Liam and I are alone in the car. Ella received a phone call from her mum while we were leaving the pub, asking where the hell her cigs were, so I dropped her home. I wasn’t just returning her home because her mum was suspicious. I wanted her safe, and now that we’re outside number 117 Highgate Road, I need to make sure Liam is too.
“This is definitely the house?” I ask.
“Yeah.” He nods at me from the passenger seat. “I’d know it anywhere.”
“Thank you, Liam.” I look in the rearview mirror and flick the indicator. “I’ll take you back to the Gladstone now.”
“Nah.” He shakes his head. “I’m staying here. If you’re going to confront that mincing fucker, I’m coming too. I’ll punch his fucking lights out.”
That’s a lot of bravado for a seventeen-year-old, but it doesn’t raise a smile. Liam has no idea how much danger he’d be in if he so much as looked at James the wrong way.
“No, you won’t.” I pull out into the road, ignoring his protestations. “We don’t want two people in the hospital.”
Liam laughs, flattered I’d think him capable of hospitalizing a grown man. I don’t bother to correct him.
***
Fifteen minutes later and I’m back outside the flat. It looks innocuous enough—marine blue front door, brass knocker, bay windows with curtains ever so slightly open—but I’m having a hard time opening the car door. My brain is urging me on, telling me to get out, knock on the door, and confront the man who’s been terrorizing my nightmares for the last twenty years, but my body is holding fast, refusing to move. I look down at my right hand, at the diamond band Brian bought me during a “makeup” holiday in Rhodes after the affair. I refused to wear it—his guilt gift—for a long, long time, and then suddenly it was our fifteen-year anniversary and the affair was a distant memory and the ring felt like a symbol of positivity, of a fresh start, so I started wearing it. I try and will the hand to move from the steering wheel to the door handle.
The hand refuses to move.
I look back at the house.
Maybe confronting James is more than foolhardy or idiotic—it’s downright dangerous. What if I’ve made the same mistake again—what if “rich gay guy Mike” really is a rich gay guy? What if I ring Brian, or the police, or whoever and tell them that my psycho ex-boyfriend has tracked me down to Brighton, falsely befriended my daughter, and then blackmailed her, and I’m wrong? How many times can you cry wolf before the men in white coats come out with a nice white coat of your own to wear? Ella described someone who could be James twenty years down the line, but I thought her description of Jamie Evans the school teacher matched him too. I’ve been wrong once; I could be wrong again. I need proof. Concrete proof.
The fingers of my right hand twitch on the steering wheel, and the next thing I know, the driver side door is opening.
***
Somehow I make it from the road to the pavement and from the pavement to the gate. I keep looking from the front door to the windows to check for signs of life, for danger, for a sign that I should run, but when my shoes hit the pathway and I try and walk toward the house, it’s as though I’ve stepped into a magnetic field. My body lunges forward, but something pushes it back. Go back. Go back. The air is thick, charged, protecting the house, urging me away. Go back. Go back. I take another step forward, my car keys clutched tightly in my hand. I just want to peer through the small gap in the curtains. Just one small look. I take another step, starting when a gull squawks overhead. There are no lights on in the living room, no warm flicker from a television set. I make a deal with God. When I peer through the gap in the curtains, I pray, don’t let James peer back.
I take another step forward, then another. I’m so close now I only need to move a couple of centimeters to my left to see through the gap in the curtains. I exhale as quietly as I can. The street is silent now. There are no gulls, no cars, no children screaming or playing, just me, this house, and the thud-thud-thud of my heart.
I hold myself very still and slowly, slowly, tilt my head to the left, toward the gap in the curtains, toward the window into James’s life.
I don’t know what I expect to see—an exact replica of his room twenty years ago perhaps—but I don’t expect the characterless room behind the curtains. A single armchair, black leather with a matching footstool, a leather sofa, same fabric, a pine side table, a beige carpet, stained with what looks like coffee by the fireplace, an entertainment unit holding nothing apart from a large flat screen television and a DVD player. And that’s it. No books, no scripts, no coffee cups, no shoes, no ornaments, no photographs. This could be a show home, a flat designed to appeal to the modern bachelor, devoid of character, color, and warmth, and yet—I press a hand to my heart as it lurches in my chest—there’s something that stops this room from being completely bland.
A batik wall hanging over the fire.