The Playdate (26 page)

“Ow,” she groaned, forcing herself to sit up.

The rosy light of the bedroom came into view. She could see a chair with her clothes folded over the top. The clock, which said 9:40
A.M.
Her bottle of sleeping pills. She’d taken two last night to keep all the black boxes shut; to let Allen get some rest without her tossing and turning.

She shook her head. This was ridiculous. She would have to ask the doctor to change these pills. With colossal effort, she pushed back the covers with trembling hands and pushed her legs out of the bed. Clinging to the chair, she made herself stand up, swaying. She felt drunk.

It took Debs a minute to realize that she could still hear the high-pitched whining noise. It was real. It was a real noise, coming from the direction of the wall she shared with the American woman.

Holding on to the bed, then the wardrobe, she stumbled her way carefully across the room and dropped slowly to her knees beside the wall, wincing at the impact on her sore knee. She leaned her hot head against the wallpaper.

The whining increased twofold through the brickwork. What was it—a shower? An electric shower?

No.

No. She knew what that was.

That was a Hoover.

Ah. Relief made her sink forward till her head touched the floor. She was safe. It was just a Hoover. It really was just a bad dream. She was safe, back in her house, the house she shared with Allen. The Poplars couldn’t get her in here, at least.

Allen’s mother’s old clock ticked away in the corner, almost sending her back to sleep on the floor with its hypnotic beat. She would have to get rid of that clock. She could put up with his mother in most parts of this house if she had to, but not in the bedroom. Nothing was ever going to come right between Allen and her with that woman’s presence in here on top of everything else.

Fighting the fatigue in her bones, she stood up slowly and pulled on her robe. Her stomach rumbled. Food. Food and a cup of tea would help, she thought.

Making her way carefully downstairs, she felt a slight dizziness play around her nose and eyes. She held on tight to the banister till she reached the hall, then kept one hand on the wall till she reached the kitchen at the back of the house.

There was a cereal bowl laid out on the table for her, with a spoon and a teacup and a note written in Allen’s big, clear handwriting.

“Couldn’t find Mum’s teapot this morning? Any ideas?”

*     *     *

She was just sitting down to the bowl of porridge she had managed to make when the squealing noise started again, this time through the dining room wall.

She sighed. The Hoover again. Now it was downstairs. She was starting to hate these walls. They might have been fine a hundred years ago, before noisy household electrical appliances were invented, when children knew better than to have a tantrum, but now she might as well be living in a cardboard box for all the sound insulation she had from the family next door. And especially that woman. That woman who was watching her and listening to her, and lying about it.

Debs sipped her tea, trying to ignore the noise. But it went on. And on. And on. It was as if the person with the Hoover was vacuuming the wall, running it along the baseboard, back and forth, back and forth.

Debs groaned. Her nerves could not take this today. She needed peace and quiet.

She poured another cup of tea, then traipsed back upstairs to her bedroom and climbed into bed, pulling Allen’s pillow behind her head and the covers over her. Her robe sat snugly and softly around her shoulders. The robe Allen had given her.

It still felt strange that another person bothered about how warm she was or how much sleep she had. Once, before she had met Allen, she’d watched a program about a sixteen-year-old boy who’d grown up in a children’s home and had been taken into the hospital with a burst appendix. “The thing that’s hard,” the boy had said, “is that everyone who comes to the hospital is paid to visit me.”

Debs had sat in her flat in Weir Close, clutching a cup of tea as the trucks rumbled past outside, tears spilling down her cheeks. She had known what the teenager meant.

She sat back on her pillows, lifted her cup of tea to her mouth, and . . .

“WOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

The whining noise came out of nowhere. The Hoover. Back in the bedroom next door. The reappearance of the noise gave her such a fright she spilled her tea down her robe.

What was going on?

She sat for a second, using a tissue from her bedside drawers to wipe down her front. The noise did not stop. Like it had downstairs, it moved backward and forward. For one long minute, then another. Then another.

“Oh, no,” Debs gasped. She was not imagining it.

That woman next door
was
harassing her. Just like those people who read in the newspaper about what she had done and put dog excrement through her letterbox in Hackney, leaving her to scrub the stinking, filthy smears from her floor.

She climbed out of bed as fast as she could and banged on the wall. The noise continued. “Stop it!” she screamed. When nothing happened, she hobbled down the stairs to the phone and dialed a number.

“Allen!” she shouted. “The woman next door. She’s Hoovering all over the house. She is listening through the wall to find out which room I am in, then using the Hoover on the wall to harass me!”

There was a long pause.

“I’m in a meeting,” he said.

She hadn’t heard that tone in his voice before. Flat and weary.

“Oh—why does no one believe me!” she shrieked, and slammed the phone down. She knew it was that woman who was ringing her, even if it was British Gas on the phone last night. And she had had enough.

Even if she’d wanted to stop herself, she couldn’t. As if propelled by the force of a meteorite about to strike earth, she pulled her gown round her, opened her front door, and flew out of her gate and through Suzy’s.

She marched up to the front door and banged three times with hard, aggressive blows.

Suzy opened the door and peered down at her.

“Stop it!” Debs shrieked. “I know it’s you! I know you’re doing this to me. Leave me alone!”

Just as she said it, a young woman with a dark bun began to walk down the stairs behind Suzy, carrying a Hoover.

“Done those skirting boards for you again, Mrs. Howard—what do you want me to do next?”

Debs faltered. Her head began to spin.

Suzy took one long step toward her. Her clear aquamarine eyes looked like they were carved from ice. She leaned forward and took hold of Debs’s robe at the shoulders and pulled her toward her, till Debs could smell the coffee on her breath.

“OK, ma’am, now you listen to me. You are acting a little crazy here. I don’t know what is wrong with you, but I am warning you now. You come near my house again, and I will call the police. And the same goes for Callie. Go near her flat again, and we will both call the cops. We know things about you, do you understand? And we are going to tell the school. So I suggest to you that you get off my doorstep and go home right now.”

And with that she slammed the door in Debs’s face.

*     *     *

She walked back through her gate, dazed.

It was strange, Debs thought.

For some reason the woman’s threat calmed her down.

For the first time in months, she actually felt calm. Just like when Mum used to scream at her and slap her when she did something naughty. Back then, she knew where she was. Knew where the boundaries were, knew what the rules were. Inside Mum’s rules she had always felt safe. She drew on the table, Mum screamed and locked her in the bathroom. She didn’t go to sleep at night, Mum screamed and slapped her legs. She fought with Alison over a doll, Mum locked them out in the rain for hours and told them to “get on with it.” Simple. They all knew where they stood.

It was strangely comforting being told off. Knowing what the rules were again.

The woman said she was crazy. Now there was a thought.

Her head was in such poor shape now, with boxes springing open and their contents flying everywhere, and blank bits, and the dizziness, that she really did not know anymore.

Hmm.

She picked up the phone and rang a number.

“Alison?”

“What?” her sister said gruffly. “I’ve got staff training in two minutes. You’ll have to be quick.”

“Alison,” Debs said. “I think I am in a bit of a pickle.”

There was silence.

“I think I might possibly be doing strange things. I don’t know what to do because they don’t seem strange to me but other people are telling me they are. And I don’t think Allen can take any more of it. I am wondering what to do.”

There was an even longer silence.

“Aren’t you seeing that shrink anymore?” Alison said, her disdain of therapists clear in her tone.

Debs shook her head. “I can’t keep doing that. It was fifty pounds a session. And anyway,” she said, “I was hoping I could talk to you instead. The thing is . . .” Her voice disintegrated into a tiny, watery squeak. “There is no one else I can talk to. And I’d just like to tell someone how I feel without paying for it . . .”

The implication hung between them on the phone.

“I’ve got to go. I’ll ring you back after the meeting,” Alison said. “Though I may be back late because the chairman wants to pick my brains about the new training course.”

“Thank you,” Debs said, taking a tissue out of her robe to quell
the sob that was coming. “And, Alison, I keep meaning to say, well done. You sound like you’re doing really well in your job.”

“Hmm,” Alison said. Unsure. Wary. “Well.”

“I think . . . I think Mum would have been proud of you,” Debs said, the oddness of the words feeling like hot spicy food in her mouth.

“Hmm,” said Alison.

They both knew it wasn’t true. But perhaps it was something.

*     *     *

Alison rang back an hour later and they spoke for twenty minutes.

“So, you’re telling me that this Poplar boy is harassing you because of his sister, but he’s somehow coerced your next-door neighbor into joining in?”

Debs tried to ignore the teasing tone in her sister’s voice. She had never been able to help it.

“She could have read about it in the newspapers, Alison. Remember that first week, when people were shouting at me in the street?” Debs caught the sob at the back of her throat. She had long ago learned that crying had no effect on Alison.

“Right. Well, sounds completely unlikely to me. Nobody would care anymore. More like your nerves making you imagine things. The boy you might be right about, though, so this is what I think you should do . . .”

Ten minutes later, Debs came off the phone with a list. Gosh, who knew what an organized mind her sister had? No wonder she was so sought after in the world of payroll.

Her sister’s words rang through her head. She had to make a list of everything that was bothering her and work out a rational reason or a solution for each of them.

This was what she had to do:

1. Ring the phone company’s nuisance department and ask them to put a trace on any incoming phone numbers. That way she could find out who was making the calls.

2. If it wasn’t the woman next door, she should go round with a bunch of flowers and apologize. Explain she was suffering from stress and do her best to fix the situation. “You could be living next to her for years,” Alison said, her voice rising to the occasion with the responsibility. “You need to sort this out now.”

3. Depending on who was making the phone calls, she had to ring the police and make her complaint of harassment official, just in case it was supporters of the Poplar family.

4. She had to go to her GP and explain how she had been feeling, and ask to change her sleeping pills to help with her anxiety so that she would not overreact to normal neighbor noise—or passing planes.

5. She had to be honest with Allen and tell him calmly how she really felt.

6. She had to think very carefully about what had happened that Wednesday night with the little girl on the road, then go and speak calmly to her mother and Ms. Buck.

Debs put the phone down, a new lightness in her step. Yes, all of Alison’s advice made sense. She rang the phone company straightaway and they promised to get back to her. Now she knew the next thing she would do.

She opened the cellar door, walked down the stairs, then bent her head to cross under the floorboards toward the plastic bag that she had hidden there. She pulled the corner of the bag and it dropped down with the heavy weight of the china. She would tell him tonight. And while she was at it she would also explain how important it was to her that this was their new house, their first home as a married couple, and that his mother’s possessions were making her uncomfortable.

And now she would go and have a cup of tea and have a think about what happened that night on the road back from after-school.

As she crawled back out of the cellar and headed for the kettle in the kitchen, she conjured up a picture of after-school club in her head.

Yes. That Wednesday. What had happened?

It had been completely full with thirty children, she seemed to recall, who were more tired and hyperactive than normal due to the fact it had been raining during playtime and they had been stuck inside for wet-play all day. The outdoor play area at after-school club was wet, too, which meant they had two and a half more hours cooped up. As a result, the atmosphere had been a little more frenetic than usual. She and Anne, the other teacher, had made thirty plates of pasta for them, then set up a drawing table, a crafts table, and a homework table, made sure the boys were taking turns on the football table, and put on a DVD for those who wanted to flop on the cushions.

Had she seen Rae at all that afternoon?

Rae. Yes. That’s right. Debs had noticed her. She had noticed how the little girl had looked physically smaller than all the other children in her slightly too-large blue school uniform. And she had behaved politely. Debs had been curious to note
this—the puppet incident in Debs’s hallway had given the impression that she was in fact fairly spirited. But while some of the older children ran around, whooping and teasing each other to tears, Rae and that other little girl, Hannah, had been whispering and giggling together, and holding hands sweetly. They had come to the craft table Debs had set up and made flower pictures for their mummies. Debs had helped them stick on some sequins. Then Hannah’s mum had arrived early and told Rae she’d have to come to play another night as Hannah had a piano lesson. But it was Hannah who had a tantrum at the news, not Rae. Rae had just looked a little sad as Caroline had led Hannah away, stamping her feet.