Watching You: A Novel

The chihuahua is called Diego. Freddie thinks it’s a superb name for a dog from South America. It follows him to Romola’s front door now as he goes to leave. Romola doesn’t follow him. She’s still at the kitchen table, being served her dinner by her mother who is called Maxine and is really nice. Romola never sees him to the door when he leaves. She never says goodbye at the end of a date or at the end of a phone call. She says it makes her feel anxious to say goodbye, she can’t explain why, it just does.

Maxine had offered to cook for him too, but they’re having lamb and Freddie can’t eat lamb, the texture is too textural, the flavour is too dead. Plus his dad had said that maybe they could get a takeaway tonight.

So Freddie says goodbye to Diego and he closes the door of Romola’s little house behind him and he walks the five minutes towards the flat where he and his dad now live.

They’d moved out of the big yellow house in Melville and now they have a nice two-bedroom flat in a Georgian house really close to Freddie’s school. It had seemed a shame to have to leave the big house in Melville, especially so soon after spending all that money on having it redecorated. But it was a crime scene now and who wanted to live in a crime scene? Well, Freddie wouldn’t have minded actually. After his experiences with the police last year, when he’d had to tell his dad about planting the red suede tassel from Red Boots’s boots at the scene of the crime to try to incriminate her and then had to wait outside the interview room while his dad told the police what he’d done, he’d become obsessed with police procedure. He no longer wanted to work for MI5. He wanted to be a forensic detective.

The governors at the Academy had asked Dad to step down. It was too much of a distraction, they’d said. They’d kept him on in an advisory capacity to steer the year elevens through their GCSEs from the back seat. But that was almost a year ago and he is currently officially unemployed. He says he’s taking a sabbatical, then deciding what he wants to do next.

Freddie’s main hobbies now are seeing Romola (which he does virtually every day, even if it’s just for five minutes after school), seeing his trauma therapist once a week (which is boring but interesting at the same time), and investigating his mum. Because after what happened to his mum he’d basically felt as though he’d never known her at all. Rebecca Mullen had killed her because she’d bullied her sister. Rebecca Mullen said his mum had been horrific and terrifying, that everyone at her school had lived in fear of her and her gang of cronies. Yet to Freddie, she was just Mum. She never bullied him or shouted at him or made him feel scared. Apart from that one last time, when she’d been ill in bed and screamed at him and called him a fucking little shit and pushed him over. And he’d seen it then, the possibility of this other side to her. And that is his latest project. It’s called The Information, after another Martin Amis novel. Because that is what he needs. Information about his mum, to try to work her out.

He’d brought all his mum’s stuff from the house in Melville, put it in three big cardboard boxes labelled ‘The Information 1’, ‘The Information 2’ and ‘The Information 3’. He’s going through it forensically and also augmenting his research with occasional question-and-answer sessions with his father. But these are generally unhelpful as on the whole his father appears to know nothing about his former wife, about what made her tick. He says that when he met her on the bus that day, when she was nineteen and he was thirty-five, he hadn’t known that she was the school bully who’d ruined Viva Hart’s life. He said he hadn’t known that brown-haired Nicola Lee on the bus was the same person as blond-haired Nikki Lee. He hadn’t known at any point. He hadn’t known until Viva Hart’s mum had hit him in the Lake District. And then, he said, he’d known immediately and then, he said, everything had made total sense.

He hadn’t been able to explain exactly what he’d meant by that. All he’d said was that his mum had always had a cruel streak and now he understood why. Freddie had written down those words – ‘cruel streak’ – and pondered them, wondering if maybe he had inherited a tiny bit of his mum’s ‘cruel streak’ because of the secret things he sometimes thought or did.

And then yesterday Freddie found something really strange in one of his mum’s boxes, buried towards the bottom of a box filled with teenage mementos. It was in a DL envelope, so old that the bit that you lick had gone bright yellow and crusty. There was nothing written on the outside of the envelope; inside the envelope was a bunch of shiny dark brown hair tied with an elastic band. Freddie brings it out after their take-out.

‘What is this?’ he says, pushing it across the table to his dad.

The hair is way too long ever to have been Freddie’s hair and too dark to have been his mum’s. Freddie already has a bad feeling that he knows who the hair belongs to. The words from the newspaper article have been swirling around his head all day. But he wants his dad to give him a different explanation, one that doesn’t make his chest feel tight. He watches his dad peer into the envelope, sees his fingers going inside, pulling out the hank of hair.

He glances up at Freddie. ‘Where did you find this?’

‘In Mum’s stuff.’

His dad returns his gaze to the envelope.

‘Whose hair is it?’ asks Freddie.

His father’s face has gone grey. All the skin on his face looks like it’s suddenly fallen away from his bones. He sees him gulp.

Freddie stares at his dad, waiting for him to say something.

But he doesn’t.