Watching You: A Novel

‘Mum?’ Jenna had heard the front door click.

‘Yes!’

Jenna came halfway down the stairs and peered into the hallway. ‘Mum, where’ve you been?’

‘That boy is up there again. In his window. And he gave me the finger.’

‘I don’t blame him, Mum. He’s probably sick of you staring up there all the time.’

Jenna had been home for two hours and already she was aching nostalgically for the big sunny suite in Seville, the late-night dinners in noisy restaurants, the thrilling conveyor-belt toaster in the breakfast hall, the freedom from being constantly told that she was being watched and played with and persecuted.

‘She was there too. At the bus stop. The woman Tom Fitzwilliam brought home in a taxi last week. I talked to her. She claims not to know anything about him. But I think she was lying.’

‘Oh God, Mum, tell me you haven’t been talking to strangers about all this. Please tell me you haven’t.’ This was a new development. Another step down the road to insanity.

‘Well, I wouldn’t call her a stranger. She’s a local. Locals talk to each other.’

‘And what did she say? This local woman?’

Her mum shrugged. ‘Not much. And then her bus came.’

‘Oh God.’ Jenna sat heavily on the stairs and pulled her hair from her face. ‘Mum. You’ve got to stop going out and doing all this stuff. You’re becoming as bad as these people you claim are stalking you. Just suppose, just suppose for one minute that you’re wrong; that Mr Fitzwilliam is not a bad man, that his son is not taking photos of you, that all of this is in your head – how do you think they’re feeling? Knowing you’re out there, creeping about, talking to their neighbours. You’ll be making them feel as bad as they’re making you feel. Doesn’t that seem wrong to you?’

Her mum rolled her eyes. ‘When are you going to wake up, Jenna? Wake up and see the truth? I know it makes no sense. But it’s true and it’s happening. Every minute of every day. And I’m not alone. It’s happening to hundreds of people. Three that I know of just in the Bristol area. All being stalked. All being followed and persecuted. It’s a terrible, terrible scourge, Jenna, but no one wants to talk about it. And men like Tom Fitzwilliam get to swan about in their big shiny cars without a care in the world with everyone thinking the sun shines out of their bloody backsides.’

Jenna inhaled slowly. She thought of Bess sitting on the landing with their head teacher in the middle of the night, the inappropriate, slightly loaded visits to their room, the red and yellow watch strap. ‘Tell me again, Mum,’ she said, ‘about the Lake District. Tell me again what actually happened.’

Her mum sat a few stairs below Jenna and held her daughter’s socked toes in her hand, massaging them absent-mindedly. ‘Well, it was our third day, boiling hot, thirty-two degrees or something crazy, too hot for walking or cycling. So we booked ourselves into an air-conditioned coach tour of the Lakes. And there was a family on the tour. Him’ – she gestured broadly in the direction of Melville Heights – ‘and his wife and boy. And I’d noticed them because I thought he seemed a bit high and mighty, you know? As if being on a coach tour was somehow beneath him. And I noticed that the wife and the boy seemed sort of in awe of him, as though he was all that mattered in the world. Every time we got off the coach they would wait for him to lead the way. I just felt, I don’t know, that there was something off with them. And then the first stop after lunch – it was Buttermere, I think – he was just getting back on the coach and this woman appeared from nowhere. A dark-haired woman, about fifty or so. She was wearing a black vest and gold chains and she was quite attractive, quite stylish, but her face was distorted with rage and she kind of threw herself at him, threw him up against the side of the coach and was shouting in his face: You fucking bastard, look at you! Just look at you! How can you live with yourself? How can you live with yourself? And she kept saying something about viva. Do you remember? Viva, this, viva that. I can’t really remember. I just remember her thumping his chest over and over again with her fists. And then another coach went by and blocked our view and by the time the coach was gone, she was gone too and he was straightening himself up and looking really humiliated. He was trying to act like nothing had happened. When we got back on the coach I passed him and I said, Everything OK? And he looked at me as though a human being had never spoken to him before and he nodded, like this’ – she nodded abruptly – ‘and the look he gave me.’ She shuddered. ‘It cut through me like a knife. And that was that. That was the moment. The moment that changed everything. I saw him and he saw me, and for whatever reason he decided to start all this; he decided to make me his victim.’

‘He was on our trip. He came to Seville,’ Jenna said, knowing even as she said it that it was the wrong thing to say.

‘Tom Fitzwilliam?’

‘Yes. The Spanish teacher couldn’t come because his wife went into early labour. So Mr Fitzwilliam came instead.’

Her mum stopped massaging Jenna’s toes and stared up at her. ‘Was he staying at your hotel?’

‘Yes.’

‘And’ – her mother dropped her foot and placed her hand to her chest – ‘he was there, with you, all week?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘God.’ Her mother cast her gaze to the floor as though she might find the correct response down there. She looked up again. ‘Are you OK?’

‘Of course I’m OK. He’s just a man.’

‘And did he … did he say anything about me? About us? About the Lakes?’

‘Of course he didn’t! Mum! I will grant you that he is the same man from the Lake District, you’re right about that. He was there, on the coach trip, something strange happened, we have no idea what it was, and it had nothing to do with us, and now he lives over the road from us and it’s all just a coincidence. That’s all it is.’

Her mum shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It absolutely is not a coincidence. And the fact that you can’t see it when it’s so incredibly clear scares me, Jenna. Promise me you’ll stay away from him. Please.’

Jenna sighed and got to her feet. ‘I’m going to unpack,’ she said.

‘Stay away from him,’ her mother called after her, ‘or I’m taking you out of that school.’