I Follow You

by Peter James

  15

  Sunday 9 December

  Roger hadn’t moved from the couch for most of the day, which was unusual for him, Georgie thought. When his schedule gave him a weekend at home, he normally went off for a two or three-hour bike ride. But today, nursing the Hangover from Hell, he lay there, barefoot and unshaven, surrounded by the newspapers, in his tattiest old jumper and tracksuit bottoms.

  A pint glass of water sat on the coffee table in front of him, along with a tepid mug of tea and a partially popped blister-pack of paracetamol. His eyes were shut most of the time, with just the occasional glance at the rugby on the television. He’d only got off the couch, some hours earlier, to dutifully make his signature dish brunch of scrambled eggs and smoked salmon, as he did every Sunday – the best scrambled eggs in the world, Georgie always said. Today, the food made him feel a bit queasy.

  Seated in an armchair opposite him, reading a book on the week-by-week stages of pregnancy, she suddenly laughed.

  ‘What?’ he said. ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘You!’ She picked up her phone and took a photograph of him. ‘Imagine if your students or your passengers on your next flight could see you now! Think how confident they’d feel!’ She giggled again and took another photograph.

  ‘I’m glad you’re enjoying my hangover, because I’m not!’

  ‘You did rather hit the booze last night, darling.’

  ‘They served some dangerously good wines.’

  ‘And port – oh, and Cognac, too,’ she reminded him. ‘A rather special vintage one, wasn’t it?’

  He grimaced. ‘What is that thing inside your head that tells you if you have one more glass of brandy, you’ll feel better the next morning than not having had it?’

  She grinned again. ‘Hopefully it will all be out of your system by Tuesday morning when you’re next flying.’

  He glanced at his watch, then reached for the paracetamol, popped two more out and downed them with some water. ‘This is the worst I can ever remember.’

  ‘Look on the bright side – at least it made your evening a lot better than mine!’

  ‘Hmmmmn.’ He looked at her ruefully.

  ‘You’re not getting any sympathy!’

  ‘Not even the tiniest bit?’

  She put down the phone and the book, walked over to him and curled up beside him, putting an arm around him and kissing him on the cheek. ‘My poor brave soldier’s got a hurty head. Let me make it better.’ She kissed him, then again. ‘Is that helping?’

  ‘It is.’

  She kissed him once more and returned to her chair. It was already dark outside, the ocean no longer visible, and spats of rain were striking the huge windows. ‘What do you fancy for supper?’

  ‘You,’ he said.

  ‘In your state?’

  ‘Maybe comfort food. How about a baked potato and tuna – or beans on toast? I can make it.’

  She shook her head. ‘You rest your pretty little head – I’ll sort something in a while.’

  Settling back down, she picked up her phone and read a text that had come in from her first client tomorrow, asking if she could change the time of her session. She replied that was fine. There were several emails she hadn’t looked at and she scanned through them, but there was nothing important, other than a cancellation from one of her regulars for her 11 a.m. group session on Tuesday.

  She returned to her book, then after some minutes announced, ‘Did you know that my body is busy preparing for the months ahead?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It says so here.’ She glanced down at her midriff. ‘Hello, busy body!’

  ‘Aren’t you meant to have symptoms?’

  She tapped the open page. ‘Morning sickness, sore breasts and cramping.’

  ‘You have those?’

  ‘And acid reflux.’

  ‘Sounds nasty.’

  ‘It is, I keep getting it.’

  ‘What about cravings? Shouldn’t you be having those, too?’

  She nodded, looking a little guilty. ‘Uh-huh. You know those pickled onions your aunt gave us – the ones she said would be ready to eat by Christmas?’

  He nodded. ‘I’m really looking forward to having those with a fine Cheddar – making a ploughman’s.’

  ‘Well, there’s a slight problem with that plan – will you forgive me?’

  ‘Forgive you what?’

  ‘I – er – ate the whole jar earlier today.’

  It was his turn to burst out laughing. ‘Probably best I am flying on Tuesday and away for the rest of the week, with your onion breath.’

  ‘You should love me all the more for it!’

  On the screen, the right wing, clutching the ball, was racing to the touchline, but Roger had totally lost track of the game. ‘I couldn’t love you any more than I do,’ he said. ‘Not possible.’

  ‘You sweet-talker, you!’ She blew him a kiss.

  ‘I mean it.’

  I. Love. You, she mouthed.

  And. Me. Loves. You, he mouthed back.

  She blew him a kiss then glanced at her phone again. There was a new email.

  You have new followers on RunMaster.

  She swiped across to the app and tapped on it. There were twenty-three new follower requests, which really pleased her. More people she might be able to convert to YouTube followers in her ambition to turn that into a commercial enterprise – Keeping fit while pregnant and afterwards! Fit For Purpose!

  ‘Hey, darling, I’ve got another twenty-three RunMaster followers,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that great?’

  But there was no response from Roger. He’d fallen asleep again. And was snoring.

  Five hundred and fifty-seven followers, she noted. Brilliant!

  She put the phone down and sat, looking at Roger, feeling a sudden deep sense of contentment.

  She picked up her phone again and scanned down the list of names, not really fussed about who any of them were, clocking a running coach, a chiropractor – and a doctor.

  It was great, she thought, that these professionals were following her – brilliant for her credibility with her clients.

  16

  Monday 17 December

  Time is the enemy.

  Marcus Valentine’s mother was late, always late. She was forever leaving him standing outside the school gates, freezing in the cold or soaking in the rain, as he watched all the other pupils walk or drive off with one or the other of their parents.

  ‘The enemy beat me!’ she’d say matter-of-factly, when she finally drove up. ‘Get in the car, you’ll catch your death.’

  In the mornings, when he was ready for school, breakfasted, his coat on, rucksack packed with his homework and lunchbox, he’d stand in the hallway, close to the front door, all knotted up inside because of the ticking-off he would be getting for being late – again – listening for the sound of the bathroom door opening upstairs.

  His wristwatch, day after day, would be telling him it was just fifteen minutes to the start of morning assembly and he knew that, with the best will in the world, even breaking the speed limit and catching all the lights, it was going to take his mother an absolute minimum of twenty minutes to get there.

  Finally, the click of the door and his mother’s voice calling down. ‘How’s the enemy?’

  ‘Twelve minutes, Mum, we’re really late. Like, really late.’

  Like, every day.

  The irritation of the teachers. The excuses he’d long run out of. Puncture. Dog eaten rat poison. Sister half severing her finger cutting an apple. Grandmother rushed to hospital. And, of course, My dad’s left home.

  It was the unsaid part that stung most of all. My dad chose my sister to take with him.

  And not me.

  That was a year after the big fuss of his younger sister Claudine’s disappearance. Age six, last seen by a passer-by standing outside the school gates with her rucksack, after their mother had totally forgotten to pick her up.

  What a shitstorm
her disappearance had caused until she was found again – only a day later! Marcus had lured his sister into being lowered down a dry well in local woods, telling her it was a prank. He had then pulled the rope up and, ignoring her screams of terror, had left her there overnight – to teach his mother a lesson not to be late. But it had really backfired. The police and dozens of volunteers had searched through the night, and his sister, after he had finally revealed where she was, had been deeply traumatized. He’d had a severe lecture from the police, a thrashing from his father, and his sister was scared to be anywhere near him – which was no great loss to him.

  His erratic and always heavy-drinking mother, Angela, from both his childhood memories and the photographs he was left with, had once been a beautiful and glamorous woman, until his father, failure and the booze had destroyed her. In her teens she had dreamed of becoming a famous actress. Too busy preparing for her roles in the amateur dramatics productions at Brighton’s Little Theatre to do a full-time job, she made ends meet by giving piano lessons in whatever free time she had.

  She’d met Marcus’s father, Robert, after he’d seen her in a stage production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and become infatuated with her, turning into a regular stage-door Johnny, she had joked, greeting her nightly with a huge bunch of flowers. But as soon as they had married, he became increasingly jealous, wanting her to quit acting and be at home for him.

  He got his wish. She managed to secure a respected London theatrical agent, but had then blown the two chances he’d provided her with – her two breakthrough opportunities to turn professional. The first was when her agent had got her the title role of Lady Windermere in a touring production of Lady Windermere’s Fan, and she’d been fired for continually being late and missing her stage calls. The second was when he’d got her a decent part in a multi-million-pound John Schlesinger movie and she’d overslept, then misread her call sheet and drove to the wrong location. Twice.

  Her agent had fired her.

  After that, hugely bored being stuck at home, with her husband away a lot having affairs that she knew about, and resentful that the world had been deprived of her talents, she’d gone back to am-dram. Until the company at the Brighton Little Theatre had tired of her unreliability, too, and voted her out. Marcus was born soon after and Claudine three years later. From his earliest days, all he could really remember about the occasional times his father was actually at home with them was arguments. Mostly he was absent. His mother became obsessed with transferring the abject failure of her own career into Marcus becoming a child prodigy and eventually a famous concert pianist. Although he had some ability, he’d had little interest in playing the piano, preferring to be up in his room, but he was too scared of his mother’s drink-fuelled rages to disobey. She forced him to practise for hours on end whilst standing over him, metronome ticking, ready to rap his knuckles with a ruler if he made a mistake, and shouting at him, ‘Timing, Marcus, timing, timing, timing!’

  His father became increasingly absent, spending weeks away at their London flat or abroad on his property interests, and – if Marcus’s mother was to be believed – womanizing.

  He had barely known his father throughout the first decade of his life, other than as a man who seemed permanently angry at his mother or him, or both. Whatever Marcus did was either wrong or not good enough in his father’s eyes. There was never any praise if he scored a goal or a try on the school playing fields or got good marks in an exam. It was quite different for Claudine, of course, clearly the apple of her father’s eye, who could do no wrong. And on the rare occasions she was mischievous, it was always somehow Marcus who copped the blame from their father.

  If he had one abiding memory of his father, it was an almost constant look of disgust and hatred in his eyes, as if he had nothing but utter contempt for his son – when all he had craved was for some recognition from him.

  It was shortly before Marcus’s tenth birthday that his father left home, taking Claudine with him. He’d overheard his father say to his mother that he was taking his ‘little princess’ and leaving the idiot boy, who would never amount to anything, to her useless care.

  After they’d left, Marcus’s mother drunkenly told him it was good riddance to both of them. It was from then on that her drinking, barely controlled to that point, finally fell off a cliff. And for a while seemed to turn her man-crazy.

  Marcus frequently found himself being dragged out of bed at all hours by his drunk mother to play the piano to her succession of men friends and chastised afterwards for missing notes. One time he’d walked in on her to see her lying back on a sofa with a guy with his head under her skirt.

  As he had retreated, embarrassed, he’d heard his mother saying loudly, laughing, ‘Don’t have kids, they fuck up your life, they fuck up all your fun.’

  In his twelfth year, he increasingly turned into his mother’s carer as she became more dysfunctional, leaving burning cigarettes in ashtrays, pans on the lit hob, and passing out on the floor. Then he came home one day and saw a note from her, in her exaggerated handwriting, warning him not to go upstairs, but to call 999 and ask for an ambulance.

  She had swallowed an entire bottle of bleach. It took her three days of agony to die.

  Marcus, who had not spoken to his father in the two and a half years since he had left, had been taken into the temporary care of his mother’s elderly, dull parents. At his mother’s funeral, his father and Claudine, to whom he also had not spoken since she had left, barely even acknowledged him, keeping their distance. Marcus had tried hard to reconnect with them there, but both coldly rejected him, neither uttering a single word.

  To prevent him being a burden on his in-laws, his father had paid for him to go to boarding school. Marcus stayed on throughout most of the holidays, burying himself in his studies rather than be with his grandparents. But he had been on another mission, too. He was utterly determined to get high grades and win a place at a top medical school, and perhaps then his father, from whom he never heard a word, would finally be proud of him. As soon as he’d got into Guy’s, he’d moved into digs. One of his tutors had admired his long fingers. ‘You have surgeon’s hands,’ she’d said.

  He’d preferred that a lot to his mother telling him he had ‘pianist’s fingers’.

  Marcus wrote to his father, proudly telling him that he had started at medical school. Three weeks later he got a terse reply from a solicitor telling him that his father had died of a heart attack on a tennis court in Marbella, two months previously.

  This Monday morning, Marcus was earlier than usual, 7.15 a.m., because he had a full day ahead. He’d be able to catch up on emails and paperwork in his office before attending a meeting at 8.30 a.m. The car radio was tuned to Radio Jersey, as it always was on his commute, enabling him to catch up on the local news. Today a presenter whose voice he particularly liked, Ashlea Tracey, was on.

  But Marcus was barely listening. He was peering to his left and right. He knew from looking in detail at her historical activity pattern on RunMaster, going back many months, when and where she most likely went out for her regular runs. But he hadn’t seen Georgie Maclean all week or over the weekend, and this was bothering him more than he wanted it to. He’d been out running trying to coincide with her regular runs but so far hadn’t had any success.

  He repeatedly looked at his running times and the running community posts. It was the first thing he did in the morning and the last thing before he went to sleep. He constantly checked Georgie’s photographs on his phone, and he’d had a close call a couple of nights ago when Claire had almost seen what he was looking at, when he’d enlarged one of her photos.

  And increasingly he was questioning why he was so bothered about her – and trying to put her to the back of his mind. But nothing seemed to shift her from his seemingly every waking thought. He kept telling himself to stop. He was aware it was becoming dangerously preoccupying. But he couldn’t stop.

  He was excited by Georgie. There
was no excitement with Claire. Sex had become a rare occurrence, and when it did happen it was quick, perfunctory, servicing a need.

  When did we last have any fun? When did we last do anything spontaneous? Are we ever going to feel the same way we felt about each other before we had children? When did we last have sex? When did I last actually want to have sex – with Claire?

  He couldn’t remember when a woman had last aroused him like this. He’d drunk too much at the dinner party, but he and Georgie’d had a lot of fun – and she wanted to train him!

  An affair with Georgie Maclean? Do I dare?

  Would she dare?

  I know I shouldn’t do it, should I?

  But I have to.

  The thrill of the chase!

  But. Big but. She’s pregnant.

  Get over it, Marcus Valentine. Get back to your boring old safe life. Suck it up. This is ridiculous. You know you’re always flirting with your female colleagues and friends, with no intention of taking it further – what’s so different this time?

  He felt a sudden charge of energy. For months he’d been exhausted. Mentally tired. Overworked. All his friends seemed to be having a nice life. He and Claire had been having a nice life, too. So why was he now being stupid enough to even think about another woman? What had changed?

  Perhaps everything had changed the day their twins, Rhys and Amelia, had been born. That was the day he ceased to be the love of Claire’s life and was replaced by their children. The arrival of Cormac three years later just compounded the situation. Rejection, the story of his fucking life. It was all he’d ever had from anyone, all his life. And probably when they grew up, they’d reject him, too.

  As he approached the lights where he had nearly run Georgie down, he slowed, looking around even more carefully, oblivious to the angry horn blast from a car behind him.

  No sign of her.

  Then he was jolted by Ashlea Tracey’s voice. ‘It’s Monday! Let’s have some Van the Man to get us all back into work in a good mood. One of the great tracks of all time!’