Unfollow Me

by Charlotte Duckworth

  She’s me, in a former life. I give her a look of pity that she doesn’t acknowledge. I want to tell her that she doesn’t need to do this, that she’s worth more than she thinks, but she’s too drunk to care, so I leave the train, making my way over to the Northern line. From here I’m about twenty minutes away. I should get there before 11pm, with any luck.

  Everything runs smoothly, as though the universe is on my side. When I arrive at my destination, I stand on the long escalator, looking upwards, and start to get second thoughts. I’m so far from home. So far from Isleworth. If this goes wrong again, I’ve got no one close by to help me, to come to my rescue. I shake the thoughts away. Now’s the time for courage.

  I exit the Tube and walk along the fashionable main shopping street of her neighborhood. This is where she belongs. And she never appreciated it. Even now, I’m still irritated with her for that. She just thought it was the norm, to pop down to the local florist for a hand-tied bunch of hydrangeas encased in thick brown paper, to stop on the way back at the deli to pick up some cheese no one has ever heard of for her dinner party that evening.

  I’m nearly there now, and the streets are quieter. The houses all loom large above me, watching me, marking me out as an outsider. They’re fortresses, protecting their spoilt and ungrateful occupants. But fortresses can be overcome.

  Finally, I arrive at his street. Their street. I feel a pang for Kensington, for the short time we spent there, wrapped in each other’s arms. Our youth, the promises he made me, that were written in dust, blown away by a whisper.

  I make my way along the street. And then I am there, outside his house. Number 36 Acacia Avenue.

  I climb the steps, my legs steady and strong now, and I press the brass bell, hoping that behind this door I’ll find the answers—the reassurance—that I need.

  HENRY

  The ironic thing is, I respected Yvonne a bit more after she had sliced open my arm. As I watched the suspicious nurse stick Steri-Strips across it—it was only a flesh wound, thankfully; “I shouldn’t be allowed in the kitchen!” I’d winked—I found myself admiring Yvonne’s balls. They were certainly bigger than mine. I know it had been an accident, her hand had slipped as I pushed her away from me, but she hadn’t even felt the need to come to the hospital with me. Instead, she just dropped the knife in my kitchen and ran.

  The police came later that evening, but they weren’t very interested in my side of things. She’d twisted it all. She’d got in there first, claiming self-defence. She’d actually accused me of assault. When I saw her at work the next week, she ignored me. Didn’t bother to ask me how I was. Didn’t seem to care that she might have left me about to collapse on the floor, bleeding profusely from a major vein. That I might have been blue-lighted to hospital, spent time in intensive care, but still made it back in time for the weekly covers meeting. Maybe she could tell she’d only nicked the skin. Maybe she’d done it before to other men. But still, cutting someone with a knife—you ought to feel some guilt about that, surely?

  Understandably, she stopped coming to the pub with us all after that. I lived in fear she would tell everyone about her pregnancy—after my initial irritation that she hadn’t enquired after my health died away, more than anything I just wanted her gone. Gone from the magazine completely. And I was in luck. One evening, I ran into a bunch of other Bennet Media journos down at the club and I heard them talking about a new launch. A woman’s fashion weekly. Mix of reportage and work-to-bar outfits, aimed at young commuting professionals. Glossy cover, but cheap paper stock inside. They were recruiting, and yes, they needed a whole picture desk. I sang her praises, told them she deserved a little promotion, that she was the best-dressed in the office by miles, that she was wasted on King. And just like that, my little problem went away. Or at least, got moved to the eleventh floor.

  I carried on with my life, trying to push to the back of my mind what she might or might not have decided to do about the baby. Her salary barely broke five figures, so I knew she couldn’t afford to keep it. I hoped she’d come to realise that, in time. And I’d done my bit, hadn’t I? I’d wanted to give her the money to go private, but after she refused my offer and then stabbed me when I was trying to talk it all through like a grown-up, well, I changed my mind.

  But the guilt remained. Especially when she sent me that email, later, telling me how things turned out. It’s always there, lingering at the back of my mind. It didn’t help that it was a boy, and I only have my three girls. I think about him sometimes. What he would have been like. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think it was for the best—for her, for me, and for the baby. Incompatible with life, that’s the phrase she said they used.

  If I’m honest, I managed to push it to the back of my mind quite well. The past was in the past. But then my wedding day came, and like a wound that never truly healed, the whole thing was split open again.

  A few weeks ago, when I was travelling home on the Underground, an inebriated lady younger than me called across the carriage. “Oi you! Instagram husband!” I looked up, only because my Bluetooth headphones had run out of battery and so I wasn’t listening to music as I usually am. I asked her to repeat herself, and she took it upon herself to come and sit next to me and tell me how much she loves my wife.

  Everyone loves my wife. People joke about their better halves, but in this case there’s no doubting that my wife is the better of us two.

  And up until last week, I’d somehow managed to stop her from realising it.

  LILY

  The gin and tonic didn’t work. After our uncomfortable conversation about James, I need something stronger. Luke is only too happy to oblige, and heads back to the bar.

  I should have told him the truth. Dangerous, Lily, dangerous, I say to myself, but I don’t care. I deserve a night off, don’t I? Maybe a little fun, even. I have cried myself to sleep most nights, ever since James left me. It’s been so long since I’ve done this, sat in a pub with a man. A man who’s attractive, and interesting, and more importantly seems to like me. I’m allowed to do this. I’m only twenty-seven.

  An hour later, we are both drunk. I escape to the toilet, sitting down. It feels as though the cubicle is closing in and opening out on me, my head fuzzy. In front of the basins, I strike up a conversation with a stranger about my eye make-up, soliciting her opinion. She tells me I’d look better with wings, and I shut my eyes and allow her to draw them on for me with her own pencil. As she chats to me, telling me I look gorgeous, I half-heartedly think about how Violet once did a video about make-up hygiene and I feel like laughing out loud at her, telling her how stupid her content is. How stupid we all are for watching.

  The girl gives me a hug, and kisses me on the cheek.

  “Good luck, sweetie,” she says. “I’ve been watching you—you can tell he’s smitten.”

  “You’re so nice,” I say, as I wash my hands. “Not like my friend Violet. She’s let us all down again. She doesn’t care. We’re all idiots for watching, you see. She doesn’t care.”

  The girl frowns, looking confused, and turns away before she hears me mutter the word bitch under my breath. But I don’t care if she’s heard or not, it feels good to say it out loud. Violet is a bitch.

  Back in the pub, I concentrate very hard on walking to the table without bumping into anything. I’m used to this feeling, of course. But only at home, where the carpet pathway from my sofa to my bed is trampled flat, familiar and reliable.

  “Mustn’t fall over,” I whisper to myself as I push through the people. The lights flash on and off and a bell rings, and then I remember what it means. Time, please, ladies and gentlemen. That’s the end of my fun, the end of the night. I’ll be turfed out now, spat out into the cold street, the joy of this evening souring into regret as I trudge to the Tube. My head will throb in response to the buzzing strip lighting on the platform. The train will throw me up and down, sloshing the contents of my stomach up into my throat. I will crawl into bed, without removing my m
ake-up, and feel ashamed for the rest of the week.

  “Hey,” Luke says, as I collapse on to the booth seat next to him. “You were ages. Was going to send out a search party.”

  I stare at him. He’s drunk too. His eyes are bloodshot, a little too wide.

  “Shall we make a move?”

  I groan inwardly. I want to hang on to the last few minutes of what’s been an enjoyable evening, but of course he’s desperate to get out of here, winged eyeliner or not.

  “I suppose so,” I say, heaving my coat on over my shoulders.

  We walk to the Tube together. He’s so close to me; my hand keeps brushing the outside of his jacket. I’m wallowing in a new self-pity now, thinking what might have been and what I’ve ruined.

  We reach the mouth of the station and he pauses.

  “Hey,” he says. He looks down at the escalator as it sucks people under. “I don’t really like the idea of you trying to get home on your own.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I say, shrugging my shoulders and pushing him away. I feel my balance shift and narrowly avoid falling over. Great, now he feels responsible for me. “Big girl.”

  “Nah but…” He shifts slightly, linking his arm through mine. “I wouldn’t feel happy about it. I’ll come with you.”

  “Suit yourself,” I say, eyes wide. “How will you get back?”

  “It’s fine, I’ll get an Uber.”

  I think of the way he spoke about his sister, the genuine concern in his eyes.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Come on,” he says, and he tugs me on to the escalator.

  He turns to face me as we descend. He’s on the step below me. If he were a stranger this would be an invasion of personal space. But he’s not a stranger. I bring my hand to my forehead. My thoughts begin to muddle.

  “I feel like such an idiot,” I say. “I shouldn’t have drunk so much.”

  “Don’t be daft,” he says. “You didn’t drink that much.” He winks at me, and then, a split-second before he does it, I know what’s going to happen. He winds his arms around my waist, and pulls me towards him. Our faces are almost touching as he gazes at me.

  “You’re adorable,” he says. “You do know that, don’t you?”

  I look away, embarrassed. Then I look back, and I feel myself leaning in towards him. I want him to kiss me.

  But he doesn’t. The escalator ends, and he stumbles backwards, unaware. I nearly fall on top of him, but grab the handrail just in time to steady myself.

  “Shit!” he says, in a heap at my feet. People wander past us, stepping over him, tutting. I haul him up. His hands are warm.

  “Serves me right for trying to snog you on an escalator,” he says, and takes my hand, leading me towards the southbound platform. “Come on. Let’s get you home.”

  YVONNE

  There’s no answer, so I ring again. I might wake the children, but then again, they sleep on the top floor, tucked away like some Victorian kids in a nursery. A room each. A whole suite of children’s rooms, in fact, with a bathroom painted in blue, a Finding Nemo mural splashed across one wall. I remember the vlog when Violet unveiled it to them: Kids Get The Surprise Of Their Lives!

  The lights are off in the house, the whole thing covered in darkness. I peer through the stained-glass panels on either side of the door to see if the light is on in the kitchen at the back of the house, but it isn’t.

  He’s still up, I know it. He never goes to bed before midnight, no matter how sleep-deprived he is. It accounts for how much he’s aged since he had the children, but he’s stubborn like that, refuses to let anyone else change his routines, his ways of living.

  I walk back down the stone steps and to the side of the house. I know where he’ll be, if he’s not in the living room. His little oasis, his hideaway, where we met once before. The vast black gate looms before me. I tap in the security code—2015, the year they moved in—and wait for it to unlock. As it clicks open, I think of the way he told me what the code was, with the casual manner of someone who’s never lost anything that mattered.

  I walk through the gate and shut it behind me. I’m in their garden. Their huge-for-London, perfectly manicured garden. A neat lawn, edged by smooth grey paving slabs, some well-tended flowerbeds and not a lot else. Just a black-painted shed in one corner, and then his man cave at the end. Clad in cedar, like something out of Grand Designs, entirely at odds with the architecture of the house itself.

  I walk down the side path and the garden is suddenly flooded with light. Security lights, activated by motion. They must go off all the time when the foxes are prowling. There’s only one door at the front of his man cave. It has an integral blind, which is pulled down, but slithers of light are escaping from the edges, and I know he’s in there.

  It’s been nearly two weeks since I last saw him.

  I tiptoe up to the door. What will he be doing in there? Probably smoking, listening to blues and feeling sorry for himself. He was always so good at that. I’d pander to it, of course. I was so in love back then, so in awe. I was a human ego-booster, a pathetic puppy dog wanting nothing but for my master to acknowledge me.

  I pause outside the door to the cabin, turning around to look at the house. She’s not there, of course. She’ll be at the hospital. But someone must be inside, looking after the kids. Perhaps Henry’s mother is there. I remember the way she looked at me when we bumped into her outside the Bluebird Cafe. Like I was something she had stepped in. The way he called her Mother, before introducing me, dismissing our relationship, referring to me as a work colleague and a friend. I had to excuse myself and rush to the toilet, locking myself in and giving in to a few brief sobs, before pulling myself together, telling myself it was only a matter of time before I got what I wanted.

  If only I’d known back then that it would take me seventeen years.

  I knock on the door. Softly at first, then with more force. The glass in the door is thick, triple-glazed probably, and even if I put my ear right up close to it, I can’t hear any sounds from inside. Maybe he’s asleep. But no, not with the light on. I could try the handle, it’d probably be unlocked, but I’m too scared of what I might find to enter uninvited.

  I knock again. Still nothing.

  Eventually I pull my phone out of my pocket and dial his number, my heart pounding in my chest as it rings.

  The call connects, but he doesn’t say anything. He hasn’t forgiven me yet.

  “I’m outside,” I say, my voice edged with that new-found power. “Let me in.”

  I hear a sigh, and then he hangs up. Seconds later there’s some movement behind the door, and then it opens.

  He stands in the doorway, staring down at me. His lip curls upwards as he takes me in. In one hand, he’s holding a crystal glass, filled with amber liquid.

  “What the fuck,” he says, and immediately I know he’s drunk, from the hoarseness of his voice. The bags under his eyes that were evident on stage just hours beforehand have suddenly increased tenfold, huge dark welts that give his face a skull-like appearance. One corner of his shirt is hanging out from underneath his jumper. His hair is tousled and greasy, and his nose is shiny with sweat.

  It is like a liberation. All those years of agony, and finally, I have won. I don’t need to be here. I don’t need to be here at all. There is nothing in this washed-up, forty-five-year-old man that I want. Or need. I have Simon.

  It is like a spell has been broken, and I am finally free.

  “Is she OK?” I say, my voice tight, precise. “That’s all I want to know. Just tell me she’s OK and then I’ll leave you alone.”

  I stare hard into his eyes.

  “You,” he spits, the whisky glass rising in his hand. The other points towards me, finger jabbing mid-air, as though he’s trying to poke me in the face. “Always … you. Turning up where you’re not welcome. So tell me, Yvonne, why are you here tonight?”

  He stumbles slightly, leaning on the doorframe.

  “Please, Henry
, just tell me if she’s OK…”

  “No!” he roars, cutting me off. “She’s NOT OK and she never will be again. There, are you happy now?”

  And I know then that coming here was a stupid idea, that he wants me dead.

  Briefly, I raise my eyes to the dark sky. I turn and leave just in time, hearing the crack of his whisky glass as it hits the patio behind me, smashing into pieces that jump across the ground, spinning where they land.

  HENRY

  Look, I’m prepared to take the blame for most of it. For a start, it was my fault, I suppose, for being so hands-off with the wedding. For never checking, for never asking, for never showing an interest. I’d feigned busyness, made jokes about my crude taste, thrown out platitudes like “whatever makes you happy will make me happy, darling” as though they were get-out-of-jail-free cards. Served me right, my father would have said.

  I first saw her from one of the front bedrooms of my parents’ house. It wasn’t my bedroom; it was one of the spares. Larger, with an en suite and sunbleached floral wallpaper that Violet said would work well in the pictures, fitting our theme of “faded English country glamor” perfectly. I never imagined that on the morning of my wedding I would wake up in that room. It will forever be my great aunt’s bedroom, because it’s the one she always insisted on at Christmas. She said she liked the fact it overlooked the driveway, that you could see people approaching.

  And so I was in there, the muted scent of mothballs possibly a figment of my imagination, when I first saw her. But before I saw her, I heard her. Not just her, but the other one too. Crunching up the gravel driveway, laughing a little. He was more serious, issuing instructions. She was teasing him, making comments about the morning mist. I leant out of the window. Andrew was with me, pressed up against the freestanding mirror, muttering about his buttonhole. But his chatter faded into the background as I stared out and strained my neck to confirm what I believed to be true.