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 there was Tilly, her face white, her huge eyes wide with shock saying, ‘Someone touched me. He touched me.’
Now Cate hustles her into the kitchen and pulls her out a chair, gets her a glass of water, asks her exactly what happened.
‘I’d just crossed the road. I was just over there. By the building site. And there was someone behind me. And he just sort of grabbed me. Here.’ She gestures at her hips. ‘And he was trying to pull me.’
‘Pull you where?’
‘Not anywhere. Just kind of against him.’
Georgia sits Tilly down at the table and holds her arm. ‘Oh my God, did you see him? Did you see his face?’
Tilly’s hands tremble in her lap. ‘Not really. Sort of. I don’t think … It was all just … quick. Really, really quick.’
‘Are you hurt?’ says Georgia.
‘No?’ says Tilly, with a slight question mark, as though she might be. ‘No,’ she says again. ‘I’m OK. I’m just …’ She stares down at her hands. ‘Freaked out. He was … It was horrible.’
‘Age?’ asks Cate. ‘Roughly?’
Tilly shrugs. ‘I don’t know.’ She sniffs. ‘He was wearing a hood and had a scarf around his face.’
‘Height?’
‘Kind of tall, I guess. And slim.’
‘Should I call the police?’ asks Cate and then wonders why she’s asking a sixteen-year-old girl who’s just been assaulted whether or not she should call the police.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ said Georgia. ‘Of course you should call them.’ Then before anyone else has a chance to pick up their phone, she’s calling 999.
And then the police arrive, and Tilly’s mum arrives and the night takes a strange tangent off into a place that Cate has never been before, a place of policemen in her kitchen, and a tearfulmother she’s never met , and a nervous energy that keeps her awake for hours after the police leave and Tilly and her mother disappear in an Uber and the house is quiet yet she knows that no one can be sleeping peacefully because a bad thing happened and it is something to do with them and something to do with this place and something else, some indefinable thing to do with her, some badness, some mistake she’s made because she’s not a good person. She has been trying so hard to stop thinking of herself as a bad person, but as she lies in bed that night, the sudden awful knowledge of it gnaws at her consciousness until she feels raw and unpeeled.
Cate awakes just before her alarm goes off the following morning, having slept for only three and a half hours. She turns and looks at Roan, lying peacefully on his back, his arms tucked neatly under the duvet. He is a pleasant-looking man, her husband. He has lost most of his hair and shaves it now, revealing the strange contours of his skull that she had not known existed when she’d first met him thirty years ago. She’d presumed his skull to be a smooth thing, the underside of a pottery urn. Instead it is a landscape with hills and valleys, a tiny puckered scar. Raised veins run across his temples to his brow. His nose is large. His eyes are heavy-lidded. He is her husband. He hates her. She knows he does. And it’s her fault.
She slips out of bed and goes to the front window, a large bay overlooking the street. The just-risen sun shines through the trees, on to the building site across the road. It looks innocuous. Then she looks further to the right, to the house with the armchair onthe driveway. She thinks of the man who lives there, the creepy man who’d followed Georgia home from the Tube station, who’d thrown her and Tilly dirty looks last night as he put out his bins – the man who matches the description that Tilly gave of the man who assaulted her.
Cate locates the card the policeman gave her last night. Detective Inspector Robert Burdett. She calls him, but he doesn’t answer so she leaves a message for him.
‘I’m calling about the assault on Tilly Krasniqi last night,’ she begins. ‘I don’t know if it’s anything but there’s a man, across the street. At number twelve. My daughter says he followed her home the other night. And she says he was staring at her and Tilly strangely on their way home from school last night. I don’t know his name, I’m afraid. He’s about thirty or forty. That’s all I know. Sorry. Just a thought. Number twelve. Thank you.’
‘Have you spoken to Tilly today?’ Cate asks Georgia as her daughter spins around the flat readying herself to leave for school later that morning.
‘No,’ says Georgia. ‘She’s not been answering my messages or taking my calls. I think maybe her phone’s switched off.’
‘Oh God.’ Cate sighs. She can’t bear the sense of guilt, the feeling that she somehow made this happen. She imagines Georgia, her beautiful guileless girl, a man’s hands on her in the dark on her way home from a friend’s house. It’s unbearable. Then she imagines tiny Tilly, too traumatised even to take messages from her best friend. She finds the number that Tilly’s mum put into her phone last night and presses it.
Tilly’s mum finally answers her phone the sixth time Cate calls her.
‘Oh, Elona, hi, it’s Cate. How is she? How’s Tilly?’
There is a long silence, then the sound of the phone being handled and muted voices in the background. Then a voice says, ‘Hello?’
‘Elona?’
‘No. It’s Tilly.’
‘Oh,’ says Cate. ‘Tilly. Hello, sweetheart. How are you doing?’
There’s another strange silence. Cate hears Elona’s voice in the background. Then Tilly says, ‘I’ve got something to tell you.’