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‘Yes, what?’
‘Yes . . . please . . . and thank you.’
It’s only when she leaves the room again that I wonder how she spoke to my daddy when we don’t have a phone at home.
Nine (#ulink_c4024be8-e8f0-58de-8bdf-e108faf8c826)
London, 2017
I check my phone again before getting out of the car. I’ve tried to call my agent three times now, but it just keeps going to voicemail. I even called the office, but his assistant said Tony was unavailable, and she used that tone people reserve for when they know something you don’t. Or perhaps I’m just being paranoid. With everything else that is happening, I suppose that’s possible. I’ll try again tomorrow.
The house is in complete darkness as I trudge up the path. I keep thinking about Jack and the way he kissed me on set. It felt so . . . real. I wear the idea of him like a blanket and it makes me feel safe and warm, the cloak of fantasy always more reliable than cold reality. But lust is only ever a temporary cure for loneliness. I close the front door behind me, leaving longing back in the shadows, out on the street. I switch on the lights of real life, finding them a little bright; they permit me to see more than I want to. The house is too quiet and too empty, like a discarded shell.
My husband is still gone.
I’m instantly dragged back in time, reliving the precise moment when his jealousy climaxed and my patience expired, generating the perfect marital storm.
I remember what he did to me. I remember everything that happened that night.
It’s a strange feeling, when buried memories float to the surface without warning. Like having all the air sucked out of your lungs, then being dropped from a great height; the perpetual sense of falling combined with the unavoidable knowledge that you’re going to hit something hard.
I feel colder than I did a moment ago.
The silence seems to have grown louder, and I look around, my eyes frantically searching the empty space.
I feel like I’m being watched.
The sensation you get when someone is staring at you is inexplicable, but also very real. I feel frozen to the spot at first, trying, but failing, to reassure myself that it’s just my imagination. Then adrenaline ignites my fight or flight response, and I hurry around the house, pulling all the curtains and blinds, as though they are fabric shields. Better safe than spied on.
The stalker first entered my life a couple of years ago, not long after Ben and I got together. It started with emails, but then she appeared outside our old house a few times, and delivered a series of hand-written cards when she thought nobody was home. Someone broke in when I was away in LA, and Ben was convinced it was her. It was one of the main reasons I agreed to move here, to a house I hadn’t even seen, except online. Ben took care of everything, so that we could get away from her. What if she found me? Found us?
The stalker always wrote the same thing:
I know who you are.
I always pretended not to know what that meant.
I feel lost. I don’t know what to do, how to feel, or how to act.
Should I call the police again? Ask for an update and tell them the things I didn’t last time, or just sit here and wait? You can never really predict how you will behave when life goes non-linear; you don’t know until it happens to you. People are capable of all kinds of surprising things. I’m dealing with the situation as best I can, without letting others down any more than I already have. I know I must be missing something, not just my husband, but I don’t know what. What I do know, is that the only person I can rely on to get me through this, is me. I don’t have anyone left to hold my hand. The thought triggers a memory, and my mind rewinds to when I was a little girl; someone always liked to hold my hand back then.
Something very bad happened when I was a child.
I’ve never spoken about it with anyone, even after all these years; some secrets should never be shared. The series of childhood doctors I was made to see afterwards said that I had something called transient global amnesia. They explained that my brain had blocked out certain memories, because it deemed them too stressful or upsetting to remember, and that the condition would most likely stay with me for life. I was just a child, and I didn’t take their diagnosis too seriously back then. I knew that I had only been pretending not to remember what happened. I haven’t given it too much thought in recent years. Until now.
I think I would remember if I had emptied and closed our bank account. I think a lot of things; the problem is that I don’t know.
I keep thinking about the stalker.
I can’t seem to stop my mind replaying the first time I saw her with my own eyes, standing outside our old home. I heard the letter box rattle and thought it was the postman. It wasn’t. A lonely-looking vintage postcard was face down on the doormat. There was no stamp. It had been hand-delivered, and I remember picking it up, my hands trembling as I read the then-familiar spidery black handwriting scrawled across the back.
I know who you are.
I opened the door and she was right there, standing across the street looking back at me. I thought I was going to throw up. I’d never seen her before, Ben had, but until that moment she was still little more than a phantom to me. A ghost I didn’t believe in. The previous emails, and then postcards, hadn’t scared me too much. But seeing her in the flesh was terrifying, because I thought I recognised her. She was some distance away, her face mostly covered with a scarf and sunglasses, but she was dressed just like me, and in that moment, I thought it was her. It wasn’t. It can’t have been.
She ran away when she saw me. Ben came home early and we called the police.
I should be more worried than I am about my husband.
What is wrong with me? Am I losing my mind?
It feels as if something very bad is happening again, something a lot worse than before.
Ten (#ulink_1a90c737-ecbb-51ee-a0cb-469f9d462440)
Galway, 1987
I feel lost when I wake up. I don’t know where I am.
It’s dark and cold. I have a tummy ache and feel a bit sick, just like I do when my brother takes me out on Daddy’s fishing boat. I reach out into the darkness, my fingers expecting to meet my bedroom wall, or the little side table made out of driftwood from the bay, but my fingers don’t feel that. Instead they touch something cold, like metal, all around me. I start to panic, but I’m very tired, so tired I realise that I must be dreaming. I close my eyes and decide that if I still don’t know where I am when I’ve counted to fifty inside my head, then I’ll let myself cry. The last number I remember counting is forty-eight.
The next time I open my eyes, I’m in the back of a car. It’s not my father’s car, I know that without having to think about it too much, because we don’t have one any more. He sold it to pay the electricity bill when the lights went out. The seats of the car I’m in are made of red leather, and my face and arms seem to be stuck to it when I first wake up; I have to peel them off.
I stare at the back of the head of the person driving, before remembering the nice lady called Maggie. Then I sit up properly and look out of the windows, but I still don’t know where I am.
‘Where are we going?’ I rub the sleep from my eyes, gifts the sandman left behind scratching my cheeks.
‘Just a little drive,’ says Maggie, smiling at me in the small mirror which shows a rectangle of her face.
‘Are you taking me back to my daddy’s house?’
‘You’re staying with me for a wee while, do you remember? There isn’t enough food for you at your house just now.’
I do remember her saying that, I’m just so tired I forgot.
‘Why don’t you have another little sleep, not far to go now. I’ll wake you when we get where we’re going. I have a lovely surprise for you when we get there.’
I lie back down on the red leather seat and close my eyes, but I don’t sleep. Even though I do like surprises, I’m scared and excited all at once. Maggie seems nice, but everything I just saw out the window looked so strange: the houses, the walls, even the signs on the side of the road.
I might be wrong, but it feels like I am a long way from home.
Eleven (#ulink_4e654f35-3e96-50be-a028-2a584db32a6c)
London, 2017
I think homes might be a little bit like children; maybe you need to establish a bond as soon as possible to achieve a lasting emotional attachment. Long days on set have meant that this house has been little more than somewhere to sleep at night. I’ve spent the evening searching for a picture of the man I have been married to for almost two years. I should have been learning my lines for tomorrow, but how can I when everything feels so wrong? I’m left with more questions than concern, unanswered mainly because I daren’t ask them.
I stare down at the only photo of Ben I’ve managed to find: a framed black-and-white picture taken when he was a child. I hate it, I always have; it gives me the creeps. Five-year-old Ben is dressed in a formal suit that looks strange on a boy so young, but it isn’t that. The thing that upsets me is the haunting look on his face, the way his smiling eyes stare out of the picture as though they are following you around the room. The child in the photo doesn’t just look naughty or devious, he looks evil.
I asked him to put the picture in his study so I wouldn’t have to look at it, and I remember him laughing at the time. Not because he thought I was being ridiculous, but as though the photo were part of a joke that I wasn’t in on. I haven’t seen or thought about it since, but staring down at the black-and-white image now stirs such a peculiar feeling inside me, something that is equal in dread and disgust. My husband and I don’t have any family left on either side, we are both adult orphans. We used to say that it was just me and him against the world, before it changed to me and him against each other. We never said the latter, we just felt it.
Wandering around the house tonight, I notice how horribly big it is for just two people; there’s not enough life to fill up the empty spaces. Ben made it very clear – after we got married – that he never wanted us to have children together. I felt tricked and cheated. He should have told me before that; he knew what I wanted. Even then, I thought I could change his mind, but I couldn’t. Ben said he felt too old to become a dad in his mid-forties. Whenever I tried to revisit the conversation he’d say the same thing, every time:
‘We have each other. We don’t need anything or anyone else.’
It’s as though we had formed an exclusive club with just two members, and he liked it that way. But I didn’t. I wanted to have a child with him so badly, it was all I wanted, and he wouldn’t give it to me; a chance to clone ourselves and start again. Isn’t that what everybody wants? I knew that his reluctance had something to do with his past and his family, but he never spoke about them, he always said that some pasts deserved to be left behind, and I can understand that. It isn’t as though I ever shared the truth with him about my own. We exchange the currency of our dreams for a reality funded by acceptance as we get older.
I remind myself that it cannot be this hard to find a single, recent photo of Ben. At one time we had albums full of pictures, but then I stopped making them. Not because the memories didn’t mean anything, but because I always thought we’d create more. I know other people like to share every moment of their private lives by posting pictures on social media, but I’ve never liked that sort of thing, and neither did he, it was something else we had in common. I’ve fought too hard to protect my privacy to just casually give it away.
I pull down the attic ladder and climb up the steps, telling myself I’m still looking for photos. There is nowhere else I haven’t already looked. Ben was supposed to take care of the move and all the unpacking. I’m guessing there must be a box full of old photo albums up here, along with all our other belongings that I can’t see downstairs: books, ornaments and the general shared detritus and dust of lives that have been lived together.
I turn on the attic light and I’m baffled by what I see.
There is nothing here.
Literally nothing. It’s as though most of the life I remember has disappeared, and there is very little left of us. I don’t understand. It’s as though we didn’t really live here.
My eyes continue to scan the dusty floorboards and cobwebs, illuminated by a single, flickering bulb. Then I see it: an old shoe box in the far corner.
The ceiling is low, and I crawl on my hands and knees, trying to protect my face from the dirt and spiders lurking in the gloom. It’s cold up here, and my hands are shaking when I remove the lid from the box. When I see what is inside, I feel physically sick.
I climb back down the attic steps, with the shoe box tucked under my arm. A cocktail of fear and relief stirs inside me; I’m afraid of what this could mean, but also relieved that the police didn’t find it. I put the box in the bottom of the wardrobe, sliding it next to others which contain things they should, instead of things they shouldn’t. Then I practically fall into bed without getting undressed. I just need to lie down for a little while, or I’ll never get through a day of filming tomorrow. I close my eyes and I see Ben’s face, I don’t need a photo for that. It feels as if the us I thought we were is being demolished, lie by lie, leaving little more than the rubble of a marriage behind.
I’m starting to think I didn’t know my husband at all.
Twelve (#ulink_5940c9fc-78a7-55c5-9456-9543949a8223)
Essex, 1987
‘Time to wake up now,’ says Maggie.
I wasn’t sleeping.
The sky outside the car window has turned from blue to black.
‘Come on, don’t dawdle, out you get.’ She folds down the front seat so that I can climb out. Her hand scrunches itself into a cross shape, just like my daddy’s hands do.
I stand on the side of the street, blinking into the darkness, looking up at the strange-looking line of shops I’ve never seen before. Then Maggie takes my hand and pulls me towards a large black door. I have to run to keep up. She walks just as fast at night as she did during the day.
‘Where are—’
‘Shh!’ She flattens out the hand that was scrunched up and covers my mouth with it. Her fingers smell of bubble bath. ‘It’s late and we don’t want to be waking the neighbours. No more talking until we’re inside.’ Her hand is covering my nose as well as my mouth and it is hard to breathe, but she doesn’t take it away until I nod to show that I understand. ‘Fingers on lips,’ she whispers, and so I do what she says, copying the way she holds her finger to her own lips, doing my best to look just like her.
She takes a giant set of keys out of her bag – there must be at least a hundred of them, or maybe just ten. They are all different shapes and sizes, jingling and jangling and making far more noise than I did when I opened my mouth just now. She slots a key into the lock and opens the door.
I’m not sure what I was expecting to see, but it wasn’t this.
It’s just a staircase. A really long one. It goes so high that I can’t even see what is at the top, as though the stairs might lead right up to the moon and the stars in the sky. I want to ask Maggie whether I could catch a star if I climb all the steps, but my finger is still on my lips, so I can’t. The stairs are made of wood, which has been painted white along the side bits, but left bare in the middle. Just inside the door we’ve walked through, is another door on the left. It’s made of metal and Maggie sees me looking at it.
‘You don’t ever go through this door unless I say it is okay. Do you understand?’ I nod, suddenly desperate to see what is on the other side. ‘Go on then, up you go.’ She pushes me in front of her and closes the outside door behind us.
I start to climb. The steps are quite big for my little legs so it takes me a while, but when I slow down she pokes her fingers in my back to tell me to hurry up. Adults are always doing that – saying things with their hands or eyes instead of their mouths. There is no rail, so I put my hand on the wall. It’s covered in tiles that look and feel the same as the corks that come out of my daddy’s wine. My brother used to thread them with cotton to make me cork crowns and necklaces, and I would pretend to be a princess.
I’m busy looking down at my feet to make sure I don’t fall, but something like a shadow high above makes me look up. It isn’t a cloud or the moon or the stars, though. Instead, a tall, skinny man at the top of the stairs is smiling down at me. He’s funny looking. He has three bushy black eyebrows, the third resting on top of his lip, his skin is white like a ghost, and when he smiles I can see that one of his crooked front teeth is made of gold. I scream. I didn’t mean to. I remember that I was supposed to be quiet, but I’m so scared the scream comes out all by itself. I try to turn back down the stairs, but Maggie is in the way and won’t let me pass.
‘Stop that noise at once,’ she says, twisting her hand around my arm so tight it feels like a burn. I don’t want to go any farther up, but she won’t let me go back down, so I’m left feeling a little bit stuck. I don’t want to be here, wherever this is. I’m tired and I want to go home.
I look back at the man standing at the top of the stairs. He’s still smiling, that gold tooth of his twinkling in the darkness like a rotten star.
‘Well hello there, little lady. I’m your new dad, but for now, you can just call me John.’
Thirteen (#ulink_12c725cd-6a57-5848-8f9d-96f08c703443)
London, 2017
‘You can just call me Alex,’ she says with a childish grin.
‘Thanks, but I’d rather stick with Detective Inspector Croft, if that’s okay,’ I reply.
She’s waiting for me outside my front door when I get back from my morning run. They both are. Her middle-aged sidekick says very little as usual, making the kind of mental notes that are so loud they can almost be heard. It isn’t even seven o’clock.
‘I have a lot to do today,’ I say, fumbling for my keys and opening the front door, trying to hide us all inside as soon as possible. I don’t know my neighbours, I couldn’t tell you any of their names, but I’m of the belief that while the opinions of strangers shouldn’t matter, they often do.
‘We just wanted to update you, but we can come back another time—’
‘No, sorry, now is fine. I have to be at Pinewood in an hour, that’s all. It’s the last day of filming, I can’t let them down.’
‘I understand.’ Her tone makes it clear that she doesn’t. ‘Did you run far this morning?’
‘Not really, 5k.’
‘Impressive.’
‘It’s not very far.’
‘No, I meant it’s impressive the way you’re just carrying on like normal: running, working, acting.’ She smiles.
What the fuck does that mean?
I hold her stare for as long as I’m able, then my eyes retreat to the face of her silent partner. He towers over her, must be twice her age if not more, but never says a damn thing. I wonder if all her bravado is just her way of trying to impress this man, her superior.
‘Are you just going to stand there and let her speak to me like this?’ I ask him.
‘Afraid so, she’s my boss,’ he replies with an apologetic shrug. I look back at the young detective in disbelief, and notice that her smile has disappeared.
‘Have you ever hit your husband, Mrs Sinclair?’ she asks.
The hallway feels smaller, seems to turn a little, catches me off balance.
