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‘Can I get you anything, darling?’

It’s seven o’clock and Catherine hasn’t eaten, but all she wants to do is lie down in a dark room and go to sleep. She feels sick and her head is throbbing. ‘Actually, Mum, I think I’ve got a migraine coming on. Do you mind if I lie down? I’m sure it’ll go in a bit.’

Her mother cocks her head and her smile morphs into sympathy. ‘I used to get headaches at your age,’ she says.

Catherine walks into the only bedroom in the flat, and puts her case by the bed her father once slept in. Two single beds pushed together. Then she remembers her mother now sleeps in her father’s bed, nearer the door, nearer the loo, so she takes her mother’s old bed. There’s a dirty, dark patch at the end of the quilt where the cat has been sleeping. She undresses down to her underwear, gets into bed and closes her eyes. She needs to sleep. If she can sleep she might be able to think more clearly, maybe start making sense of what is happening to her life.

She hears the slow shuffle of her mother’s slippers on the carpet coming closer. She hears a glass of water being put down on the bedside table, and the click of plastic and tinfoil. She opens her eyes and sees her mother standing over her, two pills in her outstretched hand. She might not know what day of the week it is, but she hasn’t forgotten the impulse to care for a poorly child.

‘Thanks, Mum,’ Catherine whispers, and swallows the pills, closing her eyes again.

For hours Catherine lies in the dark, listening to her mother’s loneliness: a small supper being prepared and eaten on a tray in front of the TV, which talks to itself. Her mother’s voice answering the phone, suddenly bright and cheerful, putting on its own show:

‘Oh, I’m absolutely fine. Catherine’s here. Lovely surprise, yes. Robert’s away. Yes, he’s in America again …’ All plausible, until Catherine hears her tell the caller that Nicholas is fine at home with the nanny. ‘Such a lovely girl …’

Oh we’re all so good at covering up. Pretending everything’s absolutely lovely. Her mother’s just not as agile at it any more, slipping in and out of time-frames, giving herself away. Catherine drifts into sleep, the television chirruping away in the next room.

She wakes to silence and darkness and turns over to look at the mound of her mother’s body in the next bed. She is lying on her back with her mouth open, the skin on her face hanging from its bones. It is how she will look when she is dead. Catherine studies her, overwhelmed with the sadness of things lost: her childhood, her child’s childhood; her mother’s strength and her belief, once, that her mother’s love had given her the strength to overcome anything. Her belief that she had absorbed that strength into her bones – an armour. She needs to talk, she needs to tell someone. It is too much to hold in any more.

‘Mum …’

Her mother stirs a little, her eyelids flicker.

‘Mum, something happened …’

Her mother’s eyes stay closed. That’s when Catherine tells her everything she has been unable to tell Robert. Out it comes. Her shame, her guilt. All of it. Her mother is silent. Has she heard? Or has Catherine’s story slipped into her dreams? Yes, perhaps she is dreaming Catherine’s tale. She may remember some of it, who knows, and dismiss it as a dream. To have said it out loud for the first time has helped Catherine, enough at least for her to fall asleep again; a sleep so deep she doesn’t feel her mother reach for her hand in the night and hold it for a while, then give it a little squeeze.

35

Summer 2013

Everything I do now is with Nancy’s blessing. I feel more certain of that when I wear her cardigan; all the years she wore it have absorbed into the wool. It is a constant, although a little out of shape from where I have stretched it around me. I wear a hat of hers too, one that she knitted. There are strands of hair still in it, her DNA snuggling up against mine. It takes me back to a time when we were as close as any two people could be: how we were when we first met, before Jonathan, before she became a mother. When it was just the two of us. I feel as if it is the two of us again. Collaborators. Co-authors. Our book, not only Nancy’s.

It was me who gave it a name. We always helped each other out if we were stuck for titles and I could almost hear her clap her hands together and say, ‘Yes, that’s it!’ when I came up with
The Perfect Stranger.
The ending is mine too. Nancy had come up with a different end, a little more subtle perhaps, but I decided that for the book to make an impact on its first reader we needed something stronger. It was me who killed the mother off.

Still, it was Nancy who did the hard graft. I try not to think too often of her sitting alone in Jonathan’s flat, writing, staring at the photographs and discovering the truth about why our son was driven to save that child. She succeeded in filling in the haziness surrounding his death and making sense of its senselessness. I’m sure it kept her going, gave her a reason to get up in the morning, as it had me. It was only when she had finished that she allowed the cancer to take hold. That’s why she didn’t call on me during that period: the book was enough for her.

My local bookshop has sold quite a few copies, according to Geoff, and several have gone in Catherine Ravenscroft’s nearest bookshop too. Not as many, but a few. It gives me a small thrill to know there are strangers out there who dislike her, that I am gathering my forces and widening the net. Softly, softly we creep up behind her. More and more of us.

36

Summer 2013

Even without looking at the numbers, Catherine guesses which house is his. It’s the house you’d love to walk right past without stopping, but this house meets Catherine’s eye and calls to her, like the phlegmy growl of a homeless drunk on the Charing Cross Road.

This house is blind, its windows thick with dirt. The paintwork, so new and pleasing on the houses either side, is scabby and peeling. The garden is being strangled by bindweed, though there’s one valiant rose bush, blushing pink, rebellious, which Catherine can smell as she walks up the path – its sweet scent defying the savagery around it. Her knock echoes down the street. There’s no answer and there’s no bell, so she bangs again, harder this time. She crouches down and pushes the letterbox. Its flap stays open, no metal basket on the other side to catch letters, straight through to the house. She sees a pair of shoes near the door, scuffed and dirty, and a coat hanging over a chair.

‘Hello. Mr Brigstocke. Please open the door. It’s Catherine Ravenscroft.’

She is determined and yet she hears a tremor in her voice. She tries again.

‘Please. I know you’re there. Open the door. We must talk about what happened.’

The house stays exactly where it is and so does Catherine, watching for the slightest movement. He has poisoned Robert against her – driven her from her home. The least he can do is look her in the eye and listen to what she has to tell him.

‘Mr Brigstocke. Please open the door. Nothing you do to me is going to bring Jonathan back. Please. I have a right to be heard.’

The door stays closed. She calls the number Kim had given her. She hears the phone ring inside. A voice answers.
We are not at home at the moment …
A woman’s voice. Nancy Brigstocke. She can’t leave a message with a dead woman. She needs to see him, needs to make him listen, needs to make him stop. She is sure he is in there. She crouches down, pushing her arm through the letterbox as far as it can go. It is slender, so, up to her elbow. She twists it, trying to reach the latch, but she can’t and withdraws it. She puts her face to the letterbox again.

‘I know you have my number. Call me – speak this time. I want to talk about Jonathan. I deserve to be heard, Mr Brigstocke.’ She stays on all fours, her forehead resting against the door. She hears the tinny distortion of a radio coming from further up the street and glances round to see a parked van, windows wound down, two builders sitting eating their lunch. She turns back to the door and decides that perhaps he isn’t in after all, so dials the number again, and this time leaves a message.

37

Summer 2013

It was as if she’d sent a sightless serpent through our letterbox. We watched its blind head sniffing the air, trying to smell us out, stretching to reach the latch – trying to break in. I should have taken an axe to her. But I’m mixing my daemons here. She is more Siren than Medusa. We heard the evil in her voice trying to lure us to the door then singing through the telephone. She wants us to listen, does she? She wants to talk, does she? She has something to say. Well, it’s too late for that. We haven’t got the stomach to witness her bleeding heart – or her husband’s, for that matter.

He’s become quite a pest, leaving messages on the site for
The Perfect Stranger
, desperate to make up for lost time, desperate to meet us. He believed we were still ‘us’, still Mr and Mrs, until I emailed him and broke the news that my wife had died some years ago; Jonathan was our only son; she never recovered from his loss. It’s pitiful, poor man. I think he is well aware that he is an incidental character in this story. I have no interest in meeting him, but I am happy to answer his questions when I can. ‘Why now?’ was simple. The truth was enough. The discovery of my wife’s writings and the photographs and realizing that for years she had protected me from knowing that the little boy Jonathan lost his life for was not a stranger; that my son had been intimate with his mother. Our emails have been gratifying. His reveal evidence of his disgust for his wife and the pains he is taking to distance himself from her;
unforgivable, shameful cruelty
, he is grateful for finally
knowing the truth
and he is
hoping for some kind of reconciliation.
His language is that of a committee member addressing the wrongdoings of an evil dictatorship.

I expressed my sorrow at the hurt and shock I must have caused him by sending him the book and photographs and also my regret that I had left a copy for his son at work.
I was out of my mind
, I told him.
As if I was reliving the loss of Jonathan and Nancy all over again.
I hoped he could at least try to understand my grief. And I believe he has, never questioning me over Nancy’s portrayal of his wife as a sexual predator. He has joined ranks with us against her.

Nancy comes up behind me and whispers in my ear. She finds his entreaties tedious and is impatient to see Jonathan again, so I pop him back up on the screen. He is still a work-in-progress, but he is almost complete. We’ve enjoyed picking out photographs: Jonathan on his eighteenth birthday, the camera we gave him hanging around his neck; Jonathan with his new backpack shortly before he set off for Europe; Jonathan smiling, handsome, on a beach somewhere in England – but it could be anywhere, so we’ll say it’s France, the first leg of his journey. His favourite books – we still have them on our bookshelves – up they go. And music, that’s important, that’s a must. His taste is a bit last century, but that’s ‘cool’ these days – shows he has depth, knows his stuff. We have kept him a teenager – we haven’t allowed him to sink into middle age. He is forever young, forever on his gap year, about to start at university. He still hasn’t decided where. Bristol? Manchester? All he needs are a few friends – and a best friend, we must give him that. Friends will make him appear more solid, more bona fide.

Geoff has been a great help in our project. We met up again a few weeks ago. He accompanied me to an event at our local bookshop where I had been invited to do a reading from my book. They are very keen, as Geoff said, to promote local authors. It was, I’m sorry to say, a rather pitiful affair. Me, standing by a small display of books, with only a handful of people turning up to listen to an old man who had published his first novel. The wine was cheap, the crisps were stale and I couldn’t wait for it to be over. It was an ordeal. My voice cracked and I found it hard to get the words out: they lodged in my throat and tripped me up. Even though I knew I should try to make eye contact with my audience, I found myself incapable of looking up from the page. I was uncomfortable being looked at. No, I didn’t like being in the spotlight.

Geoff and I escaped to the pub as soon as we could. He felt guilty for putting me through it. It was his idea, after all. I think he had underestimated how hard it would be for an elderly man who had become unused to socializing to be on display like that.

‘Geoff,’ I said. ‘Forget about it.
I
have.’ And I picked up his empty pint and took it to the bar. When I returned with the drinks I put my hand on his, in a fatherly way. ‘You have been a good friend to me,’ I said. ‘If it wasn’t for you, my book wouldn’t even have been in that bookshop. And if it wasn’t for your encouragement I wouldn’t have had the heart to start another novel.’ This got him going.

‘Stephen, that’s great. What’s it about?’

‘I haven’t worked out the story yet, but I have a character in my head. I can see him, I can hear him,’ I chuckled as I tapped the side of my head. He was in there all right. ‘I’m still at the research stage and I wondered whether you might be able to help me with something. I know you’ve already given me a lot of your time, so I don’t like to ask …’

‘No, no, it’s fine. Ask away.’

So I did. I told him the character was a teenage boy and that, although I felt confident with the characterization after all my years in teaching, it was the techie stuff I was having difficulty with.

‘I want to create a Facebook page for him. A real one …’

‘You mean a fake one. A fake page? For a fictional character?’

‘Ummm,’ I nodded, taking a sip of my beer.

He didn’t say anything. I could hear the cogs turning: old man, teenage boys, fake Facebook page. If I say it myself, I think I handled his misgivings with agility.

‘He’s not the main character, it’s actually the grandfather I want to focus on and his relationship with this boy, but still, I need to understand a bit more about the world these kids disappear into when they go online. I mean, look …’ I pointed over to a table of youngsters: drinks on the table, cigarettes standing by, faces ready to break into laughter. All normal. It could have been a scene from any decade, except they weren’t speaking. There was no conversation. They weren’t even looking at each other. Their eyes were down, on their phones, like a bunch of old ladies checking their bingo cards.