by Tammy Cohen
Frances and I were squashed into a corner of the crowded Peckham pub, sharing a table with three lads in matching Joe’s Ho’s T-shirts who had managed to escape from the rest of their stag group and were lying low, hoping not to be found. They kept boasting about the excesses of the day and then shooting glances at Frances, trying to gauge if they’d impressed her.
She was wearing a patterned silk long-sleeved top with tight-fitting jeans and boots. I’d told her we should try to blend in, but we both knew that was unlikely. I was also wearing jeans, teamed with a grey T-shirt and trainers. In the safety of my own bedroom, I’d thought it looked cool in a low-key, not-trying kind of way, but now I felt dowdy and underdressed. Already I was clammy and hot and was dreading how I’d cope if the club was rammed with people.
Frances pressed her lips together, as if trying to stop herself speaking.
‘What?’ I asked her. ‘I can see you’re worried about something.’
‘It’s just, well, do you think your friends might have a point? We know what this guy is capable of. But unless we catch him in the act of doing it to someone else, there’s not much we can realistically do, is there? Don’t you think you might be upsetting yourself unnecessarily?’
I knew she was right. And yet whenever I thought of my daughter walking to school fearful of shadows or lying in bed in the dark reliving what had happened to her while the man responsible strutted around unscathed, anger lodged in my throat, heavy and dense.
‘I want to get an idea of who he is, how he lives. You know. It’s mad but I feel like if I keep an eye on him, keep tabs on him, I can make sure he never gets near Em again. I’m like the Catcher in the Rye – you know that book? – standing way off on the sidelines just in case someone needs saving.’
It was the truth. But it wasn’t the whole truth.
The real reason for me trekking across London on a cold Thursday night in early March, preparing to go to a sweaty nightclub full of teenagers and twenty-somethings, was to let him, James Stephens, know he hadn’t got away with it, that he’d been seen. Even if I did nothing but stare at him, he’d know there was something amiss.
He’d feel it.
Frances was still looking at me quizzically, so I pushed on, the words coming out in an unrehearsed rush. ‘But what I really want is for him to be gone. Do you know, every time Emma leaves the house, I think, Is this the day? Will she see him today? And if that’s how I feel, God alone knows how she must be feeling.’
‘Have you thought about moving yourself?’ Frances asked. ‘That might be more realistic.’
I shook my head. ‘We can’t afford to. I used up my half of the equity of our old house and most of my redundancy buying the house we’re in. I stretched myself to the limit taking out as big a mortgage as I could get. I don’t have the money to move again – estate agents’ fees, stamp duty, solicitors. Anyway, we’re only just getting over the upheaval of the last move – why should we have to move again, because of him? He’s the one who should leave. I can’t help thinking there must be a way to shame him into it.’
The pub was around the corner from the bar where J-Lo was DJ’ing. When we arrived outside the venue my heart sank. It was smaller than I’d imagined and already jam-packed.
The girl taking money on the door flicked me a questioning glance. I avoided looking at her face in case she was smirking and held out my arm so she could stamp my wrist with a purple star.
Inside, we were hit by a tsunami of noise. An insistent bass that rose up through the floor, passing through the soles of my feet and reverberating through my blood, making my liver and kidneys shake, another conflicting rhythm over the top of it, then someone spitting out words without any discernible melody. And above and beyond the music, the shouting and screaming and screeching of dozens of excited young people high on youth and two-for-one cocktails.
‘I’ve died and gone to hell,’ said Frances in my ear.
Though she wasn’t far off the age of the majority of the clientele, Frances stood out in her silk top with her freshly scrubbed complexion and her expensive leather handbag clutched to her side. I felt a sharp tug of affection mixed with gratitude, seeing how far she was pushing herself out of her comfort zone for a woman she hardly knew.
‘You know, there’s a Chinese proverb that says if you save someone’s life, you’re responsible for them!’ Frances shouted as we squeezed into a gap near the bar.
I must have looked as blank as I felt because she elaborated.
‘That’s how I feel about Emma. I know it’s crazy, but I feel responsible for keeping her safe from that monster.’ She jerked her head in the direction of the dance floor, where a heaving crowd blocked our view of the DJ box just beyond.
A lump formed in my throat.
‘Being responsible for Em is my job,’ I told her, glad that the loud music covered up the cracking of my voice. ‘You’ve done quite enough already. We can never thank you enough.’
Up until that point, neither of us had laid eyes on Stephens, who’d been bent over his decks behind the crowd, but at that moment the music changed and he suddenly shot upright. An electric charge passed through me at the sight of him, the sheer powerful mass of his chest and shoulders, the hard angles of his face.
‘Feel,’ said Frances, holding out one of her surprisingly small hands.
I took it between my own and felt how it was trembling.
‘It’s seeing him,’ she said. ‘It brings it all back, as if it’s happening all over again.’
‘So it is definitely him?’
Of course, I’d known it was all along, I just needed to have it confirmed.
‘Oh, yes.’
Her voice was quiet and her features seemed frozen on to her face. I felt a brief flash of vindication, of which I was immediately ashamed.
I was right. But then I’d known from the start that I was.
For a few moments we both stood, shoulders pressed together, and stared over the heads of the dancers at the figure in the DJ box. He was wearing a white T-shirt, fitted enough for his biceps to strain the fabric. His forearms, one of which he kept raised, jerking it in time to the music, were knotted with muscle under a sleeve of black-and-white tattoos and the skin on his face stretched cling-film tight over his cheekbones.
‘He’s smiling,’ Frances commented, as if she’d imagined his crime somehow precluded him from showing pleasure.
I nodded, my throat too choked to speak.
The noise was a hammer, pounding my sleep-deprived brain until I could no longer think. After half an hour or so, when my head felt ready to explode, Stephens announced he was going to take a twenty-minute break. It was the first time I’d heard him speak. His voice was higher than I’d expected. I imagined how it had sounded in Em’s ear.
Stop, bitch.
Stephens sauntered across the dance floor, high-fiving as he went, as if he was some sort of rock star. By this stage, Frances and I had managed to nab a tiny table and two high stools on the raised section by the bar, from where we had a good vantage point over the rest of the club. At one point during his slow progression, someone tapped him on the shoulder and he swung around furiously, causing Frances to gasp out loud.
‘What is it?’
She put her hand flat against her breastbone and briefly closed her eyes.
‘That gesture. When he turned round like that. It was so exactly what happened after I stopped the car and shouted at him that night. My skin just came up in goosebumps.’
I reached out to pat her arm and was taken aback to find that she was trembling again. How had I forgotten that Emma was not the only victim in this whole thing?
Stephens had reached a table on the edge of the dance floor where five or six twenty-somethings sat behind a barricade of empty glasses and beer bottles. A woman with long dark hair sitting with her back towards us reached out her arm and hooked it around his thick neck, drawing his face close enough for a long, lingering kiss.
Anger scuttled
across my chest on tiny, hard feet.
If she only knew what he was really like. What he was capable of.
The next time I looked over, the dark-haired woman was standing up. I wished she would turn round so I could see her face. I’d bet she was young. He liked them young.
She set off in the direction of the women’s toilets.
‘Just going to the loo,’ I said to Frances, sliding off my stool. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t be long.’
The toilets were downstairs, along a narrow, scruffy corridor, past a closed door with a piece of paper gaffer-taped to it on which someone had felt-tipped ‘DO NOT ENTER’ in uneven letters. As I turned into the corridor, the woman with the dark hair was just disappearing through the door of the ladies’ loo at the end. Though the music was muffled down here, my head was still thumping and the cumulative lack of sleep made me feel curiously disassociated from myself, so I had to rest my fingertips on the wall briefly as I followed in her footsteps, simply to touch something solid.
Inside, miraculously, there was no queue. And no sign of the dark-haired woman.
I went into one of the middle cubicles. On the back of the door someone had drawn a row of five stars and shaded in the one on the far left and written ‘One star. Would not shit here again.’ I slumped down on the loo and put my head in my hands, wishing I was back home.
Then I remembered why I’d come in here in the first place and forced myself back up to standing, the blood rushing to my head. Had I missed her? Exiting the cubicle, I cast my eye anxiously over the row of basins, feeling a rush of relief and adrenaline when I recognized the back of the woman’s dark head at the end, nearest the hand-dryers.
I moved towards her, hoping I could squeeze into the basin next to hers, but there was another woman there, laboriously reapplying her make-up. So instead I went up behind her.
‘Excuse me.’
She glanced up and our eyes met in the mirror. She was older than I thought she’d be. Mid-twenties. Pretty in a very delicate way. Huge brown eyes. A tiny, well-defined mouth. A fragile bird of a woman.
My heart was thudding uncomfortably in my chest. What should I say?
‘The guy you’re with. The DJ. He’s bad news. I just want to warn you. He tried to attack my daughter. He’s dangerous.’
The words fell out in a rush, like dead fish slipping from a net.
Her eyes widened.
‘What’re you talking about?’
And now she turned around.
‘Oh.’
The exclamation came out before I’d had a chance to check it.
‘I’m sorry,’ I stuttered. ‘I didn’t know.’
Then I turned and fled, back along the corridor, heat flooding through me until all my nerves felt like they were on fire.
Back at the table, I snatched up my bag and coat.
‘We have to go,’ I told Frances, shouting to make myself heard.
‘But I haven’t finished my drink.’
‘We have to go. Trust me.’
Down near the dance floor I could see the dark-haired woman arriving back at the table. She looked like she was crying. Stephens leapt to his feet, put his arm around her narrow shoulders. I saw her say something and his head jerked up, the veins on his thick neck raised and angry.
‘Quick!’ I urged Frances, anxiety a sour taste in my mouth.
And now the woman was scanning too, and her eyes locked with mine.
Now she was pointing, and both of them were looking, and I turned and plunged into the bodies that surrounded us, hoping against hope that Frances was behind me. I knew we were a lot nearer the door than Stephens, but he was faster and he knew the layout.
My chest was a tight line as I pushed my way through the crowd, past the woman on the door, who shot me a look as if to say, I could have told you this wasn’t for you, and out on to the street.
To my huge relief, Frances followed on almost immediately after.
‘What?’ she began.
‘Run. I’ll explain everything. Just run.’
We set off down the street, past the queue of people waiting to get into the club. I felt sick with nerves and fear as we pounded along the pavement and turned the first corner, whereupon I pulled Frances into a shop doorway. We leaned against the glass, our hands on our knees, our breath fast and shallow.
‘What’s going on?’
Frances sounded scared and pissed off. And I couldn’t blame her. What an idiot I’d been. What a stupid idiot.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ve made everything worse. I wasn’t thinking straight.’
I told her about the confrontation in the toilet. The woman with the dark hair.
‘Tessa!’ Frances exclaimed, but to my relief she seemed more surprised than angry. ‘You said you only wanted to watch him. Just to see him. That’s all.’
‘I know,’ I said, wretched. ‘But that’s not even the worst thing.’
I had a flashback to the woman’s shocked brown eyes in the mirror, then how she’d turned slowly around. I closed my eyes, remorse and regret flooding my brain until I thought I would drown in them.
‘She’s pregnant.’
13
Everything felt bad.
Since the previous Thursday I’d had a knot in my stomach, tight and fibrous. The broken nights were racked up behind me one after the other and now my brain felt sluggish and my body was coated in a clammy sheen of exhaustion.
Frances had hardly talked to me on the way home from Peckham. She’d said she was tired, but I worried she was angry, and I didn’t blame her. I’d assured her we were only going to observe. Then I’d put us both at risk by not being able to keep my mouth shut.
But worse than that was the memory of Stephens’s girlfriend’s expression in the toilets when she’d turned around, her belly huge under her loose black top.
I imagined Rosie in her place. Pregnant, scared. Out of her depth. And was taken aback by how fierce the urge was to scoop this fragile girl-woman up and protect her. To keep her safe. The odds were already stacked against her, having a baby with a man like that. And now I’d made everything worse.
I tried to put all that out of my mind and focus on finding new cases for the women’s magazine feature I was writing on fresh starts, but my sleep-starved thoughts scattered in all directions like spilled beads and I could not gather them back in.
I’d had several notifications from the internet dating app Kath had signed me up to and I spent fifteen dispiriting minutes sifting through the men who had liked my profile. Kath had already told me to add a decade to any photographs I was sent, but even allowing for that, they were a grizzled lot, most with that look of having been resoundingly beaten by life. Either that or they were brimming over with themselves. A moody photo wearing mirrored sunglasses and leather jacket. An invitation to me to tell them something about myself that would impress them. One looked okay, but then I noticed a line saying he’d joined the site in 2011. If he hadn’t found love in seven years, he must be pretty fussy, I thought. Or else there was something very wrong with him. Either way, I wasn’t interested in finding out.
I clicked off the dating site and logged into Granny-Cam instead. My father was in his chair, pen in hand, filling in a crossword on a neatly folded broadsheet newspaper. My mum was asleep so, for once, the television was off. I zoomed in on her. She looked so young. It was a funny thing about the dementia, that it had erased the care lines and laughter lines that had built up over the years, so that in repose she had the untroubled face of a baby.
Hard to believe that only a few years ago Mum would have been the first person I’d have turned to with my worries about Em. God, what wouldn’t I give, I thought now, to hear her measured, musical voice again with that faint Welsh accent saying, Oh, poor Tessie, but you know … followed by something that would instantly put the world into perspective.
Fifty-two years old and I was missing my mum, even while she was right there in front of my eyes.
My dad
looked at his watch, a gesture that took me right back to childhood, my father’s watch as much a part of him as the wrist it sat on. He got heavily to his feet. When did he start having to lean on the arms of his chair to get up?
I felt a sharp prick of guilt. I knew Dad was finding it harder and harder to look after Mum. For the first time I could remember, he’d rung me the previous day, asking when I could come to visit and when I’d asked him how things were, instead of saying, ‘Fine,’ as he usually did, he’d replied, ‘I’m managing,’ in a gruff voice quite unlike his own. When I’d told him I’d be over at the weekend, he sounded so relieved.
I had to make more time for them, I reprimanded myself, watching him shuffle out of the room, straightening slowly as he went. For a few seconds I watched my sleeping mother. So peaceful. I imagined that she was her old self, nodding off in the evening in front of the television but refusing to go to bed. ‘I was never asleep,’ she’d protest when she was nudged awake, and Rosie and Emma would quiz her on what had happened in the TV programme over the last five minutes.
All of that gone now.
She was clearly dreaming, her eyes flickering beneath the latex-thin membrane of her eyelids. As I watched, she called out, something unintelligible, and Dad came to the door. He had his insulin pen in his hand, as if he’d just extracted it from the drawer. My father’s diabetes had been such a fixture in my life since I was a teenager I no longer even registered what an odd thing it must be to inject yourself three times a day every day of your life. Like his watch, it was part of what made my dad himself.
For a moment he watched my mother, frowning behind his wire-framed glasses. Then, seemingly reassured, he ducked out of the room again. Without warning, I was so flooded with love for them both it seemed possible I might drown.
Dotty was sitting by my feet, gazing up at me hopefully. ‘Come on, then, silly old thing.’
I didn’t have a plan when we set out, but my feet took me up to Muswell Hill and I didn’t have a good enough reason to make them go in some other direction.
