Watching You: A Novel

Freddie’s mother was knitting something. He had never seen her kitting before.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s a blanket,’ she said. ‘For the lady in the blue house. The pregnant lady. She’s having a girl in May.’

Freddie could see now that the design on a computer printout on the table in front of his mother involved ducklings and bunny rabbits.

‘Why would you knit something for someone you barely know?’

‘Because …’ She pulled at the cream yarn and grimaced. ‘I have no idea. Just because.’

His mum was always trying new things. It was part of her psyche. If it wasn’t growing vegetables it was t’ai chi and if it wasn’t t’ai chi it was learning to play the piano. She said she had a low boredom threshold. She said it was because she was never in one place long enough to get a job and that she hadn’t been put on this earth to be a housewife and needed a focus. She’d been running a lot lately, two or three hours a day, but clearly that was no longer enough to keep her mind in one place. So, now it was knitting. She would have made a special trip today to a special shop to buy everything she needed. She would have watched a tutorial on YouTube. She would have made a project of it.

He stared at the top of her head, the high shine of her light brown hair, combed through with an expensive oil and something approaching anger every morning in the mirror in her bedroom. She spent an hour at that mirror every day. She fussed her skin with giant pads of cotton wool and lotions and potions that cost fifty pounds a vial. She blended colours on to her eyelids that were the same colour as her skin so you couldn’t see they were there. She wanted to look ‘natural’, she said, casting subtle aspersions against women who preferred to look fake. She took pride in her tiny frame, dressed it in tiny clothes, often from children’s clothes shops. Her appearance was extraordinarily important to her; her image was her obsession. But even Freddie could see she had no idea what she was doing.

She wore the wrong sorts of heels with the wrong sorts of jeans and then she would get chatting to a woman somewhere – the school gates, the martial arts’ centre, the wool shop – and Freddie would see it; he’d see her carefully applied veneer start to crackle and peel, watch his mother’s eyes roaming over the woman in question, over her shoes, her skin, her fingernails, forensically taking in every iota of her sartorial presentation. And then the wrong heels would be replaced by trendy trainers. The red nails with short unpolished nails. The neat padded gilet with a loose-fitting parka. But they’d be the wrong trendy trainers. His mother would still be all wrong. And then they’d move to a new town and a new set of rules would apply according to the type of area and his mother would have to start trying to fit in all over again.

Not that she ever did. His mum, like him, had no friends. It was as if they could tell, he thought, they could tell she wasn’t ever going to be one of them. She was always going to be trying, never just being.

Freddie sighed. ‘When’s Dad back?’

‘Any time, I suppose. Depends how soon he can politely get away.’

Freddie couldn’t get his head round the idea of his dad in the Weaver’s Arms watching a rock band. It was too bizarre to process. His dad was just so … well, boring.

At ten o’clock he yawned and got to his feet.

‘You off to bed, darling?’ his mum said absent-mindedly, her thin hands still worrying at the knitting needles, the blanket still no more than a thin strip of cream wool.

‘Yes. I am.’ He looked at her for a moment. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked. ‘Is everything OK?’

‘Yes,’ she said brightly. ‘Of course!’

He wanted to say something else but he couldn’t find the words. He wanted to ask if she was happy. If she and Dad were OK. If they were always going to stay married. If she was glad she’d married Dad. If she was glad she’d had Freddie. If the noises he sometimes heard from their room at night were anything to be worried about.

Instead he dropped a kiss on to the top of her head. Being able to drop kisses on to the top of his mum’s head was one of the best things about his recent growth spurt, finally over five foot three at which height he’d feared he might stick, and now approaching five foot seven. He would never be as tall as his dad, but at least he was taller than his mum.

Through his bedroom window he watched the good people of Lower Melville comporting themselves on a Friday night. The trendy Thai restaurant was heaving as was the trendy pizza place. He watched people going in and out of the bar at the Melville. He trained his binoculars on to the bathroom window of Bess’s flat and saw nothing; then he moved on to Jenna’s road where all was quiet and still. He was about to draw the curtain and go back to his desk when he saw the headlights of a car bulging over the top of Melville Heights. As the lights reached the crown of the escarpment the car stopped and Freddie watched as first his father and then Red Boots stepped out of a taxi.

At first, he thought he must be mistaken. Why on earth would his father be in a taxi with Red Boots? Then as he watched he saw Red Boots push her face into his father’s back and his father turn and put his arms around her shoulders and Red Boots looked like she was trying to kiss his father and then his father was pulling back and she was pushing forward and it was a strange dance that they were performing until finally his father put his arms around her waist and walked her firmly to the front door of the blue house.

Freddie opened his window a crack to let some sound in and just about heard the words sorry, pub, few too many, no problem and sleep tight.

Then he saw his father stand, for a moment or even longer, on the street outside the blue house, his hands in the pockets of his coat, his eyes on Red Boots’s front door, before turning slowly and heading back towards his house.