Watching You: A Novel

Freddie caught his breath at the top of the escarpment before straightening and continuing to his front door. He had not meant to approach Jenna Tripp like that. He hadn’t even been expecting to see her. He did sometimes see her on the walk home, but she was usually with Bess or some other girls. It took him by surprise to see her walking alone. It had seemed preordained in some way, so soon after the question of the Lake District had raised its ugly head again. He thought, as he followed behind Jenna Tripp, that it must mean something, her being there, alone, right then. He’d thought it must be destiny. He’d thought a lot of strange and entirely fatuous things (how could someone as clever as him be thinking about destiny, for goodness’ sake?) when she’d turned suddenly and clamped her eyes on his and he’d had to wing it, horribly, with panic blowing and building inside him at the realisation that he was much closer to her than he’d thought he was, oppressively close, and that the only way to make it seem better than it was, was to make it look as though he was deliberately catching up with her to start up a conversation.

Once he’d started the conversation he’d felt a terrible awareness growing and boiling inside him, from the pit of his gut upwards, that not only was he having a weird conversation with a stranger but that the stranger was a teenage girl and that it was, in fact, quite possibly the first time he’d had a conversation with a teenage girl since becoming a teenager himself. And Jenna Tripp, now he was here, standing right next to her, was even prettier than she looked from a distance and her lips were very full and soft and her breasts made a shape in the fabric of her blazer that was both innocuous and awe-inspiring. He found that he could look neither at her face, because he wanted to touch her mouth, or away from her face, because then there were breasts, so had chosen instead a neutral corner where her shoulder met the wall of the shop behind her and fixed his gaze there.

And then he’d realised that he was mad to be having this conversation with her, that she would tell his dad and that his dad would then know he’d overheard their conversation, and that anyway, he didn’t really know what it was he was trying to uncover, that he shouldn’t have approached her before properly formulating a line of enquiry. The whole thing had been shambolic and embarrassing and humiliating and that was why he’d needed to stop for a moment before he could face the normality of walking through his front door.

Instead, though, he was confronted by a stepladder and paint-spattered dust sheets flung up the stairs and the smell of wet paint and the entirely abnormal sound of his mum laughing in the kitchen.

He followed the sound and came upon his mother leaning up against the kitchen counter, her hands wrapped around a mug of tea and Alfie the painter sitting across from her at the kitchen table in his overalls, huge long legs crossed at the knee, fingertips tapping the sides of another mug, halfway through a story that was clearly the funniest thing his mum had ever heard.

‘Good evening, my friend,’ said Alfie the painter.

‘Afternoon,’ Freddie replied with a satisfying spritz of pedantry.

‘Hello, darling.’ His mum turned briefly and hit him with a smile the likes of which he had not known she was capable of producing. ‘Alfie’s telling me stories about being a groundskeeper at a dreadful-sounding holiday resort in Ibiza! You wouldn’t believe the things they get up to on these all-inclusive holidays!’

Alfie threw Freddie a look of what could only be described as awkward regret. Freddie suspected that he had not meant his stories to elicit such amusement but that now they were he’d decided to go with the flow.

‘Anyway,’ said Alfie, giving the mug one last ripple of his big, paint-stained fingernails and lowering his gigantic foot to the floor. ‘I had better get back to it. I’ve got one more coat to do on the skirting boards before I go. Thanks for the tea, Nicola.’

Freddie stared at him. He tried to work him out, ferret out some dark intention, some element of shade or wrongness. But there was none to be found. He was as he appeared. A large, harmless man of small ambition and mediocre intellect. But something about him had caused his mother to postpone her afternoon run, to drink tea in the kitchen, to laugh, really properly to laugh, to glow, even.

Freddie added this to the growing conundrum of his entire existence and went to his bedroom.

Freddie had completely abandoned The Melville Papers. He no longer logged anything that he saw from his bedroom window, not even Jenna Tripp and Bess Ridley in their PE kits. The comings and goings of Lower Melville were of no interest whatsoever to him any more. The truth was that all of Freddie’s time these days was taken up in pursuit of Romola Brook. Or not so much in pursuit of, but in paying homage to. Appreciating. Adoring. Studying. Learning about. He’d started a new log. It was called The Romola Papers.

He followed her home most nights now, if she happened to leave school at the same time as him. Last night she’d gone home via Tesco Metro where she’d picked up a packet of custard creams and some dog food. He’d added this fact to his log. Just in case he ever wanted to buy her biscuits. Tonight she hadn’t been there. He’d waited for ten minutes until the school caretaker had come and locked the gates and then he’d given up. But that was OK because he could still find her on the internet.

He placed his camomile tea on his desk, removed his tie and clicked his way on to a conversation that Romola was having on Instagram with someone called LouisaMeyrickJones. It was pretty boring. To do with a teacher who’d been unfair during lunch break and how so and so had been in tears and then so and so joined in and there was lots of talk about how maybe they should report the unfairness and so on and so forth and Freddie was about to switch screens and find something else to do for a while when someone else popped up and said something about the spring ball.

He read on.

It was a joint event with Freddie’s school, just over a fortnight away.

A few weeks ago, he would barely have noticed the reference. But now he saw it as the portal to something extraordinary.

‘Mum!’ he called down the stairs. ‘Are we doing anything on the twenty-fourth of March? It’s a Friday?’

He waited a moment for his mother to reply. ‘I don’t think so,’ she replied. ‘Why?’

‘There’s a party I want to go to. A type of ball. At my school. Can I go?’

‘Of course you can, darling! How lovely!’

‘The tickets are really expensive,’ he called down. ‘Twenty-five pounds. Am I still allowed to go?’

‘Yes.’ His mother’s face appeared at the bottom of the staircase. ‘Absolutely. I think it’s great that you want to go. We’ll have to get you a tux! How handsome you’ll look! Just imagine it!’