Watching You: A Novel

It was a warm afternoon. Warm for March, anyway. Joey unzipped her coat and crossed to the sunny side of the street. She’d just left work and was shopping for clothes. To wear tomorrow. For her appointment to have sex with Tom Fitzwilliam in a hotel room. Which may or may not happen. She hadn’t yet made up her mind. She might go to the hotel and have sex with Tom Fitzwilliam. She might go to the hotel and not have sex with Tom Fitzwilliam. Or she might not go to the hotel at all. A hundred voices shouted in her head all at the same time and all of them were saying something different.

When her mother had died, the hurricane in Joey’s head had stopped. Stopped completely. It had been there since she was a young girl. It was why she’d failed her GCSEs. It was why she’d been expelled from two schools. It was why she’d never managed monogamy, not even when she was madly in love. It was why her friendships didn’t last the distance. It was why her underwear was tatty and her bank account was empty and her job was shit and her roots were nearly an inch long. Because all the elements of her existence were constantly going round and round her head like a load in a laundrette, churning and turning and presenting themselves to her in a dozen different conflicting ways. Things that felt like a good idea at ten o’clock would seem like the worst idea in the world by ten thirty. Someone once said to her that the key to a happy life was making good decisions. But making good decisions was beyond her because she could always see an infinity of outcomes and all of them seemed good for at least a moment. Yes, she might think about an invitation to a holiday with people she knew she’d hate being on holiday with, yes, why not, maybe it will be OK. And she’d say yes and then it wouldn’t be OK. Because she had no idea how to pay attention to her own instincts, she was incapable of taking control of her own destiny.

She was, as her mother always used to say to her with affection but also exhaustion, her own worst enemy.

But after watching her mother die, seeing the last rasps of life leave her broken body, everything had cleared. Her head stopped spinning and everything seemed millpond smooth. She was nearly twenty-seven and it was time to take steps towards a more grown-up existence. She’d married Alfie and handed in her notice at the resort and pictured herself coming home to Bristol to do the sorts of things that grown-up women who lived in Bristol did. She would get a proper job, a nice flat, she’d cook meals, spend time with her father and her brother, go to the gym, make some friends, proper solid friends, not a scrappy, transient stream of gap-year cuties popping pills all night. Maybe she’d join a reading group, book regular appointments at the hairdresser’s, get a car, take the car to a car wash, get a pet, get two pets, buy plants, get manicures, eat salads, have a baby …

And then she’d come home and realised she couldn’t afford a nice flat, and that without the nice flat there’d be no cooking nice meals, no fun reading group meetings with her fun friends. She’d realised that she wasn’t equipped for a proper job and she wasn’t ready for a baby and she couldn’t afford to go to the gym and she couldn’t afford a car and that making nice, fun, solid friends was harder than it looked. And slowly the hurricane inside her head had started up again. And then Tom Fitzwilliam had appeared above the maelstrom, looming tall and handsome, floodlight bright over the whirling and the wheeling of her thoughts, and it seemed that every minute she spent thinking about Tom was a minute not spent thinking about her crap job and her overgrown roots and her stultifying fear of taking the necessary steps towards a solid and fulfilling adulthood. As long as she was thinking about Tom and his hands at the back of her neck, his body hard against hers in the darkest corner of Melville Heights, as long as she was wondering what colour bra to buy for the sex appointment she may or may not attend tomorrow night, then she didn’t need to think about the baby Alfie wanted to have with her and the fact that she knew, deep down and without a shadow of a doubt, that she should never have married him and that one day, probably quite soon, she was going to take his perfect heart and break it clean in two.

Blue, she thought, her hand against the unyielding lace of a £4.99 Primark push-up bra. Blue, she thought, putting the blue bra into the cloth shopping basket looped over her arm. Blue.