Watching You: A Novel

It was an hour since the police had left and Jenna lay in her fleece pyjamas in a foetal ball on her bed. She held her phone in her cupped hands and stared at the screen. Bess was out with Ruby and someone called Jed. Jenna had no idea who Jed was but he seemed to like sticking his tongue out any time someone pointed a camera at him. They had started off at a KFC in town and now appeared to be in someone’s bedroom. It wasn’t Bess’s bedroom. Jenna knew Bess’s bedroom almost as well as she knew her own. Snap Maps said she was at 24 Hawthorne Drive, a road in Lissenden, the next village along.

Her gut clenched at the thought of the parallel world in which she had gone to KFC after school with Bess and Ruby and Jed and was now sitting cross-legged in someone’s bedroom larking about in that carefree Friday-night way. Jed, despite his constantly protruding tongue, appeared to be quite good-looking. Maybe Jenna could have flirted with him. Maybe Jed would have ended up, in this parallel existence, being her first love, the boy she lost her virginity to. But she would never know, because she was here, curled up in bed, her stomach still churning in the aftermath of the hideous episode in the Melville, the humiliation of walking out with the policemen while the locals stood across the street gawping at them, the stress of lying to the PCs, to her father, to everyone.

She clicked on Snap Maps again and saw that Bess was still at number 24 Hawthorne Drive. It was ten forty-five. Bess’s mum liked her home by eleven at the weekends. She’d have to leave soon if she was going to make it.

She could hear her own mum downstairs, puttering about. In the old days, before she was ill, her mum always liked to be in bed by ten with a herbal tea and a good book, but now she was regularly downstairs until midnight, 1 a.m., 2 a.m., chatting online with people in the US, checking and rechecking things, taking photos, making endless notes. She could hear her going through the kitchen cupboards now, making a mental inventory of everything so that in the morning she’d know if anyone had been in in the night to rearrange their cutlery drawer.

Jenna rolled over on to her other side and looked at her phone again. Bess had left Jed’s house. She was moving quite fast so she must be in a taxi, or her mum might have gone to collect her – which was unlikely as their block of flats had first come, first served off-street parking and her mum refused to move her car for anything other than emergencies. She watched the little icon heading towards Lower Melville. She pictured Bess in the back seat, feeling awkward and not knowing whether she should talk to the driver or not. She’d be staring resolutely at her phone right now and Jenna thought about messaging her but her thumb slid away from the screen again.

At ten fifty-five the little icon stopped on the high street and Jenna waited for it to show her best friend safely tucked up at home. She waited and waited but still the icon showed her on the high street, opposite the Melville. The time turned to five past eleven and Jenna uncurled herself and sat on the edge of her bed. Why wasn’t Bess at home? She refreshed the app to see if maybe it had frozen, but still the icon showed Bess where the taxi driver had dropped her. Suddenly Jenna pictured the doors of the taxi being locked, the windows steamed up, her little friend pinned on the back seat under some big sweaty man, frantically trying to get the attention of a passer-by. She jumped off the bed, ran down the stairs, pulled on her mum’s coat and old gardening shoes and dashed from the house.

As she got to the end of her road she could see that there was no taxi with steamed-up windows parked across the street. She narrowed her eyes, searching for the pale blond dome of her friend’s head and when her eyes finally found it she stopped and caught her breath so hard it hurt. Because there, standing together in the doorway of the local pharmacy, deep in conversation, were Bess and Mr Fitzwilliam.