Watching You: A Novel

Jenna saw Mr Fitzwilliam at his usual post the next morning, standing sentry at the school gates, greeting each student by name, throwing out hail-fellow-well-met greetings as though they were dog treats. She noticed how the children loved them, lapped them up. She could see why he was so lauded, why they called him the Superhead. He clearly knew how to run a school, knew what to feed it, how to nourish it, when to slap the back of its hand and when to pat its head. He had the aura of humorous capability and effortless control that children liked in an adult.

But still.

That didn’t mean she had to like him too.

He shouldn’t have touched her arm like that in his office. It was unprofessional. A bit like talking to fifteen-year-old girls on hotel landings in the middle of the night. And he shouldn’t have approached her directly about her mother. She was sure there were other paths he should have taken, protocols he should have followed.

Jenna could see the shadow of a white T-shirt beneath his thin blue shirt. She didn’t like the idea of it, of Mr Fitzwilliam in a white T-shirt. It was sort of gross.

She passed him with pursed lips and a hard, awkward grind to her stride.

‘Good morning, Miss Tripp,’ he said.

‘Morning, sir,’ she said without making eye contact. But even without looking at him she could tell he was smiling down at her. She could sense his hands in his trouser pockets, the subtle rut of his hips, a twinkle in his eye. Was it in fact mildly inappropriate for him to call her Miss Tripp?

She strode towards the front doors and marched up to the lockers. Bess was already there. She’d left without her this morning; Jenna had seen her halfway up the road out of the village. She’d written a text saying, Wait up bitch, but deleted it. Then she’d watched Bess run to catch up with Lottie and Tiana and she’d felt a stab of sickening sadness in her guts. Now that she was face-to-face with Bess she didn’t know what to say.

‘Sorry I didn’t wait for you,’ Bess said, nibbling on a fingernail. ‘Just felt a bit weird after yesterday.’

Jenna ached to say, Me too, and draw the line and make things good. But she couldn’t do it. The words were too deeply buried under piles of other stuff for her to quite reach them.

‘Whatever,’ she said instead. She unlocked her locker and started to fold her coat into it. She wanted Bess to say something, but she didn’t. She just locked her locker and took her books and turned away. Jenna watched her walk down the corridor, tears aching against the back of her throat.

Bess didn’t eat her lunch in the classroom that day and she wasn’t waiting for Jenna to walk home together at the end of the day either. Instead Jenna walked home alone, listening to a Sam Smith channel on Spotify. As she passed Caffè Nero on the other side of the main road she spotted Bess’s creamy blond head, tipped back with laughter, surrounded by the heads of Tiana and Lottie and Ruby. Jenna turned the volume right up and walked faster.

As she walked she became aware of someone behind her, matching her pace. She turned and saw a boy wearing a black blazer from one of the posh schools across town. She recognised him, vaguely; he was familiar. As her eye caught his he picked up his pace and stood alongside her.

‘You’re Jenna Tripp?’ said the boy.

He was odd-looking; around the same height as her, a pinched face, too much very straight hair growing downwards from his crown like a spillage, a slight air of dark superiority.

She suddenly realised that it was Mr Fitzwilliam’s son. She pulled out her earbuds and nodded.

‘Freddie Fitzwilliam,’ said the boy, holding out his hand for her to shake. ‘My father is the head at your school.’

She stared at him, not sure how to respond.

‘And I live just over there.’ He pointed towards Melville Heights, a stripe of dark colour in the distance. ‘Near you.’ He paused and took a deep breath. ‘Can I ask you something?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It depends.’

‘It’s about the Lake District.’

She stopped walking and turned to him. ‘What about it?’

‘Is that where your mum recognises my dad from?’

‘What?’

‘I overheard my dad telling my mum that the reason your mum keeps following him is that she remembers him from a holiday. And we’ve only been on one holiday. And that was the Lake District. Was it that? Were you there?’

Jenna shrugged. ‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘Can’t remember. Why does it matter?’

The boy called Freddie stared intently at a spot on her shoulder, stepped from one foot to the other and back again. He put a delicate hand to the side of his face and made a strange noise. He looked as though he was about to say something and then he suddenly brought his gaze from her shoulder to her face and said, ‘It doesn’t. Really. Forget I said anything. And don’t tell my dad.’

She shook her head slightly.

‘Promise.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. Whatever.’ She wanted this boy gone; she wanted this encounter to end.

He looked once more from her shoulder to her face and then back again before picking up his pace and darting ahead of her. She stood in place watching him until his outline was a smudge in the distance and then she carried on home.

Her mum was at the computer when she got back. She was on one of her chat rooms, one of the many places on the internet where she could go to have her craziness validated.

Gang-stalking.

Jenna had googled it the first time her mother had triumphantly lifted her head from her laptop, eyes blazing and said, It’s real! It’s happening to thousands of people all over the world! I’m being gang-stalked! It belonged to the same school of delusion-based psychiatric disorders as Morgellons and alien abductions. Her mother genuinely believed that she was being persecuted by a huge network of strangers, and that Mr Fitzwilliam was the puppet master. She believed that strangers came into their home while they slept and rearranged things and stole things and damaged things, just to mess with their heads. Her mother believed that her persecutors saw it as a kind of perverse hobby, a huge, boundless real-life game that ate into their own time and finances. She believed that she was being persecuted for her many political protests as a young person. She believed that Mr Fitzwilliam was not a head teacher but a powerful man with connections to the government who was being sent into schools and communities to manage the gang-stalking from the inside.

‘Look,’ said her mother, resting her e-cigarette on the table next to her and turning the screen of her computer to face Jenna. ‘Look what’s happening. Just across the border in Mold. There’s a woman, same age as me, same political history as me. Mr Fitzwilliam was the head at her local school before he came to Melville and it happened to her too. It started from the minute he arrived, she says. Scratches on her car. Chips in her kitchen surfaces. Light bulbs loosened. Bits of broken glass in the bath. And she says she was in the Lake District too.’

Jenna stopped unzipping her rucksack and stared at her mother. ‘What? When we were there?’

‘No.’ Her mother returned her gaze to the screen, picked up her e-cigarette and inhaled deeply. ‘No. When she was a child, I think. But still.’

Jenna rolled her eyes and pulled her homework books out of her bag. She knew that Mr Fitzwilliam had been the head at a school in Wales before he’d been brought into Melville Academy. That much was probably true, but the rest of it …

She went into the kitchen and made herself a low-calorie hot chocolate with a sprinkle of miniature marshmallows. She took her homework and the hot chocolate up to her room and arranged herself cross-legged on her bed.

‘Is he there?’ she heard her mother call up the stairs.

Jenna didn’t even need to peer from her window to verify that the innocuous bespectacled man who sat at his computer every evening in the house behind theirs would be there, because he always was.

‘No,’ she called down. ‘Can’t see him.’

She pulled out her phone, desperate to text Bess or Facetime her, desperate to tell her about her freaky encounter with Mr Fitzwilliam’s son on the way home from school. She opened WhatsApp and held her finger over the video call button. But then she put the phone down again. Bess was probably still in Caffè Nero with their friends. Instead she opened up her laptop and typed Tom Fitzwilliam Mold into her browser.

The school in Mold had brought him in in January 2014. He’d turned it from a school in special measures to an outstanding school within two years and left for his new role in Melville at the end of the winter term in 2016. Before Mold he’d been in Tower Hamlets. Before Tower Hamlets he’d been in Manchester. And before Manchester, back in the year 2001, the year Jenna had been born, he’d been promoted to deputy head of a school in Burton upon Trent where he’d taught since he was twenty-eight.

Mr Fitzwilliam was squeaky clean. His reputation was unblemished. Everywhere he went he brought nothing but light and harmony. Happy children and sunshine. But the woman in the Lake District didn’t like Mr Fitzwilliam, Jenna’s mad mum didn’t like Mr Fitzwilliam and now, for no particular reason, Jenna herself did not like Mr Fitzwilliam.

Was the woman in the Lake District also mad, perhaps? And in that case, was she, Jenna, perhaps mad too? She thought back to her encounter with Freddie Fitzwilliam and her curiosity began to bloom. What had he wanted to say to her? And might it have shed some light on the strange things she’d been thinking and feeling?

She closed her laptop and picked up her phone again. She checked Snapchat to see what Bess was up to but she hadn’t posted. She felt a terrible hollowness open up inside her, a sense that she was all alone, that she had in fact always been all alone, that the corners of her life were folding in and folding in and that there was nothing she could do about it.