Watching You: A Novel

A day that started with a conversation with one of the most lusted-after schoolgirls in Melville was always going to be unsettling. A day that started with a highly personal conversation about his relationship with his father, even more so. But it was Jenna’s closing comments that stayed with Freddie as he walked towards the city. Do you think your dad would … would he ever …?

Ever what?

What had she been alluding to?

What did she think his dad might be capable of? More interestingly, what did he think his dad might be capable of?

He could air a theory or two but that’s all they were: flimsy hypotheses based on nothing more than hazy childhood memories, no facts to back anything up, just a sense that something bad had been following them about as a family ever since he could remember.

He recalled vividly how, as he’d stood and watched the mad woman hit his father by the lake that day, he’d experienced a strong, almost dizzying sensation that he was about to discover something remarkable about his father, about his family, the kernel of something that would explain everything. But it hadn’t come.

He’d always thought it was he and he alone who suspected there was something off about his dad. But now there was Jenna Tripp. Jenna Tripp could see it too.

He passed Max as he turned down the road to his school. Max threw him a look of fear blended with disgust. Freddie totally blanked him. As he followed behind him through the school gates he pictured himself with a pair of giant rusty scissors hacking off his stupid long hair and shoving it down his throat.

He handed his phone in to the school receptionist sitting in her big mahogany panelled booth; then he headed to his locker. Here he unloaded his rucksack and his coat before heading to the toilets. That was another shit thing about these old-fashioned private schools housed in Victorian mansions: terrible, cold, echoey toilets. He examined his face for a while in the mirror, the face that Jenna Tripp had just engaged with during their conversation this morning. He stared at himself, trying to see what she might have seen. He looked like his mum. That’s what everyone always said. It hadn’t meant much to him when he was younger – who cared which one of his parents he looked like? He didn’t want to look like his mum; he didn’t want to look like his dad either. He ran his hands over his hair. He had very straight, very shiny hair, like his mum. She wore hers in a short bob. It looked nice on her. But did he, with his shiny, poker-straight fringe, maybe look a little monk-like? Or a bit like a girl? He pushed his smooth hair off his forehead and examined the planes of his face. He thought of Max and his infuriating girl’s haircut. He pulled hard at his hair until it was all bunched inside his hand and he could barely see it. He grimaced. He snarled. And then he smiled.

That night he walked home via the Greek barber’s on the corner and paid them ten pounds to shave it all off into what the barber referred to as a number three. Afterwards, as they swept his hair away and unpinned his cape and brushed the snippets from his shoulders he stared hard at the boy in the mirror who had suddenly transformed into a man. All the weakness and passivity had been expunged from him with the removal of his hair. He was no longer one of Max’s guys like us. He no longer looked like his mum. Neither did he look like his dad. He looked hard-baked. He looked fierce and fresh and feral. He looked, he thought, running his hand over the suede of his scalp, totally fucking amazing.

He walked home past Romola’s school and then past Romola’s house and then, just for old times’ sake and to test out the feeling of walking about with a shaved head, he walked past Whackadoo. He saw neither Romola nor Joey, but it didn’t matter. Just the very act of allowing himself to be seen in this new and somewhat alarming guise was exciting and made his blood pump. People might think he was a yob, he thought, they might think he was about to mug them, or start a fight with them. He passed a group of older teens, swaggering in cheap, baggy sports gear, rangy, swinging limbs, roll-ups pinched between fingers, greasy hair, gimlet eyes. Usually he would shy away, move inside a shadow or to the other side of the street. Often there would be something like cat calls or dangerous looks. Today he strode past them, bristling with fake attitude. He held his breath, waiting for it but it didn’t come. They had not registered him. He no longer looked like a kickable private-school freak. He was not on their radar.

His mother was on the sofa when he got home. As much as Freddie found his mum’s hyperactivity exhausting to live with, he found these slumps of hers even harder. He propelled himself into the room, to a point directly in front of her, hoping to shock her into some kind of reaction with his new haircut.

‘Tada!’ he said, striking a pose. ‘Whaddya think?’

She glanced up at him. For a moment he saw only the foggy blankness behind her eyes that had been there since Saturday morning. But it quickly lifted and was replaced by a look of sheer horror.

‘Oh my God. Freddie. What on earth have you done?’

‘Got my hair cut off,’ he said. ‘It was getting in my eyes.’

‘But, but … you have such lovely hair.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t. I have stupid long shiny hair that made me look like a freak. And anyway, it will grow back.’

He sat alongside his mother on the sofa and smiled at her. ‘Stop looking at me like that,’ he said teasingly.

‘But you don’t look like you any more.’

‘I know. It’s great. I feel great.’

‘Oh God, I hope it grows back before we see Grandma next month. She’ll probably have a heart attack.’

‘It’s just hair,’ Freddie said, thinking that actually it was much more than just hair. It was his very essence. He looked at his mum and saw that she was crying. ‘Oh, God, Mum,’ he said. ‘God. Please don’t cry. I’m sorry. It’s just something I needed to do, for me. It’s not about you. I swear. Please don’t cry.’

But his mum kept crying and he moved across the sofa so that he was closer to her and he put his arms around her and he tried to hug her but she shouted out in pain and pushed him away. ‘What?’ he said. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘It’s nothing. Just a bit of back pain.’

He remembered the dark shadows on her throat yesterday, the raised voices in his parents’ room on Friday night. He backed away from her and looked her in the eye and he said, ‘Mum. What happened with you and Dad on Friday night?’

She wiped away her tears, sniffed and said, ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, Dad went out in the middle of the night and came back with cornflakes and then you were both shouting at each other and ever since then you’ve been really depressed. And this …’ He gently pulled down the fabric of her polo neck. She flinched away from him and pulled it back up. ‘What is that?’

‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘Some kind of friction burn.’

‘A friction burn? On your neck?’

‘I don’t know what it is, OK? I just woke up in the morning and it was there. It doesn’t even hurt.’

He stared at her and sighed. And as he stared into her eyes he had a sudden overwhelming sense of her being a stranger to him. Who are you, he wanted to ask her, who are you?

‘What happened’, he found himself asking, ‘that day in the Lake District? Who was that woman?’

‘What woman?’

‘Oh, come on, Mum. You know what I’m talking about. I heard you and Dad talking about it in the kitchen the other day.’

He felt emboldened and brazen. He was sick of living like a gimp in his room at the top of the house, letting his life happen to him passively. He was sick of being the kid. He wanted more autonomy, more power, more say in how things happened. And buried somewhere in the dark, tangled roots of the incident at the Lake District back when he was nine years old was the key that could unlock the strange darkness at the heart of his family.

‘It was nothing,’ she replied. ‘You know that. We’ve talked about it enough times.’

‘I don’t think it was nothing,’ he continued firmly. ‘I think that woman did know Dad. And I think she was cross with him because he’d done something bad. And I think you’re both lying to me.’

‘Don’t be silly, darling.’

‘I’m not being silly. I’m being deadly serious. What did Dad do to that woman? I need you to tell me. I need to know.’

‘Oh, it was probably just something to do with his job. You know. Maybe he had to expel her daughter or maybe she wasn’t pleased with her last report. You know how over-sensitive parents can be.’

‘Daughter?’ he said. ‘How do you know it was a daughter?’

‘I don’t!’ she shouted.

He looked at her in surprise.

She continued, more softly: ‘Son, daughter, whatever. Her child.’

Freddie nodded. He’d pushed her as far as he felt comfortable. And there it was. Her daughter. A slip of the tongue. A giveaway. There was a story behind that moment. Not just a case of mistaken identity. But a woman with a daughter. A daughter who had had some kind of interaction with his father that had made that woman incredibly, terrifyingly angry.