It became my go-to daydream that he would crash that stupid little Corsa. He’d be driving – alone, of course, along pedestrian-free streets – and he’d veer off the road into a lamp post or a tree. The airbag would save him, because I didn’t want him killed. Just injured.
Taken out of the game.
Chapter 10
Well, there was one game I could take him out of, or, more accurately, exclude him from signing up for, and that was our summer holiday to Crete. I invited Jade and Tom to join us – I know, go ahead and slam me for rewarding Lucas for his bad behaviour, that’s fair. Let me just say that I viewed the move as a necessary hypocrisy. Let’s see how well the gang get on without their fire starter, I thought.
It helped that the villa had no broadband and poor mobile phone coverage. The last thing I wanted was Kieran in constant contact, his voice booming out on speakerphone, as it had been the day before we left when I’d happened to pass Lucas’s half-open door.
‘To be fair, no one thinks their own sister is hot,’ he said.
‘She’s fucking twelve, K,’ Lucas protested and there was an explosion of laughter, followed by a series of inaudible mumblings.
Then Kieran’s voice rose again, crowing with amusement: ‘Gonna forget you said that, bruv, real talk.’
I wanted to go in and throw Lucas’s phone at the wall. No, better still, I would take it from him and tell the boy on the other end that if he ever, ever laid a finger on Freya, I’d kill him.
* * *
Among other things, the holiday was an opportunity for us to get to know Jade, now Lucas’s girlfriend of over six months. She was kind to Freya, that stands out in my memory. She’d make a point of including her as she and the boys arranged themselves in a dripping still life by the pool or, drunk with sun, colonized the terrace table with their music and beers and card games. ‘Come with us, Frey,’ she’d say, when they were heading into the village, and then, when the boys objected, ‘What? I need another girl, you guys!’
(The roadman dialect soon dissolved without Kieran there to drive it.)
Perhaps it was the Greek light, incomparably silky and translucent, but Jade was a standout beauty, even among the throngs of young on the beaches and in the village bars. Everyone was still in the white lacy dresses of the Mamma Mia trend and she had a whole wardrobe of them, looking like a beach bride with her seashell jewellery and brown bare feet.
She was one of the youngest in the year group and had her seventeenth birthday while we were away. After dinner in the port, as we relaxed in front of a lavender sea, she broke off from the boys and came to thank Justin and me.
‘It’s such a treat to be here. Thank you for everything.’
‘You’re very welcome. It’s lovely for us to have you here,’ I told her. ‘You’re not missing your other friends too much? I know you spend a lot of time with Kieran.’
I could never have asked Lucas this, nor been entitled to the flawless answer she gave about our wonderful hospitality making it impossible for her to miss anybody.
‘I must admit I’m not his greatest fan,’ I said, cheerfully.
She was much too polite to contradict me. ‘He’s a character,’ she said, as if settling on a compromise.
I gave up then – to recruit her as a collaborator was a stretch even by my standards. Instead, it was her mother who offered news of him:
Saw your arch enemy today…
Oh yes. How’s he coping without his crew?
Bored out of his brain. He asked for your address there to send Jade a birthday pressie. Thought I’d better check with you first.
My pulse quickened. I had no doubt there was no gift, at least not one that couldn’t wait, and that this was simply a ploy to find out our address so he could make his way out here and ‘bump into’ us. Creep me out, put me in an impossible position. I replied with trembling hands:
Please don’t! (It wouldn’t get here in time, anyway.)
Understood. I’ll say he should just drop it round to us.
A part of me marvelled at the fact that Sheridan was able to interact with Kieran in this easy everyday way, while another rejoiced afresh in my having successfully isolated him from the pack. But a third part grew antsy every time a car drew up at the villa or a figure with his approximate build strolled towards us in the village. Might Sheridan have inadvertently given him enough intel to locate us? And he was some kind of computer prodigy, wasn’t he, so might he have been able to hack into one of his friends’ phones and discover our GPS coordinates? All too quickly it began to feel as likely that he would appear as not.
There was one particularly tense episode that has stayed with me. We’d arrived at the beach one afternoon and I was squinting into the mid-distance to judge how crowded it was and if there was any shade available, when I saw him. Kieran bloody Watts, here after all. He was in the water, standing waist-deep, his back to the shore. Without saying a word to the others, I dropped my bag at my feet, tore off my sarong and flipflops and waded out. As I reached him, a wave approached and we bobbed in unison, coming to land a couple of metres closer together. I’d never seen him unclothed, of course, but the breadth of his shoulders, pale and pimpled and with a chain of angry red insect bites, was an exact match. His wet hair was just the right shade of burnt orange.
Catching me looking, he plunged underwater and I half-expected to feel my legs pulled from under me, my head held down – that encounter in the car park had left me in no doubt that he longed to be rid of me as intensely as I did him. Then he burst to the surface a distance away, shaking and laughing, great ropes of water flying from him. I couldn’t see his face in the dazzle as he called out something to a couple nearby, but it sounded like German. He seemed, from this new perspective, too tall.
Seeing Justin peer quizzically from the shore, I returned, dripping. ‘I just had to cool off,’ I said. ‘Thanks for setting up.’
‘We’re down here,’ he said, indicating the parasol he’d set up a respectable distance from the teens.
Freya, neither one nor the other, shuttled between the two camps. ‘No one will play beach tennis with me,’ she complained to her father, a bat in either hand.
‘I will, darling.’ He took one of the bats and they found a section of smooth sand near the breaking waves.
I propped myself on my elbows and watched them for a while. Then, in one of those sudden changes of mood, the sea seemed to come alive and a figure came tumbling towards us with the surf, causing Justin and Freya to scatter. It was him, the red-headed boy. After he’d stood and shaken himself, he glanced blindly at them before ambling off with a gait entirely different from Kieran’s.
‘No need to apologize,’ Justin joked to Freya, and they giggled together before reclaiming their patch and starting a new rally.
Thank God I hadn’t said anything to Justin. It would have been the nail in the coffin of my hopes that he’d keep an open mind to my suspicions of Kieran’s activities – my ‘interpretation’, as he’d called it. Soothed by the metronomic crack-crack of ball on bat, I sank into the sand and closed my eyes, a guard dog satisfied for the moment that her humans were safe.
* * *
Back home, I soon understood that that sense of security had been as false as it was brief. Lucas and his friends began in the upper sixth and picked up where they had left off, only now with more academic deadlines to disregard than before. Kieran, who seemed to have taken sole possession of Prisca’s car, would pick Lucas up most evenings, waiting at the kerb with his phone on his lap as I watched from the bedroom window. Sometimes there’d be others in the car with him and they’d be yelping and heaving with laughter, making the little car rock. Presumably to avoid the risk of cross-examination, Lucas would frequently leave without bothering to say goodbye and I’d spend futile hours worrying about Kieran being at the wheel drunk or stoned or just distracted by his own clowning.
Having decided not to apply to Oxford after all, Lucas now announced he wouldn’t be tro
ubling himself with open days, but would choose his unis on the basis of their websites. His predicted grades were both dismayingly low and – by the time mocks had come and gone – technically optimistic. It was not beyond the realms of possibility that he would miss his insurance choice, never mind his preferred one.
‘How did we get from Oxbridge to being worried he won’t be going anywhere at all?’ I asked Vic, when I called at his flat one night to retrieve a forgotten textbook.
‘I know.’ He ran his fingers across his forehead as if to wipe clean the frown lines. ‘Here’s a personal statement for you: “I’ve decided to put my future on the back burner while I smoke weed and take wonk with the town twat.” ’
‘What’s wonk?’ I asked.
‘Ket. Ketamine. Horse tranquillizer.’ Seeing my expression, he backtracked. ‘Mind you, it’s hard to know if they’re taking it or just acting like they are.’
And sometimes it was hard to know if Vic and I were having these conversations or just acting like we were. It felt surreal, as if I was one of those parents you read about in newspaper features, the last to know ‘the truth’ about their offspring.
‘It will suit Kieran if Lucas fails his A-levels and has to repeat the year,’ I said. ‘He’s not going anywhere, is he? He never studies. I can’t see him in any kind of career. There’s no work ethic there at all, just total self-gratification.’
Once more, I know this sounds unattractive. Poisonous, even. Then again, the advantage of presenting it in this form years after the event – and the reason I’m willing to cast myself in so unflattering a light – is that history attests to my being right. If you’re not already aware that Kieran caused Lucas grievous harm, then it will take you ten seconds to google their names and find out what happened.
Or keep reading – because we’re almost there.
Chapter 11
The first thing I do the morning after seeing Kieran on the roof of The Heights is to buy a second phone, a cheap, prepaid one with rudimentary camera and audio recording functions. I can’t risk storing anything on my registered phone that could later be construed as evidence of harassment.
Having slept on that conversation with Vic, I’m more convinced than ever that only photographic proof – or audio, if possible – will persuade him that the man I saw was Kieran. Only then can we proceed in whichever way we see fit.
I reschedule my morning meeting and take the commuter service to London Bridge. Standing in the crush of humanity, an inexperienced rider of the spurts and brakes of rush hour, I wonder if any of my fellow travellers is also a stalker?
I’m not proud to confess this, but I am more experienced in the art of tailing than a certain member of my family might realize – and I don’t mean that long-ago low-speed car chase in a Croydon car park. Several times, when Freya was still at school, I shadowed her when she met friends. I’d linger out of sight or stroll by at a safe distance, satisfying myself that the person she was meeting was not some middle-aged scumbag trying to groom her or a drug lord type recruiting for a county lines gang.
Again, it had fallen to Justin to talk me down. ‘Think of all the variables that make a perfect storm, El. Don’t make yourself the one element that causes something bad to happen.’
‘You mean, she spots me as she’s crossing a road and gets run over by a bus because she’s distracted? It wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been there?’
He blanched. ‘That kind of thing, yes.’
And I thought, in silent protest, What if the child you love is being led into danger, but it’s the one time you don’t believe it? But, by then, the agony of yearning to turn back time had long since proved untenable and Justin and I had instigated a no ‘what if’s policy. We are where we are, we’d say.
And where I am now is striding along Tooley Street from London Bridge Station towards Shad Thames, scanning the faces of the oncoming pedestrians, cyclists, even motorists, all the way to The Heights. None belongs to Kieran, of course – that would be too easy.
I stab the bell for Flat 10, beanie-covered head dipped low to hide my face from the camera. I have no intention of going up again: this time, I want him to come down. In one hand I hold a small package brought from home, in the other my phone, set to ‘record’.
‘Hi?’ It’s a man’s voice, but impossible to judge from that single syllable if it is his.
‘Delivery for Mr Watts. Needs a signature.’
The hand holding the phone flies to my mouth: I should have said Mr Harding – what a fool! Instantly, adrenaline surges through me.
‘There’s no one here by that name,’ the voice replies, and it’s clear this isn’t him, but someone decades older, with a commanding patrician accent. ‘I think you need to check the address with your dispatch team. Who is this, please?’
‘GMB Deliveries,’ I improvise.
‘Can I take a name?’
‘What? No, sorry.’ Fuck.
I scurry away. There is a café across the road and I conceal myself in the unusually deep doorway just beyond it, trying to recover my composure. I am furious with myself, could hardly have been sloppier in my start to private detective work: I’ve given myself away and yet I have no idea who to. Then again, does it matter? If I’m lucky, the name Watts might mean nothing to this man, who evidently knows Kieran as S. Harding. Who is he? Flatmate? Friend? Lover?
A young couple, speaking English with heavy European accents and dressed outlandishly – fashion students perhaps, hadn’t Selena said there was a local population of wealthy undergraduates? – enter the café, causing a second memory to surface from that same conversation. She’d seen Kieran in a café on Mill Street. This must be it: Bean Box. I could do worse than station myself inside for an hour or two and wait for him to arrive or depart of his own accord.
But just as I emerge from the shadows, the door to The Heights clicks open and a man steps into the street. He’s in his late fifties or early sixties, about five ten, with silver-flecked hair and horn-rimmed glasses. Grey jeans, black sweater, expensive footwear, but no jacket or coat on this chilly late-October day. He pauses at the kerb, frowning, before striding towards the café door on a collision course with me. Realizing this, I snatch off my black beanie, the only bit of me he will have seen on camera, but it’s the wrong move because he’s peering at me as he approaches and I can see from his face that he’s making the connection.
‘Hello? You didn’t just ring the buzzer over here, did you? Flat ten.’
I feel myself flush. ‘No, not me.’
‘Why did you ask for Mr Watts?’ He speaks as if I haven’t just made the denial and, instinctively, I break into a run towards Tooley Street. ‘Hey!’ he calls after me. ‘Wait! Tell me your name!’
On the corner of Tooley, I duck into a Co-op store. As I watch, motionless behind a shelf of throat pastilles and cold remedies near the tills, the man appears at the junction, glances either way, and enters the shop. Mercifully, he takes off down the first aisle, drawing him on a route through the store that includes a blind spot that allows me to slip into the street again. I zigzag back through Shad Thames to the bridge and down the steps to the riverside path, where I merge with the tourist throng. I’ve shaken him off – for now.
But that doesn’t mean I’m safe. I can think of no reason for someone to descend ten floors to check on a messenger who’d got the wrong name, then hunt them down in the local streets, other than that he is a protector of Kieran’s of some sort.
And that makes him no friend of mine.
Killing Time (cont)
Watching Ellen as she sits at her library desk, striving to impose order on her own chaotic history, I see very clearly the etchings of sorrow in her face. Of course, she’s not the only one in the room who’s grieving. Every single one of her fellow students has been through their own uniquely unforgiving mill. We have among us a victim of gang rape and another of domestic violence; one young woman’s troubles began when her father was murdered by his own
brother; two others had their childhoods blighted by poverty and abuse. There is an authenticity to the chain of events laid out in their life stories, before being stitched back together with Penney’s guidance; a morbid pull. And yet, time and again, it is to Ellen’s story that I keep returning.
Maybe it’s because hers is the one that never quite ended when it should have.
How it should have.
Sunday Times magazine,
December 2021
Chapter 12
God only knows how we got through A-levels.
We, I know how that sounds. Like I was the one sitting them, or at least shadowing, heckling instructions ringside like a boxing coach. But it feels like a team effort, doesn’t it? Not like when our gen was young and parents barely knew you had exams, only enquiring if you’d revised on the day the first one dawned, grey and dreadful no matter how blue that young summer sky.
With the kind of nagging I would once have thought myself incapable of, I exerted enough influence to keep Lucas indoors for most of study leave. Make no mistake, Kieran continued to arrive at our gate in his car, but Lucas would resist his bidding, hanging out only briefly in the street before sending him on his way.
‘It’s fucking lockdown here,’ I heard him grumble, one time.
And Kieran replied, sneering: ‘To be fair, no one gives a shit about A-levels once you start work, innit, bruv?’
You only get to start work if you give a shit about A-levels, I thought. Jade was revising hard, I knew from Sheridan. As for Tom, who’d had an offer from Cambridge, he’d scarcely been mentioned since the holiday.
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