Watching You: A Novel

Freddie Fitzwilliam switched off his digital binoculars, let the curtain drop and wheeled his chair back across the bedroom floor, from the window to his computer. There was a shiny track in the carpet now recording the many journeys he’d made by office chair from one side of his room to the other. He was the captain of his own ship up here, in his attic room with its sweeping views across the village and the river valley and the landscape beyond. The digital binoculars had been a Christmas gift from his mum and dad. They had revolutionised his life. He could now clearly see Jenna Tripp’s road from here. He could also see the dimpled glass of Bess Ridley’s bathroom which occasionally shimmered and radiated with the suggestion of naked flesh behind. He could see Jenna and Bess meeting up each morning outside Jenna’s house in their tacky Academy uniforms: short, short skirts and bare legs even in the chill of January, linking arms, sharing earbuds, gossip. He could even see what flavour Pringles they were eating.

Freddie didn’t go to the Academy where his dad was headmaster. He went to a private boys’ school across the other side of town that took him half an hour to walk to every morning. He’d been in Melville for one year and one month since he’d woken up one morning in his old house in Mold and been told that they were moving to Bristol and that they were moving next week and that no, they weren’t coming back. His dad was a bigwig head teacher. The government sent him all over the country to ‘special measures’ schools, schools that were on the brink of being shut down because they were so fucking terrible. This one had been so fucking terrible that they’d had to sack the old head and have him walked off the premises the same day: something to do with embezzling school funds, something really bad.

At first Freddie had hated it here. His school was shit; it looked like a prison and it smelled worse. The teachers were all really old and very British, not like his old school where they’d been mostly fresh-faced Europeans. He liked European teachers; he could impress them by talking to them in their mother tongues. They always loved that. He could get away with murder if he could compliment a teacher in fluent Spanish or whatever.

Freddie could speak six languages: French, Spanish, German, Italian, Mandarin and Welsh. The Welsh he’d picked up when they lived in Mold; the rest he’d taught himself. He could also speak in about twenty different accents to such an extent that locals couldn’t tell he was putting it on. He was going to join MI5 when he left university. His parents had been telling him all his life that the government would love a clever little bastard like him, and he tended to agree with them. What else could he possibly do with all these brains, all these facts, the constant spin and bubble of his brilliant mind? It had to go somewhere. And, of course, the digital binoculars (and the Smartwatch spy camera and the spy glasses and the spy software built into his Samsung Galaxy) had played right into the whole Freddie’s-going-to-be-a-spy narrative that he and his parents had been writing for nearly fifteen years.

And at first that was what he’d used them for.

In the absence of any friends or any real desire to have friends, Freddie had spent the past year or so compiling a dossier called The Melville Papers, a kind of quasi-local paper about the local community. In it he reported on the comings and goings in Lower Melville as seen from his perch at the top of the house. He logged the visitors to the Melville Hotel – once he had seen Cate Blanchett going in; she was really, really small. He logged the dog walkers – White-haired man with miniature schnauzer left home 8 p.m., returned 8.27 – and the joggers – two middle-aged women with big bottoms, left home 7.30, returned 8.45, bought expensive crisps from the deli. He logged the occasional infraction of the law – a dog walker failing to collect their dog’s poo, countless episodes of double parking or parking on the zigzag lines by the zebra crossing, at least three shoplifting episodes, one of which had ended with the shopkeeper chasing the man all the way to the other side of the village before almost having a heart attack.

But recently, Freddie had found his focus shifting from the humdrum and the day to day; there were after all only so many times he could make a note of the white-haired man walking his miniature schnauzer before it stopped being interesting. Nowadays, Freddie found most of his attention being taken up by logging girls. It was strange because Freddie had never liked girls, not ever. A dislike of girls had, in fact, been one of his defining characteristics. He had assumed that not liking girls was his default setting.

But apparently not.

Jenna and Bess were the two prettiest girls in the village by far. Jenna was tall and athletically built with fine dark hair and quite a big bust. Bess was small with what appeared to be naturally blond hair which she wore quite short with a fringe that hung in her eyes. They were older than Freddie, year eleven to his year ten. He spent most of his time logging them now; he knew what nights they did after-school clubs, what days they did PE, what their favourite Starbucks drinks were, how often they changed their earrings.

Yes, Jenna and Bess were by far his favourites. But there was someone new now. She’d moved into the blue house two doors down a few weeks ago and she was really pretty. He’d first seen her in the restaurant at the Melville down in the village when he was having dinner with his mum and dad. She’d been with a man. He was big and rough-looking with shaved red hair and tattoos that you could see through the fabric of his shirt. Freddie had heard her first, her Bristol accent, a loud laugh. He’d been intrigued, turned his head just a few degrees to check her out. She was necking wine in a floaty top. She had a really full mouth, big white teeth, white-blond hair in a messy bun, gold hoop earrings, small feet in blood-red suede boots with little tassels. And that was what he called her while he tried to find a way to discover her real name.

He called her Red Boots.

He was watching her now; he’d watched her get off the bus in the village, then lost her for a while before picking her up again trailing a few feet behind his mum up the hill. He zoomed in tighter and tighter until he was close enough to see that she looked terrible and now, as he uploaded the film on to his laptop he zoomed in further still and there, in one frame, he saw a yellow T-shirt worn underneath a big ugly coat. He went right in on it: there was the familiar yellow and red of the Whackadoo logo. He passed Whackadoo every morning on his way to school, a big yellow breeze-block building with a huge plastic toucan outside. It was for kids or something.

Christ, he thought, Red Boots is working at Whackadoo. What kind of crap job was that? He saved the film into the top-secret folder that no one in his house was even halfway clever enough to uncover. Then he went downstairs to ask his mum what he was having for supper.