a light, the movement of a person, the fall of a heavy curtain, sudden darkness.
5
27 January
Freddie Fitzwilliam switched off his digital binoculars, let the curtain drop and wheeled his chair back across the bedroom floor, from the window to his computer. There was a shiny track in the carpet now recording the many journeys he’d made by office chair from one side of his room to the other. He was the captain of his own ship up here, in his attic room with its sweeping views across the village and the river valley and the landscape beyond. The digital binoculars had been a Christmas gift from his mum and dad. They had revolutionised his life. He could now clearly see Jenna Tripp’s road from here. He could also see the dimpled glass of Bess Ridley’s bathroom which occasionally shimmered and radiated with the suggestion of naked flesh behind. He could see Jenna and Bess meeting up each morning outside Jenna’s house in their tacky Academy uniforms: short, short skirts and bare legs even in the chill of January, linking arms, sharing earbuds, gossip. He could even see what flavour Pringles they were eating.
Freddie didn’t go to the Academy where his dad was headmaster. He went to a private boys’ school across the other side of town that took him half an hour to walk to every morning. He’d been in Melville for one year and one month since he’d woken up one morning in his old house in Mold and been told that they were moving to Bristol and that they were moving next week and that no, they weren’t coming back. His dad was a bigwig head teacher. The government sent him all over the country to ‘special measures’ schools, schools that were on the brink of being shut down because they were so fucking terrible. This one had been so fucking terrible that they’d had to sack the old head and have him walked off the premises the same day: something to do with embezzling school funds, something really bad.
At first Freddie had hated it here. His school was shit; it looked like a prison and it smelled worse. The teachers were all really old and very British, not like his old school where they’d been mostly fresh-faced Europeans. He liked European teachers; he could impress them by talking to them in their mother tongues. They always loved that. He could get away with murder if he could compliment a teacher in fluent Spanish or whatever.
Freddie could speak six languages: French, Spanish, German, Italian, Mandarin and Welsh. The Welsh he’d picked up when they lived in Mold; the rest he’d taught himself. He could also speak in about twenty different accents to such an extent that locals couldn’t tell he was putting it on. He was going to join MI5 when he left university. His parents had been telling him all his life that the government would love a clever little bastard like him, and he tended to agree with them. What else could he possibly do with all these brains, all these facts, the constant spin and bubble of his brilliant mind? It had to go somewhere. And, of course, the digital binoculars (and the Smartwatch spy camera and the spy glasses and the spy software built into his Samsung Galaxy) had played right into the whole Freddie’s-going-to-be-a-spy narrative that he and his parents had been writing for nearly fifteen years.
And at first that was what he’d used them for.
In the absence of any friends or any real desire to have friends, Freddie had spent the past year or so compiling a dossier called The Melville Papers, a kind of quasi-local paper about the local community. In it he reported on the comings and goings in Lower Melville as seen from his perch at the top of the house. He logged the visitors to the Melville Hotel – once he had seen Cate Blanchett going in; she was really, really small. He logged the dog walkers – White-haired man with miniature schnauzer left home 8 p.m., returned 8.27 – and the joggers – two middle-aged women with big bottoms, left home 7.30, returned 8.45, bought expensive crisps from the deli. He logged the occasional infraction of the law – a dog walker failing to collect their dog’s poo, countless episodes of double parking or parking on the zigzag lines by the zebra crossing, at least three shoplifting episodes, one of which had ended with the shopkeeper chasing the man all the way to the other side of the village before almost having a heart attack.
But recently, Freddie had found his focus shifting from the humdrum and the day to day; there were after all only so many times he could make a note of the white-haired man walking his miniature schnauzer before it stopped being interesting. Nowadays, Freddie found most of his attention being taken up by logging girls. It was strange because Freddie had never liked girls, not ever. A dislike of girls had, in fact, been one of his defining characteristics. He had assumed that not liking girls was his default setting.
But apparently not.
Jenna and Bess were the two prettiest girls in the village by far. Jenna was tall and athletically built with fine dark hair and quite a big bust. Bess was small with what appeared to be naturally blond hair which she wore quite short with a fringe that hung in her eyes. They were older than Freddie, year eleven to his year ten. He spent most of his time logging them now; he knew what nights they did after-school clubs, what days they did PE, what their favourite Starbucks drinks were, how often they changed their earrings.
Yes, Jenna and Bess were by far his favourites. But there was someone new now. She’d moved into the blue house two doors down a few weeks ago and she was really pretty. He’d first seen her in the restaurant at the Melville down in the village when he was having dinner with his mum and dad. She’d been with a man. He was big and rough-looking with shaved red hair and tattoos that you could see through the fabric of his shirt. Freddie had heard her first, her Bristol accent, a loud laugh. He’d been intrigued, turned his head just a few degrees to check her out. She was necking wine in a floaty top. She had a really full mouth, big white teeth, white-blond hair in a messy bun, gold hoop earrings, small feet in blood-red suede boots with little tassels. And that was what he called her while he tried to find a way to discover her real name.
He called her Red Boots.
He was watching her now; he’d watched her get off the bus in the village, then lost her for a while before picking her up again trailing a few feet behind his mum up the hill. He zoomed in tighter and tighter until he was close enough to see that she looked terrible and now, as he uploaded the film on to his laptop he zoomed in further still and there, in one frame, he saw a yellow T-shirt worn underneath a big ugly coat. He went right in on it: there was the familiar yellow and red of the Whackadoo logo. He passed Whackadoo every morning on his way to school, a big yellow breeze-block building with a huge plastic toucan outside. It was for kids or something.
Christ, he thought, Red Boots is working at Whackadoo. What kind of crap job was that? He saved the film into the top-secret folder that no one in his house was even halfway clever enough to uncover. Then he went downstairs to ask his mum what he was having for supper.
6
3 February
Jenna Tripp kicked off her black trainers, unknotted her nylon tie, dropped her rucksack at the bottom of the stairs, pulled the hairband from her ponytail, rubbed at her aching scalp with her fingertips and called out for her mum.
‘In here!’
She peered round the door into the living room. Her mum was perched on the edge of the leather sofa, the laptop on the coffee table in front of her, a notepad to one side of her, her phone on the other. Her pale gold hair was scraped back into a ponytail. She looked pretty with her hair off her face; you could see the fine angles of her bone structure, the shadowy dip below each cheekbone, the delicacy of her jawline. She’d been a model for a short while in her teens. There was a framed photo of her modelling a bikini on a windswept beach nailed to the wall outside Jenna’s bedroom. Her arms were wrap
ped tight around her body (it had been November apparently) and she was smiling up into the sky above. She was pure joy to behold.
‘Check out there, will you?’ she said now, sucking her e-cigarette and releasing a thick trail of berry-scented vapour. ‘Can you see a blue Lexus? One of those hatchbacks?’
Jenna sighed and pulled back one drawn curtain. She looked left and right around the small turning where their cottage was and then back at her mum. ‘No blue Lexus,’ she said.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘I’m sure. There’s a blue Ford Focus, but that’s the only blue car out there.’
‘Oh, that’s Mike’s car. That’s fine.’
She didn’t ask her mum more about the blue Lexus. She knew what her mum thought about the blue Lexus. She let the curtain drop and went into the kitchen. She boiled the kettle and made herself a low-calorie hot chocolate into which she dropped a small handful of marshmallows (she’d recently learned that marshmallows were surprisingly low in calories) and then she took the hot chocolate, her school bag and her phone to her room. She stopped on the way to study the photo of her mum. Frances Tripp. Or Frankie Miller as she’d been known in her modelling and acting days. She’d changed back to Frances in her twenties when she’d married Jenna’s dad and started campaigning for animal rights. He told her it would give her more gravitas. Jenna wished she’d known the girl in the photo, the carefree beauty with the wind in her hair and the sky reflected in her shining eyes. She reckoned she’d have liked her.
‘By the way!’ Her mother’s girlish voice followed her up the stairs to the landing.
‘Yes!’
‘Did you change the bulb in your vanity mirror?’
Jenna paused before she replied, her shoulders falling. ‘No,’ she said, although it would have been easier in some ways to say yes.
‘Right,’ said her mum. ‘Odd. Very odd.’
Jenna opened the door to her bedroom, slipped through and closed it behind her before she got pulled into any further conversation about the bulb in her vanity mirror. There was a Snapchat from Bess on her phone. It was a photo of her holding the local paper next to her face, pulling a kissy-face at a photo of Mr Fitzwilliam on page eight. She’d scribbled a pink love heart around both of them. Jenna tutted. Seriously, what was wrong with the girl? Mr Fitzwilliam was so old.
‘He has charisma,’ Bess had said once. ‘Plus he smells good.’
‘How do you know how he smells?’
‘I make a point of sniffing when I’m close. And he does this thing …’
‘What thing?’ Jenna had said.
‘This thing with his pen. He clicks it.’ Bess had mimed clicking a pen.
‘He clicks it?’
‘Yeah. It’s hot.’
‘You’re on glue, mate, I swear.’
She replied to Bess’s message now: Meth head.
Bess replied with a sequence of crystal emojis. Jenna smiled and put her phone on her bedside table to charge. Bess was the best friend in the world, the best friend she’d ever had. They were like sisters. Like twins. She’d known Bess for four years, ever since her mum and dad had split up and she’d drawn the short straw and moved to Lower Melville with her mum while her little brother Ethan had stayed with Dad in Weston-super-Mare. Not that there was anything wrong with Lower Melville. The cottage (or what Jenna’s mum referred to as a cottage, but was actually a tired post-war terrace with pebble-dashed walls) was in fact the house her mum had grown up in and while the cottage was as scruffy as it had always been, the village around it no longer was. Kids at her school thought she was posh because she lived here. They were so wrong.
‘Jen!’
She closed her eyes at the sound of her mother’s voice climbing up the stairs.
‘Jenna!’
‘Yes!’
‘Check out the back, will you? Tell me if that man’s still sitting in his window.’
She drew in her breath and held it hard inside her for as long as she could.
‘Why?’
‘You know why.’
She did know why, but sometimes she needed her mum to find the words to explain these obsessions, in the hope that it might wake her up to the nonsense of what she was saying.
She let her breath out, put down her hot chocolate and knelt on her bed. There was a man sitting in his window at the back of the terrace that faced the end of their garden. He was side on and absorbed in something on a screen in front of him. She watched him lift a teacup to his lips, take a sip, put the cup back down, run his hand briefly round the back of his neck, and then start moving his fingers over a keyboard.
‘No!’ she shouted down to her mother. ‘There’s no one there. No man.’
There was a beat of silence, filled, Jenna assumed, not with feelings of relief, but of disappointment.
‘Good,’ her mother said a moment later. ‘Good. Let me know if he comes back.’
‘I will.’
‘Thanks, darling.’
Jenna’s phone pinged. Another Snapchat from Bess. The photo of Mr Fitzwilliam from the paper, his face covered over in Bess’s lipstick kisses.
Jenna smiled and sent another message.
U R madder than my mum.
7
There was a photo of Tom Fitzwilliam on page eight of the local paper. He was standing at the entrance to the Academy, his arms folded across his stomach, a thin blue tie blown slightly askew by the wind, looking at the camera sternly with a half-buried smile. The headline said ‘SUPERHEAD TACKLES GANGS’.
Joey did not read the accompanying article. She was too intent on absorbing every last detail of the photograph: the lanyard around his neck on a yellow strap. The dull gleam of the narrow gold band on his ring finger. The way his waistband sat, no belt, slightly slack, just above his hip bones. The jut of his chin. The wide slope of his shoulders. The slight disarray of his hair in the same breeze that had disordered his tie. And the way he stood in full and complete possession of his surroundings.
My school. My kids. My responsibility.
Tom Fitzwilliam.
SUPERHEAD.
She touched the outline of his stomach with one outstretched fingertip, caressing the image thoughtfully as she remembered the potent look they’d exchanged a week ago as she’d left the bar at the Melville. And then she jumped at the suggestion of a hand against her waist and a sudden bloom of warm breath on the side of her neck. It was Alfie, smelling of daytime sleep and stale T-shirt.
‘Fuck, Alf, you made me jump!’
‘Sorry, angel.’
His arm snaked around her body from behind and he buried his face in her shoulder and planted his mouth firmly against her skin. ‘Mm,’ he said, breathing her in. ‘You smell fucking gorgeous.’
‘I do not smell gorgeous. I smell of chips and boys’ farts.’
‘No,’ he said, sliding his hand down the front of her terrible elasticated trousers and into the top of her knickers – the feel of his fingers against her so soon after her reverie staring at Tom’s photograph almost winded her, ‘you smell of your hormones.’
She covered his hand with hers and pushed it harder against herself. ‘And what do my hormones smell like?’
‘They smell like honey.’ He encased her fully with his big dry hand and rocked with her from side to side, his words falling into the hot space between his lips and her skin. ‘And summer rain. And birthday parties. And kittens’ paws. And hot sand. And …’ He paused and brought his other arm around her body, pulled her so close to him that they were virtually one being. ‘You,’ he finished. ‘Just you.’
She turned then, spun inside his arms and kissed him hard. Then she dragged him up the two flights of stairs between the kitchen and their room, fast, desperate, the newspaper left open on the kitchen table below, Tom Fitzwilliam’s eyes staring upwards at the ceiling.
‘You know something?’ Alfie said after, Joey’s head tucked under his arm, their hands entwined together.
‘No
,’ said Joey. ‘Tell me.’
‘You’re probably going to think this is mad.’
She ran a fingertip down the tendrils of the climbing rose that covered his torso, following them to their tightly curled tips. ‘Try me.’
He paused then and fell quiet for a very long time.
She saw a slight flush spread across his face and she turned to face him fully. ‘What is it, Alf?’
‘I know we’ve only been married a few months, and I know we’ve only known each other a short time, and I know we’re both still quite young, but what do you think about the idea of starting to try for a baby?’
She felt a bubble of unhinged laughter rise from the pit of her stomach and she swallowed it down. ‘Alf,’ she said, taking his hand in her. ‘God. I mean. Yes. Maybe one day. But we need to get ourselves sorted out. Get proper jobs. Find somewhere to live. I really don’t think now’s the time.’
Alfie looked perplexed. ‘But, you said, remember, that night when we went down to Cala d’Hort with that really nice weed from that French guy, remember? And we were talking about the future? Yeah? And you said something like I’d really like to be a young mum.’
Joey blinked and shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t have said that.’
‘But you did say that. I remember it, like so clearly because it was the last thing I’d thought you’d say because you’re so, well, you were, you know, so …’ He flailed around for a word for a moment. ‘Unmaternal.’
Joey flinched and Alfie stopped for a moment, licked his lips. ‘No. No, not that. You’re not that. But you’re just, I don’t know, you’re just not like all the girls I knew from home, all those girls who grew up waiting for the first chance to get pregnant. You always seemed like you had more important things to do.’