Watching Edie: The most unsettling psychological thriller you’ll read this year

For the briefest moment I see something in her eyes that makes me shudder, though I don’t know why – just for a second something else peeps out at me from behind her hazel stare. My hands fly defensively to my belly and an image, gone almost before it’s there, of Heri’s face flickers across my mind. I don’t reply.

‘Well,’ she says after a silence, ‘congratulations. How lovely.’ As she continues to gaze at me her pupils twitch intently, and sensing that she’s about to ask more questions, I rattle off my number and watch as she punches it in, agonizingly slowly, until finally I open the door, say goodbye as warmly as I know how, and at last she turns to leave. But before she does she stops and pauses and says very softly, ‘Do you remember the quarry, Edie? How we used to go up there together, all of us?’

I feel momentarily light-headed, a wave of nausea washes over me, and when I speak my voice is barely a whisper. ‘Yes.’

She nods. ‘Me too. I think about it all the time.’ And then she leaves, her sensible lace-ups clattering upon the staircase as she retreats lower and lower. I lean against the wall, weak with relief, until from far below I hear the front door’s heavy slam as she closes it behind her, like a jailor.

Before (#ulink_9ae14923-c300-5784-8fab-b15f5c9b257e)

Year 11 leavers’ day, and everywhere you look girls are writing on each other’s shirts in felt-tip pen, drinking from Coke cans I think they’ve filled with something else, throwing flour bombs out of top-floor windows. I sit on the bench below the library window and watch. They’re all going up to the rec later to get drunk – I’d heard them talking about it in the loos. They hadn’t asked me, but I don’t really mind because Mum always worries if I’m back late. I see Nicola Gates over by the water fountain, but she turns away when I wave.

And that’s when I first see Edie. Walking across the forecourt in the direction of the main doors. As I watch, her face appearing then disappearing behind others in the crowd, she stops, her eyes squinting up at the building before darting around herself again and then finally landing upon me. I hold my breath. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so pretty before, not in real life.

Then there she is, standing right in front of me, and at first I’m too distracted by all the different parts of her to take in what she’s saying: the smell of the leather jacket she’s carrying over her arm, mixed with something else, something soft and appley, her eyes, big and golden brown with lots of black eyeliner, pale mauve varnish on her nails. In the hollow of her clavicle is a little gold locket with a tiny green stone in the middle. If you were to put your finger beneath it you’d feel the jump jump jump of her pulse.

‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘What?’

She smiles. ‘The office. Where is it?’ Her voice is clear and sure with a northern accent – Manchester maybe.

Of all the people she could have stopped to ask, she’d picked me. I get to my feet. ‘I’m going that way myself,’ I tell her, though I wasn’t. ‘I’ll walk with you if you like.’

She nods, shrugs. ‘Yeah, OK. Ta.’

As we walk, I see Sheridan Alsop and Amy Carter standing by the water fountain. They stop talking and watch us as we pass. I have a mad impulse to link my arm through hers, this stranger who walks beside me, and I imagine us strolling along like that, arm in arm like best friends. How amazed Amy and Sheridan would be to see that! I don’t though, of course. People don’t like it when you do that sort of thing, I’ve realized.

‘My name’s Heather,’ I tell her instead.

‘I’m Edie. Well, Edith really. But how lame’s that?’ She looks around herself then shakes her head, ‘Bloody hell, this place.’

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I know! Totally lame, isn’t it? Are you going to come to school here then?’

She nods. ‘Starting my A-levels in September.’

‘I’m doing my A-levels here too! What’re you studying? I’m taking Biology and Maths and Chemistry. I was going to do a language as well but Mum and Dad said it was pointless because it’s not what I need to read Medicine at uni. Best to concentrate on just the three. What with all my volunteering work and everything too. I’m going to be a doctor one day and—’ I stop myself, my mouth snapping shut. I always talk too much, Mum says. I bite my lip, waiting for Edie to look at me the way the other girls do.

But she doesn’t, she only smiles again. Her long brown hair swings in front of her face and she pushes it away, tucking it behind her ear. ‘I’m doing Art,’ she tells me. ‘And photography. I’m going to go to art college in London. Saint Martins probably,’ she adds with breezy certainty. And she explains that she’s recently moved down here to Fremton from Manchester with her mum. She has this way of talking, like she’s a bit bored by everything, looking around herself like she finds it all a bit of a joke, but all the while glancing back at me, including me as if I’m in on the joke too. It’s nice. I could stare at her for hours.

We’ve already reached the office, even though I’d taken her the long way round. ‘It’s in here,’ I say, and I’m about to tell her that I’ll wait for her, that I’ll show her around after if she wants, but she’s already moving away. ‘OK. Thanks, yeah?’ she says. ‘See you later.’

The door swings shut behind her. Edie. Eedee. I turn the word over and over in my mind on the walk home, trying it out for size, tucking it away for safekeeping like it’s a precious locket on a fine gold chain.

‘Heather … Heather … HEATHER!’ My head snaps upwards and I look around my bedroom in a daze. How long had it been this time? ‘Heather!’ My mother’s voice, its note of irritation rising as she calls me from the kitchen, propels me to my feet. I look around myself for clues. I’m dressed in my school uniform, my bag of books by my desk. It’s light outside, but definitely an evening sort of light, I think. Slowly it comes back to me. It had been the last day of term before exams started. I had returned home from school and come up here to begin my revision and then … it must have just happened, the way it sometimes does, and I never know why. Almost as though I fall asleep while I’m wide awake. It usually happens when I’m upset or angry, like the time with Daniel Jones, the boy who’d bullied me all through primary. I hadn’t even known I’d hit him till I saw the blood. A jumble of my classmates’ voices, past and present, crowds in on me, mingling to make one long mocking hiss. What’s wrong with you? Why do you stare like that? Weirdo. Fucking freak. I shake my head to clear it.

My dad collects clocks and there are hundreds of them in our house all ticking at once, like the air is shivering, chattering its teeth. I listen, and sure enough after a few moments, there it is: the clanging jangle of dings and dongs as they all strike the hour at once. I count to seven. Teatime, then. My mother’s never late. The thought of her downstairs sat at the kitchen table waiting to begin grace jolts me into action. ‘Coming!’ I shout. ‘I’m coming!’

Downstairs, Dad sits at the kitchen table reading aloud from a newspaper article about geological engineering. Mum moves around the kitchen not listening to him, transferring plates of food from the worktop to the table in front of us. I watch her, trying to gauge her mood, but she puts the last plate down and without looking at me, sits and begins to pray.

Sometimes Mum reminds me of the lake where we used to go camping back home in Wales. I’d wade through its water on hot summer days, occasionally chancing upon inexplicable pockets of ice-cold, before blundering further into a shallower, warmer patch. I’d stay there for as long as possible, wallowing in the sunny warmth until the touch of slimy seaweed or the thought of eels or dead fish slipping past my ankles would make me panic and press on. Being with Mum is like that sometimes: you never know where the cold pockets are, or what’s there waiting for you in the warmer spells.

‘Heather!’ My mother stops mid-prayer and I realize too late that I’d been absent-mindedly picking at the tomato salad.

‘Sorry,’ I say, and feel myself redden.

Sometimes I do this thing to help me sleep: pretend that everything’s as it was before, that I am six again and Lydia three, and we’re all still OK. I imagine Lydia’s hand in mine as we run together in the garden of our old house and hear her laughter as I fall asleep.

As if to rescue me from my thoughts the face of the girl I’d met that afternoon pops into my head, and I feel a sort of light, lifting in my heart. Edie.

Fremton’s a horrible town. I shouldn’t say that, but it’s true. We moved here from Wales when I was ten – a fresh start, Mum said. After what happened, people in our village who I’d known all my life suddenly looked differently at me when I passed them in the street, or else swooped down on my parents like big black greedy crows, cawing sympathy, pecking for answers.

Eventually Mum and Dad stopped doing the things they used to do. Slowly, bit by bit, Mum pulled out of choir practice, her book group, organizing school fetes. Except for church on Sundays, she barely left the house at all. Dad carried on teaching at the boys’ school across the valley but at home he found refuge in his study, mending his clocks and reading his books. I guess from the outside it might have looked like we were shutting out the world to find comfort in each other, but it wasn’t like that at all. My mum and dad cleaved like a stricken tree, me like a lost squirrel hopping between the two halves. Dad had never looked at me in the same way after it happened and Mum didn’t either, but it was different with her. With Mum I knew in my heart that she wished it was Lydia who had come home safe and sound that day, not me.

So when they told me one evening after supper that Dad had been offered a new job in an English town 160 miles away, that it meant a promotion and a bigger house, I knew the real reason for the move: we would be going somewhere nobody knew about us, about what had happened, and what it meant. And a month later here we were. But nothing changed, not really. My mum found a new church to go to, but apart from that she still hardly ever leaves the house. These days her focus is on me. My schoolwork, my weight, my piano practice, my future. She’s trying to make me better, I think.

Now that the exams are over I have seven empty weeks to fill, so when I’m not helping Mum around the house or doing my volunteering work there’s nothing much else to do but walk. Fremton’s right next to the motorway, so wherever you are you can hear it, the never-ending rush of traffic on its way to somewhere else. The whole town feels like it’s been forgotten somehow, like everyone upped sticks and left years ago. There’s a canal that runs through the middle but no one goes down there very much and the shops in the square are mostly empty since the superstore opened on the Wrexham road. There’s a big statue of a miner in the centre of the square, carrying a sack of coals on his back, but someone’s spray-painted a big orange willy on his head. Then there’s just streets and streets of council houses till you get to the Pembroke Estate, three high towers pushed right up against the motorway, like they’re standing guard, warning outsiders away.

Wherever I go I look out for Edie, my eyes scanning the faces I pass, hoping that one day one of them will be hers. I think about her smile and her brown eyes and how nice she’d been to me and I wonder what she’s doing and where she lives, whether she’s bored or by herself like me. Then, out of the blue, I see her again. I’m walking home through the square when I spy her sitting on a bench by the statue, smoking a cigarette. I stop in a shop doorway to watch her. She’s wearing a short denim skirt and her legs are long and tanned, stretched out in front of her, a silver chain around one ankle. Her hair hangs loose around her shoulders and she smokes her cigarette like she’s deep in thought. She looks beautiful. It’s as if she shines against the greyness of this town, I think, like she’s full of light. I hesitate before half raising my hand to wave and I’m about to call her name when someone cuts across in front of me and reaches her first. My hand falls to my side, her name catching in my throat.

I can’t see him properly, whoever he is, this person who’s come between the two of us. I only know that his effect on her is instant, her face and neck flushing pink, her eyes wide and bright. She listens to what he says, laughs and glances away, but only for a second, as though her eyes can’t quite help being drawn back to him. And then he sits down next to her, so close that their arms touch. He says something and she shakes her head, a smile hovering upon her lips, and I don’t know what it is, this strange heat that’s there in the crackling, held-breath space between them, I only know that it has no place for me.

As quickly as it began, it’s over. He leans in close and murmurs one last thing in her ear that makes two red spots appear high on her cheeks before he gets up and walks away. I get a clearer look at him now. He’s dressed in tracksuit bottoms, a zipped-up jacket with a hood. He’s about twenty or so and very handsome, I suppose, though I don’t like his face at all, its roughness and its smile that shows he knows she’s watching him still. I wait for a few moments more, in the shadow of the shop’s doorway, before I take a breath and go to her.

When I’m there, standing in front of her, saying her name, she looks at me so strangely, as though she hardly knows where she is, tearing her eyes from his retreating back and blinking up at me. ‘Edie?’ I say again, and the moment lengthens until, at last, her expression clears and she smiles and says, ‘Oh, hiya! Heather, right?’ and my heart somersaults with relief.

After (#ulink_0fa84f02-145f-54cb-ac0c-a5391b9cff04)

A new family’s moving into one of the ground-floor flats today. I stand by the window and watch them; a couple of teenage lads lugging furniture from a van, while a small, ginger, tattooed woman shouts directions from the kerb. As I watch, she raises her arm to point at something and her top rides up to reveal a long, red scar running the entire width of her back and I find myself wondering how she got it, what could possibly have happened to leave such an awful wound behind. Best part of an hour it takes them, the two, grim-faced boys towering over their mother as they traipse back and forth beneath boxes, a sofa, a fridge, watched all the while from the van’s front seat by a shining black lump of muscle and teeth that barks and barks and barks.

My hands fall to the warm curve of my belly. The decision to keep it, the baby, was never consciously made, I just never went through with getting rid of it. I got as far as making the appointment, booking myself in at a clinic, but when the time came for me to put on my coat and take myself to the bus stop, I simply didn’t. My coat stayed where it was, I stayed where I was, and the seconds and minutes ticked by until the time had passed, my appointment had been and gone, and the phone with which I could call and reschedule remained untouched. I had never actively wanted a child – motherhood was something that happened to other women, not to me – yet some stubborn, unexamined part of me clung to the life growing in my belly, and it clung stubbornly to me.

The boys carry the last of the boxes from the van and are followed into the building by the woman and the dog. Within minutes I hear the sound of banging coming from the ground floor, the repeated thwack of a hammer echoing up the stairwell, and I stay where I am for a while longer, staring out at the street, watching the afternoon traffic pass until the hammering stops and the sound of a drill takes its place.

Heri, my baby’s father, was a chef at the restaurant where I waitress. Like me he worked more and longer shifts than everyone else and we were often left to lock up together, sometimes sharing a beer after a long night. He would tell me about his home in Tunisia, about lagoons and deserts and the sirocco winds. I liked him; I liked that he didn’t push his nose into my life, never asked questions I didn’t want to answer, liked that he was always somehow self-contained and by himself, like me.

The night we spent together was not unexpected, but never repeated. An attraction that had always been there flickering into life one evening and, for no particular reason, acted upon. From the window of his bedsit you could see the floodlit grounds of Charlton Athletic Football Club. ‘You see!’ he said proudly as we stood looking out. ‘The very best seats for free!’ He’d shaken his head sadly as he added, ‘You English really can’t play football.’ We drank beer and talked about our corner of south-east London. The only possessions he seemed to own were lined up on the windowsill: a book, a metal tin, some writing paper and pens, a photograph of a woman with a small boy. His clothes were folded neatly on a chair, his bed a single mattress pushed up against the wall.

‘You are a strange one,’ he said, turning to me, his large, almost black eyes watching me in the half-light. ‘So beautiful, work so hard, so quiet.’

I continued to stare out at the illuminated pitch.

‘You never talk about yourself,’ he went on. ‘Why are you not married, not …’ He shrugged, and when still I didn’t reply, he reached over and brushed a strand of hair from my face.

We undressed in the yellow glow of the floodlights, his skin dark and warm against my paleness; a night’s comfort. And afterwards our friendship had continued exactly as it had before. When the day came for his wife and little boy to join him over here, I was happy for him and wished him well. He left the restaurant soon after for an office-cleaning job the three could do together and even after I learnt I was pregnant the thought of contacting him never occurred to me.

And the child inside me grows. I don’t think about what will happen after it’s born; a strange calmness possesses me: what will be will be.

In the weeks following Heather’s visit she phones me repeatedly, sometimes several times a day. I never answer. Instead I watch as my mobile vibrates and buzzes, the unfamiliar number flashing on the screen, my stomach twisting queasily. Sometimes she leaves a message, but I delete them all unlistened to. It’s six weeks before the calls stop abruptly one day. Life begins to return to normal, the water closing over the disturbance that she’d made, my pregnancy taking over my thoughts once more, leaving no room for anything else, not even her.

But out of the blue like a carefully aimed dart, she pierces my life again. A few days after the woman and her two lads move in downstairs, I spot the postman approaching from my window and go down to collect my mail, expecting an appointment letter from the hospital. As I pass the new tenants’ ground-floor flat I hear the sound of bolts being drawn and keys turning in their locks before the door opens a crack, stopped by a heavy thick chain. Someone peers out at me through the slim black gap as I pass. For a few seconds I feel myself being watched until finally the door closes again. I hear the locks turn and the bolts shoot home once more.