Under Your Skin (22 page)

Passing the front door on my way up to bed, I think I see a shape against the etched glass, the contour of a hand stretching out to press the bell, but it’s only the rippling shadow of an olive tree, thrown by the streetlamp.

Philip rings again in the morning, and this time I answer. I tell him things have quieted down. “Oh good,” he says. “It’s awful, worrying so much about you and being so far.” Fake concern.
If it is so awful, why don’t you come back?

“Is everyone at work being supportive?” he asks and in my head I reply, “
Supportive
? Are they being
supportive
? Is telling me they don’t want me anywhere near them
supportive
?” But I don’t say any of that. I say, “They’ve given me a couple of days off.” I sound like a petulant child.

“Oh, good of them.”

I rest my forehead on my palm. I feel irritated and drained at the same time. He is so far from understanding what I am going through. “I suppose so,” I answer in the end.

How different I am on the phone to my daughter. Millie is bursting with it: baby lambs and Easter bonnets and bike rides with Ian’s niece, Roxanne, who’s only nine and
she
has pierced ears. I delight in every joyous word. In the background is the clatter of Robin’s kitchen—the scrabbling of the dog and the snuffling of the baby, plates clattering: the rattle and hum of family life.

“That’s because she’s half Spanish,” I hear Robin shout. “They get their ears pierced at birth.”

“Like circumcision?” I say when she comes on the line.

“Oh, don’t,” she says. “Are you all right, Gaby?” Her tone is serious.

“I’m fine,” I say cheerfully.

“Are you sure? You’re having a nice break from work?”

“Yes! What’s happening up there?”

She tells me Millie is being awesome, brilliant with the baby and scarfing all her veggies. I ask if she is cleaning her teeth properly. They are at such funny angles; now that the big ones are coming through, she tends to miss some. And Robin, who knows me well enough not to mind me fussing, says Millie has been giving it her best shot. She calls out to Millie, to include her in the conversation: “I had to send you back, didn’t I, yesterday, to have another go at that one that’s growing behind the little tooth?” I can hear Millie’s distracted agreement. “She’s feeding Charlie,” Robin says by way of apology. “We’ve started solids.”

“What’s he eating?”

“Carrots.”

“I’ve got loads of those.”

“Bring them! We don’t have many carrots up here in the boondocks. When do you think you might come?”

I let out a small groan.

“Come now,” she says softly. “Get in the car and drive. If you bust a gut, you’ll be here in time for midmorning coffee. I’ve got those yum-yums I know you’re partial to.”

“M&S?”

“Sainsbury’s. Not quite as delish, but almost.”

“So more of a yum?”

“Hop in your car and get here for midmorning coffee and a yum.”

I groan again. “I can’t. I’m stuck. I have to wait . . . Next weekend—I should be able to come up then. I miss my little girl.”

“On Wednesday, I’ve got to come to London to see my ob-gyn
guy. I could pop in and see you. I can’t let you have Millie back because it’s Roxanne’s birthday on Friday and I’ve promised Millie she can come to the party, but I could bring her up for the day. If you’re missing her enough by then.”

“Oh, yes, do that. Do that.”

“If I can coax her away from Roxanne and the baby . . .” Her voice fades. “Do you want to say good-bye to Mum?” Then, gently breaking the callousness of my little angel, “She’ll ring again later.”

I put my hand to my heart. A tiny dagger of disappointment.

“Okay,” I say cheerfully. I forgive my daughter everything. “I love you both.”

•   •   •

I forgot. I thought, now the hacks had gone, I was safe. I leave the house, my head still in Robin’s kitchen, through the front door as if life were normal. When the door closes. it’s already too late. A silver Mondeo is parked outside the gate, and Perivale is inside. A prickle of fear slowly climbs my spine, pelvis to skull, vertebrae by vertebrae. My neighbor was parked in that space last night. Perivale must have waited for them to leave, or
circled
.

He’s wearing his dirty green waxed jacket, and his face, in seated repose, looks more jowly than I remember. On the passenger seat is a heap of newspapers, and in his hand a takeaway polystyrene cup. I smile, my heart hammering. He nods tersely and looks hurriedly across at the newspapers, splashing a tiny bit of coffee with the movement, as if embarrassed at being seen.

I run to my own car, which is parked round the corner. I sit for a moment until my pulse settles. I think he might tap on the window, but he doesn’t. Why hasn’t he approached me? What is he waiting for? I contemplate going back and tapping on
his
window. I’d rather know what he wants, get it over with. I imagine myself screaming, “There’s a murderer out there. Don’t waste time watching me, or
circling
!” And then I think, Why, as an innocent person, should I care? Just the thought exorcises something inside, makes me feel better.

The sky has cleared and it’s a bright blue day. Sun, but air as cold as the sea after a downpour. Children on miniature scooters trickle past, expensively shaggy small dogs taut on leads, ambling parents shouting, “Stop!” Any minute one of them is going to see me, sitting here like a dressmaker’s dummy, so I put the key in the ignition and pull out.

I don’t notice at first. I am driving down Trinity Road, hugging the central reservation, when the filter light looms. I will be forced to turn right if I stay where I am. I put on my turn signal. The car behind, a small red Renault driven by a short-haired man, puts on his turn signal, too. A horn blares. We both swerve. The Renault pulls back a bit and puts some distance between us.

It is still there, two cars away, when I swing left onto East Hill, and still there, hugging my tail, after an erratic speed-weave into the bus lane. My hands grip the steering wheel; I change gears with coiled fury and fear. I pull back into the main stream of traffic and immediately right into the Tonsleys, a grid of residential streets choked with one-ways and no entries and commuter-blocking barriers. I turn this way and that, nip and tuck, and scissor back. I can feel a wildness in me, a sort of rage. The gears growl. The steering wheel jerks beneath my hands with a life of its own. Who is it? Perivale? Could he have changed cars? A tabloid reporter, hulking out there, out of sight?

I wrench into a parking space and wait, engine throbbing. Around me, the street is still. An airplane spirals. The squeal of a distant bus braking. I scan the street once more, pull back out, manage a wobbly three-point turn, and drive slowly back through the Tonsleys the way I came, eyes scouring. Nothing. I turn right onto East Hill and continue on my way. I begin to feel oddly bullish.
Action is good. I can beat my opponents. If I can throw off a tail, surely I can withstand Perivale, fight for my reputation, wrest back my life.

At East Putney Tube Station, I pull in on a double-red line. No sign of Jack. I’m late, but then so is he. It hasn’t rained all morning, but the gutters are still flowing and the striped awning above the flower stall sags. Gloves warm the hands of the young florist; she is bashing them together in a sort of clumphing clap.

Behind her is a newsagent, and I leave the car quickly and run in to get a bottle of water. I grab a few random things at the till, including a packet of Polos. My throat is dry with thirst: must be nerves.

I’m back in the car, purchases stowed, before Jack arrives. I see him before he sees me. His head’s down, and he is walking with a lopsided gait, an Adidas messenger bag hanging over one shoulder. He scrunches up some sort of wrapper—a sausage roll?—and throws it into the closest bin. Then he looks up, clocks me, and heads over, almost at a run. He leaps a puddle, rather unsuccessfully; mud splatters up the back of his jeans. He’s wearing a warmer jacket today, which he brushes for crumbs, and a trendy reworking of a deerstalker hat. In the car, he yanks it off, and his hair bounces out as if it’s been restrained.

He rearranges his feet to avoid the empty cans and sweet wrappers, the pay-and-display tickets stuck to chewing gum. It’s a cleaner-free zone, my car, a glimpse into my grubby little soul—the bit Philip could never begin to understand. Jack doesn’t say anything. Maybe he’s at home in such a mess. Instead, he apologizes for being late. It was more of a journey than he’d anticipated: long wait for a Wimbledon-bound tube at Victoria, and the District line, so slow, chugging along like a rural train.

If he had been standing there waiting for me as I drove up, I would have told him about the red Renault, shrieked a little, but now I feel the tension of it slipping out of reach. Am I being paranoid?
Have I made the whole thing up? The sense I have of being followed, watched, may be getting worse . . . am
I
the problem? Is it in my mind? The bullishness I felt earlier has gone. If I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t, how can I be sure,
make
sure, of anything?

I’ve reached the lights. “Where to?” I say. I look straight ahead. I feel jaw-achingly self-conscious. I realize that I am without parameters. I have no idea what he thinks of me at all. I have lost my bearings. I don’t know what to do with my face.

“Ah, yes.” He pulls out his phone and fiddles until he finds what he needs.

The Baxters live in a pretty tree-lined street of semidetached Victorian villas in West Putney. We are not followed. I keep checking. Their house, painted one of those tasteful National Trust colors—Clutch, or Bone, or Dead Skin—is set back from the road behind a gate and a small drive. An ornamental cherry, its boughs laden with clusters of candy pink blossom, squats in a raised flower bed by the front door.

“People’s taste in plants is often so much more vulgar than their taste in anything else,” I say. My voice sounds strange. I’m quoting Roger Peedles: off camera, he’s a big one for the arch, withering generalization.

Jack looks at me and shakes his head. “I can’t believe you said that. I’m sitting in a beaten-up Nissan with a plant snob.”

“ ‘Beaten-up Nissan?’ ” I say, raising an eyebrow. “Could I possibly be sitting in a ‘beaten-up Nissan’ with a car snob?”

He grins and I realize we’re both more comfortable when we’ve had a go.

We’ve agreed I should wait in the car. Jack leaps out and negotiates the gate. Children’s shouts reach me through the open window. The back garden: that climbing frame from the photograph at the police station. A toddler’s red plastic car. Millie was desperate to have one of those. Why didn’t we let her? Philip probably thought
they were ugly. The front door opens. A slim woman greets him. They’re expecting him: he rang ahead. He’s writing an in-depth profile of Ania Dudek, cutting through the tabloid mulch, getting to the real woman. Mrs. Baxter was open to persuasion. She loved Ania. They all did. The children miss her madly.

I close the window and lean back in the seat. I am in a backwater. No one followed me; I tell myself that again. I should have told Jack. Now it’s too late.
No one followed me
. The pavements are deserted. The residents of West Putney are in their houses, cooking lunch, doing homework, gardening in the new spring air. I am safe for a moment. The car warms. I yawn.

•   •   •

When Jack gets back in, his breath smells of coffee. Wet cherry blossom adheres to the soles of his shoes.

“Did you learn anything interesting?”

“Let’s get out of here.”

“Okay.” I put my foot on the accelerator and screech off. I’m pretending to be the getaway vehicle, but I’m not brave enough. The spirit that moved my limbs earlier has drifted, dissolved. The speedometer says fifteen miles per hour.

He gets it, though, or at least offers this tame reprise. “Quick. They’re after us,” he says, teeth gritted.

“Where am I going?”

“The pub. Don’t you think?” He is holding a spiral-bound notebook. He flicks it like a Spanish fan. “I can debrief.”

I turn left and right and wiggle through the backstreets of Putney until we reach the river. “The pub”: it’s funny how people use the definite article, as if carrying a Platonic ideal in their imagination that any old establishment can slot into. The Duke’s Head, large and airy, nice enough. Philip and I came here once, years ago, to watch the boat race. I park on the slope of the embankment closest
to the bridge. A red bus crosses. Its reflection ripples in the water below, clouds scudding, like an advert for London.

The tide is in, lapping the balustrade, and there’s an amount of frenetic activity by the boathouses—hulls being hoisted, legs getting wet, muscles flexing, ducks waddling. The pub is still quiet—not yet noon—though a group of broad-shouldered rowers guffaws at the bar, pints of beer held in that way some men have, all gripped fists and elbows at right angles. They recognize me as we enter. Pulled-back hair, no makeup—as a disguise, it used to work. Not now. Not now I’ve been photographed teeth bared. I smile into their stares. Nothing back. One of them, in shorts and a T-shirt that reads
FIT
, nudges his companion.

“What you having?” Jack asks. I want a Diet Coke, but it seems so small and mealymouthed, everything this man seems not to be, so I turn my back on the rowers, in all their poker-faced meanness, say, “Oh, go on, half a lager shandy,” and find a seat in the window.

He crosses the room with a sort of lopsided skip, and then shouts over his shoulder: “What kind?”

There’s a moment of panic when I can’t remember what shandy
is
. “Lager,” I call pathetically.

“Lemonade or lime?”

“Oh, yes. Lemonade, please.”

Jack keeps looking over at me, rolling his eyes impatiently at the slowness of the barmaid. He spills a drop of my drink, smashing it down too fast on the table, and mops at it with the sleeve of his jacket. The rowers have lost interest now, resumed their banter.

“Right.” Jack, oblivious, takes a swig from his pint of Guinness. Froth arches on his upper lip. He takes his notebook out of his pocket. Are there clues in there, or is it all just words and make-believe? He launches straight in. “So, Ania had worked for them for seven months. She had answered an ad they placed on Gumtree for a weekend nanny. Mr. Baxter, who is in advertising,
has been spending a lot of time in Düsseldorf, working on the BMW account.”