Stalker

122

Jackie is feeling restless. She goes out into the kitchen and thinks about getting something to eat, even though she isn’t really hungry.

Maybe she should just have a quiet sit down and drink a cup of tea.

She feels across the worktop with her hand, along the tiles, past the big mortar, and finds the pot of tealeaves with the little glass knob.

Her hands stop.

She feels her way back to the stone mortar.

The heavy pestle isn’t resting in the bowl like it usually is.

Jackie runs her fingers across the whole worktop but can’t find it, and thinks that she’ll have to ask Maddy about it once things between them have calmed down a bit.

She stifles a yawn and fills the kettle with water.

During the days following her row with Erik, Maddy kept saying that Erik was sad and that he’d never want to come back to them now. Maddy tried to explain that she forgets loads of things, and embarked on a long description of how she’d forgotten keys and notes and football boots.

Jackie has tried to explain that she isn’t angry any more, that it isn’t anyone’s fault when things don’t work out between two grown-ups. But then the media witch-hunt started.

Jackie hasn’t told her daughter why she’s keeping her home from school. She’s postponed all her lessons with her pupils and has cancelled all her work as an organist.

To help the days pass and to stop herself thinking so much, she’s been spending all her waking hours at the piano, practising scales and finger exercises until she feels ill and her elbows hurt so much that she has to take painkillers.

Obviously she hasn’t told her daughter what they’re saying about Erik on the news.

She’d never be able to understand it.

Jackie can’t understand it herself.

She doesn’t listen to the television any more, can’t bear to hear the speculation, the wallowing in pain and grief.

Maddy has stopped talking about Erik now, but she’s still very subdued. She’s been watching children’s programmes for younger children, and Jackie has a feeling she’s gone back to sucking her thumb.

Jackie feels a lump of anxiety in her stomach when she thinks about how she lost patience with Maddy when she didn’t want to play the piano today. She told her she was acting like a baby, and Maddy started to cry and shouted back that she was never going to help with anything ever again.

Now she’s hiding in her wardrobe, with blankets, pillows and stuffed toys, and she doesn’t answer when Jackie tries to talk to her.

I have to show her that she doesn’t have to be perfect, Jackie thinks. That I love her no matter what, that it’s unconditional.

She walks along the cool hallway into the living room, which is flooded with sunlight from the windows. The light feels like streaks of hot water, and she knows the piano is going to feel as warm as a large animal.

Out in the street some sort of engineering work is going on, she can feel the muffled vibration of large machines beneath her bare feet, and she can hear the old windowpanes rattle in their frames.

In the middle of the parquet floor she feels something sticky beneath her heel. Maddy must have spilled some juice. There’s a fusty smell in the room, a smell of nettles and damp soil.

An itchy, electric sense of danger flares up inside her, and she feels a shiver run up her spine to her neck.

It’s hardly surprising that she’s shaken up after everything that’s happened, the things that are being said about Erik are terrible, she thinks as she wonders if she just heard something from the window facing the courtyard.

She listens, and walks closer to the glass. Everything is quiet, but someone could easily be standing there looking at her when the curtains are open.

She moves cautiously towards the window and puts her hand out to touch the glass.

She closes the curtains, the hooks jangle on the rails, and then everything is quiet again, apart from the gentle sound of the curtains swaying against the wall.

Jackie goes over to the piano, sits down on the stool, lifts the lid of the keyboard, settles more comfortably, lowers her hands and feels something lying across the keys.

It’s a piece of fabric.

She picks it up and feels it. It’s a cloth or scarf of some sort.

Maddy must have put it there.

It’s a piece of intricate embroidery. She follows the pattern of the stitches with her fingertips.

It seems to be some sort of animal, with four legs, and wings or feathers on its back, and a man’s head with a curly beard.

She stands up slowly as her whole body goes cold, as if she had just fallen straight through broken ice.

There’s someone in the room.

She felt it a moment ago, just now.

The parquet floor creaks behind her back under the weight of an adult body.

A feeling of absolute danger makes the world shrink to a compact point in which she is utterly alone with her terror.

‘Erik?’ she says without turning round.

Something rustles slowly and the vibration from the floor makes the empty fruit-bowl on the table rattle.

‘Is that you, Erik?’ she asks as calmly as she can. ‘You can’t just turn up here like this…’

She turns round and hears the sound of unfamiliar breathing, shallow and agitated.

Jackie moves slowly towards the door.

He stays where he is, but there’s a sort of squeaking sound, as if he were wearing plastic clothes, or rubber.

‘We can talk through everything,’ she says, with obvious fear in her voice. ‘I overreacted, I know I did, I wanted to call you…’

He doesn’t answer, just shifts his weight from one foot to the other. The floor creaks beneath him.

‘I’m not cross any more, I think about you all the time… it’s going to be fine,’ she says weakly.

She moves into the passageway leading to the hall, thinking that she has to get out, that she has to lure Erik out of the flat, away from Maddy.

‘Let’s go and sit in the kitchen – Maddy hasn’t come home yet,’ she lies.

There’s a sudden thudding sound on the floor, he’s rushing towards her and she holds up a hand to stop him.

Something strikes her raised arm. The pestle glances off her elbow and she staggers backwards.

The adrenalin rushing through her veins means that she doesn’t even notice the pain in her arm.

Jackie backs away, holding her injured arm up, turns and walks into the wall, hits her knees against the little table, grabs the glass bowl that Maddy usually uses for popcorn, and strikes out hard. She hits him and drops the bowl. He falls forward into her and Jackie hits her back against the bookcase.

Jackie can feel his rain-clothes against her body. She pushes him away with both hands and smells his bitter breath on her face.

Books crash to the floor.

It isn’t Erik, she thinks.

That isn’t his smell.

She runs, with her hand against the wall, into the hall and reaches the front door, and starts to turn the lock with shaking hands.

Heavy footsteps approach from behind.

She opens the door, but something jangles and the door bounces back.

The safety chain, she forgot the safety chain.

She pulls the door shut, fumbles with the chain but she’s shaking too much and can’t unfasten it.

The person who wants to kill her is coming closer, making a little purring sound in their throat.

Jackie pushes the twisted chain sideways with her fingers and suddenly it comes loose, she opens the door and tumbles out into the stairwell. She almost falls, but manages to reach her neighbour’s door and bangs on it with the palm of her hand.

‘Open the door!’ Jackie screams.

She feels movement behind her, turns round and puts her arms up in front of her face to shield it from the blow.

Jackie falls against her neighbour’s door, blood runs down her cheek and she lets out a deep gasp as the next blow knocks her head sideways.

A bitter flower blossoms and fills her mouth and nostrils, a warm flower with petals like thin feathers.