Watching You: A Novel

Tom stood shyly in the doorway for a moment looking exhausted before collapsing on to the edge of the bed a foot or so away from Joey and saying, ‘Christ. I am shattered.’

She was unsure how to respond so she jumped to her feet and grabbed the room-service menu from the desk. ‘A cocktail?’ she suggested. ‘Some wine?’

He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I drove. I shouldn’t …’

‘No,’ she agreed.

‘But you order something. Please.’

‘No,’ she said, sitting down again, ‘it’s fine.’

And then suddenly, and without much in the way of a preamble, he leaned across and he kissed her on the mouth.

She pulled away and looked at him. ‘Tom. I—’ She wasn’t sure what she was going to say. Something like, We don’t have to do this if you’re tired. Or, We could just talk. But his mouth was back against hers before she had a chance to form a syllable. She attempted to give herself into him. She wanted so much for her body to follow her brain’s train of thought: that this was what she’d wanted, that yes, maybe she’d had doubts, and yes, maybe he was having doubts too, but that maybe if they just kept kissing for long enough, somehow or other the spark would be reignited.

They kissed for a few minutes, but her body did not follow her brain and in fact she did not enjoy the kiss. It was cumbersome and slightly sour. He had come straight from work, from a day of tea and coffee and lunch at his desk. He hadn’t brushed his teeth. She tried again to lull her body into wanting what was happening to it. She moved closer and pressed her breasts against him, pulled the fabric of his shirt away from his waistband and placed her hands against the bare skin of his back. She remembered that day on the bus when his jumper had lifted and she’d seen his flesh, the power of it. This stirred her for long enough to unbutton his shirt and pull it open. But then suddenly he was pulling away from her. She looked at him and his eyes were full of something she’d never seen there before.

‘What?’ she said. ‘Are you—?’ And then she stopped when she saw the marks on his body. Scratches. Bruises. Bite marks. The indents of actual teeth. ‘Oh my God. Tom …’

He pulled his shirt closed but she pulled it open again.

‘What is all this?’

‘It’s nothing. Just … breaking up a fight in the playground. You know.’

‘But Tom – those are teeth marks.’

‘Yes, yes they are.’

‘Who bit you, Tom? Who did this?’

He sat back. His head dropped into his chest and the soft paunch of his stomach collapsed into two rings of flesh over his waistband. He looked tired; he looked broken. ‘It’s Nicola. She gets, I don’t know, overly emotional. She gets very jealous. She carries a lot of anger inside her. And most of the time she contains it. But sometimes she can’t … and she takes it out on me.’

‘She attacks you?’

Tom nodded.

‘And you let her?’

‘Most of the time I let her. Yes.’

Joey paused for a moment to absorb the awfulness of what he was telling her. ‘But – how? Where?’

‘At home. In our room. At night. She’ll say it’s something I said or something I did. This’ – he looked down at the marks on his body – ‘this was because she saw me talking to one of my students in the village. We talked for all of thirty seconds. But Nicola was convinced there was more to it. I mean, the girl was fifteen, for crying out loud! Fifteen!’

‘And coming here tonight? Was this deliberate? A cry for help? I mean, you must have known I’d see all this.’ She gestured at his marked body. ‘You must have known I’d ask?’

His head dropped forward again and she stared into the crown of his hair, into the place where the pink of his scalp showed through. She put out her hand and she touched it.

‘Yes.’ He nodded heavily. ‘Yes. I guess. It’s just been this thing, this awful dysfunction I’ve carried around for fifteen years. This twisted, wrong thing. It’s like she hates me as much as she loves me, but that the hate is where she gets her passion. It’s the hate that makes her feel, and when she feels she wants to hurt me. And when she hurts me I want to hurt her. And it’s this rotten, awful cycle and I’ve had enough, Joey. I’ve had enough.’

‘Do you hurt her too?’

‘Sometimes …’ He looked up at Joey with desperate eyes. ‘But you have to believe me, it’s never out of control. It’s self-defence. I don’t do this to her.’ He gestured at the marks on his body. ‘It’s all so wrong and my poor boy, my Freddie, I know he knows something’s not right. I know he does. He’s nearly fifteen. He’s just starting to look at the world and see what’s going on. Ask questions. And now she’s started being cruel to him too. She hurt him yesterday. She pushed him over and called him a little shit. My lovely boy. My amazing lovely boy. And I just … I don’t want to do it any more. She’s cruel and she’s dark and you – you’re the opposite! From the moment I saw you that day in the bar at the Melville, when you knocked over those leaflets, I could just tell; you were so good and so bright and so pure. Everything that Nicola isn’t. And I wanted you so much, more than I ever wanted anything in my whole life.’

He’d begun to cry and Joey put her arms around his neck and pulled his head against her shoulder and stroked his hair and she felt a terrible realisation that Tom Fitzwilliam had not brought her here to scratch an itch. He’d brought her here to rescue him.

‘Do you love her, Tom?’

She felt his head shake. ‘No,’ he murmured into the soft jersey of her dress. ‘No. I’ve never loved Nicola. Sometimes I think I hate her.’

‘Then why …?’

‘I don’t know. She was just always … she was there.’

‘There?’

‘Yes. From the moment she came up to me on the bus that day when she was nineteen years old and said, Hello, Mr Fitzwilliam. And then suddenly she was pregnant. Only weeks after we met. And I was thirty-five and it seemed – I don’t know, the right time to be settling down, I suppose.’ His face fell into a wry smile. ‘You know, she told me that she fell in love with me when I was a teacher at her school. When she was fourteen years old. She told me that she decided then and there that she was going to marry me one day. And that nothing was going to stop her. And yet, I don’t even remember her. She was invisible to me. If anything should have been a warning, it was that.’

‘Tom, you can’t go on like this. It’s … it’s mental!’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know I can’t. But how? How do I escape? If I leave her it will all come out. She’d tell the world about the sickness between us. I know she would. And then Freddie would know and the school would know and the world would know – and then what? Then what would happen? Everything would be over for me. Everything I’ve worked for. Everything I care about. I’m trapped, Josephine. I’m completely trapped.’

‘I can’t save you, Tom,’ Joey whispered. ‘You do know that? I cannot save you. You’re going to have to save yourself.’

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I know you’re right. And I will. I will save myself. I’ll find a way. I’m sure I will.’

She held him for a little while longer and then he said, ‘I should probably go home. I don’t know what I was thinking. Using a beautiful young woman like you to try and fix my own stupid mess. I’m so sorry.’

‘No. Tom. Please. Don’t be sorry. I was using you too. To fix my own mess. Go home. We’ll finish this conversation another time.’

She watched him button up his shirt, tuck it back into his trousers.

‘Please don’t think badly of me.’

‘I don’t, Tom, trust me – I am not in a position to think badly of anyone.’

Joey watched him go. He looked smaller somehow, and older.

She lay for a while after he went and she closed her eyes. Immediately her head filled with images of Nicola, her teeth in Tom’s flesh, her fingernails raking through his skin, her sharp little face knotted with anger. Then she thought of Tom saying, I will save myself. I’m sure I will.

She sat upright, her breath catching in the back of her throat. Then she quickly collected her possessions, threw them into her handbag and ran from the hotel.