People LIke Her(74)

And I imagine you standing in the living room at the bottom of the stairs, cautiously looking around, hesitant, unsure at this point whether I am really gone, whether you are really alone.

And when you spot the envelope I can see you crossing the room and opening it, and starting to read there at the living room table, still standing, letting each page fall as you have finished with it.

And then you’ll know. What the point of all this is. Who the real villain of the piece turns out to be.

You made me, Emmy. You made me into what I am. You made me capable of doing this.

The burden I have borne, this regret and pain and sorrow and anger, I have carried long enough. I am glad to be near the end now. This is not about revenge. This has never been about revenge. It is about justice. And when it is over, all I want to do is close my eyes, and know that I have done what needed to be done, and rest.

Goodbye, Emmy.

Dan

It’s a scene I have been anticipating in my head all week. As I’m seeing Bear and Emmy off. As I’m working that afternoon, typing away in the kitchen of the empty house. As I’m making Coco’s dinner, giving her a bath, and reading her to sleep. As I am watching TV, watching whatever I want to watch on TV, eating whatever I want to eat and as much of it as I like. The next day, as I am sitting in a café with my laptop, occasionally checking my phone for messages from Emmy and quietly impressed by the totality of her silence (I hadn’t expected her to take the whole communication-blackout thing anything like as seriously as she has) or as I’m explaining once again to Coco where Mummy is and when she’s due back. As Coco and I are watching cartoons in the morning and waiting for Doreen to come and as I’m waiting in the evenings for another picture of my daughter to appear on Ppampamelaf2PF4’s feed and as I’m confirming with Doreen that it’s still okay that she takes Coco on Saturday, as we’ve previously discussed. As I am booking my train ticket and working out how best to get from the station to Pamela Fielding’s house. As I am looking at pictures of Pamela Fielding’s house on Google Maps. As I am falling asleep with a whole bed to myself in the evenings and practically as soon as I am awoken each morning by Coco calling plaintively down the corridor to let me know she’s ready to get up.

It’s a bright day, Saturday, so I suggest that Doreen and my daughter go for a walk along the canal, then stop off at the playground next to the skate park. That should kill most of the morning. I give Doreen some extra cash for lunch, suggest they stay out to eat and check out the city farm in the afternoon. My idea is enthusiastically received.

By my calculations, what I need to do should take me six hours.

I give it five minutes after they’ve left, and then I depart the house as well. I didn’t say anything to Emmy about any of this before she went. Far better, in my thinking, to present it to her afterward as a fait accompli. Maybe I won’t tell her anything at first, just wait until she notices that the RP account has been shut down, wait until she asks how I got the stolen laptop back.

Like a lot of writers, there is some part of me that genuinely thinks I would make a pretty good detective.

All the way to the Tube I’m imagining to myself what I’m going to say to Pamela when she opens the door.

Hi there, Pam. I’m Dan. And I’m here to tell you to leave my fucking daughter alone.

Of course I’ve done an image search for Pamela Fielding, but the results show fifteen UK-based women (and several books about eighteenth-century literature), so I don’t know which of them has been running the account and lives at the address I’m on my way to. None of them looks particularly deranged.

I arrive at Liverpool Street about fifteen minutes before my train is ready to depart. Right next to the barrier there are two policemen in helmets and luminous tabards, and I experience a brief moment of intense self-consciousness, a moment of wondering whether to make eye contact or not, whether to smile or not.

I might as well admit it. There were some mad moments when I considered taking something with me on this expedition. A hammer. A Stanley knife. A pair of scissors. Not that I would use them, of course. Just something to show I meant business. I imagined myself ramming the scissors into the doorframe. Taking the hammer to the little window in the middle of the front door. Fucking up the wheels. I spent about forty-five minutes wondering if I knew any way I could get my hands on a gun before sanity intervened. Mental, I told myself. You sound absolutely mental.

It being midmorning on a Saturday, the train is relatively uncrowded. This isn’t a line I’ve used before, and it surprises me how quickly we’re in the country, or at least what I think of as the country, how quickly we’ve left behind the office blocks and Victorian terraces and new high-rise developments and are passing golf courses and a field with horses in it.

I count the stops, seventeen of them, and stare out the window, my guts churning. We pass dispersed farm buildings and corrugated barns and things in fields under black plastic. All of the towns we pass through look pretty similar. An enormous IKEA. Multistory parking lots. Gardens with trampolines in them. The sky is low and grey and threatens rain.

A very tall old guy in a furry-hooded coat with a plastic bag in each hand is the only other person to get off at my station. Christ, England is depressing. The coffee shop is closed, the waiting room locked, the platform windswept and deserted. With a bit of a judder, the glass doors open to reveal an equally deserted taxi rank, the wind swirling little hurricanes of dust and burger wrappers around on the tarmac.