the only running I did was to keep up with her walking. She’s a fast walker and I’m tired now. She kept looking around the whole time, as though she was scared, but we didn’t pass any other people at all along the back streets, good or bad.
The cottage is very pretty, just like Maggie. It has a smart blue door and white bricks – it’s nothing like our house at home. She doesn’t have much stuff, and when I ask why not, she says this is just a holiday cottage. I’ve never been on holiday, so that’s why I didn’t know about things like that. She’s busy putting clothes in a suitcase now, and just when I think she might call the police, she decides to make us some tea and a snack instead, which is nice. On the walk here I told her all about how my brother said we can’t afford to eat, so she probably thinks I’m hungry.
‘Would you like a slice of gingerbread cake?’ she asks from the little kitchen. I’m sitting in the biggest armchair I’ve ever seen. I had to climb it just to sit on it, like a mountain made of cushions.
‘Yes,’ I say, feeling pleased with myself, sitting in the nice chair about to eat cake with the nice lady.
She appears in the doorway. The smile that was always on her face before, has vanished.
‘Yes, what?’
I don’t know what she means at first, but then I have an idea. ‘Yes, please?’ Her smile comes back and I am glad.
She puts the cake down in front of me, along with a glass of milk, then puts on the television for me to watch while she goes to use the phone in the other room. I thought she had forgotten about calling the police, and now I feel sad. I like it here, and I want to stay a bit longer. I can’t hear what she is saying over the noise of Zig and Zag on the TV – she’s turned the volume up very loud. When I’ve finished the cake I lick my fingers, then I drink the milk. It tastes chalky but I’m thirsty, so I finish the whole glass anyway.
I feel sleepy when she comes back in the room.
‘Now then, I’ve spoken to your daddy, and I’m afraid he says that what your brother told you is true: there isn’t enough food for you at home any more. I don’t want you to start your worrying again, so I’ve said to your daddy that you can stay here with me for a few days, and then I’ll take you back home once he’s sorted himself out. Does that sound grand?’
I think about the TV, and the cake, and the comfy chair. I think it might be nice to stay here for a little while, even though I will miss my brother a lot and my daddy a bit.
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘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.
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