Watching You: A Novel

20 April 2018

Dearest Eloise,

Happy birthday to you! You are one year old today which means that it has been 363 days since I last saw you.

Your daddy tells me everything about you, your daddy and your aunty Joey of course. They show me photos and films of you and tell me what you’re learning to do. But I have asked them not to bring you here. I don’t want you to think of me as That Strange Woman in the Scary Place Where I Have To Go When I’d Rather Be Doing Fun Stuff at Home. I don’t want you to think of me at all. I just want you to enjoy being a child, enjoy having the loveliest daddy in the world, enjoy spending time with your aunt Joey who is about a hundred times more fun than I am. And then hopefully, one day, they’ll let me come home and then I can be a cool new person in your life. Or not. Whatever you want. You’re in charge of you and me. You get to decide all that.

But before that day comes, I thought it would be really important for you to understand why I did this to us, why I hurt someone so much that it meant that I would be taken away from you and from Daddy. So I’m writing this to you now and will let Daddy decide when you’re old enough to read it. And I’d love to be able to tell you it was an accident, that I didn’t mean it to happen. I’d love to say it wasn’t my fault, that it was somebody else’s fault, that I’d never have done something like that knowing the price I might have to pay. But that’s not true, and I’m sure, by the time you’re old enough to read this letter, you’ll know it’s not true too.

I went to that woman’s house with the intention of hurting her. And I went there knowing that there was a chance – a slim chance, I thought – but a chance that I would be caught and then I would have to go away for years and years and miss out on all the good things I should have been sharing with you and Daddy. I hoped I wouldn’t be caught. I hoped the police would think it was her husband and that he would go to prison – but that didn’t happen. And now I’m in here and you’re out there and I have to accept that it is entirely my fault, mine and nobody else’s.

Daddy will have told you about my little sister Viva and what happened to her. But I really want you to hear it from me, because the answers to all your questions are contained in the way I felt about her, and that’s not something anyone but me can really express.

I was two when Viva was born. I was furious about it. Absolutely furious. I was cross for years that my mum and dad hadn’t thought I was enough for them. I was livid that I had to share them with someone else, and not just anyone else, but with this little butterball girl with dimples and shining eyes, this child who beguiled every adult who came across her. She was always in a good mood, always ready to play, always hugging everyone and kissing everyone. When she started school, everyone wanted to be friends with her. She was so different to me; it took me years to make friends at school, and even then I kept them at arms’ length. I never wanted them to come home after school, to encroach on my space. I was an introvert. Viva was an extrovert. I adored her. I hated her. But by the time I was a teenager we’d found a way to coexist. She looked up to me because I was clever and self-contained. I admired her because she was gregarious and sweet. She was my favourite person in the world.

I never told her that. I wish I had. There isn’t a day that passes when I don’t regret the fact that I never told her how much she meant to me, how much I adored her. And then when she was fourteen, it all slowly seemed to fall apart. She got quieter and quieter. She lost weight. She was grumpy, monosyllabic. The light died in her eyes. It just died. And I tried to talk to her about it and she would say: I’m fine, I’m fine. But I knew she wasn’t fine and I’d heard rumours about a girl at school giving her a hard time but I never saw any evidence and she refused to talk about it.

And then one day my silly, shining, bouncy, chatty, gorgeous baby sister went to school and she never came home.

A few days after she died, my mum found her diary. I expect you know about this and what was inside it. Daddy will have told you by now. Viva had a big crush on one of her teachers, and he in turn gave her a lot of attention. Way too much attention in my opinion. He led her on. He made her think she was a big part of his life. More than just another student. On the night she died she’d written in her diary that she thought he might be waiting for her somewhere in town. That she was going to go along and see if he was there. But he wasn’t there. He was at the school until late. Maybe she’d thought he was going to save her from her bully? That he was her last chance? No one will ever really know why she went there, but when he didn’t turn up, she felt bad enough to take her own life. And when she took her life, she took mine with it.

You don’t have a brother or sister yet. But until you’ve experienced the incredible mix of emotions that a sibling brings to your life it’s really very hard to imagine. The love and the hate, the fun and the fights, the rivalry and the kinship. No one else knows your world like a sibling does. They’re there, every crap summer holiday, every day off school, every time your parents argue, every boring Christmas Day, every birthday party, they’re there. And they are a part of you. And with Viva it sometimes felt like we were continuations of the same person, that I began where she ended, and vice versa.

When she left, she took with her any sense I had of myself as a worthwhile person. Without her I was just this blank space. When she died my whole world turned black. The blackness faded over the years, but it never went away. Sometimes a good day might feel grey. But nothing ever felt white. Not ever. Not even my wedding day. All I could think was that my sister should be there.

Lots of people lose a sibling. But not everyone does what I did. And while I cannot ever excuse the choice I made last year, and the terrible actions I took, I wanted to explain to you exactly what pushed me to do the unforgivable thing I did. Because not only did Viva’s diary tell us about her feelings for her English teacher but it also gave us the full and shocking picture of the bullying she’d been subjected to by a girl called Nikki Lee. I won’t go into the detail. It’s too upsetting. It’s too vile. But I remember sitting there at sixteen years old, with my sister’s diary in my hands, tears flowing down my cheeks, vowing to myself that if I ever saw Nikki Lee I would kill her. I would kill her with my own hands.

And then one day, during a visit to the Lake District with my mother in 2011, I saw her. We’d stopped for ice creams at the side of Lake Buttermere when a coach pulled up. I saw him get off, our old English teacher, and then I saw his wife and son. I pointed her out to my mum: I said, Look, isn’t that Nikki Lee? It seemed unbelievable, unthinkable. But the more we looked, the clearer it became.

My mum went mad. She ran across the street and confronted Tom Fitzwilliam, screamed at him and hit him. Nikki must have seen my mum coming and was already back on the coach with her son. Tom calmed my mum down and the coach left. But after that I became obsessed. I googled them all the time, working out where they were, what they were doing. The fact that the two people who, in my opinion, had destroyed my sister were living together as married couple, had had a child, had made lives for themselves while my sister lay rotting in the ground sickened me. I became consumed by rage and hate. So when I read in the local paper that Tom Fitzwilliam had been appointed the new head at the Melville Academy I found out where they were going to be living and bought a house as close to theirs as possible.

For months I watched them. I watched Nikki Lee running around the village, pretending to be a normal person. And then on that dreadful Friday last March, she actually came to my front door. And because she was Nikki, all her attention was fixed on Daddy, not me. It was as if I didn’t exist.

She gave us a blanket she said she’d knitted herself. It was so ugly. Daddy tried to pass it to me, but I couldn’t bring myself to touch it. I could hardly breathe, and I threw up after she’d gone. I decided then that I would confront her, that night, while her husband and son were out. I decided then that I would tell her I knew who she was, who she really was, that I would tell everyone who she really was. And I knew without a doubt that there was every chance I might kill her.

When I arrived she was sitting in her kitchen. I knocked on the back door and she let me in. She was surprised to see me there, but she was friendly. I said I’d come to thank her for the blanket. Then I asked her if she recognised me. She said no. Then I asked her if she remembered a girl called Viva Hart. She said she didn’t but it was clear she was lying. I saw it all flash across her face: the realisation of who I was and why I was sitting in her kitchen. The conversation became fractious. I got angrier and angrier. I showed her the photos of teenage girls I’d found on their hard drive when I hacked into their network. I told her her husband was still a pervert, that he shouldn’t be allowed to work with children. She called me a mad bitch. I grabbed her. I thought she’d fight back but then I remembered my sister’s diaries: Nikki Lee never did her own dirty work. She wasn’t a fighter. She was a coward. And so, of course, she ran away from me. She turned her back.

And that’s when it happened, Eloise. That’s when I made the decision that shaped your life, my life, Daddy’s life, all of our lives, forever. It didn’t feel wrong at the time; in fact it felt horribly right. For days afterwards, I felt euphoric. I was glad I’d killed Nicola Fitzwilliam. I had no regrets. As far as I was concerned she deserved to die. I had honoured my sister. I had balanced the universe. I was at peace.

But now, as I sit here writing to you, I wish more than anything that I hadn’t done it. I wish I could turn back time and do everything differently. I wish I’d confronted Nikki Lee at Lake Buttermere, climbed on board that coach and told her what she’d done, told her exactly what I thought of her and her seedy pathetic husband. I wish I could have exposed her in front of all those people and then walked away and got on with my life.

Instead I let the shock of seeing her sit in the pit of my stomach like a poisonous seed. I let it grow and grow and grow until it consumed me, consumed me to the point where I put my hatred for Nikki Lee before my love for you and Daddy.

I only had you for two days before Daddy came to take you home. You slept in my bed the first night. Every time the nurse put you in your crib you cried. So eventually I asked them to leave you in my bed. I was in and out of awareness all that night. Everything felt dreamlike, hazy. But there was one moment when I awoke from a short, hard sleep and turned to face you and you were awake, eyes wide open in the dark, and you had a piece of my hair clutched tight in your fist and you were staring at me. Staring with the widest, gentlest, calmest gaze. And for a split second I thought you were Viva. I cried and my tear splashed on your cheek. I wiped it away with my fingertip and your skin was so soft it took my breath away. And you blinked at me, and it was as if you were saying, It’s OK. We’re all going to be OK.

And then Daddy took you the next day and I didn’t cry because I knew you’d be fine. I’d seen it in your eyes. You’d shown your true self to me and I saw you. And I knew you. And I let you go.

Happy birthday, beautiful child. I don’t know you. But I do love you. Always and forever. And ever after that.

Your Mummy