‘Hi.’
Tilly is a tiny thing, with gobstopper eyes and shiny black hair; she looks like a Pixar girl. She and Georgia have only recently become friends after being at the same school for nearly five years. She is the first really decent friend Georgia has acquired since she left primary school and while Cate can’t quite work Tilly out, she is very keen for the friendship to flourish.
‘He knew it was me,’ Georgia continues. ‘When he looked at me. I could tell he knew it was me, from the other night. It was a really dirty look.’
‘Did you see it?’ Cate asks Tilly.
Tilly nods again. ‘Yeah. He was definitely not happy with Georgia. I could tell.’
Georgia opens a brand-new packet of Leibniz biscuits even though there’s a half-empty packet in the cupboard and offers it to Tilly. Tilly says no thank you and then they disappear to her bedroom.
The front door goes again and Josh appears. Cate’s heart lifts a little. While Georgia always arrives with news and moods and announcements and atmospheres, her little brother arrives as though he’d never left. He doesn’t bring things in with him, his issues unfurl gently and in good time.
‘Hello, darling.’
‘Hi, Mum.’ He crosses the kitchen and hugs her. Josh hugs her every time he comes home, before he goes to bed, when he sees her in the morning, and when he goes out for longer than a couple of hours. He’s done this since he was a tiny boy and she keeps expecting it to stop, or to peter out, but he’s fourteen now and he shows no sign of abandoning the habit. In a strange way, Cate sometimes thinks, it’s Josh who’s kept her at home all these years, way beyond her children’s need to have a stay-at-home mother. He still feels so vulnerable for some reason, still feels like the small boy crying into the heels of his hands on his first day of nursery and still crying four hours later when she came to collect him.
‘How was school?’
He shrugs and says, ‘It was good. I got my Physics test back. I got sixty out of sixty-five. I was second top.’
‘Oh,’ she says, squeezing him again quickly. ‘Josh, that’s amazing! Well done you! Physics! Of all the things to be good at. I don’t know where you get it from.’
Josh helps himself to a banana and an apple and a glass of milk and sits with her for a while at the kitchen table.
‘Are you OK?’ he asks her after a short silence.
She looks at him with surprise. ‘Yes,’ she says.
‘Are you sure you’re OK?’
‘Yes,’ she says again, with a laugh. ‘Why?’
He shrugs. ‘No reason.’ Then he picks up his milk and his schoolbag and heads to his room. ‘What’s for dinner?’ he says, turning back halfway down the hallway.
‘Chicken curry,’ she says.
‘Cool,’ he says. ‘I’m in the mood for something spicy.’
And then it is quiet again, just Cate and the dark shadows through the window, her unfocused thoughts passing silently through the back tunnels of her mind.
5
Later that night it happens. A sort of coalescence of all of Cate’s weird, unformed fears about this place.
Georgia’s friend Tilly is assaulted moments after leaving their flat.
Cate had invited Tilly to stay for supper and she’d said, No, thank you, Mum’s expecting me, and Cate had thought, Maybe she just doesn’t like curry. Then a few minutes after she left there was a knock at the door and the doorbell rang and Cate went to answer it and there was Tilly, her face white, her huge eyes wide with shock saying, ‘Someone touched me. He touched me.’
Now Cate hustles her into the kitchen and pulls her out a chair, gets her a glass of water, asks her exactly what happened.
‘I’d just crossed the road. I was just over there. By the building site. And there was someone behind me. And he just sort of grabbed me. Here.’ She gestures at her hips. ‘And he was trying to pull me.’
‘Pull you where?’
‘Not anywhere. Just kind of against him.’
Georgia sits Tilly down at the table and holds her arm. ‘Oh my God, did you see him? Did you see his face?’
Tilly’s hands tremble in her lap. ‘Not really. Sort of. I don’t think … It was all just … quick. Really, really quick.’
‘Are you hurt?’ says Georgia.
‘No?’ says Tilly, with a slight question mark, as though she might be. ‘No,’ she says again. ‘I’m OK. I’m just …’ She stares down at her hands. ‘Freaked out. He was … It was horrible.’
‘Age?’ asks Cate. ‘Roughly?’
Tilly shrugs. ‘I don’t know.’ She sniffs. ‘He was wearing a hood and had a scarf around his face.’
‘Height?’
‘Kind of tall, I guess. And slim.’
‘Should I call the police?’ asks Cate and then wonders why she’s asking a sixteen-year-old girl who’s just been assaulted whether or not she should call the police.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ said Georgia. ‘Of course you should call them.’ Then before anyone else has a chance to pick up their phone, she’s calling 999.
And then the police arrive, and Tilly’s mum arrives and the night takes a strange tangent off into a place that Cate has never been before, a place of policemen in her kitchen, and a tearful mother she’s never met , and a nervous energy that keeps her awake for hours after the police leave and Tilly and her mother disappear in an Uber and the house is quiet yet she knows that no one can be sleeping peacefully because a bad thing happened and it is something to do with them and something to do with this place and something else, some indefinable thing to do with her, some badness, some mistake she’s made because she’s not a good person. She has been trying so hard to stop thinking of herself as a bad person, but as she lies in bed that night, the sudden awful knowledge of it gnaws at her consciousness until she feels raw and unpeeled.
Cate awakes just before her alarm goes off the following morning, having slept for only three and a half hours. She turns and looks at Roan, lying peacefully on his back, his arms tucked neatly under the duvet. He is a pleasant-looking man, her husband. He has lost most of his hair and shaves it now, revealing the strange contours of his skull that she had not known existed when she’d first met him thirty years ago. She’d presumed his skull to be a smooth thing, the underside of a pottery urn. Instead it is a landscape with hills and valleys, a tiny puckered scar. Raised veins run across his temples to his brow. His nose is large. His eyes are heavy-lidded. He is her husband. He hates her. She knows he does. And it’s her fault.
She slips out of bed and goes to the front window, a large bay overlooking the street. The just-risen sun shines through the trees, on to the building site across the road. It looks innocuous. Then she looks further to the right, to the house with the armchair on the driveway. She thinks of the man who lives there, the creepy man who’d followed Georgia home from the Tube station, who’d thrown her and Tilly dirty looks last night as he put out his bins – the man who matches the description that Tilly gave of the man who assaulted her.
Cate locates the card the policeman gave her last night. Detective Inspector Robert Burdett. She calls him, but he doesn’t answer so she leaves a message for him.