Stop at Nothing

by Tammy Cohen

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ I said, reminding myself yet again that you can never judge what goes on behind the closed doors of other people’s lives. ‘That’s so tough for you. My parents are also ill, but at least they’re in their eighties so you kind of expect it.’

  ‘Mum spies on them on her laptop.’

  Emma was getting her own back at me about the biscuits.

  ‘It’s not spying. I keep an eye on them, that’s all.’ My voice sounded shrill. Defensive. ‘My mum has dementia and my dad has diabetes. I have a webcam set up in their sitting room so I can check Mum hasn’t given him the slip or Dad isn’t lying in a diabetic coma. It’s perfectly legal, and it reassures them, knowing they’re not entirely alone.’

  ‘She’s obsessed,’ said Em. ‘She watches them for hours.’

  ‘Hardly.’

  I couldn’t explain even to myself the fascination of observing my parents when they had quite forgotten they were being observed. Certainly, I did it primarily out of love and to make sure they were safe, but I couldn’t deny there was also an element of voyeurism, of which I wasn’t proud. More than that, it took me back to my childhood, eavesdropping on grown-up conversations. Hoping to hear an insight into the adult world but also an insight into me, some objective sense of who I was.

  ‘I didn’t know you had another daughter.’

  My chest froze.

  Frances was looking at the family photograph on the fridge. The four of us. Back in the days when we were four.

  ‘Rosie doesn’t live here any more,’ said Em quietly.

  ‘She’s away at university,’ I added quickly, looking away so neither of them would see the heat that rushed into my cheeks. ‘Manchester.’

  Changing the subject, I asked Frances what she did for a living, even though it was a question I’d come to dread myself. I’d have pegged her for something in media or marketing but it turned out she worked as a business systems analyst for an investment bank called Hepworths. Em made the mistake of asking her what a business systems analyst was and we both spent the next few minutes glazed over, emerging none the wiser. Something to do with computers and data.

  ‘What about you, Tessa?’

  There it was. The reflexive surge of panic that question always induced. I was annoyed at myself for having brought it up.

  ‘I used to edit women’s magazines,’ I began, as I always did. I might as well have had it tattooed across my forehead: I used to be someone.

  ‘And now?’

  ‘I’m a kind of freelance editorial consultant.’

  I didn’t want to get into it. The slow death of print magazines coinciding with me becoming the ‘wrong demographic’: We just feel we need a figurehead who better reflects the readership.

  Younger, is what they meant.

  Now I went into offices to fill maternity cover or to consult on new projects. And the rest of the time I sat at home pitching features to a dwindling number of publications or chatting in private Facebook groups with other dispossessed journalists still lamenting the end of the blank-cheque era and complaining about how rates were going down instead of up and how long it took for invoices to be paid.

  ‘Freelance is good, though, right?’ said Frances. ‘Being your own boss.’ I realized she’d guessed something of my discomfort and a lump formed in my throat at how tactful she was.

  I went to the loo, listening as I climbed the stairs to the low murmur of conversation. It was heartwarming that Em felt so comfortable with Frances, despite an age difference of more than a decade. When I came back into the kitchen, Em was taking a selfie of the two of them on her phone and some muscle that had been tensed inside me relaxed at the sheer normality of it.

  As Frances left, I couldn’t help asking her exactly where she lived. One of the Avenue roads, it turned out. Beautiful, big houses, many of them worth millions, though she was quick to explain theirs had been converted and she and her mum lived in the upstairs flat.

  ‘We used to have a house not far from there,’ I told her. It was my own hubris, of course, wanting her to know we didn’t always live here, in this nondescript terrace in this nondescript street in the no-man’s-land just south of the North Circular, only a mile from our old house, though it might as well be five hundred. ‘Sold it when we got divorced. Em still goes to school around there.’

  ‘Dad still lives in Muswell Hill, though,’ added Em.

  It shouldn’t have hurt. Not after all this time.

  Later, I was watching on my laptop as my parents ate a TV dinner that had been prepared for them earlier by one of the agency care workers when my ringtone startled me. So few people called any more that having to talk to someone live now seemed startlingly exposing.

  It was Detective Byrne.

  ‘You’re working late,’ I said, anticipation fluttering in my stomach. The news that Em’s attacker had been charged and was safely behind bars would be such a boost for Em – and for me.

  ‘Eight p.m.? Believe me, Mrs Hopwood, I wish that counted as late. Anyway, I’m really sorry to have to tell you that we’ve reached a dead end with the case.’

  ‘What?’

  On my screen, my mother speared a boiled potato with her fork and glared at it with the utmost suspicion.

  ‘As you know, resources are really stretched. The only way I managed to get the manpower to track down the CCTV from the bus and then send it around all the different forces was by calling it an attempted abduction rather than an assault. Putting together the identification tape, showing it to witnesses, it all takes time and money. And now Emma hasn’t been able to make an identification.’

  ‘Not officially, but you know afterwards she was sure it was Number Eight.’

  There was a hesitation. Then:

  ‘Unfortunately, we can’t do these things in retrospect, as I’m sure you understand. And since Miss Gates made a false identification, well, we’re at a—’

  ‘Frances made a false identification?’ My voice was shrill, echoing my complete surprise. ‘You mean she picked the wrong guy? But that’s not possible. She described him. I know it was him.’

  Detective Byrne exhaled softly.

  ‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘this is not an exact science. We’re all of us only human. Sometimes our memories play tricks on us, convincing us we saw something that wasn’t there. Or we are so desperate to help we persuade ourselves into something that we’re not a hundred per cent sure of. And sometimes we get it wrong our end. Maybe the guy we captured on the CCTV wasn’t the one who assaulted your daughter. Maybe once he got off the bus he went in the opposite direction to Emma and it was some other opportunistic criminal who just happened to be walking past who followed your daughter.’

  ‘What are the chances of that?’

  ‘At quarter past midnight on a Friday night in inner London? Higher than you might like to think.’

  ‘So that’s it, then?’

  Onscreen, my mother had thrown her potato on the floor. It stared up from the carpet like an eyeball.

  ‘We’re not closing the case, Mrs Hopwood. It’s only that there are no further active lines of inquiry we can pursue. I’m really very sorry. We all wanted to get him for you.’

  Only after he had hung up did it occur to me that I should have corrected him.

  It wasn’t for me. It was for Emma.

  Barely ten minutes later, the phone went again.

  ‘Oh, Tessa, I’m so, so sorry.’

  Frances sounded on the verge of tears.

  ‘Detective Byrne just rang. I feel awful. I didn’t want to tell you this afternoon, but the truth is, when I was in the police station earlier, I was torn between two of the men in the video. I went back and forth between them. Obviously, I chose the wrong one.’

  ‘But you sounded so certain earlier.’

  ‘Because I knew how upset Emma was that she hadn’t been able to identify him. And I wanted to give her some hope, you know? And now I feel like I’ve let you both down.’

  I r
eassured her as best I could and hoped she couldn’t hear the disappointment in my voice.

  I’ve never been good at hiding my feelings.

  Later that evening, while I was doing my best to forget about the collapsed case by scrolling through Rosie’s friends’ Facebook pages on the off chance of seeing a new photo of my elder daughter, my phone pinged with a notification. Frances Gates has sent you a Friend request, the blue-and-white wording said.

  I clicked confirm, touched that Frances wanted to keep in touch.

  Less than a minute later a private message popped into my Facebook inbox.

  I really am so sorry.

  The profile picture was a close-up of Frances that looked to have been cropped from a larger group photo. A suggestion of other people’s sleeves pressing against hers, a stray strand of fair hair on her shoulder.

  It’s okay, Frances. Honest, I wrote.

  But really, it wasn’t. Not at all.

  4

  ‘Everything would be all right, I think, if I could just get some sleep.’

  The locum doctor nodded, but he was looking at his computer screen rather than at me. He was reading the notes from the last GP I saw here, a few weeks ago now, and from the one before that. Each time, a different doctor; each time, the same story told all over again. Not that there was much to differentiate it from all the other stories they must hear in here. I wondered if we became interchangeable in the end, us middle-aged women, with our flushes and our anxieties and our bursting into tears at the supermarket checkout.

  ‘It must be very frustrating, I’m sure, and obviously, if you were a candidate for HRT, that would be something we’d try next, but given your family history … However, perhaps if you tried to reframe how you view the menopause?’

  ‘Reframe?’

  ‘Try not to view it as a collection of unpleasant physical symptoms and accept it instead as a natural fact of life that will pass. Surely knowing that every woman goes through the same thing must be some sort of comfort? Strength in numbers, after all!’

  The doctor had a smattering of raised purple bumps on his neck. Despite the wedding band on his left hand, which he touched regularly with the fingers of his right, like a talisman, he didn’t look much older than Rosie.

  And now I’d let myself think of Rosie the tears came.

  The young doctor glanced at me, then back to the screen, as if out of delicacy.

  ‘I’m sure it must seem quite overwhelming sometimes,’ he said, not unkindly. I wondered if the notes he was reading mentioned all the other times I’d fallen apart in front of one or other of his colleagues. Unstable, they might have written. Histrionic, even.

  ‘Have you tried talking to friends?’ the doctor suggested, as if this possibility might have somehow slipped my mind. ‘I know there’s still a stigma and sometimes women are embarrassed to bring it up but …’

  I let out a noise that wasn’t very attractive.

  ‘I assure you, the hard part is getting my friends to shut up about it.’

  He tried to give me a new prescription for temazepam, but I told him I’d stopped taking it. I could still hear the unspoken judgement in Detective O’Connell’s voice on the night of the attack, five weeks before, when he’d said I’d seemed out of it. That list of seventeen missed calls viewed through a sleeping-pill fug.

  The GP surgery was in Muswell Hill, near our old house.

  Phil had suggested at one point I might prefer to find a doctor closer by. ‘You’re supposed to inform them when you move postcode,’ he’d said sanctimoniously.

  He thought it was healthier for me to break all the links with our old life and move on. Start again, as he’d done.

  I’d stayed more out of spite than loyalty to a practice that had always seemed a bit impersonal. He’d taken everything else. He did not get to keep the lacklustre GP.

  My journey home took me past Phil’s house.

  Well, that’s not entirely accurate. One possible route home took me past his house and, although it was longer and I knew it wasn’t good for me, I still took it because, sometimes, you can’t help ripping the corner off a scab, despite knowing it isn’t entirely healed. Sometimes, a clean, sharp pain can take your mind off a low-level, festering one.

  There was an overhanging bush on the pavement opposite and I paused underneath it, my phone out as if I were checking it.

  Phil’s house wasn’t exactly his house. It belonged to his ‘girlfriend’, which was a term that always made me laugh because there was nothing girly about Joy. Apart from her name, maybe.

  When we’d sold our family home and divided up what was left after the monster mortgage was paid off, the plan was that we’d each have enough to buy a small place in the area where I live now. Fair, and easy for the kids, we decided.

  Except afterwards, Phil maintained I’d decided that all on my own in my head, while he’d been non-committal. I’d heard what I wanted to hear, he said, as ever refusing to countenance any narrative outside my own. In the end, that was what convinced him he was doing the right thing, he told me later, the fact that there had been two of us in our marriage but, even in the dismantling of it, I’d managed to make it all about me.

  I’d gone ahead and bought my place, my head in such a state I shouldn’t have been allowed to choose the next Netflix movie, let alone a house.

  And then Phil had moved in with her. Joy. Into her house, just a few roads away from our old one, this red-brick villa with its extra-wide front door with the stained-glass panels and its deep bay window with the plantation shutters, and the black-and-white tessellated front path and the wisteria and the fucking brass welly cleaner. My life had imploded, but nothing changed for him.

  Only the face on the pillow next to him.

  There was a movement in the top window. A flash of fair hair that was gone in a nanosecond. Rosie? I shrank back into the shadow under the bush and stared and stared, my heart racing. But nothing.

  I moved off down the road, my chest tight, as if someone had sewn a line of stitches through the middle of it, cutting off the air.

  Rosie would be at university. It wouldn’t be her. It would be one of Joy’s anodyne twins with their long, shiny hair and netball-player legs.

  Even so, every step hurt.

  Safely two streets away, I stopped and fumbled in my bag for my glasses so I could text Kath, trying to make myself forcibly normal again. In Muzzie. 12-year-old GP tried to ply me with drugs but I said no, no, no.

  The answer pinged back almost immediately. I imagined Kath at her desk in Pimlico at the head office of the housing association where she is chief press officer, surrounded by people half her age who’d do her job for half the salary. I knew she’d be desperate for a distraction.

  Excellent work. Now listen carefully. DO NOT GO NEAR EVIL PHIL’S HOUSE. Do not pass go. Do not collect £200. Understood? In other news, LOOK!!!

  There followed a screenshot from a phone app. Even before I magnified it, I knew what it was.

  In the 15 days since I stopped drinking I’ve saved £120 and lost 5lb in weight.

  I sighed.

  Ever since Kath signed up to NoMoreDrinking.com, she’d become horribly evangelical.

  I don’t recognize you any more, I texted back.

  That’s because I’ve lost 5lb and bought a whole new wardrobe with all the £££s I’ve saved.

  I replaced my phone and specs and set off, feeling calmer. I’d always valued my friends but, in the last couple of years, since everything started going wrong, I’d come to depend on them more than ever.

  The thing was, these days, all of us had bad stuff in one way or another. Kath’s adored older brother dropped dead of a heart attack three years ago while training for his first ever marathon. Our other university friend, Mari, who hadn’t long completed the painfully slow process of becoming a fully-fledged grief counsellor, found herself very nearly having to counsel herself after her oldest son attempted suicide. Drugs-related, it turned out. He’s fine n
ow, thank God, but those things leave a mark.

  Even seemingly perfect Nita, the one school mum I was still in contact with, hadn’t got through fifty completely unscathed. The last time I saw her she told me her mum had been diagnosed with aggressive inoperable liver cancer and given just months to live.

  What I’m saying is, bad stuff came with the territory.

  On my way home, I called into the garden centre. Not that my house had much of a garden. More like a yard with a fence around it. As it faced north-east, the yard got no direct sunlight during the winter months so the concrete flags were green and slippery with algae, while summer days saw us migrating southwards as the day progressed, chasing the sun, ending up flattened against the back fence by five forty-five, when it disappeared altogether.

  What our yard needed was lots of big, colourful pots with big, colourful plants in them, I decided. Or maybe I could deck it in sections and lay down lots of that purple slate that was so popular.

  In the event, I wandered aimlessly around, stroking the leaves of plants whose names I didn’t know and baulking at the price of the giant, colourful pots. I saw some bedding flowers I liked the look of, then realized I had no way of getting them home. I bought some seeds instead, which I knew would simply join the other packets in the kitchen drawer.

  Em was at home when I got in. There was a time, not so long ago, when she was hardly ever home, always out with friends, or at the library revising, or at any number of after-school activities or else staying with her father. ‘Hello, stranger,’ I’d say when I encountered her by the kettle or on the landing. On the rare occasions where she had an evening free, I felt like I’d won an unexpected prize.

  But in the weeks since the attack, particularly the last week, since the case collapsed, she’d been at home more often than not, coming directly back from school, rarely going out, apart from to drama club or to her dad’s. And rather than being pleased to have her with me, I worried about what her near-constant presence meant.

  ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ I asked her as we sat together at the kitchen table over a cup of tea.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said, rolling her eyes good-naturedly – it was far from the first time I’d asked her.