The Watcher (2 page)

While she was trying to open the compact, unsuccessfully, she suddenly started to cry. There was nothing spectacular about how it happened. The tears just trickled out of her eyes and she could not stop them. She raised her head in disgust and saw a face she did not know – a face that had now become a crying face. That made her turmoil complete. How was she to go back to the room with fat, red, swollen eyes?

Almost in a panic, she tore a whole bundle of silky-soft tissues from the silver dispenser on the wall and tried to stem her flood of tears. But it almost seemed as though the effort to stop them only made them flow all the more strongly. They just did not stop.

I have to go home, she thought. There’s nothing for it, I have to leave!

And as if everything was not bad enough already, now she heard a noise behind her. The door leading to the hall opened. High heels clacked on the marble floor. Liza could see the blurred outline of a figure through her tears. A woman who was crossing the room towards the toilets. She pressed the tissues to her face to make it look as though she were blowing her nose.

Hurry up, she thought, go away!

Suddenly the footsteps stopped. For a short instant there was complete silence in the room. Then the stranger turned around and went over to Liza, putting a hand on her gently trembling shoulder. Liza lifted her head and looked at the woman in the mirror. A face full of concern. Enquiring eyes. She did not know the woman, but judging by what she was wearing, Liza guessed she was there for the birthday party too.

‘Can I help?’ she asked. ‘Don’t think you have to talk to me, but . . .’

The warmth and concern audible in the calm voice were too much for Liza to bear. She lowered the tissues.

Then she surrendered to her pain and stopped trying to staunch the flood of her tears.

It was late on Sunday evening when Carla was first conscious of a peculiar thing about the lift and its doors. At that point she did not have long to live, but her powers of imagination could not let her see what would happen to her that night.

She sat in her flat, somewhat puzzled, because suddenly she was certain about what had been going on for a few days now. The lift would come up to her floor, the eighth, and stop; the doors would open automatically, but then nothing further would happen. No one got out; she would have heard their footsteps in the corridor. Nor did anyone get in; she would have heard footsteps beforehand. She was sure there had been none. If there had been, she would have registered them on some level of consciousness. The building was not good at muffling sounds. It was a seventies tower block, a rather unadorned block with long corridors and many flats. Families lived in the larger flats and the smaller flats were inhabited by singles who worked the whole time and were almost never home. Hackney was one of the poorer boroughs of London, but the area where Carla lived was not all that bad.

She tried to remember when she had first heard the lift come up without hearing anyone step out of it. Of course that happened occasionally, and had happened since she moved there. If someone pressed the wrong button, realised their mistake and got out at a lower floor, the lift would still make the journey to the top floor, open its doors, then close them again and wait until it was called to another floor. But recently it had been happening more often. Unusually often.

Perhaps in the last week? Perhaps in the last fortnight?

She turned the television off. The talk show on TV right now did not interest her anyway.

She went to the flat’s front door and opened it. She pressed the light switch right beside her doorbell, bathing the corridor in a harsh white light. Who had decided on these lights? They gave your skin a deathly pallor.

She looked down the long, quiet corridor. Nothing and no one in sight. The lift doors had closed again.

Perhaps some joker in the block who had taken to pressing ‘8’ before he got out. Although quite what someone would get out of that was a mystery to Carla. But many of the things that drove people, that people did or wanted to do, were a mystery to her. When all was said and done, she thought, she was fairly isolated from society. Alone, abandoned and living on her pension for the last five years. If you got up on your own, spent the day reading or watching television in a small flat, only occasionally making the effort to go for a walk, and then ate alone again in the evening before sitting down in front of the television, you ended up distancing yourself from normal life. You lost contact with people whose daily life was made up of their job, colleagues, spouses, children and all the related worries, tasks and, of course, joys. Perhaps she seemed much stranger to other people than she realised.

She closed her front door again and leant against it from the inside, breathing heavily. When she had moved into the block, she had at first thought that she would have a better life there. She had hoped that in a building full of people she would feel less lonely, but the opposite was the case. Everyone here slaved away with their own lives, no one seemed to really know any of the others, and everyone lived as anonymously as possible. Some flats were also empty. For some time now no one but Carla had lived up on the eighth floor.

She went back into the living room, wondering whether to turn the television on again. She left it. Instead she poured herself some more wine. She drank every evening, but she had imposed a rule on herself that she was not to start before eight. Until now she had managed to stick to that.

She jumped when she heard the noise of the lift again. It was going down. Someone must have called it. At least that was normal life. People coming and going in the block. She was not alone.

Perhaps I should look for another flat, she thought.

Her finances did not give her much room for manoeuvre. Her pension was modest. She could not make big changes. Nor was it clear that she would be less lonely elsewhere. Perhaps it was down to the building. Or perhaps it was down to her.

Thinking that she could no longer bear the silence, she reached for her telephone and hurriedly dialled her daughter’s number. She did it before fear or shyness could get the better of her. She had always had a good relationship with her daughter, but since Keira had got married and had a baby, the contact had started to crumble a little. Young people did not have time. They were so occupied with themselves and their lives.

Where to find the energy to look after a mother whose life had gone down the pan?

Carla could sometimes scarcely believe it herself: divorced after twenty-eight years of marriage. Her husband had been in debt up to his eyeballs. He had lived beyond his means and over the years the debts had grown and grown. He had skedaddled before his creditors could catch up with him. For years there had been no trace of him. Carla still suffered from the experience. She was often whiny. Keira had escaped the mess into which her father’s bankruptcy had plunged the family by finding her own comfortable life in Bracknell, forty-five minutes south-west of the centre of London. After finishing her maths degree, she had found a good job in a bank and married a man with a safe job in the bank’s management. Carla knew she should be happy for her daughter.

Keira answered the phone on the second ring. She sounded stressed. Her little boy was screaming in the background.

‘Hi, Keira. Mummy here. I just wanted to see how you were.’

‘Oh, hi, Mum,’ said Keira. She did not sound enthusiastic. ‘Yes, everything’s OK. Johnny’s just not sleeping well. He’s always screaming at night. I’m pretty shattered.’

‘He must be getting his teeth through.’

‘Yes, that’s it.’ Keira went silent for a moment, then asked, duty-bound, ‘And how are you?’

For a second Carla was tempted to just tell the truth: that she felt rotten, that she felt completely alone. But she knew that her daughter did not want to hear that, because everything was too much for her too right then. She would have reacted badly.

‘Oh, well, I am on my own rather often,’ she said. ‘Since I retired . . .’ She left the rest of the sentence unsaid. Things could not be helped.

Keira sighed. ‘You have to find some leisure activity you enjoy. A hobby where you meet like-minded people. Whether it’s a cookery course or a sport that you start doing, you need to be round people.’

‘Hmm, jumping around with old ladies in aerobics classes for the elderly . . .’

Keira sighed again, this time with obvious impatience. ‘It doesn’t need to be that. God, there’s oodles of options. You’ll be able to find something that matches even your expectations!’

Carla was tempted to let her daughter in on the secret that she had been going to a self-help group for single women, but that she had not managed to make lasting friends. Probably she had been moaning too much. Nobody could bear her for long. No, it was better not to let Keira know about that project.

‘I think everything just depresses me,’ she said. ‘If I go swimming or cook during the day, it just makes me realise that I’m not a fully active member of society any more. That I’m not working and have no family to care for. And when I come home again, then of course no one is waiting for me.’

‘But you would certainly meet some nice women who you could do things with now and then.’

‘Most of them probably have families and wouldn’t have time for me.’

‘Right, because you’re the only divorced pensioner in all of England,’ replied Keira sharply. ‘Do you want to sit in front of your television in your flat every night for the rest of your life under a cloud of despair?’

‘And get on my daughter’s nerves?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘This block is oppressive,’ said Carla. ‘No one shows any interest in anyone else. And the lift is always coming up to me and then no one gets out.’

‘What?’ Keira sounded irritated.

Carla wished she had not said that. ‘Well, I just noticed it. That it happens quite often, I mean. Apart from me, no one else lives up here. But the lift is always coming up.’

‘Then someone is sending it up. Or that’s the way it’s programmed. That it automatically goes to different floors.’

‘But it only started in the last week or two.’

‘Mum . . .’

‘I know. I’m getting a little odd. That’s what you think. Don’t worry. I’ll get my life back on an even keel somehow.’

‘Of course you will. Mum, Johnny is screaming again and . . .’

‘I’ll leave you! It’d be nice if you and Johnny would visit. Maybe one weekend?’

‘I’ll have a look and see if there’s a good time,’ said Keira vaguely. Then she quickly said goodbye and hung up, leaving Carla with the feeling that she had been an annoyance and a burden.

She is my daughter, she thought defiantly. It is normal for me to call her now and then. And for me to tell her when I am not feeling well.

She looked at her watch. It was just after ten.

Nevertheless, she decided to go to bed. Perhaps to read something. Certainly in the hope of falling asleep quickly.

She was just about to go to the bathroom to brush her teeth when she heard the lift coming up again.

She stood in her hall, her ears pricked.

I really wish that someone else lived up here too, she thought.

The lift stopped and the doors opened.

Carla waited. For nothing to happen, no sound, nothing.

But this time she heard something. This time someone left the lift. There were steps. She heard them quite clearly. Steps outside in the corridor, which was no doubt brightly lit.

Carla swallowed. Her throat was dry. She felt a prickling sensation on her skin.

Now don’t let it get to you. First you got worked up because there was no one in it, and now you are getting worked up because someone is.

The steps approached.

This way, thought Carla. Someone is coming to my door.

She stood paralysed behind her front door.

Someone was on the other side.

When the doorbell rang, the spell was broken. The bell was normal life.

Burglars don’t ring the bell, Carla thought.

Nevertheless, she took the precaution of looking through the peephole first.

She hesitated.

Then she opened the door.

Gillian went back into the kitchen. ‘That was Diana, Darcy’s mum,’ she explained. ‘Darcy isn’t coming to school today. She has a sore throat.’

The telephone’s ringing had not been enough to tear Becky out of her lethargy. She was hunched over her bowl of muesli, staring moodily at the flakes and bits of fruit in the milk.

Just turned twelve, thought Gillian, and already as grumpy and listless as a teenager at the height of puberty. Weren’t we different back then?

‘Hmm,’ said Becky, showing no interest. Chuck, her black cat, sat on the chair next to her. The family had found him on holiday in Greece. He had been a half-starved bundle of bones on the side of the road and they had smuggled him into their hotel. The big issue for the rest of the holiday had been how to get him out of the hotel without being discovered, and then, after taking him to the vet, how to bring him back in again. Gillian and Becky had dripped liquid food into his mouth for hours with a pipette. For a while everything suggested he would not survive. Becky had cried the whole time, but although things were difficult and nerve-racking, she and her mother had been very close as they nursed Chuck together.

In the end, Chuck’s will to live had won through. He had travelled back to England with his new family.

Gillian sat opposite her daughter at the table. Now she had to drive Becky to school. She and Darcy’s mother shared the school run and this week was Diana’s turn. But not, of course, on a day when her own daughter wasn’t going to school.

‘But I did find out something interesting,’ said Gillian. ‘You’ve got a maths test today!’

‘Maybe.’

‘No, not maybe, you have! You’ve got a test and I had no idea.’

Becky shrugged. She had a moustache of hot chocolate on her upper lip. She was wearing black jeans that were so tight Gillian wondered how she had managed to put them on. Her black jumper was just as skin-tight and she had a black scarf wrapped several times around her neck. She was trying to look cool, but with the chocolate on her lip she just looked like a little girl in a strange costume. Of course Gillian refrained from telling her that.