‘No,’ I said shortly. ‘He doesn’t.’ And the awful, overwhelming cold terror came over me again that it might have been David that I saw earlier. That he might have found me.That he might take Tilly away.At least she was safe at nursery; they knew not to hand her over to anyone except me.
But no. He’d texted me. He hadn’t come and shouted in my face. If he was here, he’d behere, not hiding behind a phone screen – that wasn’t a ‘David’ thing. He had to look you in the eye, to see how much he was scaring you.
Ross took a deep breath. ‘Okay,’ he said and rocked back. ‘Okay. Look. Let me make you a cup of tea and then you can tell me about it, how does that sound?’
‘Tea?’ The word didn’t seem to make sense for a moment. ‘Tea? What, in your shed?’
Another deep breath. ‘Unless you want to stay here and quietly become one with the forest, yes. There’s a kettle and your daughter might have left us some biscuits, plus I really ought to go over there and sort out my builders.’ He looked at me directly now, very straight dark eyebrows over a very straight, dark gaze. ‘And you might need someone to talk to.’
‘I don’t need you to save me,’ I repeated.
‘I know. And nearly ten thousand quid’s worth of therapy says I’m probably not going to try. At least I know enough about how the whole thing works to avoid the major pitfalls, but some of the things I learned might be transferable. So, if you need someone to listen – here I am.’
Above us, the rooks called, taking off from the high trees, a coughing laugh of a sound as they coiled, lazy as smoke, overhead. I looked up at them for a moment, and then down at Ross and fought the urge to cover my head.
‘I’d like tea, I think,’ I said.
‘Good. Come on.’ After a moment where his hands didn’t seem to know quite what to do, he grasped my sleeve and began to lead me out through the woods on the path that I’d followed with Tilly a few days before.
It was definitely easier when not carrying a toddler, but then, most things were. I had another brief flash of mother-guilt; my daughter was at nursery to enable me to work, to earn money, not to go and drink tea with cute guys. Then, as I snagged my toe in tree roots, I wondered where the phrase ‘cute guys’ had come from. It was a Tia phrase, not mine. But maybe, I pondered as I squeezed my way past an intrusive pine whose fallen cones littered the ground beneath and crunched underfoot disconcertingly like small round bones, I didn’t have the vocabulary for this situation, which was why I had to borrow Tia’s.
None of this situation was like me. From the bursting into tears – but that had just been shock, surely – to deciding to head off through the woods on the say-so of a man who was trying desperately not to save me. These just weren’t Libby Douthwaite things. Libby Douthwaite was a strong, independent woman: a single mother keeping body and soul together with ad hoc jobs, bringing up her daughter as best she could. She didn’t cry on the shoulder of a man with bitten nails and a chewed-at beard, she took life by the balls and shesqueezed.
But oh, sometimes, just sometimes, wasn’t it nice to admit that Libby Douthwaite had no idea how to keep life running? Couldn’t I, just this once, let myself get talked into letting go? When everything seemed so hard, when it felt as though I wasn’t living but trying to move forward against an irresistible force that kept pushing me back to where I started, with the guilt weight of motherhood acting as ballast, anything that made it all stop was welcome.
So, by the time we arrived at the shed, I was a slack heap of coat and boots. All conscious thought and action had deserted me and I was following Ross unthinkingly.
The builders were gathered around the shed like a very orderly riot. When we burst out of the forest behind them, they all turned in a whiff of cigarette smoke and a whirl of fluorescent jackets and trousers which were ninety per cent pocket. They all stared at us.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ Ross said confidently. ‘There’s been a bit of a hitch.’
Group muttering broke out.
‘Yes, yes, I know I said we were going to get started but I’m having problems getting vacant possession,’ Ross went on. He spoke more assertively than I’d ever heard him, and he was even standing differently, hands out of his pockets and his shoulders level. It was like watching someone take on a role on stage the way he’d shaken off his previous diffidence and uncertainty and was inhabiting the part of a man in charge. ‘So I think we’ll call it a day for today and I’ll call tomorrow to let you know where we are in the plans.’
The mob fidgeted. Meanwhile I clenched my fingers around my muddy mobile and tried to stop myself peering through the trees in search of shadows. There had been no follow-up messages, which was good. Perhaps David had just wanted to rattle me and make me feel unsettled. Maybe he wanted me to believe that he still had tabs on me. I was conflating seeing someone who had looked a bit like him with receiving that message and it was making me feel hunted, while it was all just coincidence. Yes. Just a fluke.
Ross continued his conversation and occasional asides with the ringleader of the group, marked in his leadership by the fact that he was wearing a hard hat. I looked at Ross chatting lightly with his team of builders. There were occasional bursts of laughter from them, a general air of bonhomie and goodwill that told me that they liked him.
I didn’t listen. I still had the curious floppy, unfocused feeling that made me wonder whether I’d been hypnotised into going along with Ross’s suggestion of tea in the shed. Or was it the fear of having to explain myself that made me feel so peculiar? After all, how exactlydidI explain that creeping feeling of terror, that pinch between the shoulder blades that told me I was being watched? To someone who had never experienced being stalked and spied on, it would sound stupid. Paranoid, even. Perhaps Ross would think I was mad and that it couldn’t possibly have been as bad as it was; maybe he’d try to minimise and explain away David’s behaviour. Or roll his eyes and talk over me, as others had done. There had even, I remembered through that distant haze that new motherhood had conferred on me, been an attempt to medicate me out of my horror.
I shook my head. Memories of that time blurred and ran as though I were looking at a watercolour painting in the rain, rather than my own past. It was now almost impossible for me to pin down any definites – if someone had asked me when David started to behave as though I were an unreliably trained dog, or when I had started to realise that his desire to know where I was and what I was doing transcended simple curiosity, I couldn’t have said. These things had crept up on me in those very early, sleep-deprived days. The control, the manipulation of my behaviour, the disinterest in his child counterpointed by the obsessive interest in my whereabouts, and, underlying it all, thefear, it had all grown out of what had appeared to be concern for my welfare during my pregnancy. The edges of what had been a caring desire to keep me safe and healthy had run and merged into coercion and, in my view, a mental illness.
But how did I explain that? How could I possibly get Ross to understand that I’d taken my child and run because I couldn’t bear the levels of surveillance I was expected to live under? Nobody who hadn’t experienced it could truly understand.
The builders’ collective broke into ones and twos and made their way to a series of vans parked on the end of the forest trackway. There was a degree of rollicking banter, which Ross seemed to return cheerfully enough, and then they left, the vans rolling over the uneven roadway slowly until they met the proper tarmac, then speeding off into the distance, leaving Ross standing at the shed’s open doorway and me limp and dishevelled still half under the trees.
There was a silence, broken by the steady drip of water from the leaves that stubbornly adhered to branches. It was raining again. Had I sent Tilly’s boots with her to nursery? I couldn’t remember, and it echoed my feeling of loss of control that had come with trying to sort my memories of David and how he’d made me feel.
I shivered and Ross noticed. ‘Come and sit down,’ he said, standing aside in invitation. ‘I’m assuming you don’t have anywhere to rush to?’
I shook my head; words still seemed to be hard to gather.
‘Good. A sturdy cup of tea is what you need, heals all ills. Er, if you have the kind of ills that need healing, of course, I am making no judgements. So, come on, make yourself comfortable and tell me what was behind that text message.’
And so I found myself on a fold-up camping chair drinking tea out of a mug with a chip in it and telling Ross about my relationship.
‘I met David when he came to appear in a play at the theatre I worked in. He was fun and we had a good laugh whenever we met, then he asked me out and… well. I ended up living with him and then got pregnant, although by the time Tilly was on the way the relationship wasn’t doing well. But we agreed we’d try to make a go of it because of the baby.’
