I Am Watching You(2)

‘Wow. Jail. So what was that really like?’

It is at this point I consider my role.

Privately I am picturing Anna’s mother toasting her bottom by her Aga, worrying with her husband if their little girl will be all right, and he is telling her not to fuss so. They are growing up fast. Sensible girls. They will be fine, love.

And I am thinking that they are not fine at all. For Karl is now thinking that the safest thing for the girls would be to have someone who knows London well chaperoning them during their visit.

Karl and Antony are going to stay with friends in Vauxhall and fancy a big night to celebrate their release. How about they meet the girls after the theatre and try the club together?

This is when I decide that I need to phone the girls’ parents. They have named their hamlet. Anna lives on a farm. It’s not rocket science. I can phone the post office or local pub; how many farms can there be?

But now Anna isn’t sure at all. No. They should probably have an early night so they can hit the shops tomorrow morning. They have this plan, see, to go to Liberty’s first thing because Sarah is determined to try on something by Stella McCartney and get a picture on her phone.

Good girl, I am thinking. Sensible girl. Spare me the intervention, Anna. But there is a complication, for Sarah seems suddenly to have taken a shine to Antony. There is a second trip to the buffet and they swap seats on their return – Anna now sitting with Karl and Sarah with Antony, who is telling her about his regrets at stuffing up his life. He only turned to crime out of desperation, he says, because he couldn’t get a job. Couldn’t support his son.

Son?

It sweeps over me, then. The shadow from the thatched canopy of my chocolate-box life – me shrinking smaller and smaller into the shade as Antony explains that he is fighting his ex for access, telling Sarah that there is no way he is going to have his son growing up not knowing his dad. ‘Don’t you think that would be just terrible, Sarah? For him to grow up not knowing his dad?’

Sarah is the one who is surprising me now – there’s a catch in her throat as she says she thinks it’s really cool that he cares so very much, because many young men wouldn’t, would just walk away from the responsibility. ‘I feel really awful now. Us banging on about Stella McCartney.’

And the truth? At this point I have absolutely no idea about any of it anymore. What do I know? A woman whose son’s only access battle involved an 18-certificate film at the local cinema.

An hour of whispering follows and I try very hard to read again, to take in the pluses of the quieter generation of wind turbines, but then Antony and Sarah are off to the buffet again. More lager, I am thinking. Big mistake, Sarah. And this is when I decide.

Yes. I will head to the buffet myself on the pretext of needing coffee, and in the queue or passing in the corridor will feign trouble with my phone. I will ask Sarah for help – hoping to separate her from Antony for a quiet word – and give a little warning that she needs to step away from this nonsense or I will be phoning her parents. Immediately, you understand me, Sarah? I can find out their number.

Our carriage is three away from the buffet. I stumble into seats passing through the second, bump-bump-bumping my thighs, and then feel for my phone in the pocket of my jacket as I pass through the automatic doors into the connecting space.

And that’s when I hear them.

No shame. No attempt even to keep themselves quiet about it. Making out, loud and proud, in the train toilet. Rutting in the cubicle like a pair of animals.

I know it’s them from what he’s saying. How long it’s been. How grateful he is. ‘Sarah, oh Sarah . . .’

And yes, I admit it. I am completely shocked to the core of my very being. Hot with humiliation. Furious. Winded and desperate, more than anything on this planet, to escape the noise.

Also the shame of my naivety. My ridiculous assumptions.

I stumble across the corridor to the next set of automatic doors and into the carriage, breathless and flustered in the scramble to put distance between myself and the evidence of my miscalculation.

Nice girls?

In the buffet queue, I am listening again to the pulse in my ear as I wonder if someone else will have heard them by now. Even reported them?

And then I am thinking, Report them? Report them to whom, Ella? Will you just listen to yourself? Other people will do precisely what you should have done from the off. They will mind their own.

At which point my emotions begin to change and I am wondering instead how I came to be this out of touch, this buttoned up. This woman who evidently has not the first clue about young people. Or anything much.

Into my head now – a kaleidoscope of memories. Pictures torn around the edges. The magazines we found in our son’s room. That night after the cinema when we came home early to find Luke trying to override the Sky security to watch porn.

So that on this wretched train, I find that I need very urgently to speak to my husband. To my Tony. To reset my compass.

I need to ask him if the whole problem here is not with them but with me. Am I altogether ridiculous, Tony? No, really – I need you to be honest with me. When we had that row over the Sky channels and Luke’s magazines.

Am I the most terrible prude? Am I?

I do try to ring him, actually – that night from the hotel after the conference session. I want to tell him how I did the sensible thing and moved to the other end of the train. Minded my own. The girls clearly quite streetwise enough.