The House Swap(50)
It’s half past two and I’ve been out for hours. Forcing myself to stand up, I start to make my way back across the park. I turn on to the road that leads back to the house and hurry along, hugging my jacket to my body and shivering in the cold spring wind.
Lost in my thoughts, I am only vaguely conscious of the noise behind me – a rush of sound, a squeal of brakes. And then it’s right there, in a split second of violent colour. A car veering too close to the pavement – cutting so close to me that I feel a shudder of semi-contact, my force field bristling in sudden shock, before it swings away again and zooms off up the street. I fling myself back against the hedge. The car is already out of sight, but my mind and body haven’t quite caught up. It was close. Very close. I’m bending down, my legs weak, and crouching at the side of the road, ducking my head between my knees and struggling to talk myself down.
It must be five minutes before I manage to straighten up and walk on. I tell myself not to be stupid. It was a moment in time, with no significance. It means nothing.
By the time I’m back at Everdene Avenue, it has started to rain lightly and I put up the collar of my coat and duck my head down. If Amber is looking out of her window, then she’ll still recognize me at once. But there’s no swinging front door, no plaintive call across the street, and I quickly unlock the door of number 21 and slip inside.
My heart lifts with relief when I see the note scrawled on white paper in the middle of the kitchen table. Gone to supermarket to pick up some stuff and might swing by the cinema on the way back to see if there’s anything on this evening that we might fancy seeing. Back by four. F. At least I have another hour or so to collect my thoughts. But I can’t seem to settle for long, and before I know it I’m prowling restlessly through the house once again, going from room to room and staring at the barely there possessions – searching for any clue as to how you live, what you’re like, what you care about now.
The more I cycle through the faceless rooms, the more my helplessness grows. This is pointless; I have already done this search, back when I found the aftershave bottle. There’s only one place I failed to look: the little cabinet under the desk in the study, which was locked. At the time, I let it go, but now the conviction grips me that I need to look inside. I hurry to the study, cross to the empty desk and drop to my knees beside it. I tug at the drawer, but of course it’s still locked. I peer underneath, run my hands across the floor in search of a key, then I look around the rest of the room, meticulously combing every nook and cranny I can find. The key isn’t there.
Frustrated, I kneel back down and pull again at the drawer. I can feel the resistance, but the mechanism is a cheap one, rattling against the strain. Frustration surges up inside me and, before I have time to check myself, I set the flat of one hand on the cabinet above the drawer and use the other to yank the handle hard, once, then again. The catch rips and breaks, and the drawer is sliding out fast and smooth on its rollers, opening up what’s inside.
It’s a single wallet folder, green and unlabelled. I reach in and pull it out, opening it and taking out the contents. Several sheets of paper, printed from the internet, with some scribbled, illegible annotations in dark pen. I glance at the first sheet, and my throat seizes up. It’s a printout from 192.com of every household in the UK that is registered under Francis’s and my surname, and picked out in yellow highlighter is our own Leeds address in full.
I can feel my heart hammering as I spread out the other sheets on the floor in front of me. A photograph from a property website of the block we live in, advertising one of the other flats for sale. The homepage of the company where I now work, along with the Team page, where my own face smiles out blandly from the thumbnail photograph. A few screenshots of my social-media profiles, locked down and basic as they are. It’s all public information, but the collection of it, the fact that you’ve bothered to print it out … it feels quite odd. Invasive.
On the final sheet, I see the profile I set up months ago on the house-swap site: the photographs of the inside of our home, the chatty description of its location and the invitation to contact me. It had never occurred to me to wonder how you found me on the house-swap site, but now I realize you must have set up a Google alert or something similar on my name, my address. It’s what anyone might do, if they wanted to keep abreast of something. But even as I try and rationalize it, I’m aware that there’s a world of difference between something and someone, and especially the kind of someone I am to you. A world of difference between attention and obsession.
My head spins, and I’m pushing the papers shakily into a pile, forcing them back into the folder and shoving it into the drawer again, as if, in another moment, I might be discovered. I lean against the desk, thoughts buzzing.
Next to me, my phone is blinking, signalling a new email. I sent so many messages yesterday, caught up in disbelief and confusion, and you didn’t reply to a single one. Until now.
The message is brief. Don’t worry. I’ve been keeping myself busy. Scrolling down, I realize it’s a reply to one of the angrier emails I sent: What’s the point of all this? How are you occupying yourself there, in my flat? What the fuck are you actually doing? Your response is cryptic, brief and anonymous. It seems hardly worth the effort of typing. And then I notice the attachment.
I open it, my breath coming fast and shallow. At first, I don’t understand. It’s a picture of the hallway, taken in low light, from the far end by the kitchen. There’s nothing distinctive about it, no sign of activity. Then I see the photographs. They’re hung up just as I’d left them, but they’ve been altered somehow. Then I see. My own face has been cut out of them, leaving only black space.