Watching You: A Novel

Joey stared at Alfie sitting on the bed, cross-legged, the laptop open and balanced on his knees. His once flowing red locks were short now, growing back from the brutal number two he’d inflicted on himself when they got back to the UK that had made his head look suddenly slightly too small for his body. His lower face was covered in a mulch of four-day stubble. He was wearing a grey vest with deep-cut armholes that showed off most of his tattoos and a pair of elderly Gap underpants. He was huge. A solid brick wall of a man. Even sitting on a slightly fey bed he looked like a Celtic warrior. A Celtic warrior who’d forgotten to get dressed.

She scrutinised his hard, young man’s body. And then she thought of Tom Fitzwilliam’s soft, grown-up body and she wondered what would happen to Alfie’s hard body as the years passed. Would he turn to fat or to sinew? Would he still be Alfie Butter, crap guitarist, brilliant hugger, hopeless painter and decorator, big-hearted romantic, attentive lover? Or would he be someone else? How could it be possible that she didn’t know? That no one could tell her? That she would just have to trust in the universe to bring everything to some kind of satisfactory conclusion? How could it be?

Joey felt her brain swell and roil. She thought of her nasty Whackadoo uniform, the smell of fried nuggets and boys’ toilets. She thought of Tom Fitzwilliam, the click, click, click of his ballpoint pen. She thought of the feeling that had enveloped her when he was in the bar, the feeling that had taken her the most part of the afternoon and evening to purge. She thought of her mother, the lack of her, the loss and she felt, suddenly, dreadfully, out of control.

‘Are you OK?’ said Alfie, looking at her curiously.

‘Mhm.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yeah,’ she said, making herself smile. ‘Sure. Possibly having a tiny, baby, shit-job-missing-Ibiza crisis, but nothing worse than that.’

‘Come here,’ he said, big freckled arms spread apart, ‘I’ll hug it away for you.’

She acquiesced although part of her wanted to shout, A hug is not always the right answer, you know. But as she felt his arms around her, his warm breath against the crown of her head, she thought that it might not be an answer, but it was certainly better than yet another question.

She stopped at the corner shop on her way home the next day. It was the end of the first day of her new job and she felt rubbed raw by the rudeness of people, the loudness of children, the lack of sunlight, the sheer length of the day. She wanted to go home and shower and put on joggers and a hoodie and drink a cup of tea. But mainly she wanted wine. Lots of wine.

As she turned into the booze aisle of the shop she saw Tom Fitzwilliam’s wife. What was her name again? Jack had told her but she couldn’t remember. Something beginning with an ‘N’, she thought. She had her hand in the chilled drinks cabinet, about to pull out a bottle of cold mineral water. She was flushed, her hair sweaty and tied back, wearing shiny black leggings and a black fitted top that revealed a slightly sinewy, over-worked-out physique. On her wrist was a lipstick-pink fitness tracker. On her feet were bright white trainers.

She turned slightly as she became aware of Joey’s eyes upon her. She smiled coolly, then took the bottle to the till at the other side of the shop. Joey could hear her from here, chatting to the cashier. She was well spoken with a slightly northern slant to some of her words. She told the cashier that she’d just started running again, a new year’s resolution after a broken ankle the year before had put her out of action. It was wonderful, she said, to be pounding the tarmac again. She always felt out of sorts when she wasn’t running regularly. Two miles a day cleared out the cobwebs, she said, got the cogs turning.

Joey peered around the corner of the cereal aisle to get a better look at the woman Tom Fitzwilliam had chosen to marry. She looked weightless, sprite-like. Everything about her was delicate, sinuous, as though she’d been drawn with sharpened pencils. Joey was small, but Tom’s wife was doll-like, with hair as fine as gossamer and a button nose. She imagined those tiny hands grasping his soft waist. She wondered if he’d ever been unfaithful to her. She wondered how often they had sex. She imagined, suddenly, this tiny child’s toy of a woman astride her big, handsome husband, her head tipped back.

She grabbed a bottle of something cheap with a screw-top lid and took it quickly to the till. As she walked back up the hill towards the painted houses she saw Tom’s wife just ahead of her, a matchstick silhouette clutching a bottle of water, shoulders hunched against the bitter January wind.

And there, high above, in the pale backlight of a top-floor window in the Fitzwilliams’ house, she saw a small beam of a light, the movement of a person, the fall of a heavy curtain, sudden darkness.