about twelve my uncle Aaron saw the scratches and the scars, put two and two together and took me to my GP, who referred me to the Portman Children’s Centre, for therapy.
I was sent to a man called Roan Fours.
2
CATE
‘Mum, can you talk to me?’
Cate’s daughter sounds breathless and panicky.
‘What?’ says Cate. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘I’m walking back from the Tube. And I feel …’
‘What?’
‘It’s, like, there’s this guy.’ Her daughter’s voice lowers to a whisper. ‘He’s walking really close.’
‘Just keep talking, G, just keep talking.’
‘I am,’ snaps Georgia. ‘I am talking. Listen.’
Cate ignores the teenage attitude and says, ‘Where are you now?’
‘Just coming up Tunley Terrace.’
‘Good,’ she says. ‘Good. Nearly here then.’
She pulls back the curtain and peers out on to the street, into the blackness of the January night, waiting for the familiar outline of her daughter to appear.
‘I can’t see you,’ she says, starting to feel a little panicky herself.
‘I’m here,’ says Georgia. ‘I can see you now.’
As she says this, Cate sees her too. Her heart rate starts to slow. She lets the curtain drop and goes to the front door. Folding her arms against the freezing cold she waits for Georgia. Across the street a shape disappears into the driveway of the big house opposite. A man.
‘Was that him?’ she asks Georgia.
Georgia turns, her hands clasped into fists around the sleeves of her oversized Puffa coat. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘That was him.’ She shivers as Cate closes the door behind her and bundles her into the warmth of the hallway. She throws her arms briefly around Cate and hugs her hard. Then she says, ‘Creep.’
‘What was he doing exactly?’
Georgia shrugs off her coat and throws it carelessly on to the nearest chair. Cate picks it up and hangs it in the hallway.
‘I don’t know. Just being creepy.’
‘Creepy in what way?’
She follows Georgia into the kitchen and watches her open the fridge door, peer into it briefly and then shut it again.
‘I don’t know,’ Georgia says again. ‘Just walking too close. Just being … weird.’
‘Did he say anything to you?’
‘No. But he looked like he was going to.’ She opens the larder cupboard and pulls out a pack of Jaffa Cakes, takes one out and puts it whole into her mouth. She chews and swallows, then shudders. ‘Just freaked me out,’ she says. Her eyes catch sight of Cate’s white wine and she says. ‘Can I have a sip? For my nerves?’
Cate rolls her eyes, then passes her daughter the glass. ‘Would you recognise him?’ she asks. ‘If you saw him again?’
‘Probably.’ Georgia is about to take a third sip from Cate’s wine and Cate snatches it back from her.
‘That’s enough,’ she says.
‘But I’ve experienced a trauma!’ she says.
‘Hardly,’ says Cate. ‘But it just goes to show. Even somewhere like this, somewhere supposedly “safe”, you need to keep your wits about you.’
‘I hate it round here,’ says Georgia. ‘I don’t know why anyone would want to live here if they didn’t have to.’
‘I know,’ Cate agrees. ‘I can’t wait to get home.’
The house is a rental, temporary accommodation after their home a mile away was damaged by subsidence. They’d thought it would be an adventure to live somewhere ‘posh’ for a while. They hadn’t thought that posh areas were full of posh people who didn’t really like the fact there were other people living in close proximity. They hadn’t thought about the unfriendly security-gated houses and about how eerily quiet these leafy, mansion-lined streets would be compared with their bustling Kilburn terrace. It hadn’t occurred to them that empty streets could be scarier than streets full of people.
A little while later Cate goes to the bay window in her bedroom at the front of the house and pulls back the curtain again. The shadows of bare trees whip across the high wall opposite. Beyond the high wall is an empty plot of land where an old house has been ripped down to make way for something new. Cate sees pickup trucks reverse through a gate between the wooden construction panels sometimes and then reappear an hour later filled with soil and rubble. They’ve been living here for a year and so far there has been no sign of a foundation being dug or a hardhatted architect on site. It is that rarest of things in central London: a space with no discernible function, a gap.
She thinks of her girl turning that corner, the fear in her voice, the footsteps too close behind her, the audible breath of a