Watching You: A Novel

The baby kicks her feet. Joey picks them up, brings them to her mouth and blows on to them. This delights the baby, who kicks her feet even harder and beams at Joey in stupefaction.

Joey slides the nappy under the baby’s bottom and pulls the fasteners together across her distended belly. Then she pulls the baby’s arms and legs into a soft yellow babygro and expertly pops together all the popper buttons. The balled-up nappy she tucks into a scented plastic bag.

‘There,’ she says to the baby. ‘All done.’

The baby smiles at her again and she scoops her off the changing mat and carries her downstairs.

The baby is called Eloise. She is Jack’s daughter, Joey’s niece. She arrived ten days early and is now four months and six days old. She has dark hair like her mum and green eyes like Joey. She is perfect.

Jack gets home from work an hour later. She sees his face change, as it does every day when he returns and his eyes find his daughter, from haunted awe to tired joy.

‘There she is,’ says Joey, passing the soft body to her brother. ‘There’s your girl.’

Jack had brought the baby back from the hospital when she was two days old. There was no space on the nearest mother-and-baby unit and Rebecca had let the baby go without shedding a tear. ‘I want Joey to take care of her,’ she’d said, folding babygros and nappies into a bag. ‘Not a nanny. Joey.’

Those first weeks had been a huge shock. Alfie had moved out shortly after Rebecca’s arrest. After being held for questioning by the police for the best part of a day, Joey had had no choice but to tell him about her ridiculous infatuation with Tom Fitzwilliam and he in turn had told her about all the girls he’d kissed at work since he’d realised that she didn’t really love him. Alfie had cried; Joey had breathed a sigh of relief.

And so she finds herself alone now for long, quiet days. Just her and Eloise in this big house that had once felt like a slightly unwelcoming hotel and now feels simply like the place where she lives with Jack and Eloise. Some days she feels lonely, some days she feels numb, some days she feels like escaping to an Ibizan beach bar and drinking herself into oblivion. But no longer does she feel useless. She had not wanted a baby of her own; even less had she wanted another person’s baby. But now that baby is here and she loves her with a primal ache.

Rebecca asked them not to bring the baby to visit. She’s on remand at Easthill Park. She hasn’t been granted bail and is due to be sentenced on 3 September. She will never be coming home to raise her baby. Joey had never told Jack what Rebecca had once said to her about not wanting a baby, about getting pregnant to make him happy. She didn’t want anything else to cast darkness across what should have been the happiest moments of his life.

She’d asked him, a couple of weeks ago, when they were both drinking whisky at the kitchen table at three in the morning; she’d said, ‘Why her, Jack? Why Rebecca? Even without the murder thing, I always wondered why you chose her?’

And he’d smiled sadly and said, ‘I didn’t choose her. She chose me.’

She’d started at that. So similar to what Tom had said about Nicola. She wondered if that was how it worked, that while most women spent their lives searching for the perfect man, men sat around waiting to be chosen and then made the best of it.

‘But you loved her, right?’

‘Of course. And I still do. But it’s terrifying to think that I never knew her at all. Not even a tiny bit.’

Joey had seen Tom in town the week before. He’d been dressed down in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt. He was wearing sunglasses and carrying a shopping bag from Russell & Bromley. She’d watched him from the bus stop where she sat with Eloise by her side in her pram. He still had presence, she’d observed detachedly, he still occupied space with a certain swagger, a certain élan. For a brief moment she’d remembered herself in the dark shadows of Melville Heights, his hands pulling her body towards his, everything so hard and desperate and frantic. A brief flicker of something passed through her. Something bright and urgent.

But then she pictured his sad, heavy face in the Bristol Harbour Hotel, the slump of his shoulders, the defeated rolls of his stomach, the pale sheen of his scalp through the thinning spot on the crown of his head. She remembered the terrible marks on his body, as though he’d lain down and allowed himself to be savaged by an animal. The thickness of his breath. The smallness of him as he headed from the hotel room.

She had no idea what she’d been thinking. None at all.

The next day Joey takes Eloise to visit her mother. Or Nana Sarah as she and Jack have decided that Eloise should refer to her once she is old enough to refer to things. The sky is heavy with summer storm clouds and she doesn’t have an umbrella and should be heading home, but something brought her here today. Some sense of life moving on. Babies did that to you: they pinned you down in the moment at precisely the same time as hurtling you into the future and hitching you back to the past.

There’s a small bunch of tulips on Mum’s grave, growing gnarled and papery in the August heat. She lays her dust-pink summer roses next to them and sits on her bottom, one hand on the frame of the buggy, jiggling it gently to keep Eloise asleep.

‘Hi, Mum,’ she says. ‘It’s me. I’ve brought Eloise to see you. But she’s sleeping so you won’t get much out of her today. Things are settling down at home. But Jack is so, so sad. It kills me to see him like this. I’m so used to him being the one jollying everything along, jollying me along. It’s weird how we’ve swapped roles. But it’s good. I needed to stop playing the helpless child and having a brother like Jack made that so easy to do. I know I keep coming here and telling you that I’m growing up, but before I used to think that being grown-up meant doing grown-up things. Now I know that’s not true, that being a grown-up is not about getting married, about smart flats and reading groups, it’s about taking responsibility for your own actions and the consequences of those actions. So yes, I’m getting there, Mum. I’m definitely getting there, I—’

She stops then at the sound of a presence behind her. She catches her breath and turns. It’s a man, a middle-aged man in a Stone Roses T-shirt and combat shorts, grey hair cut shaggy around a craggy face, a bunch of red 99p Asda tulips in his hand. ‘Hi, babe,’ he says.

‘Dad,’ says Joey.

‘Brought Mum some flowers,’ he says, tapping them against his other hand.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Me too.’

His eyes go to the buggy. She sees them fill with tears. ‘Is this …?’

‘Yes. It’s Eloise.’

He nods and suck the tears back. ‘Wow,’ he says. ‘Wow.’

‘She’s sleeping.’

He nods again. ‘Don’t wake her.’

They fall silent for a moment.

A raindrop lands between them, fat and heavy. Then another. They both look upwards and then at each other.

‘Shall we?’ says Joey.

‘A drink, maybe?’ says her dad.

‘Yes,’ says Joey. ‘That would be nice.’