‘No,’ I agreed. ‘It isn’t. But Josh is my friend. If you do what you’re thinking about doing, you’re going to destroy his life.’
She turned away from me and back to the door.
‘Don’t do it, Alicia,’ I said. ‘Please.’
I heard footsteps then, coming from the other way. I turned, and there was a man coming towards us. He was kind of ambling. Shuffling. As he got closer, I saw it was Clive. Or Owen. Or whatever his name was. I looked back at Alicia. I folded my arms. I stared at her. ‘Please, Alicia, go home!’
As I said that, the door opened and Roan appeared. I darted to the other side of the garden gate, just out of sight. I heard Alicia say something like, ‘You can’t just do this to me, Roan,’ and then her voice went kind of muffled as if someone had their hand over her mouth and then I saw Roan pulling her out of his front garden, on to the street. I wanted to see what was going on but I couldn’t from where I was standing. I turned and saw the guy called Clive or Owen or whatever and he was standing outside his house and he was watching the drama and I ran across. I said, ‘Clive, I need your help. Get me on that roof. Quick.’ And God bless him, he did as he was told, hoisted me up there. And then I could see everything.
I got my phone out and I recorded it. Alicia was going insane. She was punching Roan and he was letting her and she was saying stuff about how she was going to kill herself and it would be his fault and he just kept grabbing her wrists and saying, Shush, shush, please, Alicia, keep your voice down. Please. God. And it was obvious that Roan cared more about his wife finding out than he cared about whether Alicia was going to kill herself or not. And she got louder and louder and I saw him put his hand over her mouth. I saw her bite his hand and I saw him slap her. She tried to slap him back but he grabbed her arms and pushed her away from him, so hard she fell. My hands shook. It was horrible. Like watching animals.
When Alicia finally left, I saw Roan just standing on the pavement, rocking back and forth. I filmed him walking back to the house.
Clive called up. He said, ‘I’m going in now.’
‘Wait, wait, help me down!’ I said.
‘I’ve got to go to bed,’ he said.
‘No, Clive, wait.’
He looked like he was about to walk away and leave me there so I jumped down but misjudged it badly; my leg hit the wall on the way down and I felt my joggers rip. I landed hard on my bum in a knot of limbs and dropped my phone. I was winded; I could hardly breathe and I could feel blood seeping through the hole in my joggers, but I managed to get to my feet. I felt in the grass for my dropped phone then pushed past Clive and ran after Alicia. I wanted to check she was OK.
I had almost caught up with her when I heard the click and buzz of a security camera outside a gated mansion turning to watch me. I ducked down and pulled my hoodie closer around my face, still the invisible girl.
Ahead of me Alicia was picking up speed; she knew she was being followed. I picked up my speed to match hers. But then I slowed down again as I heard muffled footsteps behind me and I saw the long black shadow of a person coming after us.
And I knew, even before I saw their face, whose shadow it was.
53
Breakfast the next morning is lukewarm porridge, a small banana and some kind of unspecific juice – tropical, maybe? Owen thinks he will miss the food when it’s time to go home. He likes prison food. It’s like real food but with most of the challenging elements removed. He likes the way it’s arranged on a tray; he likes not having to think about it. Maybe he’d like prison too, he ponders. Maybe he’d be happier in prison than out in the world having to make decisions about food, having to deal with women looking at him as if he was going to rape them, having to worry about getting a job, a girlfriend. Maybe this was, in fact, his destiny? Maybe they’d find Saffyre Maddox’s body cut up in pieces underneath his bed and he’d suddenly remember that oh yes, hehad indeed killed her, case closed, life in prison, no parole. Lots and lots of bland featureless food on trays forevermore. Maybe a cult following of strange women wanting to marry him now he was the cold-hearted murderer of a beautiful young girl. Maybe it would be a better outcome all round.
He passes the empty tray to the policeman on the other side of the door. His name is Willy. He’s Bulgarian. He’s utterly humourless, which isn’t a great state of affairs for someone called Willy.
It’s just gone eight o’clock. It looks like a sunny day. Is it possible, Owen wonders, to become institutionalised in under a week? He’s lost any real sense of what life used to feel like. The guy in Tessie’s bathroom about to trim his fringe feels like a distant memory. The guy who used to go to work every day and teach teenagers how to code also feels like a dream. The guy in the papers, the incel with a taste for impregnating comatose women is a fictional version of himself. The only version of himself that feels real is this one, here, sitting alone in his cell in Kentish Town. He sits for a few moments, staring at the sunny angles painted on to the walls of his cell. He feels a strange moment of hopefulness. Deanna doesn’t think he’s a monster. That’s enough. That’s all he needs to go about the rest of his life.
His thoughts begin to curl back on themselves, beyond the sunny cell, beyond cutting his fringe in Tessie’s bathroom, beyond the steamed-up windows of his classroom at Ealing College, beyond Tessie’s hand on his shoulder at his mother’s funeral, beyond his mother slumped over the kitchen table, looking as though she was drunk but actually being dead. They curl back to the other version of himself: the pretty little boy whowouldn’t smile for the camera in the modelling agency studio. Who was that little fellow? he wonders now. Who was he and how did he end up here?
He tries to remember moments of pain that might have brought him to this point. He thinks about the build-up to his parents’ divorce when he was eleven years old. Divorce, he thinks, is damaging for children; everyone knows that. But was there something in particular about the way his parents broke apart that might have led, of all the myriad possible versions of himself, to this one?
He thinks of the house they once lived in, in Winchmore Hill. A post-war thing with pebble-dashed walls and small windows, a porch full of spider plants, a dark dresser with a phone on it and notepad, a small chandelier. His mother had a thing about chandeliers. He remembers his mother on the bottom step, the phone in her hand, talking to a friend, a crumpled tissue at her nose, saying, ‘I think it’s over this time, Jen, I really do.’
He remembers the smell of cigarette smoke curling up the stairs to where he sat on the landing. He remembers coming down a minute after the phone call ended and saying, ‘What’s over, Mum?’ and her smiling and stubbing out her cigarette and saying, ‘Nothing, Owen. Nothing at all. Now get back to bed. School tomorrow.’
But he’d been on high alert after that, watching his parents like a hawk for the thing that would show him what was really happening.
Suddenly Owen’s flesh crawls as a memory returns to him, something he used to think about all the time but hasn’t thoughtabout for years, not since his mother died, because it sickens him so much.
He remembers his father coming home from work one night, late, the smell of London pubs about him. Owen saw him from the top of the landing, dropping his keys on to the dark dresser. Unzipping his jacket. He saw him sigh and then pull back his shoulders as if bracing himself for something.
‘Ricky?’ His mother’s voice from the front room. ‘Ricky?’
His father sighing again and then moving towards the door. ‘Hi, love.’
And then the sound, as his father opened the door of the front room, of music, not TV music, but strange, dreamy music, an American man singing something about a wicked game. His mother saying, ‘Hello, darling, come into my boudoir.’ And Owen tiptoeing down the stairs and peering through the banisters and seeing his mother standing in a room full of candles wearing strange items: underwear with holes cut out, something around her neck, heels four inches high, lips painted red and Owen’s father walking in, his mother grabbing his tie and pulling him towards her saying, ‘I want you to fuck me like I’m a whore.’
And then the door closing and noises – grunts, bangs, muffled wails – before they stop, very suddenly, and his mother is sobbing and his father walks out of the room, doing up his trousers, his face red and says, ‘Act like a whore, I’ll treat you like a whore.’
