calm the thud-crack in her heart. She looks around her small kitchen and at all the boundaries that surround her in her old East London maisonette; at the low ceilings and narrow rooms, at the double-glazed, triple-locked door that leads out onto a paved patio. At the window grills that slide across and meet in the middle. At the moose-headed coat hook in the hallway that holds her black lycra running top and the pair of creased and dusty wide-legged trousers she’d once worn for weekly self-defence classes at the local gym.
At first, what she learnt there made her feel safer than any triple-locked door. She enjoyed making a fist in a boxing glove so her wrists didn’t snap and her tendons didn’t bruise, and how to deliver a punch with speed and precision. She had felt reassured and emboldened by the tight wrap of the gloves around her wrists and how they made her arms feel bionic, almost not her own. She had enjoyed the feeling of strength return to her body.
But she abandoned the lessons when she began using her new-found skills in unconstructive ways. There wasn’t a local gym class on earth that would teach her the skills she needed to defend her against herself.
Becky tries not to panic about how much she has to do, how she will manage a day’s work, a flight to Cannes and a couple more hours’ peppiness for all those new people who will need impressing. All on no sleep whatsoever? Back in her bedroom she lightly folds a dress and rolls up a cotton shirt and two T-shirts. Fills her washbag. Pulls out pants and socks and assembles it all in a pleasing jigsaw inside her carry-on suitcase: two carbon-scented copies of the Medea script at its base.
She makes notes on her Cannes meetings, banishing thoughts of that silken hair spilling out onto the kitchen floor, coming up with six ways to pitch her idea to six different kinds of people.
But she knows what she really wants to do and she knows that it is destructive so she fights it, at first holding her own hand lightly, reassuringly, like a friend. And then when the feeling does not subside, gripping her hand tightly, before grasping at the thin skin and raised veins of her own wrist, holding it tight, as if pulling herself back from a fight. She has agreed, in therapy, that standing up to this instinct is a good thing. Succeeding means she has taken her power back, or something like that; but without sleep all those rules are dissolving at their margins, her desires pushing away old decisions.
Surely if she just does more, the instinct will leave? She clears the washing basket. Cleans surfaces that already gleam. Lays out an array of jams and breakfast cereals despite the fact she never eats breakfast and her daughter’s favourites are firmly established and unflinching.
She means to make a cup of tea next, but somehow before the kettle boils she has opened Scott’s Twitter page and she is already on her way to losing the fight.
Becky has two Twitter accounts: one that is her. And one that isn’t.
The one that isn’t Becky is Melanie. Melanie has a line drawing of a face in the photo caption, all thick and twisty like the pen hasn’t been taken off the page. ‘Melanie Hasn’t Tweeted Yet’ but Melanie follows a few people – thirty-seven corporate accounts like BBC News, Sky News, Popbitch, and another dozen or so famous people, including a TV presenter who crossed the Gobi Desert on foot and whose dinner-party speciality is puffer fish. Then there are forty or so ‘ordinary people’, people who maybe said something funny once or do something unusual or are vocally for or against some issue or other. And she doesn’t check on anything they have to say, because all of them – the corporations, the celebrities, the nobodies – are padding to disguise the fact that Melanie is following Scott.
She knows it’s overkill, but Becky dreads the slip of a fingertip, an accidental ‘like’ or retweet of a Scott comment, anything that might tip him off that Becky Shawcross is monitoring him. Safer not to look directly at him.
Scott has changed his main picture again.
Now Scott is in fancy dress, dressed as Elvis in a maroon button-down shirt, the collar of a leather jacket pulled high around his neck and his hair styled like a whip of black treacle.
It’s not a picture she has seen before.
Perhaps he has been to a party.
She logs into Facebook, via another fake profile account. He friended her without asking questions. He already had 762 friends. Why not welcome another one? Somebody has tagged him at this party. Elvis lives! A grinning friend of his has slung an arm around Scott’s neck. Scott is pouting for the camera in aviators. Not for the first time, he has chosen a costume that allows him to wear sunglasses. He likes to hide his eyes, those giveaway windows to the soul.
She scrolls back through his timeline. She’s seen it all before, a thousand times. His whole life is in her head, or at least those parts that she can get at from the safety of her own flat.
Last year Scott purchased a large indoor fish tank. His colleagues appreciated the cupcakes he bought them one afternoon in Soho. He celebrated the birthday of his oldest house plant and 152 people put hearts by it.
Recently drank espresso Martinis with an old friend who’d flown over from Australia. You’d think he was Australian, with a name like Scott, but he’s English. Like Becky, he was brought up in Hounslow, where the roof tiles vibrate under the flight paths.
And there’s one picture of him that kills her every time now. Taken a year or so ago, it’s like he’s staring right back at her, without the usual sunglasses hiding his eyes, without a care in the world. Without remorse. You don’t get that icy-blue finish to the eyes without going into a shop and buying coloured contact lenses, without swaggering in there, your veins running cold with vanity. In the picture, he’s got an expensive haircut with bits of white blond at the ends. Becky reckons the colour is officially ‘ash blond’. Successful, good-looking, like a boy band member, his hair dipped in ash dye – the ashes of other people. Not a crack in that gorgeous fucking life of his.
She surrenders to it, the scanning and watching distracts her from her twitching hands, from thoughts of the kitchen floor. She’ll read him until Maisie stirs, she knows that now, so she scrolls to champagne glasses intertwined and fizzing. She surfs his flat, job, and the people who love him best (a sister in Belgium, some nieces and nephews). No sign of a significant other; that’s something, at least.
How easily he lives.
But she is breathing quickly now, the energy inside whipping itself into a hot storm with nowhere to go because it’s not enough to see him live his life. It never is. And yet, she has a daughter who relies on her. Everything she wants must be measured against that.
Enough, she tells herself. And so she dresses in jogging bottoms and threads the laces of her running shoes with trembling hands and closes the door behind her with a double then a triple lock. Silently, so as not to wake Maisie, a crackle of worry across her chest about leaving her, but knowing that there are two people to look after. Another edict from another therapist. Self-care. Making time for her.
Becky takes three quick steps, ordering everything inside herself to be quiet, and soon enough she has slipped into a good, quick pace and is running through the streets, heels slamming hard on concrete, landing so as to feel those shockwaves snake up sharp through fibula and tibia. And then, when her chest and muscles ache, she adjusts her gait to save her shin-splints and instead let lungs and thighs scream.
She runs down an alley – she’d never dream of taking it at night and even now, with just the weak morning daylight, she holds her breath in her chest and her keys in her hand like a dagger. Once she’s out the other end, she races for the park where round and round and round she will go, pushing herself faster on each lap.
She lets herself have one lap – only one – where she lets Scott fuck her before she cuts his throat.
Then she is so full of shame. It drums in her ears and leaks out of her tear ducts and flecks her mouth with spittle.
She stops running. Finds a tree. Stands with her back to the rough-edged bark and now she cannot stop what she does next. She curls her hand into a fighter’s fist, making sure her thumb stays on the outside of her second and third knuckles, exactly as she was taught. Then, at the thought