Watching You (14 page)

M
arnie can’t find her keys. She searches the same drawers again and the pockets of her jacket. Zoe follows her to the bedroom and back to the kitchen, complaining.

“But I have homework to do.”

“You’re looking after your brother. It’s only for a few hours.”

“Why can’t you take him?”

“I have to go out.”

Zoe knows the argument is lost, but continues because the unfairness warrants an adequate protest. When Daniel was around she could sometimes persuade him to see her point of view. He enjoyed the cut and thrust of an argument, wanting Zoe to be passionate and articulate. It was like when they played Scrabble and Daniel would find a way of guiding Zoe to the best squares or the highest-scoring words, never letting her settle for something mediocre. “I’m a journalist,” he’d say. “Words are my tools.” With her mother it was different. She’d changed in the past year, becoming tougher, harsher, intransigent.

Elijah is in Marnie’s wardrobe, deep in conversation with himself.

“Listen to him,” says Zoe. “He’s a freak!”

“Don’t talk about him like that,” scolds Marnie.

“He’s always talking to himself.”

“He has an imaginary friend.”

“Which can’t be healthy.”

“It’s just a stage.”

Marnie kisses the top of her head. “Even to the post office,” she says, offering her cheek. Zoe grudgingly returns the kiss. Her mother leaves. Standing in the bedroom doorway, Zoe watches Elijah, who is lying on his stomach with his feet sticking out of the wardrobe. He’s such a baby, she thinks. She shouldn’t have to spend her weekends looking after him. Ryan Coleman plays park football at two. If she hurries she might still get there. And say what? It doesn’t matter. Anything is better than staying home.

She pulls Elijah’s coat over his arms, being too rough with him. He squawks and she tells him to shush. She laces his trainers and holds him at arm’s length, talking sternly. “OK, we’re going to the park, just you and me, but we have to hurry.”

“Can I go on the swings?”

“If you’re good.”

“Can I have an ice cream?”

“You’re not allowed to have ice cream.”

“Only if I’m good.”

“OK, but don’t tell Mum.”

Once outside, she stops Elijah running ahead by holding the hood of his jacket like a leash. They pass the bank of shops near the tube station and Elijah waves to Mr. Agassi, the dry-cleaner, and Judy, the florist. Zoe is thinking about Ryan. Maybe he’ll want to hang out with her. She has her babysitting money. They could go to Westfield Center at Shepherd’s Bush.

The bus takes them down the Edgware Road as far as the M40 flyover and they catch another along Euston Road past Madame Tussaud’s and the Planetarium. Elijah presses his face to the window, talking to himself.

“Why do you always do that?” asks Zoe. “Talk to yourself.”

“I don’t.”

“What about your imaginary friend?”

“What does imaginary mean?”

“Made up. Make-believe.”

“He isn’t make-believe.”

“He lives in the wardrobe.”

“So?”

“Does he have a name?”

“Malcolm.”

“Your friend is called Malcolm.”

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing.”

Elijah pouts. He doesn’t like to be laughed at.

“Don’t worry about it, squirt,” says Zoe, giving him a hug.

They get off the bus at Regent’s Park near the southwest gate. Dodging the slower pedestrians and dog-walkers they reach the playing fields just after three. Impromptu football games are underway, shirts versus skins, with clothing marking the boundaries and goals.

Ryan is shirtless and barefoot. He lopes across the grass like a loose-limbed red setter puppy, calling for the ball, passing it with one touch. Zoe has never been very interested in football. Daniel once took her to a big game at the new Wembley stadium. Zoe tried to follow the action, but mostly she stared at the people in the stands who treated every near-miss as if it were a life-and-death occurrence. They cried, swore, abused the referee, and chanted insults at opposing fans.

“Why is it so important?” Zoe asked.

“Supporters belong to a tribe,” Daniel explained.

“A tribe?”

“People want to belong. They want to be part of something bigger.”

“Why?”

“It means they’re not alone.”

Across the grass, Ryan notices her and waves. Some of his mates look over, checking her out. Zoe pulls back her shoulders and wishes her cut-off shorts weren’t so obviously old jeans that her mother had cut down when Zoe wore holes through the knees.

Dean Hancock smirks and makes some comment. He’s playing for the “shirts” because his pudding-shaped body embarrasses him. The game hasn’t finished. They kick off again.

Zoe wanders back and forth in the shade of a tree. Meanwhile, Elijah crouches on his haunches and pokes twigs into bare patches of mud between clumps of turf. Like a magpie, he collects anything shiny or brightly colored.

“So what brings you outside on such a nice day?” asks a voice.

Zoe turns. The man from the library is leaning against a park bench. He’s wearing jeans and a light cotton shirt, buttoned at his wrists. A long stalk of dry grass is balanced between his lips like he’s a farmer.

“Are you following me?” asks Zoe.

The man laughs. “What other reason could there be? It’s a sunny day. This is a public park. I
must
be following you.”

Zoe feels foolish.

“I managed to find that spare laptop,” he says. “If you’re interested.”

Zoe doesn’t answer. Elijah is watching them. He runs to Zoe and takes her hand, resting his head against her hip.

The man crouches down. “Is this your little brother? Hello, little big man.”

Elijah frowns at him.

“Say hello,” says Zoe.

“Hello.”

Someone has scored a goal. There are high-fives all round. Zoe looks across and hopes she hasn’t missed Ryan doing something impressive.

“So which one is your boyfriend?”

“Nobody.”

Ruben smiles. “So about that laptop?”

She hesitates. “I’m not allowed to.”

“Suit yourself.”

He turns to leave, ambling away, not looking back. At the last moment Zoe calls out and meets him halfway, still holding Elijah’s hand.

“I’ll be at the library tomorrow afternoon…if you want to bring it.”

“Fine.”

He raises two fingers in a casual salute. Then he glances up at the sky, as though expecting rain. The clouds float across his eyes for a moment until he blinks them away.

After he’s gone, Elijah tugs at her hand, trying to attract her attention.

“What is it?”

“What was the man’s name?”

“Ruben.”

Elijah frowns and goes back to poking a stick into the damp earth.

P
enny opens the door barefoot, dressed in a T-shirt and shorts.

“Thank God! Adult company.” She hugs Marnie and holds her at arm’s length, as though studying her. “Abigail is sleeping. Twelve more years and I can send her to boarding school.”

“It can’t be that bad,” says Marnie.

“Oh, you think? Madam woke eight times last night. I thought I was in Guantanamo Bay. Sleep deprivation, waterboarding, motherhood. I gave up the lot—my age, Osama’s last hiding place, who killed J.R.…” Penny looks past her. “Where are your brood?”

“Zoe is looking after Elijah.”

“Perfect, a live-in babysitter, I’ll buy her from you. How much do you want?”

“Right now you can have her.”

“Why?”

“Someone kidnapped my sweet little girl and replaced her with a princess bitch-face.”

“Mmmm,” says Penny, “you’re not selling parenthood to me.” She pulls Marnie into the kitchen and automatically opens the bar fridge, pulling out a bottle of wine without bothering to read the label. Glasses are found and filled. Clinked together.

Penny leads her to the conservatory, where she puts the baby monitor on the windowsill, adjusting the volume. “No more talk of children,” she says. “I’m more concerned about you. When’s the last time you shaved your legs? You look like a Wookie.” She notices the graze on Marnie’s arm. “What happened?”

“I was knocked off my bike.”

“Who?”

“It doesn’t matter. We need to talk.”

“That sounds serious.”

Penny pours herself more wine. Marnie hasn’t touched hers. She glances around the room. There’s a fern drooping in a glazed pot, shedding dead leaves onto the floorboards. This is where Daniel filmed Penny for the birthday DVD.

Marnie pulls the big red album from a cotton shopping bag and sets it down on the coffee table.

Penny’s eyes crinkle. “I wondered when you’d find that.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Daniel made me promise.”

“But even afterwards…?”

“I thought it would just make you sadder.”

“Sadder?”

“It was such a beautiful idea—for your birthday. He spent weeks working on it. I went through my stuff and found him photographs from university.”

Penny opens the album, turning the pages. “That’s one of mine…and that one. He wanted me to track people down so they could film messages. I contacted the usual suspects and gave the details to Daniel.”

“Did he discover anything unusual?”

Penny’s eyes widen. “What do you mean?”

“I’m trying to find out what happened. I thought if I could trace his last movements…” Marnie looks around the room. “This is where he filmed you.”

“Yes.”

“Did he come here often?”

“Three or four times.”

“Why so often?”

“He was going to a lot of effort.” Penny gazes at Marnie with a mixture of pity and sadness. “He wanted to make it up to you.”

“Really?”

Penny frowns. “Tell me what’s bothering you, Marnie.”

“On the DVD that Daniel was making, one of my old boyfriends said he hated me and that I’d ruined his life.”

Penny laughs. “Talk about a sore loser.”

“I’m being serious.”

Penny glances at her painted nails. “Daniel did say that you’d made a few enemies.”

“What do you mean enemies?”

“I wouldn’t lose sleep over it—I’m forever pissing people off.”

“That’s you, not me.”

“Don’t be nasty. We can both be quite vindictive.”

“Not me.”

“What about that lecturer you slept with at university—Mr. Hatch?”

Marnie cringes at the memory. James Hatch had been late thirties, married. He smoked and drank to excess, coughing phlegm that gurgled in his throat. At nineteen Marnie had fallen for his rumpled charm, sharing glasses of red wine in his rooms and listening to the silky words he borrowed from the poets. His own verse—a slim volume published a decade earlier—had set nothing on fire except his own ego.

In the beginning their affair had seemed exciting and dangerous, until it became sleazy and infantile. It involved sex in his rooms, sex in his car, and sex in the house when his wife was away. Hatch wasn’t attractive with his clothes off: all skin and bone and stretched out like a lemur.

Marnie didn’t do it for better marks or preferential treatment. The opposite happened. The lecturer belittled her in class and picked apart her essays so that nobody could accuse him of showing favoritism. When Marnie complained, he accused her of not being adult enough to handle such a relationship. Marnie ended it then, refusing to answer his text messages and emails. Her marks fell further. She thought about complaining to the vice-chancellor’s office but feared the ramifications. Instead she changed her course, dropping English literature. Hatch was suspended soon afterwards, accused of plagiarism and “excessive borrowing” from a student’s work.

“Somebody told his wife,” says Penny.

“And you think it was me?”

A swatch of Marnie’s hair has come loose from its pins and hangs down by her ear, swaying as she shakes her head.

“Well, he blames you,” says Penny.

“How do you know?”

“I bumped into him a few years ago. He looked like a completely different man.”

“And he mentioned me?”

“He said somebody sent photographs to his wife. He also believed the same person had stitched him up in the plagiarism case. He blamed you.”

Marnie feels her stomach spasm. There is something wrong inside her; she can feel it slipping and swelling, rising into her esophagus. She rushes to the bathroom and vomits bile and yellow water.

Penny knocks on the door. “Are you OK?”

“The wine,” says Marnie. “I’m out of practice.”

I
can’t always protect Marnie, not unless she acknowledges my existence. And I can’t help her if she makes bad decisions. Naïvete can be attractive, but it’s also dangerous. That’s when hearts are bruised and knickers are stained.

In her second year at university Marnie went to a party in Millwall—a rough area of south-east London where the Thames curls around and comes back on itself, bringing to mind a dog’s bollocks when you see it on the map. She wore a little black dress, the only one she owned, and went along with a friend. The house was full of strangers, but she found her groove, drinking and dancing. Her friend drifted away. At the end of the night Marnie needed a lift home. A guy offered. Have one more drink, he said. She took the glass from his hand.

She could barely stand when she walked to his car. She clung to his arm and his hands were groping her already, fondling her breasts and sliding up her thighs.

A factory worker came across Marnie at 6:00 a.m. the next morning, wandering the streets of Shepherd’s Bush. Crying. Cramping. She couldn’t remember anything at first, but the flashbacks came soon enough, the feeling of pressure between her legs, her arms like lead weights. This is what she told the police. She could remember the party, the music, the wine, but not the name of the man who spiked her drink and drove her to his bedsit; the one who raped her and made her shower afterwards.

Doctors took samples. They gave her the morning-after pill and antibiotics in case of infection. Then she went home and spent three days in bed. Embarrassed. Traumatized. Scared.

The police interviewed a man called Richard Duffy. Marnie identified him in a line-up, but withdrew her allegations when she realized what came next—the criminal trial, the questioning, the laying bare of her character and her sexual history.

I traced Duffy through his number plate, telling the DVLA that I worked for an insurance company. I watched him for a few weeks, following him to work and home, seeing a man who was dumb with certainty and nurturing an ingrained sense of entitlement. Private school will do that to you. So will a mother’s unconditional love.

He lived in Hammersmith and worked as a telecom engineer, although he told women he was a freelance journalist and war correspondent. He saw himself as a real man in a world where limp-dicked metrosexuals were being fêted. He was a rower. Single scull. Five mornings a week, he skimmed up and down the Thames, looking at his torso afterwards to see how the sessions were chiseling his physique.

One morning I waited at the rowing club, watching the sun rise and the mist float on the water like soap-scum. The rowing club had a small dark door painted black, scarred and chipped by graffiti carved into the paintwork. Duffy had a key. He arrived early and lifted his scull from a rack along the wall.

Beyond the bend in the river, I could see broken wooden pallets washed up on the shore. Low tide. Mud flats. A rowboat canted sideways and crusted with barnacles. Duffy turned around, surprised to see me. “What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to talk.”

“Why?”

He carried the scull easily to the ramp, placing it down gently with the nose facing the water. Is it called a nose, I wondered. Maybe it’s the bow and the back is the stern. Do rowers use nautical terms?

Duffy turned to collect his paddle. He brushed past me and I plunged the needle into his thigh, injecting 100 milligrams of Ketamine directly into his muscle. He spun around, rearing away from me, staring at his leg. The drug took hold quickly. He staggered on unstrung knees and leaned against me, his sour morning breath on my cheek.

“Why are you doing this?” he slurred.

“
You don’t remember the rape?”

More puzzlement. Maybe he had drugged and raped so many women he couldn’t recall every name and face.

“Marnie,” I said.

Again nothing.

“The party in Millwall.”

The penny dropped. He was slurring his words. “What did you give me?”

“Your drug of choice.”

“I can’t feel my legs.”

“They’re still there.”

His knees buckled and he sat like a rag doll on the edge of the sloping ramp. He tried to stand. Fell. Tried again. Nothing worked.

I could feel the cool dawn on my cheeks. Any moment the others would arrive. Duffy looked at the door, hoping for help. Then he gazed across the river to where a council truck was collecting bins, chomping on bags of rubbish with stained metal teeth.

“What are you going to do?” he slurred.

“I’m going to watch you die.”

“No, please. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’ll make it up to you.”

“How are you going to do that?”

“I don’t know.” He was crying. “I’ll make things right. I’ll move away. I’ll give you money. Please, you don’t want to do this.”

“That’s where you’re wrong.”

“For the love of God, show some mercy.”

“Are you really calling on God?” I looked up into the brightening sky. “I don’t think he’s listening. Wait?” I paused. Listened. “Nope.”

He looked into my face and saw his death lurking there. He made promises. He would do, say, undo, unsay whatever I wanted. He would go to the police and confess. The drug had reached his lips and he dribbled his last pledges.

I moved forward and raised my foot onto his shoulder. I kicked him gently and he toppled backwards into the water, bobbing once or twice, his face showing as he rolled and gulped for air. His limbs wouldn’t obey. His head went under last.

The current carried him away. The cold carried him down. They found his body four days later, eleven miles downstream. Only the river knew where it would resurface but the Thames seems to favor the U-bend around the Isle of Dogs. He wasn’t pretty anymore. The river is tidal, the water cruel. Bodies are hit by boats and barges and attacked by seabirds. Not much evidence is left behind. Inquests are inconclusive. Deaths unexplained.