by Tammy Cohen
‘Hello, Grandma!’ Em shouted, struggling to be heard over the sound of the television. She went over and put her arms around her grandmother and I was struck all over again by the contrast between my daughter, rude with health and the power she didn’t yet know she possessed, and my shrinking mother, with her papery skin that always seemed like it would crumble to powder if you pressed too hard, like a moth’s wings.
My father insisted on making the tea, which meant the drinks arrived with a grey scum floating on the top. I don’t think I breathed the entire time it took him to walk from the kitchen to the living room with two steaming cups in his unsteady hands.
While we drank, I was conscious of the monitor fixed in the corner of the ceiling, winking red. For a moment, it amused me to think of a parallel me opening up my laptop back in London and watching us all politely sipping our scummy drinks. Then an image flashed through my mind of James Stephens, breaking in and creeping along the narrow hallway, opening up my laptop, spying on me, and I felt weak with dread.
How much could he have found out about me from my Facebook page?
Did he know where I lived?
‘Are you feeling unwell, Tessie?’ my father asked over the top of Midsomer Murders. ‘You’re looking very pale.’
‘No, I’m fine, Dad. Honest. Just a bit tired. I don’t sleep terribly well.’
‘I never sleep,’ announced my mum. ‘Up all night long, while he’ – she jerked a thumb in my father’s direction – ‘slumbers like a baby.’
Dad rolled his eyes. ‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ he said under his breath, and we exchanged a small smile. ‘But seriously, Tess, what you need is fresh air. Take that dog of yours out a bit more often. That’ll sort you out.’
As my father detailed his other failsafe methods of getting to sleep – no tea after 4 p.m., in bed directly after the ten o’clock news – I scanned his face, noting the violet shadows under his eyes and the deep lines that went down from the corner of his mouth like those on a ventriloquist’s dummy. Had those always been there?
When he took our cups back into the kitchen I followed him.
‘How are you, Dad? Really?’
He opened his mouth as if he was about to reply, ‘Fine,’ as he always did. But then he closed it again and wiped a hand across his face.
‘I’m tired,’ he said finally, and something inside me caved in. I’d never heard him sound so defeated.
‘Is it time to consider other alternatives?’ I said gently. ‘Dr Ali said he’d recommend some good nursing homes when the time came. I could come with you to look at them.’
My father sighed then pulled back his shoulders and straightened up.
‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘If you’d asked me yesterday when she didn’t know who I was and kept shouting for help, I might have said yes. But just look at her today. It’s almost like the old Judy is back. I can’t do it to her.’
‘But you have to think of yourself too. Your own health.’
‘I shall be all right. Don’t worry about me.’
I cooked lunch from ingredients I’d bought at the Sainsbury’s in town, a fish pie that Mum looked at with suspicion and refused to eat until I fed it to her a spoonful at a time.
I washed up afterwards while Dad and Em played Scrabble in the living room and Mum dozed in her chair. Once again I found myself thinking about Stephens and what he might have been able to discover from my Facebook page.
I tried to reason with myself. I was sure I’d never had to give an address to Facebook, so there was no way Stephens could have found out where I lived. So all he had really was a name, a photograph, a job description and a list of my friends. Nothing that could lead him to us.
I wiped my hands on my jeans, got out my phone and googled Tessa Hopwood, journalist. Pages of results came up and I scanned through, feeling weak with relief when I saw that after the top result, which was my own website, they were almost all links to features I’d written for various publications or quotes from me when I was still an editor and people still cared what I thought. Nothing that gave away my address.
I picked up the brush to resume washing up but stopped, pan in hand, when something else occurred to me.
If he’d been able to access my biographical details in the ‘about’ section, he’d have seen links to Rosie and Emma, who were listed as my daughters. But what would he see if he looked up their biographical details?
I fished out my phone again, my hands still soapy, and clicked on Rosie’s Facebook page. She’d unfriended me ages ago, but I could still view her public profile. To my relief I saw that the entire biographical section was blank. Good girl. Now Emma.
Like her sister, she’d added only sparse personal details, but my heart stalled as I saw that under ‘current home town’ she’d put Bounds Green, N22.
With unsteady fingers, I called up Google again, this time typing in ‘Tessa Hopwood journalist N22’. The first entry was from Companies House. My accountant had persuaded me to register myself as a limited company the previous year. And here was my entry, Tessa Hopwood Ltd, with myself as director.
Followed by our full address. How ironic that the thing that had first led me to James Stephens might be the very thing that now led him to me.
My mouth felt suddenly sandpaper dry, and for a moment my parents’ kitchen blurred as my mind emptied.
He knew where I lived.
He knew where Emma lived.
‘Penny for them,’ said my father, coming into the kitchen.
I shoved my phone into my pocket and turned back to the sink.
‘Oh, it’s just work.’
I took a deep breath in and let it out slowly. There was nothing to say Stephens had made those connections. He didn’t seem like the type who spent a lot of time online. Those biographical details weren’t on the first page you came to. You had to click a couple of times to get to them. It probably wouldn’t even occur to him to see what was on there, much less to follow it up. As a journalist, it was second nature for me to dig around and follow up all leads, but most people wouldn’t bother.
Finally, I felt calmer, my pulse no longer racing. I was overreacting. Increased anxiety was an age-related thing, the twelve-year-old GP had informed me with regret that last time I’d visited the surgery and tried to explain how, sometimes, in the dead, still hours of the early morning I listened to my heart racing and it sounded like the drumming of distant horse’s hooves. Lots of women in their fifties experienced it, he said. Had I tried yoga?
Menopause: the gift that kept on giving.
Later, we went for a walk. My mother allowed me to put on her coat and her new scarf then looked at me coyly from under her lashes, asking: ‘Are you taking me out somewhere?’ as if I were some long-distant beau. We walked around the beautiful university park, lingering on the bridge over the river, where, in a different lifetime, my mum used to play Pooh sticks with the girls.
As we walked over the lawn my phone beeped with a message alert.
It was an email that had been sent via my website. The address was unfamiliar, a series of seemingly random letters and numbers. But the image that filled my screen when I clicked on the message was anything but. A photo of the front of our house with Dotty framed in the window, looking over the back of the sofa, observing the goings-on in the street, as she often did when we were away from home.
The message was short, written in bold capitals:
PEEKABOO
16
‘Were you threatened at all?’
‘Well, no, not in so many words.’
‘And was the photograph taken from inside your garden gate – on your property, if you like?’
‘No, from the street.’
I could hear a loud tapping, as if the woman on the other end of the line was hitting the keys of a computer as I spoke.
‘Okay, well, what I can do is log your report, so there’s a record of it, and if you have any further communication, take a note of it, date and time
and that sort of thing, and if anything else happens where a concrete threat is made to you or to your daughter, you get back in touch with us. All right?’
‘So you can’t trace the IP address?’
‘Not unless there’s been a credible threat made, no.’
‘But, like I told you, I’m pretty sure I know who sent the photograph – the guy who attacked my daughter. And if you could just trace the IP address, I could prove it was him.’
‘I’m afraid it’s not as easy as that. Data protection means the providers won’t give us that kind of information without a court order. So a crime would have to have been committed. And I’m sorry to say, if someone has gone to the trouble of making an anonymous account, they would more than likely use a public computer anyway, like in a library, that sort of thing. So the IP address would be next to useless anyway.’
I hung up and sat for a moment with my head in my hands as frustration fizzed along my nerves.
Twenty-five minutes I’d been on hold to the 101 non-emergency number, and all for nothing.
I rang Frances. To tell the truth, I didn’t much feel like talking to anyone, but I’d told her I’d get back to her once I’d called the police.
‘There’s nothing they can do,’ I told her. ‘Not without any overt threat. And even then I get the feeling it would have to amount to major harassment for them to take action.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. But look, all you can do now is put it out of your head. I mean, there was no sign of damage when you arrived home, was there? He’s just trying to spook you, that’s all.’
‘I know you’re right, but I keep jumping out of my skin every time someone walks past the house.’
It was Frances I’d called from Oxford station earlier on having sent Em off in search of cappuccinos. There’d been a moment where I dithered about calling Kath or Mari instead. The two of them had always been the ones I’d turn to first in any crisis. But then I’d have had to own up to sending Stephens those messages online and following him to the club in Peckham, and I couldn’t face having to go through it, knowing they’d warned me to keep clear of him. Couldn’t face admitting to that shameful moment in the toilets, his pregnant girlfriend’s face crumpling. Mari’s voice in my ears: Oh, Tessa!
So I’d called Frances, because, out of everyone, she would understand. And she’d made me promise to call Detective Byrne when I got home. But even after I’d got into the house, my fingers fumbling with the key in the lock, fearing I might find the place ransacked or, even worse, Stephens waiting inside, having somehow broken in, I’d still had to wait a couple of hours for Emma to go up to her room, so she wouldn’t overhear. And then Detective Byrne hadn’t answered his mobile and when I called his office number he hadn’t been there, and the man I’d spoken to had interrupted my rambling explanation to tell me to call 101 if I wanted to report harassment.
And now it was nearly nine o’clock in the evening and it had all been a waste of time.
After saying goodbye to Frances I got out my laptop and called up the message again. That photo of my house still shocking in its incongruous familiarity. I studied it, searching for clues. There were the tops of car roofs just visible in the lower part of the picture, so he must have been standing on the other side of the road when he took it.
I walked to the window and stared out over the low wall that separated our front garden from the pavement, then over the cars parked on either side of the road. The house opposite, which was occupied by an ever-changing cast of Polish labourers, was plunged into darkness, apart from one window at the top that was lit by a greenish flickering light like an eye winking.
17
The dating site Kath had signed me up for notified me every time I had a new message, and even though I kept vowing not to click on them I always gave in, with predictably negative effects on my self-esteem.
‘I’m sure they’re probably very nice people when you get to know them,’ I told Mari when she called for an update, ‘but really, if I want to hang out with octogenarians I’ll just visit my dad. Again.’
Though it at least took my mind off Stephens and the anonymous email, you could say my expectations were scraping-the-bottom low. So I was taken aback when, a couple of days after the trip to Oxford, I clicked grudgingly on the link to my profile page and found a message from a man in his early fifties who didn’t begin by listing his achievements or all the ways the women in his life had let him down but simply told me his name was Nick and he was a university lecturer. One ex-wife. One ex-stepson. Originally from Edinburgh, he now lived in west London and he wasn’t expecting stars and rainbows, just hoping to meet someone interesting to have a laugh with over dinner, or go to see movies with and be able to talk about them afterwards.
I peered at the thumbnail photo then enlarged it as much as I could. A handsome face, with lively eyes set into lightly tanned skin, and plentiful dark hair, turning silver at the temples. Well-cut blue suit worn with a crisp white shirt. If you asked a random person to put together an identikit of a middle-aged woman’s fantasy boyfriend, he’d pretty much be it.
It was probably taken years ago, I told myself. But no, at the end of the message, he apologized for his formal attire, explaining that the picture had been taken at his mother’s eightieth birthday party the previous year.
I dashed off a reply before I had a chance to talk myself out of it. Non-committal. The barest biographical facts about me then more questions about him. Like how, when he seemed perfectly normal, had he ended up on a dating site? And why, come to think of it, was I here too?
Within minutes, I had a response. It was, Nick told me, a matter of logistics. He had met someone lovely through the normal channels, but it was too soon after his divorce and he wasn’t in the right head space for a new relationship. The break-up had been bitter, he said. His wife had got back together with her first husband, an old friend of Nick’s, informing Nick she’d only really married him on the rebound. She’d moved back to their home town, taking her young son, whom Nick had raised as his own, with her. Nick hadn’t reacted well, and for a long time afterwards he felt poleaxed by loss. Then, by the time he’d dealt with his demons and was ready to start dating (wasn’t that a terrible word, he asked? Like we were school-age again?), the lovely woman had got engaged to someone else and he hadn’t found anyone else who came close.
Logistics are a bastard, I wrote back. That’s why my social life mostly consists of sitting on my sofa watching Masterchef with the dog. The logistics of being in the right place at the right time to meet the right man are so complicated at my age, it’s easier to stay put. Plus, the dog is pretty good company. As long as she hasn’t been eating the remains of our curry again. In which case, wide berth.
I asked him how often he saw his stepson, who he’d obviously loved immensely. I don’t, came the reply. The divorce was brutal. Lots of regrettable things said and done on both sides. But that’s a conversation for another time.
We messaged back and forth a few times, me flicking between my profile page on the dating site and the piece I was writing for a women’s lifestyle website on whether middle-aged women were the true activists of the twenty-first century. I had been really enjoying writing the feature, which tapped into many of my own personal experiences and those of my friends, but now I found myself distracted, and I was annoyed to find my heart was fluttering every time Nick’s name appeared in my inbox.
‘Idiot,’ I said out loud.
I decided to take Dotty for another walk. Who knew, perhaps my father was right and the fresh air would miraculously cure my insomnia? I took my shopping bag so I could kill two birds with one stone and call into Tesco on my way home.
It was one of those unseasonably warm March days that make you start thinking of bagging up your winter jumpers and trying to work out when you last waxed your legs. The exchange with Nick had buoyed me up and everything looked more promising. Even the crisp wrappers on the street and the used mattress leaning up agai
nst the house at the end of our road didn’t dent my mood. It was all part of the vibrancy of living in London, I told myself. The richness of urban life.
With the sun pooling on the paving stones, it was easy to tell myself that the fear I’d felt just two days before, looking out of my front window on to the pavement, where the anonymous photographer had stood, was out of proportion. There was no definitive proof it was Stephens. And even if it was, Frances was right. He was just trying to scare me away. Of course, I worried for Em. But she never came home at night on her own any more, and it wasn’t as if he could keep watch on the house without sticking out like a sore thumb. There were no trees on our road, no overhanging greenery. Besides, the attack on Em had been opportunistic, as had the other crimes he’d been convicted of. Assault. ABH. Stephens just didn’t seem the type, I told myself, to plan ahead.
Dotty and I strolled around the neighbourhood. Up the New River, a man-made waterway that would have been picturesque were it not for the beer cans and used metal canisters of amyl nitrate that littered its banks. There were geese on the river – huge, scary creatures – and I dragged Dotty towards the far side of the path so that she couldn’t antagonize them.
On the high road, I tethered her to the bike rail outside the Tesco Express. I didn’t normally do it. You heard stories about dogs being stolen from outside shops, but Dotty was no expensive pedigree and, besides, the bike rack was just outside the automatic doors, where I could keep an eye on her while I was whizzing around. I only needed a couple of things. Bread and milk, mostly. I’d be out of there in minutes.
But, as usual, I remembered other things as I was going around. Dishwasher tablets, those energy bars Em really liked. And then I had to take the baked beans back to exchange them when I realized I’d picked up the ones with those hideous mini-sausages in them by mistake. And there was only one person on the tills, so the queue stretched back along the soft-drinks aisle. All the time, I was checking on Dotty regularly. Each time I looked, there she was, staring at the doors.
