by Lisa Jewell
‘Ha!’ The repressed laughter escaped like a clap of thunder. ‘Me! Important things!’
He looked at her, his blue eyes clouded with confusion, and suddenly she felt horribly sorry for him. She brought her hand down on to his cheek and cupped the side of his face. ‘No,’ she said, ‘no. I’m not really an important things kind of person. I’m still trying to work out what the important things even are.’
‘Babies!’ said Alfie triumphantly. ‘Babies are important. And I am one hundred per cent ready to do this.’ He wrapped her hand inside both of his. ‘One hundred and ten per cent. Just totally bring it on. And you’d be an amazing mum. You really would.’
‘And you say that based on …?’
‘On the … on you. Just based on you.’
‘Alfie,’ she said, ‘I sometimes think … I worry that you think I’m something I’m not. I’m clueless, Alfie. Totally clueless. I’m not sure I could cope with the responsibility of raising an actual real-life person. Truly.’ She looked at Alfie, reaching into his blue eyes, expecting to see disenchantment coming down like shop shutters. But his gaze was still bright, still hopeful.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I believe in you, Joey Mullen. I totally believe in you and I think you and I could make the most beautiful baby you’ve ever seen and give it everything a child needs. Will you at least think about it?’
She cocked her head and regarded him. Beautiful Alfie, the love of her life.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’ll think about it.’
8
8 February
Freddie checked the time: five fifty-three. He pushed his chair across the floor to the window and picked up his binoculars. It was early evening, dark already, but maybe he could get a couple of good shots of Jenna coming back from her Wednesday-afternoon netball club in her skirt and hoodie. She should be turning the corner of the high street any second now.
Freddie was not a voyeur. Voyeurism was a form of control, like mental abuse, like rape, like bullying. It was nothing to do with the physicality of the action, and all to do with the feeling of power it gave the perpetrator, the balancing out of delicate ids and egos. But Freddie wasn’t a pervert. He wasn’t a bully. He wasn’t a criminal. He watched girls in order to understand them. He was just trying to work it all out. It was just another project.
He focused his binoculars and trained them on to the village. He saw his mum hurtle past the Melville in her running gear, looking like a small boy with her hair scraped off her face and tucked inside a black baseball cap. He saw the man with white hair walking the miniature schnauzer. He saw two younger boys from the Academy, clutching skateboards, heading, he assumed, towards the playing fields by the river on the other side of the roundabout where there was a skate park. And there, there she was: Jenna Tripp, powder-pink sports bag slung over her shoulder, long, solid legs, white trainers, navy hoodie, earbuds, dark ponytail and a huge clear plastic cup of some overpriced frappé from Starbucks in her right hand.
He got some more footage as she turned off the high street into her little side street and then he saw her stop and he panned out to see what she was looking at. There was a woman standing on the pavement outside Jenna’s house. Freddie was pretty sure it was Jenna’s mum. She was wearing a T-shirt with the words ‘STOP FRACKING NOW’ emblazoned across the front and held a 35-mm camera that she was using to photograph a car across the street. Jenna picked up her pace and approached the woman, who started to gesticulate agitatedly, pointing at the car and then, suddenly, chillingly, looking up and, very deliberately, pointing at him. Freddie snapped one more photo before diving off his chair and on to the floor. When he peered over his windowsill a moment later, Jenna and the woman were both gone. He plugged his binoculars into his computer and opened up the images. He went to the last photo he’d taken and zoomed in on the woman’s face.
Her eyes were narrowed and locked completely on to him, her finger pointing at him and her mouth clearly forming the word you.
9
‘Mum, what the hell are you doing?’
‘What does it look like I’m doing?’
‘Acting like a crazy person is what it looks like you’re doing.’
‘Did you not see him?’
‘Who?’
‘Up there, in the yellow house. He’s taking pictures again.’
Jenna looked up at the painted houses above and found the yellow one. ‘Where?’
‘Up there in the top window. He’s always at it.’
Jenna narrowed her eyes at the top window. She couldn’t see anything. But then she hadn’t expected to. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘whoever it was has gone now.’ She knew better than to try to disabuse her mother of her outlandish observations. She’d tried that approach for ages. It hadn’t worked. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go in.’
Her mother narrowed her pretty blue eyes at her; then her gaze passed over Jenna’s shoulder towards something behind. She said, ‘Look at this. Look.’
Jenna sighed. The sweat from netball had dried on her skin in the cold evening air and she was shivering and desperate to get indoors.
Her mother crouched down next to her red Vauxhall Corsa and indicated a point just above the back-wheel arch. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘That scratch. That was not there yesterday. And that’s been done deliberately, you can tell. Someone’s done that with a key. Look, you can see the teeth marks.’
Jenna leaned down and examined the scratch. Her mum’s car was so old that she could remember being driven to her first day at nursery school in it. The scratch certainly looked newer than some of the other damage, but that meant nothing.
‘Why?’ said her mum. ‘Why us? Why me? I don’t understand.’
‘Come on.’ Jenna offered her mum her hand. ‘Let’s go in. I’m freezing.’
Her mum got to her feet. ‘I think I need to call the police again. For all the good that it’ll do me. But honestly. It’s getting ridiculous. And now your school seems to be involved too.’
Jenna pushed the latched door open and went indoors. ‘What do you mean, my school?’
‘Your head teacher. That superhead. It’s him up there taking photos. I’m sure it is. And you know who else seems to be living up there now? That woman I told you about, the one who was on that tour with us in the Lake District? Remember? It’s all connected. The whole thing is connected, Jen. And it’s just getting bigger and bigger and bigger.’
Jenna dropped her PE bag in the hallway and hung her blazer off the banister. ‘I’m going to run myself a bath, Mum,’ she said. ‘Do you want me to leave the water in for you?’
‘Yes please, love. Thank you. Remember to rinse it out first though!’ she called up after her. ‘In case there’s any broken glass!’
‘Yup,’ Jenna called back. ‘Sure.’
10
11 February
Joey was sitting on the 218 bus on her way home from work on Saturday when she saw a tall man in a blue jumper and blue jeans leaving the big JD Sports holding a carrier bag and looking slightly lost. Her instinctive reaction, coming a split second before realising that the man was Tom Fitzwilliam, was attraction. Intense attraction. The sort of attraction that makes you burn at your core.
The bus came to a halt at the traffic lights and she watched him walking first in one direction and then in another. He appeared to be looking for something and then she saw his pace quicken to a gentle run and his arm extend from his body as though – it seemed momentarily possible – he was about to take to the sky, like Superman. As he pulled his arm higher above his head, his blue jumper pulled away slightly from his stomach and she glimpsed for a startling moment an inch of bare flesh, creamy pale with the smooth, supple give of freshly baked bread crust. His long legs took him swiftly to the kerb, to the taxi that had pulled over at his command (not request. No. Command). He swung in his big carrier bag and then himself. The taxi pulled away in front of Joey’s bus and she watched it with some excitement from her seat near the front. By the time they’d
loaded up with passengers at the next bus stop, Tom and his taxi were gone from view.
The house was empty when Joey got home. Alfie was at his mum’s, in theory painting her kitchen, in actuality most likely watching sports on her leather sofa eating a home-cooked meal off a tray on his lap. Jack was at work and Rebecca was on a hen weekend in Gloucestershire. For a while Joey wandered from room to room, absorbing the sense of space. She still felt unable to spread herself around this house and usually went straight from the kitchen to her bedroom and from her bedroom to the front door without lingering or settling. When she did occasionally sit in the living room, it was as a guest, conscious of not outstaying her welcome. ‘Make yourself at home,’ her brother always insisted. But that was easy for him to say. They were siblings. Brother and sister. Extensions of one another. He would never feel her presence as a weight or an unease. But the same was clearly not the case for Rebecca. Joey was a stranger to her, someone to hide from and to avoid.
The rooms in her brother’s house felt anonymous, no different in some ways to the rooms at the Melville Hotel in the village: all pale furnishings and soft golden objects with no obvious purpose. She could not imagine a baby coming into this house. She could not imagine the noise of it, the uncontrollability of it, the endless head space that it would occupy. Her thoughts returned, as they had a dozen times since Alfie’s unexpected pronouncement of last week, to the concept of her own baby. Wouldn’t it be nice, Alfie had said later that evening, for our baby to be the same age as Jack and Rebecca’s baby? They could grow up together. Be best mates forever.
The clear implication being that they should make a baby now. Not soon. Not at some point. But now.
And Joey did not want a baby now.
Most definitely not now.
As she thought this she came upon a photo of her and Jack posed between their mother and father outside their grandmother’s house in Exeter. She was about three years old, wearing a red sweatshirt and her hair in pigtails. Jack was an incredibly awkward thirteen-year-old with a heavy fringe that almost covered his eyes. He had his hand placed protectively on her shoulder. He’d loved her with a passion from the day she’d arrived. The ten-year age gap had never divided them. If anything the absence of sibling rivalry had brought them closer together. But it was her parents who drew her inspection now; if she was three in this photo then her mother would have been thirty-one. Thirty-one, married and a mother of a toddler and a teenager. Joey could see the bloom of youth still upon her mother’s skin, the lustre of her chestnut hair. Young, she thought, my mother was so young. Only a few years older than I am now. She had not thought of her mother as a young person when she was a child and then her mother had died before Joey had had a chance to notice that she was now old.
On her way back up to her bedroom, she passed Rebecca’s study door. Rebecca worked from home three or four days a week as a systems analyst. For hours at a time she wouldn’t come out. Joey would hear the hushed tones of her voice through the door as she passed by on her way to her attic room, or the plasticky click of her fingertips against the keyboard. But more often there was silence. As though there was no one in there at all.
She peered down the stairwell to check no one had noiselessly returned home, before gently pushing open Rebecca’s study door. She jumped and clutched her heart. A man, in the corner. But no, not a man, a life-size cardboard cut-out of her brother in Hawaiian swimming trunks. She remembered it from the photos of her brother’s stag night. He and his mates had carried the cut-out all around Bristol, getting pretty girls to pose for photos with it along the way.
It was a small square room. Three walls were covered with built-in shelves and a fourth housed a deep bay window overlooking the street. There was a coffee machine and a kettle, a tray of mugs and cups, a small fridge, a small cream sofa. Everything to ensure that she need rarely leave the room. On her desk were three large monitors, two keyboards, neatly stacked paperwork, a photo of her and Jack on their wedding day. Joey picked it up and gazed at it. She could barely remember her brother’s wedding. She’d arrived in the UK with a hangover and basically drunk her way through the next forty-eight hours until it was time for her to catch the Sunday evening flight home. She could not have told you what Rebecca had been wearing but, glancing now at the photo, it seemed it was a cream satin slip dress. She also saw that Rebecca had worn her hair down and combed to a shine and had small diamond drops from her earlobes. She had smiled, clearly at least once, and thankfully the photographer had been there to capture it. But Joey’s overriding memory of the weekend was looking at her amazing brother’s slightly mousey new wife and wondering why she wasn’t smiling.
She put the photo down and let her hands wander indiscriminately over the objects on Rebecca’s desk. A chartreuse paperweight. A tube of Cath Kidston hand cream. A very realistic plastic cactus in a green pot. A silver Links of London bracelet. A tiny photo of a Border collie being cuddled by a teenage girl who Joey assumed was Rebecca.
There was a window seat built into the bay, upholstered with grey ticking cushions. Joey sat down for a moment to take in the view across the valley. From here she could see over the tops of the trees opposite. She could see the chimneys of the houses in the village and the river and voluptuous hills beyond. And from the left-hand portion of the bay she could see directly into the right-hand portion of a mirror-image bay on Tom Fitzwilliam’s house. She could see a suggestion of a table lamp, the blur of a mirror, the profile of a woman’s face.
Nicola Fitzwilliam. Applying face cream. Her fingertips working into her porcelain skin.
11
Freddie heard the tantalising echo of high-heeled shoes against the paving stones outside and quickly pushed his chair across his bedroom floor to investigate. It was late afternoon on Saturday. The sky was growing dark, grey veins threading through the pale evening sky, a smudge of moon just visible on the other side of the river. It was her. Red Boots. And she was wearing her red boots. Red boots, skinny jeans, leather jacket, big scarf, blond hair all puffed up on top of her head, lipstick. She looked as pretty as he remembered her looking the first time he’d seen her at the Melville. He grabbed his camera and went back to the window.
Red Boots was already halfway down the hill. She turned left into the village at the bottom of the hill and he followed her with his lens across the road to the bus stop. He checked his bus app and saw that the next 218 was not due for eight minutes. She pulled out her phone and played with it for a while. Every now and then she would look upwards – directly, it seemed, towards the painted houses. He zoomed in on her and saw her bottom lip pinched between her teeth. What was she waiting for? What was looking at? Then suddenly, when the 218 was only two minutes away, she stood up abruptly and walked towards the village. A moment later he saw her walking across the other side of the road. The bus had been and gone and she had a bottle of something in a blue carrier bag which she took back up the hill.
She reached the blue house and bypassed it, coming to a stop outside his. What was she doing? Had she clocked him watching her? She couldn’t have. He was brilliant at watching people without them realising. But then he thought of Jenna’s mum last week, the pointing finger, the word you. Maybe he wasn’t as stealthy as he thought he was. He pulled back into the shadows of his room waiting for her either to knock on his front door or to turn around and head back to her own house. But she did neither of these things. She stood there for exactly three minutes and eighteen seconds until there was the sound of footsteps up the hill and a man appeared, cast in the shadow of the street lights that had just been switched on. Freddie pushed open his window and put his ear to the gap.
‘What are you up to, sexy?’ asked the man. It was him. The husband.
‘I don’t really know,’ Red Boots replied. ‘I was going to get the bus into town and meet you somewhere but you didn’t answer your phone. So I bought a bottle of wine and came home instead.’
‘Sorry, baby,’ said the guy. ‘I ran out
of juice and didn’t have my charger with me.’
‘Don’t worry,’ she replied. ‘It was a pretty half-hearted attempt at going out; I’m not sure I really wanted to anyway. And now you’re here so looks like it was too late anyway.’
‘Yeah,’ said the guy, ‘I’m knackered. Guess what?’
‘What?’
‘I finished it.’
‘Your mum’s kitchen?’
‘Yeah. All done. Just need to go back and do a second coat on the skirting. But apart from that, I’m done.’
‘God, finally.’
‘I’ll show you pictures once I’ve got some charge in my phone. It looks really good.’
‘So after all those weeks of farting about, it ended up taking you one day.’
‘Yeah. I know. I just thought … after what we talked about the other day … it’s about time I got serious about things.’
There was a short silence. Freddie couldn’t see what they were doing. Then Red Boots said, ‘Well, you’re a very, very good husband, Alfie Butter. I’m very impressed.’
‘And you’re a very good wife, Joey Mullen, and I think we should go inside and drink that wine and do the things that good husbands and wives get to do on Saturday nights.’
‘Netflix?’
‘Possibly.’
‘Come on then.’
Then Freddie heard the sound of a key in the lock of number 14 and the bang of the door behind them. He exhaled his held breath and thought two things; firstly that he now knew Red Boots’s name. The second was that although he now had an explanation for her sitting at the bus stop for six minutes and then coming home again, he did not have an explanation for why she had stood outside his house for three minutes and eighteen seconds pretending that she wasn’t.