Watching You: A Novel

The previous Saturday had proved to be one of the worst Joey could remember at Whackadoo. They’d had thirteen separate birthday parties booked in and then it had started to rain at about ten o’clock and of course by lunchtime the place had been filled to capacity and everyone seemed to be in a bad mood; two separate fights had broken out, one between a group of ten-year-old boys, the other between two fathers in their forties. The police had been called to deal with the latter and then there had been a blockage in the boys’ toilets that remained unreported for over an hour by which time the floor was swimming in wet toilet paper and faeces. And then a young girl on her first day in the job had accidentally knocked over a table in a party room, laying to waste a birthday cake that looked like it had cost around a hundred pounds and upturning thirty cups of blackcurrant squash. The whole day had been a firefighting exercise: every time one situation had been dealt with, another flared up. Yet still her encounter with Tom the night before had played on a loop in Joey’s thoughts and each and every time she felt a jolt of shock, of horror, of guilt, of shame – and of bone-grinding desire.

The day had passed and she’d emerged, soiled and shabby, into the damp evening air half expecting to see him standing there with that terrible look of desperate longing on his face. But, of course, he was not there. He was not there as she sat on the bus back to Melville. He was not there when she got off the bus. Neither was he there as she walked past the very spot where it happened the night before. He wasn’t there when she stood at her front door for an inordinate amount of time looking for her keys, pretending to read a text message. She went through an entire Saturday night, Sunday morning, Sunday night and Monday without a glimmer of his presence.

On Tuesday morning Alfie had said, ‘Are you OK, babe?’ and rubbed her feet. And she’d wanted to cry because she was so far from OK and really, when she thought about it, she’d never been OK. Not ever. But she’d said, ‘I’m fine. Just tired.’ And he’d said, ‘You know you can talk to me, don’t you? About anything?’ And she’d nodded and sucked back her tears and stroked his hair and thought about all the lovely girls she passed in the street every day who would be better for Alfie than she was.

And then later that day Alfie got a call from a woman in the village. She’d heard from Nicola that she’d just had her place done up by a really good decorator and would he be able to come to her house and quote on a job for her. ‘Can I borrow your phone?’ he’d said. ‘I want to take some new photos of the work at Nicola’s to show her and the camera on my phone’s shit.’

She’d said yes absent-mindedly. And then, as she put the phone down, a thought came to her. She’d called him straight back and said, ‘I’ll take the photos. I’m much better at taking photos than you. Leave it with me. I’ll go after work.’

The boy opened the door. He’d had all his hair shaved off and looked strangely raw and animal. There was a tiny frisson of embarrassment in the moment. He blushed and almost tripped over his own feet as he moved backwards to let Joey in.

‘Door!’ he shouted crossly over his shoulder down the hallway. ‘The door!’

Then Nicola appeared. Joey had not seen Nicola for quite some time. Last time she’d seen her she’d been in her usual costume of shiny Lycra and fleece and baseball cap, rosy-cheeked and smiling, light on her feet as though she could just take off spontaneously. Now she was in jeans and a jumper and worn-out socks, her hair tied back in a bunch, her skin dull and blotchy. She looked equally as alarmed as her son to see her standing there.

‘Hi!’ she said. ‘I’m Joey. Alfie’s wife. I live a couple of doors down? With Jack and Rebecca?’

Nicola managed a smile. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Yes. I’ve heard lots about you from Alfie. What can I do for you?’

Joey brought her phone out of her pocket. ‘Alfie’s going to quote on another job tomorrow. He wanted to show the new client some pictures of his previous work. He’s a bit crap with a camera so I offered to take them for him.’ She passed the phone from one hand to the other, her smile still stapled in place. ‘Is that OK?’

Nicola closed her eyes and opened them slowly. Then she shook her head and smiled again and said, ‘Yes, sure. Of course! You’ll have to excuse some of the mess. We’re not exactly minimal around here. But sure, yes, come in.’

Freddie moved aside and let her through. She felt sure he sniffed the air as she passed.

‘Where should I start?’ Joey asked brightly.

‘Well,’ said Nicola, smoothing down her jumper with her hands. ‘He did all this’ – she gestured around the hallway – ‘and the kitchen and the front room and the stairway. All the way up to the landing.’

Joey’s gaze followed Nicola’s hand as it gestured upwards. She felt breathless suddenly with the audacity of what she was doing. She had crossed the breach into Tom’s house. Made it beyond the hallowed portal into a world that Joey had only been able to imagine, a world that contained Tom’s things and Tom’s child and Tom’s wife and Tom’s breath and dander and shed hairs and dried sweat. The trousers she’d gripped inside her hand were in here somewhere, buried in a laundry basket or clipped to a wooden hanger in a cupboard full of Tom’s clothes and jumpers and big, serious shoes. The swinging lanyard was pooled on a tabletop, the wayward ties tamed in a drawer. He dreamed in here and drank in here and ate in here and grew older in here.

‘Would you mind’, she asked Nicola, ‘if I turned on a light or two?’

The Fitzwilliams’ house wasn’t as Joey had pictured it. Alfie had told her it was a shithole, but she hadn’t envisaged it to be quite so much of a shithole. Even with Alfie’s perfect, immaculate paintwork, it felt unloved, unwelcoming. There were no paintings hanging on the walls, no colour, most of the lights were switched off. It was also cold.

‘Gosh, no. Please do. And can I get you anything? A cup of tea or something?’

Nicola was not what she’d imagined either. She’d pictured her as a proper Melville housewife, whipping up a kitchen supper with ingredients from the deli in the village, chopping the stalks off expensive flowers to arrange in heavy glass vases, chatting with a friend over a dewy bottle of half-drunk wine around a kitchen island, an open laptop glowing blue with a half-completed Ocado order. She’d imagined Nicola as a proper grown-up woman, but she seemed more like a young nanny not sure how to deal with a visitor in her employer’s absence, too scared to switch on lights or open cupboards or turn up the heating; not properly formed, not quite right.

‘No,’ she replied, ‘no, thank you. I’m fine. I won’t be long.’

Nicola disappeared for a moment and left Joey to it. She switched on an overhead light that gave out a cruel yellow glare and took a few photos. But without the softening effects of flowers or gentle lightbulbs or table lamps her pictures looked institutional, uninspiring, bleak.

She popped her head into the kitchen. Nicola jumped slightly. ‘Please,’ she said, getting to her feet, ‘come in. Please. He did the walls in here, obviously, and he also repainted the dressers and all the shelving in here.’

She moved out of Joey’s way to allow her to take the photos.

‘So,’ she said, ‘Alfie tells me you met at a tacky all-inclusive resort on Ibiza?’

‘Yes,’ Joey replied, somewhat surprised. She hadn’t imagined Alfie and Nicola chatting much. ‘Although I wouldn’t say it was tacky. It was four-star. It was quite nice actually.’

‘Oh,’ said Nicola vaguely. ‘Well. It sounded tacky, the way he described it. And I suppose I can’t quite picture it. I’ve never holidayed abroad.’

Joey started at this pronouncement. ‘Really?’

Nicola nodded. ‘It’s Tom’s job, you see. It’s all-consuming. It’s everything. It always has been.’

Joey nodded, as if that was an acceptable explanation for a thirty-something-year-old woman not to have been on holiday abroad.

‘If we do go away, we tend to stick close to home. So that Tom can get back easily if there’s an emergency.’

‘Did you not go abroad on your holidays when you were younger? Before you met Tom?’

‘Ha, well, there wasn’t really much being younger before I met Tom. So no, I’ve never been abroad on holiday. Not properly.’

Joey nodded. She was desperate to ask Nicola how old she was but couldn’t think of a discreet opening.

‘He’s madly in love with you, you know.’

Joey stopped, statue-still, and caught her breath. A blast of adrenaline shot through her. She turned and looked at Nicola. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘Alfie,’ said Nicola. ‘He adores you.’

‘Ah.’ Joey’s insides turned liquid and her head fizzed with relief. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Alfie. Yes. I know. He’s a sweetheart.’

‘He really is,’ she said. ‘And ever so good-looking. You’re a very lucky girl.’

Joey blanched and crossed the kitchen to take some photos of the French doors on to the back garden. There was a bench here with a pile of old newspapers hanging off it; washing drying on a radiator: underpants scrunched into small stiff twists of fabric, a tired drooping bra, a pair of jeans that looked as though they could stand up by themselves. A cold breeze whistled through an open window.

‘Here. Let me get out of your way,’ said Nicola.

Joey noticed a grimace as Nicola got off her chair and walked to the other side of the room, a slight limp. ‘Are you OK?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ said Nicola. ‘I’m just taking a break from running and my body doesn’t like it. My muscles get all, you know, gnarly.’

‘You should do some stretches.’

‘I do try to remember, but it’s all or nothing for me when it comes to exercise. Once I get out of the routine, it all goes to pot.’

‘What made you stop running?’

Nicola stood leaning against the hob of a five-ring burner. It was covered with pans, piled into one another, then layered over with baking trays. The sink was full of old washing up. The dishwasher stood with its door open, half empty. A school timetable two terms out of date was pinned to a small cork board by the door.

‘Oh. I just go through phases. You know.’

‘Can I?’ Joey gestured towards the front room.

‘Yes,’ said Nicola. ‘Sure.’

Nicola followed Joey and stood in the doorway watching her as she photographed another load of magnolia walls and shiny white woodwork. There was a faded blue sofa in here, an old piano against the wall, a chrome floor lamp, a small gilt-framed mirror above a fake stone fireplace, a high-backed chair in the window that looked as though it should be in an old people’s home.

‘So, the landlord didn’t mind you having the place redecorated then?’ Joey asked.

‘No. She was delighted. We went halves on it. But I just couldn’t live with it another second; it was yellow in here. Yellow walls! Can you imagine?’

Joey shrugged and smiled. She wasn’t a fan of yellow walls but at least they might have injected some warmth and sunshine into this drab room.

‘And I’m so glad that Alfie’s getting some more work. It’s hard to get anyone decent, in cities. Much easier in the sticks.’

‘So you used to live in the countryside?’

‘We’ve lived virtually everywhere. Even east London for a while. Now that was hair-raising.’

‘Was it?’

‘God, yes. Ninety per cent Bengali intake at Tom’s school. Luckily, we lived a bit further out, in a more gentrified area. But really, it was like Calcutta!’

‘Wow,’ said Joey. She turned so that Nicola couldn’t see her face. ‘Wow,’ she said under her breath. So, she thought, Tom’s wife is an ignorant, small-town racist. Yet married to a man who dedicates his life to underprivileged children, to improving their prospects, a benevolent man with charisma to spare. How did that work?

‘Do you think you’ll stay here?’ she asked. ‘In Bristol?’

‘I doubt it,’ said Nicola. ‘Tom likes to conquer, triumph, consolidate and move on. Shame. I like it here.’

‘Where are you from originally?’

‘Originally from Derby. Grew up mainly in Burton-on-Trent.’

‘And where is Tom from?’

‘Tunbridge Wells. He’s a fancy southerner. Went to boarding school. Mother was an honourable something. Way posher than me. Anyway,’ she said. ‘Are you done?’ Her mood had turned. She seemed keen to get rid of Joey now. And Joey was happy to leave. She didn’t like this house. And she didn’t like Nicola.

‘Yes!’ she said brightly. ‘I am pretty much done. There’s just the landing to do. If I can? I’ll be really super quick.’

‘Sure,’ said Nicola, turning out the lights before Joey was even out of the room.

The stairs were carpeted in baggy grey carpet that looked like a health-and-safety hazard and she watched her step carefully as she ascended. There were three doors on the landing: one to a bathroom, one to what looked like a small bedroom and another to what looked like a bigger bedroom. She heard floorboards creaking above with careful footsteps and realised that the son was lurking about, eavesdropping.

She took the photos as fast as she could, but halfway down the stairs she stopped on the half-turn and peered through the long window that looked out over the back gardens and the ‘secret’ woodland beyond. From here she could clearly see the gate at the foot of Tom’s garden where she’d peered through the gaps in the fence on Saturday morning. She touched the glass briefly with her fingertip, before completing her descent.

‘Well,’ said Nicola, waiting for her by the front door. ‘It’s been lovely to meet you. Please do send Alfie my love.’

‘Yes. Yes I will. And send mine to Tom.’ Her voice caught on the last consonant of his name. She had no idea if Tom had mentioned their neighbourly encounters or not.

But Nicola looked unfazed and smiled and said, ‘Yes. I certainly will. If he ever gets home, of course. The hours he works are extraordinary.’

‘Yes,’ said Joey. ‘I can imagine.’

She looked upwards at the attic bedroom window as she left Tom’s house and saw the shadow of his son move quickly out of sight.