My happiness came and went like a ghostly breath. Throughout January I went from looking forward to Lee working, to missing him, to looking forward to him going back to work again.
When I opened the door my first thought was that Lee had been in the house again, moving my things around. There was a smell, a draft from somewhere. The house felt chilly, strange. I shouted “Hello? Lee?” although I knew he was working; he’d sent me some texts earlier. I wouldn’t have put it past him to come home early to surprise me, though, so I was cautious going into the living room in case he was hiding in there and was going to jump out at me.
It wasn’t messy, the way you’d expect a burglarized house to look. It was only when I realized my laptop had gone, complete with the charger, that I looked across to the patio doors and saw that they were slightly open, the exterior of the lock damaged, as though someone had drilled through it.
I reached in my bag for my phone and dialed Lee’s number.
“Hey,” he said. “What’s up?”
“I think someone’s been in my house,” I said.
“What?”
“The back door’s open. My laptop’s gone.”
“Where are you now?”
“In the kitchen, why?”
“Don’t touch anything, go and wait in the car, okay? I’m on my way back.”
“Should I call the police?”
“I’ll do it. I’ll be there in a minute. All right? Catherine?”
“Yes—yes. I’m okay.”
Sitting in my car outside I started shaking and crying. It wasn’t the laptop. It was the thought that someone had been in there, had broken into the house and been through my things. He might even still be in there.
The patrol car arrived a few minutes before Lee did, and even though I was halfway through explaining what had happened, Lee shook the officer’s hand and they both went inside, leaving me outside by the car. And half an hour later, a white van with a crime scene investigator who told me her name even though I forgot what it was seconds later. I went into the house with her and showed her the lock and the dining table where my laptop had been.
Soon after that, Lee and the uniformed police officer came down from upstairs. There was a lot of handshaking and laughing and then the officer left.
I made the crime scene woman a cup of tea while she dusted for fingerprints and swabbed a few surfaces. It all looked quite random to me.
When she left, I started crying again.
“I’m sorry,” I said, as Lee took me in his arms and held me.
“It’s all right,” he said. “You’re safe. I’m here.”
“I can’t stand the thought that someone’s been in here,” I said.
“I’ve called someone about the locks,” he said. “He’ll be here in a minute. Don’t worry. Do you want me to stay tonight?”
“You’re supposed to be working, aren’t you?”
“I can get out of it. I’ll just have to keep my phone on in case something kicks off, all right?”
I nodded.
Later, hours later, the back door secured with a new lock, Lee was making love to me in my bed, gentle this time, taking it slowly. I was thinking about whoever it was, wondering if he’d been in here, in our bedroom. Wondering what else he’d touched.
He was so tender with me, so loving, that all thoughts of the intruder were dispelled, and I lost myself in the sensations of Lee’s fingers and mouth.
When I finally opened my eyes he was watching my face, a smile on his lips. “You should do that more often,” he murmured.
“Do what?”
“Let go.”
“Lee, don’t go anywhere, will you?”
“I’m staying here. You can sleep if you want to.” He ran his fingers over my temple, down my cheek. “Have you thought about what I asked you?”
I wondered if it was worth pretending not to know what he was talking about. “I’ve thought about it,” I said.
“And?”
I opened my eyes and looked at him sleepily. “Keep asking,” I said. “One day I’ll surprise you and I’ll say yes.”
He smiled, and reached out and stroked my cheek, a long, soft touch that started with my face and ended on the side of my thigh. He told me he loved me, his voice barely a whisper. I loved him when he was like this, gentle, calm, happy.
I was sick when I woke up this morning. I just about made it to the bathroom. I spent a few minutes beside the toilet, wondering if I’d eaten anything that had disagreed with me, or whether it was a delayed reaction to the amount of alcohol I’d drunk on Christmas Day.
It was when I was sitting there on the tiled floor, shivering, that I remembered. He was getting out today.
It was just past five, still dark outside. When I was able to get up I brushed my teeth and tried to get back into bed, but I didn’t quite make it. My feet veered toward the door to the flat.
I knew it was locked, but I had to check nevertheless. As I checked it, six times, one-two-three-four-five-six, I told myself it was locked. I locked it last night. I remember locking it. I remember checking it. I remember checking it for fucking hours. Even so, it might not be locked, I might have made a mistake. What if I’d unlocked it again, without realizing? What if something went wrong with the checking, and I wasn’t paying attention.
Again. Start again from the beginning.
The feeling of him is strong today. I can smell him, feel him in the air. I remember how it felt, waiting for him to come back, knowing there was nothing at all I could do to get away, no point in running, no point in fighting. It was easier just to give up.
And now?
I finished the door, but it still felt wrong.
I’d have to start again. My feet were freezing, my skin goose bumps all over. I should have gone to get a sweater, some socks. It wasn’t right, though. The door might as well have been standing wide open, with him on the other side of it, waiting. Waiting for me to make a mistake.
I checked again, concentrating, my breathing already starting to quicken, my heart thudding in my chest. I couldn’t get beyond the image of him standing just on the other side of the door, waiting for me to stop checking, waiting for me to step away from it so he could take advantage.
This was bad, very bad. My phone was in the kitchen, Stuart was at work, and in any case I still hadn’t seen him or spoken to him since
that
text . . . I couldn’t leave the door, I couldn’t even get as far as the bedroom.
Just once, I told myself sternly. Once more, and it will be fine. Once more and it will be safe to leave the door. I tried deep breathing, tried to snatch more than just gasps, tried to hold it, tried to think of Stuart’s voice.
I finished one round of checks and stopped.
I was starting to feel calmer, my breathing slowing. While I had the chance I went back to the bedroom, not looking at the curtains, crawling straight back into bed. My stomach was churning and I was shivering with the cold. My bedside clock said it was twenty past seven. Two hours, just on the door.
I got out of bed again and found some socks and my fleece hoodie, then went to the kitchen to put the heating back on.
I found my phone and called the office. I hadn’t taken a sick day since I’d started working there, but today was going to have to be the exception. There was no way I was going to be able to leave the house.
I managed to hold off the checking for half an hour, then I decided I needed to open the curtains and that started me off again. Fortunately I had to stop at eight to make the obligatory cup of tea.
I sat on the sofa with my cup of tea and picked up the book I’d been reading. It was one of the OCD books Stuart had recommended for me. One of the chapters recommended identifying all the compulsions, all the rules, and listing them in order of importance. I reached for my organizer and found a piece of paper and a pen.
It took a long time, a lot of careful thought, a lot of crossing out and starting again, but in the end my list looked like this:
COMPULSIONS
Checking the front door
Checking the windows and curtains
Checking the flat door
Checking the kitchen drawer
AVOIDANCE
Red clothes
The police
Crowded places
ORDERING
Tea times
Shopping on even days
Counting steps
The front door was the top one, without a doubt. It occurred to me that, since Stuart had moved in, it felt as if I’d managed to abdicate responsibility for the front door to him, somehow. I wondered if I could gradually work my way out of this pit by passing some of it onto his shoulders, and if that was somehow unfair.
I looked at the clock—half-past eight.
What time did prison releases happen? Would he be out by now?
I closed my eyes and tried to think of something else.
How long would it be? How long until he found me? I tried to picture him coming out of prison, going somewhere, to a friend’s house, maybe, Lord knows he probably still had plenty of them. Maybe he would find someone else, some other girl. Maybe he had been changed by his time inside. Maybe he wouldn’t come looking for me at all.
Now I was just lying to myself.
He was going to come for me, it was only a question of time.
I only just made it to the bathroom in time, sick again. Nothing left in there but pain.
The burglary changed a lot of things, for me. I never felt safe after that, even when Lee was with me. When he wasn’t there, when I was out in town, or at work, or even just driving from home to work or back again, I kept feeling as though I was being watched. When I was at home, alone, it felt as though someone was in the house.
It didn’t help that I kept finding more and more of my things missing. If it hadn’t been for the burglary I might think I’d just mislaid them, but they were things I didn’t use often and I was fairly sure where I’d left them: my passport, for one. It had been in an old satchel at the back of the wardrobe, along with a wallet containing euros, which was also missing. An old diary. I couldn’t begin to think why that had been taken, but it had. My old cell phone, which didn’t even work—that had been on the bookshelf in the living room.
Each time felt almost like being burglarized all over again.
Lee said it was common in burglaries like this. It was a tidy search, he said. Quite often people had no idea what had been taken. He said there had been several burglaries in my area over the past few months, and some people had been targeted more than once.
He stayed over every night he wasn’t working, and sometimes turned up unexpectedly when he was, letting himself in and scaring me half to death. One night he came in filthy, wearing clothes that stank like a homeless person’s. He peeled them off in the living room, left them in a reeking pile, and went straight upstairs to shower.
When he came back down he was smelling a whole lot better, and looking much better, too. I made him dinner and afterward he made love to me downstairs in the living room, gentle, tender, loving. He listened to me telling him pointless things about what had gone on at work, stroked my hair away from my flushed cheeks, kissed my sweaty forehead and told me I was the most beautiful thing he’d seen all week. After that he got dressed again, back into the same filthy clothes, and went back out into the night.
I had another two days without him, no sign, no word, no phone call, and then on the Tuesday I came home from work early. It felt as if someone had been in here again. I had no idea what it was that made me think that; the door was double-locked, the windows all secure and shut, but the house just felt different. I checked everything before I even took my coat off, looking for whatever it was that was out of place. Nothing, not a sign. Maybe I’d imagined it, whatever it was, this presence, the feeling that Lee had been here. Maybe it was wishful thinking.
I cooked dinner and phoned Sam afterward for a chat. I watched something inane on television. I washed the dishes and put everything away. I hummed along to the radio while I did it.
At a quarter to twelve I turned the television off and thought about bed. The house was suddenly achingly quiet. The central heating had gone off an hour ago and it was cold.
I checked the front door and the back door, turning the lights off as I went around. I pulled the curtains open a little in the front room and as I did so I thought I saw something outside: a shape, a shadow, across the street—next to the house that had been up for sale for months and months. A bulky shape, like a man, standing in the dark space between the front of the house and the garage.
I waited for it to move, for my eyes to adjust to the light and tell me what it was.
It didn’t move and the more I squinted at it the more I seemed to remember that there was a bush there, a tree, something. It just looked strange in the dark.
I closed the living room door and turned on the landing light, heading wearily upstairs. I got myself undressed and put on some pajamas, brushed my teeth. Turned on the light by the bed and pulled back the covers.
That was it, then.
Lying under the duvet, glaringly colorful against the clean white sheet, was a photo.
I stared at it for a moment, my heart beating fast.
It was a printed digital photo, of me. I picked it up, my hand shaking so much that the image was blurred, even though I recognized it and knew exactly what it showed: me, naked, on this very bed, my legs splayed, my face flushed and strands of my hair sticking to my cheek, my eyes looking directly at the camera with a look of pure lust, pure seduction, naked desire.
He’d taken this picture on one of the first weekends we spent together; the same weekend we’d fought against the wind on the beach at Morecambe, the weekend he’d told me he loved me for the first time. We’d been messing around with the camera, taking pictures of each other. We’d had fun with them afterward and he’d let me delete them off the memory card. Clearly not before he’d managed to make a copy.
For a moment I gazed into my own eyes, wondering about the person I’d been then, the person who’d wanted this so much. I looked so happy. I looked as if I was falling in love.
Whoever that person was, it wasn’t me now. I tore the picture into tiny pieces, threw the pieces down the toilet and flushed. The little bits all floated happily to the surface again and danced around like confetti on the wind.