by Tammy Cohen
Whenever I thought back to the previous night, hearing Em’s soft footsteps padding downstairs and the click of the night latch going on, the jangling of the keys, I ached with impotence. Just how much was my daughter bottling up?
I rang Nita. Her daughter, Grace, had been friends with Em since they started in reception class, two little girls in light-up trainers and with their hair in plaits. I wanted to ask her if Grace had noticed any changes in Em since the attack, and to warn her that Em might need extra support over the next few days while she got over the shock of seeing the man who attacked her walking in the street.
Nita’s phone went straight to voicemail and I left her a rambling message asking her to call me back.
Then I sat down at the kitchen table, phone still in hand, wishing there was someone else with a link to the school that I could call, needing to close that gap between my world and my daughter’s.
Belatedly, I remembered the school mums’ WhatsApp group. We’d started it years before when Emma and her friends were in secondary school and we were no longer all meeting up at the school gates every day, as we had when they were younger. We wanted a way of staying in contact so we could talk through any concerns about changes in behaviour or fallings-out, or ask questions about homework or exams or how it felt that our daughters were growing away from us. Since its inception we’d dealt with bullying and a burgeoning eating disorder and whether fifteen was too young to allow your daughter to sleep with her boyfriend under your roof.
Over the last two years, after losing my job and then Phil, my contributions to the group chat had more or less dried up and then, after the estrangement with Rosie, I’d muted it completely, unable to face going back on. For all I knew, I might have been ejected from the group. Even if I hadn’t been, I was sure they’d have forgotten I was ever part of it, as it had been so long since I last actively contributed. But perhaps there’d be some mention on there of what had happened to Em, some clues Em’s friends had dropped to their parents about how she was coping with it, or even whether I was right to think there might have been a boyfriend in the picture.
I clicked on the WhatsApp icon. There were various chats there. One with Emma from last summer when she’d gone away to a festival with her friends, one with Kath and Mari and a couple of our other friends where we posted silly photos and lots of ‘send gin’-type messages. An old family chat between the four of us with the last comment from Phil just before it all fell apart – Stir-fry tonight?? – the poignant mundanity of it making the breath catch in my throat.
And now, here it was: Year 8 Mums. Although, of course, Year 8 had turned seamlessly into years 9, 10 and 11 since the chat started, children growing into semi-adults in front of our eyes.
The current conversation was about tutoring. Who was doing it. How much it was costing. Everyone agreed it gave our kids an unfair advantage over kids whose parents couldn’t afford tutoring, but no one, it seemed, felt strongly enough to give up that advantage out of principle.
I started to scroll backwards until I got closer to the date of Em’s attack five and a half weeks ago, scanning the comments for mention of her name. There was a conversation about arrangements for picking up a group of girls from a party and then another one about the deadline for delivering English coursework.
I scrolled further and found a conversation that was different in tone from the others, less brisk and practical. I caught the words ‘dreadful’ and ‘awful’ and then ‘poor girl’ and my heartbeat quickened. I scrolled up the thread to where it started with someone – Tilly’s mum, Selina – saying: OMG, have you heard about the attack? and then Ruth’s mum, Ayesha, chipping in, What happened??? with a goggle-eyed emoji. Then the reply: Emma Hopwood was assaulted on her way home from the party on Friday night.
I was surprised how much it hurt, seeing it laid out so bluntly in black and white, just a thing that happened to someone else’s child. At least it proved my hunch was right and they’d forgotten I was ever in the group.
Those first comments were followed by a string of horrified responses from those who hadn’t yet heard about the attack. Lots of OMG! and that poor girl. Others who’d already heard the news from their own daughters jumped in, adding the extra information they’d gleaned. Where it took place. What exactly happened. How she managed to get away.
Thank God she’s ok, wrote Ellie B’s mum, Mel, only …
Instantly, my hackles rose. That word ‘only’, with everything it implied.
… I can’t help wondering why she was on a bus alone at that time. I would never let Ellie come home alone.
Now it came, the chorus of assents.
Absolutely!
Exactly.
I understood what they were doing, distancing themselves, so that this became something that happened to other people’s children, not to theirs. But still their words were like elastic bands snapping against my skin.
No way would I have let Tilly go if she had to come home alone, said Selina. Me neither, wrote Mel. WTF didn’t they get her an Uber?
Now Nita chimed in for the first time:
Em refused Uber, didn’t feel safe.
I mouthed a silent ‘thank you’, though my stomach was clenched tight.
In that case Tessa shouldn’t have let her go at all, wrote Ayesha.
Then it came. As I knew it would.
Unfortunately, as we all know, this isn’t the first time Tessa has screwed up.
My eyes swam as I read Selina’s comment and I was assailed by a hot rush of guilt and shame. The things the women were saying were only the same things I’d been berating myself with ever since that awful night. Why did I let her go? Why didn’t I insist she got a cab? But to know that other people had also been levelling those same criticisms, even implying there was some sort of a pattern of neglect, felt unbearable.
I don’t want to be a bitch, wrote Ayesha. But sometimes I think Tessa thrives on the drama.
An icy blade of shock sliced through my brain. Is that really what they thought of me? That I’d brought all of this on myself somehow – the divorce, the move, the rift with Rosie, the terrible thing that had happened to Em? All of it an attempt to thrust myself into the limelight?
There was one more comment on the thread. I hoped it might be Nita again, defending me. But instead it was Mel. And what she wrote broke me into tiny pieces.
It’s those poor girls I feel sorry for.
The WhatsApp messages played on my mind for the rest of the day. These were women I’d once counted almost as friends. We’d shared playdates when the girls were too young to stay on their own and taken each other’s children to ballet lessons and pantomimes. I’d helped with face painting at their daughters’ parties and sponsored countless charity walks and climbs and swims and silences. Even though my job had meant I wasn’t around as much as some of the others, I’d tried to make up for it with sleepovers at weekends and trips to the cinema. I’d even managed to get Ayesha’s oldest daughter, a wannabe designer, into London Fashion Week, pulling every magazine-editor string I possibly could.
And now it was as if none of that history had happened, as if I were some stranger from a foreign country, who didn’t belong and couldn’t get things right. Worse was the worry that some of the opprobrium would be deflected on to Em. That if I was now an outsider, maybe Emma would be too, merely by association.
It’s those poor girls I feel sorry for.
The hurt I felt was the raw, flayed hurt of the playground.
I’d only just resumed work after the body-blow of the WhatsApp messages when Em came home. I glanced at the clock on the computer screen. Three twenty. She wasn’t usually this early.
‘I had a headache,’ she said when I asked her. I scanned her face anxiously. She did look pale, but still I wasn’t sure I believed her.
‘Are you okay, Em?’ I persevered. ‘Are you still upset about seeing that man yesterday?’
‘No, honestly. This has nothing to do with him. I just ha
ve a headache.’
I couldn’t remember the last time Emma had complained of a headache. I stood up to hug her and she submitted stiffly before heading upstairs.
That night, as I lay waiting in vain for sleep to claim me like a forgotten suitcase, I heard muffled sounds coming from Em’s room. I went to my door and listened and was horrified to hear what sounded like stifled sobs.
But when I crossed the landing and opened her door, whispering her name softly, she pretended to be asleep.
Back in my own bed, now wide awake, a ball of fear and worry formed in my gut, solid as a fist.
7
Until that week, I’d never really noticed that there was a café practically next to the Tube entrance on Brownlow Road. It was a bit of a greasy spoon, to be fair, and when Nita ordered a flat white the waitress looked at her blankly and said in a heavy accent, ‘So I give you Nescafé with milk,’ but it was clean enough. And there was a table in the window overlooking the street.
‘I don’t get why we’re meeting here,’ said Nita, taking a baby wipe from her bag and surreptitiously running it across the white plastic table top.
I thought about lying. The stinging WhatsApp chat I’d read the day before still weighed heavy on my mind, and I was reluctant to give Nita and the other school mums any more reasons for distancing themselves from our family. They already believed drama clung to us like a bad smell.
But Nita was still my friend, the one school mum who’d stuck by me, even after all the madness surrounding the break-up, the sobbing in the playground, the fixation on Joy and her family and her house, the awful estrangement from Rosie. And though it still hurt that Nita hadn’t been more vocal in standing up for me on that WhatsApp chat, she had at least not piled in with the others. Plus, with her daughter Grace and Em long-time friends, she was a valuable link to the life my daughter led when she wasn’t with me.
So I told her about the ID line-up and how Em was sure she’d seen the man she’d failed to recognize right here on the street.
‘He was coming out of a doorway somewhere over there,’ I said, gesturing to the parade of shops directly across from us, separated from the main road by a small lay-by in which cars could park to load or unload.
Nita frowned. Or at least that’s what I presumed she was doing. Since she’d started having regular Botox, I found I had to guess at some of Nita’s facial expressions. That’s not to say she didn’t look amazing, her neat features perfectly set into her small, smooth face like tiny jewels in a ring, only that she looked occasionally as if she’d been varnished.
‘So we’re here to spy on him?’
‘Just to keep an eye out, that’s all,’ I said. I didn’t mention that I’d been in this café since it opened. Sitting at this very table. Keeping watch. ‘The police say they can’t get involved, so I feel like it’s up to me to make sure she’s all right.’
Nita reached out and put one of her small hands on my arm.
‘Tess, I know how hard this must have been for you. If something like that happened to Grace, I don’t know what I’d do. But what do you think would happen if you saw this guy? What are you going to do, perform a citizen’s arrest?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘So why not leave it? There’s nothing to say the guy lives around here. He could have been visiting or passing through. Or it could have been some random man who happens to look like the guy from the video. You need to focus on Emma, not him.’
Nita called the waitress over to ask if they had smashed avocado on sourdough toast. The woman shook her head blankly. ‘No avocado. But we have brown bread,’ she said helpfully.
‘With what?’ Nina asked.
‘Butter?’ the woman suggested.
Normally, Nita and I met up in Muswell Hill, where she still lived and where it would be unheard of for a café not to sell avocado. I remembered the first time I’d seen her across the classroom on Em and Grace’s first day of primary school, all perfect glossy hair and good teeth, one of those stay-at-home mothers who arrived at pick-up with a Tupperware container full of home-made cookies and who knew the name of every kid in the class by the end of the first week, and I’d just known we wouldn’t get along.
Yet somehow, despite everything, Nita and I became friends. And remained friends. Even through these last two turbulent years, and in spite of the rumours about my erratic behaviour that spread around the school like wildfire. In spite of the judgements of Rosie’s friends’ parents.
‘I’m worried about you, Tess,’ said Nita now, her huge brown eyes liquid in her unnaturally smooth face. Would this be the way it was now? I wondered. Half the women I’d grown up with remaining preserved in aspic at some indeterminate age while the rest of us grew wrinkly and saggy until one day we looked in the mirror and no longer recognized ourselves?
I didn’t even mind my lines. Not really. I ate well, I exercised a little. I took care of myself. What I minded was that it wasn’t a level playing field and that nobody ever admitted it. And that by the time I realized how many women I knew were secretly slipping off every three months to have botulin injected into their faces, I was twenty years behind the curve, unable to catch up even if I wanted to.
‘No need to be,’ I said, but my attention was fixed on a point out of the window and across the street, where a door had opened up.
Nita followed my gaze.
‘Is that …?’
But the man who came out was old, with a white beard and a back bent almost at a right angle. I smiled, wanting Nita to know I was well aware I was being ridiculous.
‘Has Grace said anything about Em?’ I asked her now. ‘Has she mentioned a boyfriend at all?’
Nita shook her head.
‘Well, has she been acting out of character at all since the attack?’
‘Not that I can remember,’ said Nita. ‘Although I know Grace was upset that Em pulled out of the play.’
I’d been biting into a greasy croissant, but now my head shot up. Emma loved drama club. She wasn’t a born actress, hated drawing attention to herself, but she’d always enjoyed being part of a big school production. She’d even mentioned the possibility of going into stage management or theatre directing at some point. And she’d been thrilled at this year’s choice – the musical Cabaret.
‘What do you mean, pulled out of the play? Why would she do that?’
Nita widened her already wide eyes.
‘Oh God, I’m sorry, I had no idea she hadn’t told you. I don’t know why. She announced it a couple of days ago apparently.’
A couple of days ago. So it would turn out to be about him. I knew it would.
The croissant solidified in my mouth and burned as I swallowed it down.
Back at the house, I waited until Emma had come home and made herself a cup of tea before broaching the subject of the abandoned school play.
‘I’ve just got too much work to do, with exams and everything.’ Em was looking at something on her phone and didn’t meet my eyes. Needles of unease pricked my skin.
‘Who are you messaging?’
‘Frances. She’s been really nice about making sure I’m okay.’
I was touched at Frances’s kindness. She’d already done so much to help.
‘Did you tell her about seeing him in the street?’
Still, Em didn’t look up.
‘No, not yet.’
‘Are you sure you dropped out of the play because of work and not because of what happened? Because if you’re worried about coming home from rehearsals or from drama club, I’ll happily come to meet you.’
‘I’m not eight years old, Mum. And it’s not about him. Honest.’
She tried to smile and her hand went up to her hair. I caught sight of a new bald spot, just behind her ear, small as a five-pence coin.
A memory blazed in my mind of holding Emma as a hairless newborn and feeling that heartbreakingly soft patch of skin at the front of her head where the bones of her skull hadn’t yet fused,
and something tore inside me like damp paper.
I turned away so that my daughter wouldn’t see my face.
8
It was two days later that I saw him.
I’d told myself that this would be the last day I sat in that café. The last weak coffee, the last time the tired-looking waitress would greet me without recognition, as if she’d never seen me before. But the fact is I’m not sure that’s true. I felt so helpless at that time, so powerless to help my hurting daughter. At least being in the café gave me the illusion of taking control. Besides, what would I do at home? After a string of broken nights my concentration was shot, and when I sat at my computer to work, the words I was searching for floated out of reach, like fruit flies that I grabbed at in vain.
The thing that no one tells you about insomnia is how, in the middle of the night when you’re lying in bed, your mind feels scalpel-sharp, thoughts dazzling as crystals, too bright to sleep. But as soon as the alarm goes off – if you’re lucky, waking you from the light, restless state you slipped into what seems like only minutes before – they turn turgid, crawling sluggishly through the bog of your mind.
Coming to the café gave me an escape from hours I’d otherwise spend staring blankly at the computer screen. And like I say, it made me feel like I was doing something, even if all I was doing was looking out of a window.
Which was exactly what I was doing when a door opened between the mini-market and the fried-chicken shop, halfway along the parade of shops directly opposite and he came out.
Just as with the ID tape, I felt an instant thump of recognition in the pit of my stomach, even though he had his back turned, double-locking the door he’d stepped out of.
The dark puffa jacket he wore emphasized the solid breadth of his shoulders. Even from across the street I could see the white flash of a logo on the sleeve. When he turned around I saw his distinctive-shaped face, the cheekbones wide, the chin with those jutting twin points.