‘July,’ I said, realizing for the first time how long it had been going on. And then it didn’t feel like a joke, it felt crazy that I hadn’t reported it earlier. But it all happened so slowly, and I kept telling myself it was harmless, that it would go away.
How naive I was when I opened that first card withthe pink carnations on the front that you sent to the hospital. Just two words inside:
Thank you.
I remember thinking it was odd that no one had signed it, but it didn’t toy with my mind in the middle of the night like the next one did a week later. The second card came through the letterbox. Same flowers on the front. Different words, and this one hand delivered.
You’re perfect.
They kept coming after that, like you were writing out the messages from a packet of Love Hearts.
At first, weeks could go by without a single incident, but since you stepped out of the shadows in May and showed me your face, your cold dark eyes, barely a day passes without you messing with me. You’re so good at appearing when I least expect it, staying around just long enough to wreak terror on my life and then disappearing before the police can find you.
‘Keep a diary, Dr Lawson,’ the police told me. ‘Write it all down. Every sighting or attempt at contact, and how it makes you feel. Prosecuting harassment isn’t easy. Often just a warning from us does the trick, but if it does go to court then having a diary entry of each event can make a difference.’
That was back when they were confident too. But how can they warn you when they don’t know who you are? When they can’t find you to talk to? All they have to go on is my description, and even that I was only able to give them last month when I saw you properly. While I’d love to say you’re the very essence of evil, you’re not. You’re just so … so average. Average height, average build. Dark hair, not short, notlong. Jeans and t-shirt style of clothes, often a backpack. That’s how I described you to DS Church.
One average-looking man in a seaside town of two hundred thousand. And that’s not including the tourists who flood in and out like the tide anytime the sun shines and most times when it doesn’t. You aren’t even a needle in a haystack, you’re one tiny piece of hay.
‘He’ll slip up one day,’ they said. This was a while in, when they were no longer confident but apologetic. ‘Just keep doing what you’re doing. Vary your routine as much as possible, and the routes you take. Always carry your mobile with you.’
What they didn’t say, but what they meant, was that stalkers escalate their harassment. Their obsession grows and with it their need for more, and that is when they make a mistake. I read that little tit-bit online late one night, shining the light of my phone away from Stuart’s sleeping face so as not to wake him.
I still log every sighting with the police, even though I’ve long stopped expecting it to lead to anything.
Five minutes before my shift starts I walk through the hospital doors. I ignore the sign for A&E and head towards the back of the hospital. Stopping by the police station to drop off your latest gift has almost made me late, but I still have time to gather myself before I’m due to start work.
I turn one corner and then another until I reach my destination – a set of three female toilets half hidden beneath a staircase.
The walls are painted a garish yellow and the room smells of human waste and bleach, mingled togetherwith the lavender air freshener that squirts out from a little box by the sinks every five minutes, but I like the quiet compared to the new toilets at the front of the hospital.
I choose the last cubicle in the row and lock the door. I drop the lid of the toilet seat and sit for a moment, feeling so tired. So spent. And I haven’t even started my shift yet.
I reach inside my bag for my diary – a black A5 day planner I bought just for you. The first entry is the day I saw you standing in the park across the road from the house. It was early December, when I was going to work and coming home in pitch-black darkness most days. It’s hard to remember how I felt back then as I opened the front door. Alert, I suppose. Since July I’d been receiving cards and the occasional email that made my blood run cold. There’d been hang-up calls to the house. The phone would ring endlessly in the middle of the night until we unplugged it and decided to do without a landline.
My head was full of the pre-Christmas panic of trying to fit in even one of the long list of festive events the school had invited parents to. Plus Christmas shopping and the set meal the A&E staff all begrudgingly paid for and went to each year, as well as work itself, which was a constant stream of office party mishaps, and homeless people with pleurisy or pneumonia. Not to mention the barrage of accidents from hanging Christmas lights.
I stepped out of the front door, pulling my scarf tighter around my neck, and there you were. A shadow behind the railing in the park. I didn’t see your face and probably wouldn’t have noticed you at all if you hadn’t moved, swinging your arm back and throwingsomething at me. It flew through the air, catching in the light of the street lamps, and that’s when I saw what it was – a doll with dark-red hair, like mine.
Terror shot through my body like a bullet firing from a gun. I raced back into the house and up the stairs to wake Stuart, but by the time he went out there, you were gone. We found the toy in the gutter and took it to the police station, along with the cards. It was the sort of thing Beth used to play with when she was younger, the kind of baby doll with eyes that close by themselves whenever it’s lying down, except this one had no eyes. They’d been picked out, and one of its arms had been burnt until the plastic had melted into a gloopy blob. But the worst thing about that doll, the thing that spreads dread through my body every time I think about it, was the clothes it was wearing – little green doctors’ scrubs.
I skip through empty pages until I come to your first sick gift in January – a pale-pink box left on my doorstep with my name scrawled across the top. Beth scooped it up as she walked in from her swimming lesson and brought it to me in the kitchen.
I thought it was a gift from her and grinned as I pulled off the lid.
It was hair. Dark-red hair, cut from a doll, the police told us later. No head this time, or body, just clumps of hair cushioned on a bed of pink carnations – Christ, I hate those damn flowers now – and charred bits of photographs.
The photos were black in places, bubbled and brown in others, but I still recognized the happy faces of my children, the family snapshots of us from holidays.
‘What’s in it, Mum?’ Beth asked me, stepping closer.
I shoved the lid back on and pulled Beth into my arms so she couldn’t look.
Stuart and I deleted our Facebook accounts after that, but it was too late. You had violated me, and then you took your chance and slipped into my head, burrowing deeper and deeper until you’re all I think about most days, and most nights too.
The dolls became a regular occurrence after that, but you never bothered with a gift box again. The police sent everything to the forensics lab and for a while I held out hope that they’d be able to trace the dolls and who purchased them, but they were all a generic type. Easy to buy in any toy store or online, impossible to trace.
My hands turn to a date in April. The page is more creased than the rest, I’ve read it so many times.
