Watching You: A Novel

Freddie’s dad had left the house at gone eleven, walked down the escarpment to Lower Melville and come back fifteen minutes later with what looked like a box of cornflakes. But his father didn’t eat cereal. His mother didn’t eat breakfast. The only person in the house who might have had the slightest interest in cornflakes was him, Freddie. But even then, his interest in cornflakes was minimal and certainly not strong enough to precipitate a middle-of-the-night dash into the village. The whole evening had been unsettling. The incident with Jenna’s mum and the police, and then his dad taking him out and being really nice and allowing him to open up about the thing in the Lake District, and then Red Boots walking in with her mate and her dad being all flirty and weird with her. And there’d been a strange moment, just as he and his dad left a moment later, when he turned briefly to look at Red Boots and caught the eye of her pregnant friend and something in her gaze had sliced through him like a laser.

He got out of bed and crept to his door. He could hear his mum and dad murmuring together in their bedroom across the landing. He heard the murmuring climb up the dial towards lively debate and then head rather quickly towards hushed shouting.

His stomach clenched. He stood for a few more minutes listening to the shouting buck and reel. He could make out the odd word and the occasional phrase: ‘… that girl. Nothing to do with me. Never, ever, ever. How could I have known?’ But he could not string enough of them together to form a coherent thread. For a moment his parents fell silent and a blade of fear cut through him. He tensed his body and squeezed his eyes closed and waited and waited for it to come: the terrible slap of flesh against flesh, the muffled moans of pain, the thud of bodies being flung about. Nausea swept through him. How could a night that had started with a glass of ice-cold Coke at the Melville with his dad be ending like this? It couldn’t. It just couldn’t.

But the silence continued and after a moment he opened his eyes again, unclenched his fists, let his breath out slow and steady. He heard the toilet in his parents’ en-suite shower room being flushed, the click of the light switch, the innocuous squeak of bedsprings. He moved away from his bedroom door and back towards his window.

The village was closing down for the night: the last stragglers were leaving the Melville, the Thai restaurant was already locked up and switched off, the pavements virtually empty. And down there, out of sight, were Jenna Tripp and her mad mum. He wondered what they were both thinking tonight. He wondered how Jenna was feeling. He held his hand to the cold glass of his window until it left a ghostly, foggy imprint; then he drew his curtains again and climbed into bed.