Watching You: A Novel

Tom Fitzwilliam was fifty-one and he was, according to Jack, a lovely, lovely man.

Not that Joey had asked her brother for his opinion of their neighbour – it had been offered, spontaneously, apropos of an article in the local newspaper about an award that the local school had just won.

‘Oh, look,’ he said, the paper spread open in front of him on the kitchen table. ‘That’s our neighbour, lives two doors down.’ He tapped a photo with his forefinger. ‘Tom Fitzwilliam. Lovely, lovely man.’

Joey peered over Jack’s shoulder, a half-washed saucepan in one hand, a washing-up sponge in the other. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’ve seen him, I think. Black car?’

‘Yes, that’s right. He’s the headmaster of our local state school. A “superhead”.’ He made quotes in the air with his fingers. ‘Brought in after a bad Ofsted. His school just won something and now everyone loves him.’

‘That’s nice,’ said Joey. ‘Do you know him, then?’

‘Yeah. Kind of. He and his wife were very helpful when we were having the building works done. They used to send us texts during the day to let us know what was happening and calmed down some other not-so-nice neighbours who were getting their knickers in a knot about dust and noise. Nice people.’

Joey shrugged. Jack thought everyone was nice.

‘So.’ He closed the paper and folded it in half. ‘How did the interview go?’

Joey slung the tea towel over the side of the sink. ‘It was OK.’

She’d applied for a job at the Melville, the famous boutique hotel and bar in the village: front-of-house manager. The pleasant woman interviewing her could tell the moment she walked in that she was not fit for purpose and Joey had made no effort to convince her otherwise.

‘Glorified receptionist,’ she said now. ‘Plus four night shifts a week. No thank you.’

She didn’t look at Jack, didn’t want to witness his reaction to yet more evidence that his little sister was a total loser. She had quite wanted the job; the hotel was beautiful, the owner was nice and the pay was good. The problem was that she couldn’t actually see herself in the job. The problem was … well, the problem was her. She was nearly twenty-seven. In three years’ time she would be thirty. She was a married woman. But for some reason, she still felt like a child.

‘Fair enough,’ he said, turning the pages of the newspaper mechanically. ‘I’m sure something will come up, eventually.’

‘Bound to,’ she said, her heart not reaching her words.

Then, ‘Jack, are you OK about me and Alfie being here? Like, really?’

She watched her brother roll his eyes good-naturedly. ‘Joey. For God’s sake. How many times do I have to tell you? I love having you here. And Alfie too. It’s a pleasure.’

‘What about Rebecca, though? Are you sure she’s not regretting it?’

‘She’s fine, Joey. We’re both fine. It’s all good.’

‘Do you promise?’

‘Yes, Joey. I promise.’

Joey got a job three days later. It was a terrible, terrible job, but it was a job. She was now a party coordinator at a notoriously rough soft play centre in the city called Whackadoo. The uniform was an acid-yellow polo shirt with red pull-on trousers. The pay was reasonable and the hours were fine. The manager was a big, butch woman with a crew cut called Dawn to whom Joey had taken an instant liking. It could all have been worse, of course it could. Anything could always be worse. But not much.

All employees of Whackadoo were required to spend their first week on the floor. ‘Nobody gets to sit in an office here until they’ve cleaned the toilets halfway through a party for thirty eight-year-old boys,’ Dawn had said, a grim twinkle in her eye.

‘Can’t be any worse than cleaning vomit and Jägerbombs off the bar after a fourteen-hour stag party,’ Joey had replied.

‘Probably not,’ Dawn had conceded. ‘Probably not. Can you start tomorrow?’

Joey stopped in the village on her way home from the interview and ordered herself a large gin and tonic in the cosy bar of the Melville Hotel. It was early for gin and tonic. The man sitting two tables away was still having breakfast. She told herself it was celebratory but in reality, she needed something to blunt the edges of her terror and self-loathing.

Whackadoo.

Windowless cavern of unthinkable noise and bad smells. Breeze-block hellhole of spilt drinks and tantrums, where a child shat in the ball pond at least once a day apparently. She shuddered and knocked back another glug of gin. The man eating his breakfast looked at her curiously. She blinked at him imperiously.

You could see the painted houses from down here, a bolt of running colour across the tops of the narrow Georgian windows. There was the cobalt blue of Jack and Rebecca’s house, the canary yellow of Tom Fitzwilliam’s. It was another world up there. Rarefied. And she, a half-formed woman working in a soft play centre: what on earth was she doing up there?

She looked down at her bitten nails, her scuffed boots, her old chinos. She thought about the elderly pants she was wearing, the decrepit bra. She knew she was two months past a timely trip to the hairdresser. She was drinking gin alone in a hotel bar on a Thursday at not even midday. And then she thought of herself only five months ago, tanned and lean, clutching her bouquet, the talcum sand between her toes, the sun shining down from a vivid blue sky, standing at Alfie’s side; young, beautiful, in paradise, in love. ‘You are the loveliest thing I have ever seen,’ her boss had said, wiping a tear from her own cheek. ‘So young, so perfect, so pure.’

She switched on her phone and scrolled through her gallery until she got to the wedding photos. For a few minutes she wallowed in the memories of the happiest day of her life, until she heard the bar door open and looked up.

It was him.

Tom Fitzwilliam.

The head teacher.

He pulled off his suit jacket and draped it across the back of a chair, resting a leather shoulder bag on the seat. Then, slowly, in a way that suggested either self-consciousness or a complete lack of self-consciousness, he sauntered to the bar. The barman appeared to know him. He made him a lime and soda, and told him he’d bring his food to the table when it was ready.

Joey watched him walking back to his table. He wore a blue shirt with a subtle check. The bottom buttons, she noticed, strained very gently against a slight softness and Joey felt a strange wave of pleasure, a sense of excitement about the unapologetic contours of his body, the suggestion of meals enjoyed and worries forgotten about over a bottle of decent wine. She found herself wanting to slide her fingers between those tensed buttons, to touch, just for a moment, the soft flesh beneath.

The thought shocked her, left her slightly winded. She turned her attention to her gin and tonic, aware that her glass was virtually empty, aware that it was time for her to leave. But she didn’t want to move. She couldn’t move. She was suddenly stultified by a terrible and unexpected longing. She turned slightly to catch a glimpse of his feet, his ankles, the rumpled cowl of grey cotton sock, the worn hide of black leather lace-up shoes, an inch of pale, bare flesh just there, between the sock and the hem of the trousers she’d been aware of him slowly tugging up before sitting down.

She was in the hard grip of a shocking physical attraction. She turned her eyes away from his feet and back to her empty glass and then to the wedding photos on her phone, which had only 2 per cent charge left and was about to die. But she couldn’t, she simply couldn’t sit here staring into an empty gin glass. Not now. Not in front of this man.

She was aware of him taking papers out of his shoulder bag, shuffling them around, pulling a pen from somewhere, holding it airily away from him in one hand, clicking and unclicking, clicking and unclicking, bringing it down to make a mark on the paper, putting it away from him again. Click, click. One foot bouncing slightly against the fulcrum of the other. She would leave when the waiter came with his food. That was what she’d do. When he was distracted.

The screen of her phone turned black, finally giving up its ghost. She slipped it into her handbag and stared at the floor until finally the barman disappeared at the sound of a buzzer somewhere behind him and reappeared a moment later with some kind of sandwich on a wooden board arranged alongside a glossy hillock of herbs and curly leaves. She saw Tom move paperwork out of the way, smiling generously at the barman.

‘Thank you,’ she heard him say as she picked up her jacket and squeezed her way between her chair and the table, almost knocking it over in her keenness to leave without being noticed. ‘That looks lovely,’ he was saying as she crossed the bar, her heavy boots making a loud knocking sound against the dove-grey floor tiles, the strap of her shoulder bag refusing to sit properly against her shoulder, her trailing jacket knocking over a small display of leaflets about the village farmers’ market as she passed.

The barman called over, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll pick them up.’

‘Thank you,’ she said.

She wrenched open the door and threw herself out on to the street, but not before, for just one flickering second, her eyes had met his and something terrible had passed between them, something that she could only describe as a mutual fascination.