Cate closes her eyes briefly. ‘That’s a mile away.’
Roan says nothing.
‘I’ll tell Georgia to be careful,’ she says. ‘I’ll tell her to call me when she’s walking home at night.’
‘Good,’ says Roan. ‘Thank you.’
4
‘I know who it was!’ says Georgia, who has just burst into the kitchen with Tilly in tow. It’s just turned four thirty and they’re both in their school uniforms. They bring a blast of winter cold and an air of panic into the flat with them.
Cate turns and gazes at her daughter. ‘Who what was?’ she says.
‘The creepy guy!’ she replies. ‘The one who followed me the other night. We saw him just now. He lives in that weird house across the street. You know, the one with the gross armchair in the driveway.’
‘How do you know it was him?’
‘It just totally was. He was putting something out in the bins. And he looked at us.’
‘Looked at you how?’
‘Like, weirdly.’
Tilly stands behind Georgia nodding her agreement.
‘Hi, Tilly,’ says Cate belatedly.
‘Hi.’
Tilly is a tiny thing, with gobstopper eyes and shiny black hair; she looks like a Pixar girl. She and Georgia have only recently become friends after being at the same school for nearly five years. She is the first really decent friend Georgia has acquired since she left primary school and while Cate can’t quite work Tilly out, she is very keen for the friendship to flourish.
‘He knew it was me,’ Georgia continues. ‘When he looked at me. I could tell he knew it was me, from the other night. It was a really dirty look.’
‘Did you see it?’ Cate asks Tilly.
Tilly nods again. ‘Yeah. He was definitely not happy with Georgia. I could tell.’
Georgia opens a brand-new packet of Leibniz biscuits even though there’s a half-empty packet in the cupboard and offers it to Tilly. Tilly says no thank you and then they disappear to her bedroom.
The front door goes again and Josh appears. Cate’s heart lifts a little. While Georgia always arrives with news and moods and announcements and atmospheres, her little brother arrives as though he’d never left. He doesn’t bring things in with him, his issues unfurl gently and in good time.
‘Hello, darling.’
‘Hi, Mum.’ He crosses the kitchen and hugs her. Josh hugs her every time he comes home, before he goes to bed, when he sees her in the morning, and when he goes out for longer than a couple of hours. He’s done this since he was a tiny boy and she keeps expecting it to stop, or to peter out, but he’s fourteen now and he shows no sign of abandoning the habit. In a strange way, Cate sometimes thinks, it’s Josh who’s kept her at home all these years, way beyond her children’s need to have a stay-at-home mother. He still feels so vulnerable for some reason, still feels like the small boy crying into the heels of his hands on his first day of nursery and still crying four hours later when she came to collect him.
‘How was school?’
He shrugs and says, ‘It was good. I got my Physics test back. I got sixty out of sixty-five. I was second top.’
‘Oh,’ she says, squeezing him again quickly. ‘Josh, that’s amazing! Well done you! Physics! Of all the things to be good at. I don’t know where you get it from.’
Josh helps himself to a banana and an apple and a glass of milk and sits with her for a while at the kitchen table.
‘Are you OK?’ he asks her after a short silence.
She looks at him with surprise. ‘Yes,’ she says.
‘Are you sure you’re OK?’
‘Yes,’ she says again, with a laugh. ‘Why?’
He shrugs. ‘No reason.’ Then he picks up his milk and his schoolbag and heads to his room. ‘What’s for dinner?’ he says, turning back halfway down the hallway.
‘Chicken curry,’ she says.
‘Cool,’ he says. ‘I’m in the mood for something spicy.’
And then it is quiet again, just Cate and the dark shadows through the window, her unfocused thoughts passing silently through the back tunnels of her mind.
5
Later that night it happens. A sort of coalescence of all of Cate’s weird, unformed fears about this place.
Georgia’s friend Tilly is assaulted moments after leaving their flat.
Cate had invited Tilly to stay for supper and she’d said, No, thank you, Mum’s expecting me, and Cate had thought, Maybe she just doesn’t like curry. Then a few minutes after she left there was a knock at the door and the doorbell rang and Cate went to answer it and