Watching You: A Novel

‘You never told me that Rebecca had a sister who killed herself.’

Jack glanced up from the pile of letters he’d just put on the kitchen table. He was in a T-shirt and pyjama bottoms, his dark hair awry and slightly pungent. He did not look like a man who had spent seven hours the day before performing open heart surgery. He looked like he’d been in the pub all night and had a kebab on the way home.

‘What?’

She reached for a box of Weetabix. ‘Rebecca. Last night she told me she had a sister who killed herself when she was fourteen. Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘God,’ he said, ‘I don’t know. Probably because you weren’t here when I was at the finding-out-all-about-Rebecca stage of things.’

‘But she’s my sister-in-law. I live with her. It would have explained so much. It would have made me …’ Joey paused. She’d been about to say, It would have made me like her. ‘Understand her better,’ she finished.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘It didn’t occur to me. And besides, maybe I thought it was none of my business. You know, she’s very private.’

‘Yes. I do know that. But still. It’s such a huge thing not to know about someone.’

‘Well,’ Jack said, ‘now you know.’

‘Why …?’ Joey paused again. She didn’t want to sound as though she was being ghoulish. ‘Why did she do it? Rebecca said she didn’t really know.’

Jack sighed. ‘No one knew. She didn’t leave a note and everyone blamed everyone else and the whole thing was a horrible mess. I think for a while they all thought it had been something to do with a teacher at her school. That there’d been some kind of inappropriate relationship. But it turned out that there was nothing to it. Just a schoolgirl crush. It turned out that she killed herself for nothing.’ He sighed. ‘Her dad ended up turning to drink, and her mother died a few years ago having never come to terms with it. It completely destroyed them.’

‘I just can’t imagine,’ Joey began. ‘I mean, God. If you’d done that when you were fourteen. If I’d lost you. And then Mum. I would just … I would never have been happy again. Fuck.’ She felt a tear start to form in her left eye and blinked it back.

‘Are you crying?’

‘Not really,’ she replied.

He peered at her closely. ‘Oh, God,’ he said. ‘Triple bypass and crying women. It’s all too much. Come here.’ He opened up his arms to Joey and she stepped inside his embrace. He smelled of bed and unwashed hair. He smelled of home.

‘You’ll never die, will you?’ she sniffed into his T-shirt.

‘I’m going to try really hard not to.’

‘Good.’ She nodded. ‘That’s good. Because I don’t think I’d be able to live without you.’

Alfie was lying across the bed, naked, in a post-coital tangle of sheets. She’d waited up for him to get back from his bar job until 1 a.m. the night before, then pounced on him. He’d been surprised and pleased and had then ruined it by suggesting towards the end, breathlessly and lovingly, that he not use a condom.

‘Fuck!’ she’d said, her eyes wide in the dark of their room. ‘No! We haven’t decided about that yet! We haven’t decided! You can’t just randomly suggest it in the middle of sex!’

‘No,’ he’d said gently. ‘No. You’re right. I’m sorry. I just thought. You seemed so …’

‘What, into having sex with you?

‘Well, yes.’

‘And why would that mean that I suddenly want to have a baby?’

‘It doesn’t. Not at all. It was just … I’m sorry, OK? Can we forget it?’

They’d managed somehow to get back to the point where they’d left off and finish in a reasonable state of harmony. But as Alfie faded into a deep sleep, Joey unpinned his arm from around her torso, moved to her own side of the bed and then lay awake for an hour, trawling her psyche for the real underlying reasons why she didn’t want to have a baby with Alfie. Which inevitably redirected her thoughts to Tom Fitzwilliam. Her mind began replaying and replaying the journey into work that morning in Tom’s car, the intimacy of it, the way it had felt when he told her she had beautiful eyes, and then she’d moved on to the feeling of his hand against her arm in the Melville when he kissed her hello. She’d finally fallen asleep at about two thirty and when she awoke six hours later she found she’d been dreaming of Tom Fitzwilliam.

‘Morning, lover,’ she said now, climbing on to the bed and sitting cross-legged.

‘Morning.’ Alfie rolled over and wrapped his arms around her knees.

She dropped a kiss on to the crown of his head. ‘Fancy dim sum in town later with Jack and Rebecca?’

‘What’s that?’ he said. ‘Dumplings?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Dumplings. In little baskets. And noodles and things.’

‘Sounds fucking awesome,’ he said, nuzzling his face into her thigh. ‘Dumplings. Awesome.’