by Tammy Cohen
‘It’s just that you’re home so much more now than you were before … well, before it happened.’
That’s how we referred to the attack now, Em and I. It. That thing. What happened. As if taking away its label somehow reduced its power.
‘That’s because exams are getting closer,’ she said, which was true, although they were still months away. ‘It’s easier to study at home.’
‘And you’re sure it’s not because of—’
‘No. I told you. It’s because of work.’
She twiddled a strand of her long hair around her index finger, which is something she’d done since she was a child in times of stress. ‘Stop,’ I said softly, reaching out to tap her hand. Since she’d confided in me a couple of days before that she was worried her hair was falling out, I’d been scanning her scalp anxiously, and now I was sure I could see patches on her head where her hair was noticeably sparser.
‘Em, sweetie. You know you can talk to me.’
Emma stared down at the floor and I realized she was trying not to cry. She’d always been this way. Fiercely protective of her own feelings but also not wanting to put other people in a position where they felt something was demanded of them.
‘It’s okay to put your own needs first for once,’ I told her, shuffling my chair around the table so that I could put my arm around her. ‘Come on, tell me what’s going on.’
‘What, so you can pass it on to Dad and try to find a way to make this his fault too?’
I flinched at the unexpected barb, hurt burning behind my eyes. I wasn’t proud of the way I’d acted during the break-up. There were occasions when I’d thrown the girls’ suffering in Phil’s face, used things they’d told me in private to guilt-trip him about what he’d done. But that was then. I’d apologized so many times since. I knew I hadn’t acted well.
‘Sorry, Mum,’ said Em, in a small, lumpy voice, leaning her head so it rested in the crook of my neck and I could smell her apple shampoo. ‘I didn’t mean that. But I don’t want to talk about it, because that means I have to think about it and I just want it to go away. I want him to go away.’
Now, of course, I know I should have pressed her, despite the tears she was trying so hard not to shed. But you can’t force teenagers to open up, can you? You have to let them come to you in their own time.
That’s what I tell myself, anyway.
Sometimes I catch Mum looking at me with an anxiety that both melts me and sets my teeth on edge, at the same time.
‘Why don’t you go out?’ she suggests, and I pretend to consider it. I don’t tell her how my neck aches from looking out for you or how I steel myself before going around corners in case I bump into you or how I avoid shop windows for fear of seeing your face reflected back behind me.
I’ve stopped listening to music while I’m out on my own. With headphones in my ears, how would I hear you coming?
Yesterday, I was on my way home and the sun was shining and I leaned against the park railings and raised up my face to the warmth, and for a moment I forgot myself and closed my eyes. Then I felt goosebumps on my skin, as if a shadow had fallen across me, and my eyes sprang open, but not before I’d convinced myself that when they did I’d find you standing in front of me.
‘Are you okay?’ asked a woman with a pram standing nearby. I realized I was hyperventilating. I must have looked insane.
Last night, I dreamed I was back there next to the park with my eyes closed, and that cold feeling came and I knew that you were there, just inches away, but my lids were glued shut and my legs wouldn’t work. When I woke up my breath was ragged and my skin felt ingrained with you, and even after I dragged myself to the bathroom and ran the water scorching hot in the sink I couldn’t wash you off.
5
I kept an eye on Em while trying not to make it obvious that was what I was doing.
The problem was, she had always been hard to read. Meeting her at the school gates when she was small, I’d inspect her little face when she came out of the classroom, my anxious mother’s heart searching for clues as to what sort of a day she’d had. But there would be nothing, just the same Mona Lisa smile as always.
‘Yeah, it was fine,’ she’d answer, and it would take a tap on the shoulder from a teacher or another parent to find out that there’d been some incident where she’d got hurt or fallen over. Getting her ready for the bath one evening, I’d been horrified to discover a bruise on one milky shoulder in the shape of a perfect bite mark, but when I asked about it she’d shrugged it off. ‘It’s fine now.’
‘She’d make a brilliant poker player,’ Phil and I used to joke. Well, it wasn’t so funny now, I thought, scanning her face at breakfast-time, a little over five weeks after the attack, trying to work out what was going on behind that placid exterior.
She’d always bitten her nails, but the hair thing was more worrying. When she wasn’t twirling strands of it absently around her finger, she was compulsively patting her head to see if it was getting thinner. One night she came to me, her hair still wet from the shower. ‘Look,’ she said, holding out her hand. We both stared at the small clump of hair lying across her palm as if it were the body of some once-living creature. When she parted the top sections, I could now see two or three coin-shaped patches where the scalp showed through. But when I suggested she talk to a counsellor about what had happened, she insisted there was no need.
Still, in most other respects, she gave the appearance of having put it behind her. True, she was still around more often than she’d been before, but that could easily have been down to a heavier school workload, as she said. She’d always been conscientious about schoolwork, often stressing far out of proportion to the importance of whatever essay she was working on. It would have been out of character for her not to be preoccupied and subdued with important end-of-year exams looming.
Of course, I still worried, but I tried not to dwell on it. ‘Don’t let that man take any more from you – or Em – than he already has,’ Mari counselled me over the phone when I confided how much Em’s attacker was still on my mind. ‘When he comes into your head, deliberately shut him down, and that way you restore your own power.’
So, for a few days, I persuaded myself that things were getting back to normal. See how Em is walking around the house with her phone in her hand, laughing with her friends on FaceTime, showing them the disgusting tuna sandwich she made or the weird way Dotty is sleeping? Isn’t that exactly as it should be?
Then one afternoon, just under a week since I’d last tried to broach the subject of the attack with Emma, it all came rushing to the surface again in the most agonizing way.
It was mid-afternoon and I was, for once, upstairs, working at my desk, which was in an alcove on the landing. There were three bedrooms in our house, but I couldn’t bring myself to set up my office in Rosie’s room. It would have felt like I was admitting she wasn’t coming back.
So I was sitting at my cramped desk, facing the wall, when I heard Em’s key in the lock and the sound of her bursting in through the door, breathing noisily, as if she’d been running.
‘Hello, darling!’ I called down.
There was no answer, although I could still hear those painful, rasping breaths.
Puzzled, I got up and peered over the top of the banister, racing down when I saw that Em – my normally stoic daughter – was leaning against the wall in the hallway with her head in her hands.
‘What is it? What’s happened?’
I flew down the stairs and put my arms around my daughter’s shaking shoulders.
‘Em, talk to me. What’s the matter?’
‘I’ve seen him, Mum.’
The words were muffled and, though I instantly guessed what she meant, still I pretended I didn’t, as if I could force reality down a different channel by merely refusing to recognize it.
‘Saw who? Is it a boy? Is that it?’
She shook her head and finally raised her tear-streaked face so that I could hea
r her properly.
‘Him. Number Eight. I saw him while I was crossing the road outside the Tube station. He’d come out of a doorway somewhere on the opposite side and then crossed straight over right next to me.’
There was a tightening then, in my chest, but still my first thought was that she was mistaken. I wanted her to be mistaken.
‘Darling, you must have seen someone who just looked similar. He’s obviously in your thoughts, so it wouldn’t be at all surprising if you thought you saw him.’
‘Mum, it was him. I know it was. He was exactly the same height and he had that weird chin and those exact same eyes and he was wearing that same jacket with the badge thingy on the sleeve, and then when he passed me I smelled that aftershave and I started shaking all over. I know it was him, Mum. What if he recognized me? What if he followed me?’
Her eyes were wide, locked on mine, searching for reassurance, just like she was small again.
I took her into my arms and held her for a while, the solid warmth of her. I was glad she couldn’t see my face so I had a chance to neutralize the shock from it.
‘He didn’t follow you, Em. You said yourself he was going the opposite way. And there’s no way he would recognize you. It was dark the night it happened. He came up to you from behind. He probably didn’t see your face the entire time. You’re perfectly safe, sweetheart. You’re home now.’
All those platitudes I told her as I rocked her to and fro like a baby, wanting to give her comfort, hoping she couldn’t feel my own heart pummelling against my ribs.
It was what I’d feared, right from the night of the attack. That the man who’d done it would turn out to be local. Since the failed ID parade, after the bogeyman had a face and we knew he’d got away with it, those fears had only intensified.
It used to drive Phil mad, this compulsion I had to jump right to the worst-case scenario. ‘My wife, the catastrophist,’ he’d say, rolling his eyes, as if I were deliberately dramatizing my fears for effect. He never understood how thinking through the very things I most dreaded was my way of guarding against them happening. Everyone knows bad news takes you unawares, so making myself confront the direst outcomes rendered them impossible.
Except, of course, it didn’t.
I felt sick. But still I forced my features into a smile and took Em into the kitchen to make her some tea, telling her all the time that she was safe, that nothing bad would happen to her.
After a while she calmed down, the pink blotches fading from her cheeks.
‘You’re right, I don’t think he ever saw my face,’ she said at last. ‘I mean, he couldn’t, could he, if he was grabbing me from behind?’
‘Exactly.’
‘And just because I saw him coming out of that doorway today, it doesn’t mean he definitely lives around here, does it? I mean, maybe he was working here and getting the Tube home. That’s a possibility, isn’t it?’
‘Of course it is.’
‘Will you call that detective, though, to double-check? You’ve still got his card, haven’t you?’
Detective Byrne had given me a business card with all his contact details on that first night when Em was attacked, telling me to call him any time I needed to find out what was going on with the case.
‘Darling, I really don’t think the police will—’
‘Please?’
I shrugged and took out my phone, rummaging around in my wallet to find the policeman’s white, functional card.
I was expecting to leave a message. Like most people brought up on a diet of TV cop shows, I imagined the police to be constantly on the move, out and about investigating crimes, and that idea was proving hard to shift, despite having witnessed at first hand the mountains of paperwork on the desks at our local station, the shiny patches on the upholstered office chairs hinting at long, sedentary hours. Instead, Detective Byrne – Detective Sergeant Byrne, as it said on his card – answered on the second ring.
‘Mrs Hopwood. What can I do for you?’
He had one of those voices, deep and gentle, that somehow release tensions you hadn’t even known you were carrying, and I found myself exhaling softly before speaking.
‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ I started, remembering too late how I’d read on Twitter that women – and it was mainly women – who started conversations that way immediately lost ground.
‘It’s just that’ – ‘just’, another disempowering word – ‘Emma thinks she saw the man who attacked her – you know, Number Eight from the video you showed us – not far from here, actually. I thought maybe you could put her mind at rest that it couldn’t be him.’
Detective Byrne sighed.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Hopwood. I can understand your concern. And Emma’s too. But I’m not at liberty to tell you where a suspect in a case lives, let alone one who has not been charged with any crime.’
‘But surely you’re allowed to reassure us that he’s not living right here, practically around the corner?’
‘All I can say is you don’t need to be concerned.’
Em was watching my face, so I smiled brightly as I put my phone down.
‘He says we don’t need to be concerned,’ I told her. ‘So that’s good, isn’t it?’
Em nodded, and my heart contracted as I watched her swallow hard behind the soft, pale skin of her throat.
We sat and chatted for a little while then she said she had to go upstairs to work. And when she came down for dinner a couple of hours later, she seemed to have put Number Eight out of her head. We talked about a teacher from school whose husband was facing deportation after fifteen years living in the UK. ‘They can’t do that, though, can they, Mum?’ asked my big-hearted girl. ‘Not after all this time?’
Later, we watched TV together, a show about couples meeting for a blind date in a London restaurant. We agreed that the women were uniformly in a different league from the men.
‘How about you?’ I asked her, nudging her in the ribs. ‘Any boyfriends on the scene?’
At one point before the attack I’d been convinced there was someone. Just little things. Spending longer in the bathroom before school. Texting furiously then clicking off abruptly if I came near.
‘Shush, I’m trying to listen.’
I glanced at Em and saw she was blushing, which made me think my suspicions were right, but I knew better than to push her. If there was a boy, I’d have to let her tell me about it in her own time. She’d always been that way.
At eleven, we both went up to bed, meaning, of course, that I lay in bed reading, then trying to sleep, then giving up and reading again. I tried to remind myself of what Detective Byrne had said, about us not having to be concerned, but his words sounded hollow in my memory, as if he’d been telling me what I wanted to hear.
The more I thought about it, the less likely it seemed that he’d have told me anything different, even if Em’s attacker was living around the corner. No charges had been brought, after all. He was still a free man.
Whenever I closed my eyes I pictured my daughter passing inches away from the man who might have attacked her and the horror of it made them ping open again.
Around one in the morning I heard the sound of Em’s door opening. I expected her to go into the bathroom but, instead, I heard her padding softly down the stairs.
I got up, walked over to my door and opened it a crack, listening for her heading into the kitchen for a drink of water. But in place of the sound of the tap running I heard a clicking noise coming from the front door and the sound of keys jangling.
Hearing Em coming back up, I pulled my door gently to and dived back into bed.
Then I lay staring at the ceiling and tried not to think about what it meant that my daughter was double-checking the locks on the door and setting the latch we never used in the middle of the night.
6
‘I didn’t know who else to tell. I hope you don’t mind.’
‘Oh my God, not at all. I’ve thought about Emma loads
since I saw you both last. Wondering how she was getting on.’
I didn’t let on to Frances that I knew she’d texted Em directly, checking to make sure she was okay, or that she and Em often ‘liked’ each other’s posts on Facebook and Instagram. Besides, it was good if there was someone else Em could talk to about what happened if she needed to. I suspected she hadn’t been completely open with her friends. ‘I don’t want to make a big thing out of it,’ she’d told me. And if my suspicion was right and there was a boyfriend she was confiding in, she wasn’t about to tell me.
‘Oh, Emma’s all right. I think. Not that she’d tell me, probably. She’s at that age.’ I stood up from the kitchen table, tucking the phone under my chin while I rinsed out my coffee cup at the sink. ‘I only thought I should warn you that she might need a bit of reassuring, now that she’s seen him. Or seen someone who looks like him.’
‘You think she’s wrong?’
I shrugged, nearly dislodging the phone.
‘I don’t know. I mean, it would be such bad luck, wouldn’t it? To see the man who’d tried to abduct you while you were walking home, minding your own business.’
I think I was waiting for Frances to agree with me, hoping for reassurance that, no, fate would not be so unkind. Instead, she said:
‘It can’t be uncommon, though, I would guess. Don’t you think it stands to reason that most opportunistic crimes would be committed locally? Someone taking advantage of a situation that presents itself as they go about their day-to-day lives?’
A situation. Had Em been a ‘situation’ to this man?
‘So I expect it must happen a lot,’ Frances went on. ‘Victims of crime coming across the perpetrators in the street. Poor Emma, though. What a traumatic thing to happen. I think I’d struggle if I saw him again. I can’t imagine how much worse it must be for her.’
A cold chill caused the skin on my arm to come up in small bumps. I’d called Frances after Em had left for school, hoping to have my fears allayed. Instead, as I said goodbye and pressed the phone off, they felt far more real.