Watching You: A Novel

Jenna Tripp kicked off her black trainers, unknotted her nylon tie, dropped her rucksack at the bottom of the stairs, pulled the hairband from her ponytail, rubbed at her aching scalp with her fingertips and called out for her mum.

‘In here!’

She peered round the door into the living room. Her mum was perched on the edge of the leather sofa, the laptop on the coffee table in front of her, a notepad to one side of her, her phone on the other. Her pale gold hair was scraped back into a ponytail. She looked pretty with her hair off her face; you could see the fine angles of her bone structure, the shadowy dip below each cheekbone, the delicacy of her jawline. She’d been a model for a short while in her teens. There was a framed photo of her modelling a bikini on a windswept beach nailed to the wall outside Jenna’s bedroom. Her arms were wrapped tight around her body (it had been November apparently) and she was smiling up into the sky above. She was pure joy to behold.

‘Check out there, will you?’ she said now, sucking her e-cigarette and releasing a thick trail of berry-scented vapour. ‘Can you see a blue Lexus? One of those hatchbacks?’

Jenna sighed and pulled back one drawn curtain. She looked left and right around the small turning where their cottage was and then back at her mum. ‘No blue Lexus,’ she said.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘I’m sure. There’s a blue Ford Focus, but that’s the only blue car out there.’

‘Oh, that’s Mike’s car. That’s fine.’

She didn’t ask her mum more about the blue Lexus. She knew what her mum thought about the blue Lexus. She let the curtain drop and went into the kitchen. She boiled the kettle and made herself a low-calorie hot chocolate into which she dropped a small handful of marshmallows (she’d recently learned that marshmallows were surprisingly low in calories) and then she took the hot chocolate, her school bag and her phone to her room. She stopped on the way to study the photo of her mum. Frances Tripp. Or Frankie Miller as she’d been known in her modelling and acting days. She’d changed back to Frances in her twenties when she’d married Jenna’s dad and started campaigning for animal rights. He told her it would give her more gravitas. Jenna wished she’d known the girl in the photo, the carefree beauty with the wind in her hair and the sky reflected in her shining eyes. She reckoned she’d have liked her.

‘By the way!’ Her mother’s girlish voice followed her up the stairs to the landing.

‘Yes!’

‘Did you change the bulb in your vanity mirror?’

Jenna paused before she replied, her shoulders falling. ‘No,’ she said, although it would have been easier in some ways to say yes.

‘Right,’ said her mum. ‘Odd. Very odd.’

Jenna opened the door to her bedroom, slipped through and closed it behind her before she got pulled into any further conversation about the bulb in her vanity mirror. There was a Snapchat from Bess on her phone. It was a photo of her holding the local paper next to her face, pulling a kissy-face at a photo of Mr Fitzwilliam on page eight. She’d scribbled a pink love heart around both of them. Jenna tutted. Seriously, what was wrong with the girl? Mr Fitzwilliam was so old.

‘He has charisma,’ Bess had said once. ‘Plus he smells good.’

‘How do you know how he smells?’

‘I make a point of sniffing when I’m close. And he does this thing …’

‘What thing?’ Jenna had said.

‘This thing with his pen. He clicks it.’ Bess had mimed clicking a pen.

‘He clicks it?’

‘Yeah. It’s hot.’

‘You’re on glue, mate, I swear.’

She replied to Bess’s message now: Meth head.

Bess replied with a sequence of crystal emojis. Jenna smiled and put her phone on her bedside table to charge. Bess was the best friend in the world, the best friend she’d ever had. They were like sisters. Like twins. She’d known Bess for four years, ever since her mum and dad had split up and she’d drawn the short straw and moved to Lower Melville with her mum while her little brother Ethan had stayed with Dad in Weston-super-Mare. Not that there was anything wrong with Lower Melville. The cottage (or what Jenna’s mum referred to as a cottage, but was actually a tired post-war terrace with pebble-dashed walls) was in fact the house her mum had grown up in and while the cottage was as scruffy as it had always been, the village around it no longer was. Kids at her school thought she was posh because she lived here. They were so wrong.

‘Jen!’

She closed her eyes at the sound of her mother’s voice climbing up the stairs.

‘Jenna!’

‘Yes!’

‘Check out the back, will you? Tell me if that man’s still sitting in his window.’

She drew in her breath and held it hard inside her for as long as she could.

‘Why?’

‘You know why.’

She did know why, but sometimes she needed her mum to find the words to explain these obsessions, in the hope that it might wake her up to the nonsense of what she was saying.

She let her breath out, put down her hot chocolate and knelt on her bed. There was a man sitting in his window at the back of the terrace that faced the end of their garden. He was side on and absorbed in something on a screen in front of him. She watched him lift a teacup to his lips, take a sip, put the cup back down, run his hand briefly round the back of his neck, and then start moving his fingers over a keyboard.

‘No!’ she shouted down to her mother. ‘There’s no one there. No man.’

There was a beat of silence, filled, Jenna assumed, not with feelings of relief, but of disappointment.

‘Good,’ her mother said a moment later. ‘Good. Let me know if he comes back.’

‘I will.’

‘Thanks, darling.’

Jenna’s phone pinged. Another Snapchat from Bess. The photo of Mr Fitzwilliam from the paper, his face covered over in Bess’s lipstick kisses.

Jenna smiled and sent another message.

U R madder than my mum.