Watched: When Road Rage Follows You Home (5 page)

After flicking on the air-conditioning, Charlie turned left, cruising along the empty street. It was a beautiful morning: blue skies, sunny and warm. He had to squint as he took the next left, turning onto the road that ran parallel to theirs. The speed limit was twenty but Charlie was barely doing that, twisting his head from side to side and checking each driveway.

He turned into a cul-de-sac, reaching the end and doing a three-point turn before heading back. There was the odd blue car but nothing like the type Esther had described. He’d known exactly what she was talking about: every estate had them. Someone who’d bought a car and spent the next five years constantly adding parts to it until it was a howling monstrosity that you could hear from half-a-mile away.

Charlie turned into the next street, drifting along and checking both sides until he reached the end, almost back where he’d begun on the parallel road. He checked the clock on the dashboard – if he didn’t get going, he was going to be late, which was hardly an example to set on his second day. Driving along every small side street was going to take hours.

Knowing he couldn’t do anything else, Charlie started driving along the road that ran parallel to theirs again. At the end, it was a short series of turns and he’d be on the dual carriageway. Even if the traffic lights were against him, he should still be on time.

He gave way at a traffic island and then accelerated, touching twenty-five before easing off. As he was about to brake for the next island, he felt an unexplainable pull to face left. Whether it was the angle of the sun, or a sixth sense that there was something to see, Charlie turned to spot a tree overhanging a driveway. Parked front-first underneath was a metallic blue hatchback, angled crookedly so it was half across the drive, half across the pavement.

Charlie peered over the top of the adjacent property, deep into the bright sky. Although it was three-quarters-of-a-mile following the road, in a straight line, their house was barely a couple of hundred metres away.

FIVE: ESTHER

Esther had just about finished packing the rubbish from their driveway into black bags when the recovery vehicle pulled up. A cheery looking man in overalls climbed out of the driver’s seat, checking his phone.

‘Are you Esther Pooley?’

She turned to point at her car. ‘Yep.’

He scratched his chin, re-pocketing the phone. ‘There are some serious wee shites around. Did they slash all four?’

‘Unfortunately – it must have happened overnight.’

‘Aye – that’s what happens when the schools break up. Fourteen-year-olds on the street getting lashed on cider, picking fights with each other, then going after good folks like yourselves. Kids today, eh?’

Esther nodded in agreement, even though she didn’t think it was kids and wasn’t convinced that children nowadays were any worse than when she was young. When she was fifteen, she would hang around with her friends in the park hoping someone had managed to get hold of a bottle of booze from somewhere.

The man whistled as he wheeled a jack across to her car and began propping it up. Esther carried the bags of rubbish to the back of the house, squeezed as much as she could into the bin, and then left the rest by the side.

It was a little after nine in the morning and she’d been up for three hours. Where the time had gone, she wasn’t quite sure. She remembered finishing the coffee and having another, then getting dressed, but it couldn’t have taken that long to clear away the rubbish.

When she had cleaned herself up, Esther went next door and rang the doorbell. From inside, there was the sound of a door slamming, something metallic clanging and a child screaming. A few seconds later, Liz opened the door, though she was peering over her shoulder, facing inside. ‘Gary, will you put that down. How many times have I told you?’

She turned to face Esther with an exasperated sigh. ‘Sorry about that, love. Bloody kids.’

‘I was worried I’d be waking you up.’

Liz had a dressing gown wrapped tightly around herself with fluffy pink slippers on her feet. Her hair was untied, the grey strands static and wiry. Her skin was redder than the previous day, with more white patches of wrinkled skin around her eyes intermingled with the sunburn. She stifled a yawn but didn’t look as if she’d slept.

She waved a hand in front of her face. ‘When you’ve got a four- and a six-year-old, nine in the morning feels more like the middle of the afternoon.’

‘Oh, right.’

From inside, there was another clatter, with Liz spinning around. ‘Sorry, you better come in. They’re in the kitchen and are probably trying to stuff each other into the microwave or something.’

Liz retreated into the hall, with Esther following her into the house and closing the door. The inside gave Esther a glimpse of what their house could look like. It was a mirror image of theirs, with the living room and stairs on the other side of the front door, but looked so much better fully furnished. The colours were soft pastels, with a tall mirror in the hallway, a row of hooks for keys and a height chart with ‘Gary’ and ‘Mark’ and various numbers written next to a stack of horizontal lines.

Esther stepped over a child gate into the kitchen, following Liz. Sitting at a dining table were two boys, crayons in hand, a rainbow of colour spread across white sheets of paper and part of the table-top. They were strikingly similar: short dark hair, wide brown eyes and a sense of mischief in their matching smirks.

Liz stood, hands on hips, peering from one to the other. ‘What have I told you about drawing on the table?’

The slightly shorter boy, who Esther assumed was Mark, replied: ‘It was an accident…’

‘Yeah, like it’ll be an accident when Santa forgets to come this year.’

‘Aww, Mum…’

Liz turned to Esther. ‘This is Mrs Pooley. She’s going to be living next door with her husband. Say hello.’

The boys peered up from the table and said ‘hi’ in unison. Esther couldn’t help but smile at how similar they were.

‘Call me Esther.’

‘That’s nice, isn’t it boys,’ Liz said. ‘Now go and play in the living room. I need to talk to Esther for a few minutes without you two getting in the way.’

The children slipped out from their seats without complaint, heading into the room beyond. The younger of the two nudged his brother with his shoulder and then tried to trip him, before bursting into laughter.

‘…and no fighting!’ Liz called after them. She picked up a cloth from the sink and sat at the table, scrubbing away at the crayon. ‘Do you want a tea, or anything?’

‘I’m all hot-drinked out for this morning.’

Liz reached across and flicked the kettle on. ‘When you have kids, you’ll find yourself living off tea and biscuits.’

Esther felt awkward standing in the centre of the kitchen as Liz scrubbed away. She bobbed from one leg to the other before getting to the point. ‘I was wondering if you’d heard anything overnight?’

Liz didn’t look up from the table. ‘I’d be lucky to hear a smoke alarm over Steve’s snoring. It’s like a pneumatic drill when he gets going.’

‘Is Steve your husband?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Oh…sorry.’

Liz shrugged. ‘Don’t worry about it, love. It’s just not our thing. We’ve been together for longer than I can remember and he’s a good daddy to those terrors.’

‘It’s just that someone slashed my tyres and I was wondering if anyone had heard or seen anything.’

Liz peered up from the table. ‘I’ll ask Steve when he gets in from work but I’m sure he would’ve said something if he had. I didn’t hear a thing.’

‘It’s all right – I figured as much. I found the phone number for a tyre place and someone’s come out to fix them.’

Liz smiled limply, rubbing a flake of sunburned skin from her forehead. ‘You always get a bit of this when it’s summer. Last year, someone at the other end of the road had their car window put through. It’s just because it’s a through-road. We stopped parking on the road because of it. It only takes one idiot.’

‘Did the police get anyone for it?’

‘I don’t know. It’s just one of those things, isn’t it? There’s a neighbourhood watch scheme run by this guy who lives one street over – Dougie something – he’s a nice guy and runs these kids’ club things. You can probably talk to him...’

Esther thought about saying they’d had rubbish dumped on their drive too but didn’t know what good it would do. She could ask the other neighbours if they’d heard anything but it wouldn’t be the best way to introduce herself – ‘Hi, I just moved in yesterday, did you see anyone skulking around last night?’. As for talking to the neighbourhood watch guy, she wasn’t sure she wanted to go that far yet.

After a little small-talk about local supermarkets, the weather and how there was hardly ever anything on television to watch, Esther said her goodbyes and returned to her own house.

The mechanic was sitting on the ground, hands covered in grease, with a dark black smudge across his cheek. ‘Someone’s really done a number on these,’ he said, pointing at the tyre by his foot. He reached his fingers into the fold of rubber. ‘Whoever did this had a bloody big knife. Kids, eh? In my day it was Swiss army knives, now they’re carrying around machetes.’

Esther shivered as the image of the man in the baseball cap slipped through her mind.

‘Sorry, love, I didn’t mean to scare you, like.’

Esther corrected herself, standing straighter and forcing the tremor away. ‘You didn’t. Do you want a cup of tea?’

The man perked up instantly. ‘That’d be epic. Milk and two sugars if you can.’

Esther took one last look at the shreds of rubber wrapped around the mechanic’s wrist and then went into the house, wishing he hadn’t mentioned the word ‘machete’.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

The rest of the morning flew by. The mechanic finished relatively quickly and didn’t charge too much, the sun continued to shine, and Esther found the wallpapering simpler than she thought it might be. She tried not to think about the driver from the day before and the fact that someone, presumably him, had been on their property and knew where she lived. If he was trying to scare her, then he was doing a really good job.

She ran through the events over and over in her mind, thinking of the little things. If she’d been thirty seconds earlier, she would have been through the traffic lights before he was there; thirty seconds later and she would have been behind him. If there hadn’t have been a car in front of her, she would have noticed the arrows painted on the tarmac and not got in the wrong lane. If she hadn’t broken the scraper’s blade, she wouldn’t have needed to leave the house.

If, if, if.

As she snipped across the bottom of a paper strip and pressed it to the wall, Esther felt her mobile phone vibrating in her pocket. She dried her hands on a piece of cloth before digging the device out of her trousers.

‘I told you I’m fine,’ she said, putting it on speakerphone.

Charlie’s voice echoed from the tinny-sounding speaker. ‘Aren’t I allowed to call my lovely wife to say “hello”?’

‘Hmm… I suppose so. How’s work?’

‘Busy. Did you get your car sorted?’

‘Yes – he didn’t even try to rip me off so I kept his business card. It’s always helpful to know a good mechanic.’ Esther stood, wiping her free hand on her jeans and peering out of the window to the garden below. There was a flicker of movement close to the fence. ‘…Look, I’m in the middle of wallpapering, so I’ve got to go. I’m fine, though, and the car’s fixed. Are you still going to be home on time?’

Charlie faltered, sounding a little put-out. ‘Should be.’

‘All right, I’ll see you then.’

Esther re-pocketed her phone and took her trainers and socks off. They were covered in a thin film of paste and were gloopily clinging to the bare floorboards. She dashed down the stairs, unlocked the side door, and crept into the back garden.

Skulking along the fence line was the black and white cat. It took a few steps, sniffed the air and then continued moving. Esther retreated inside and opened the cupboard where she’d put the crockery, finding a pasta bowl and filling it with water. Back in the garden, she tiptoed across the long grass, enjoying the texture of the blades, and the heat on her bare shoulders.

When the cat noticed her, its legs straightened, eyes fixed. Esther crouched and put the water on the floor, flattening a patch of grass and sitting cross-legged on the lawn. The cat peered towards her, then away towards the hedge at the bottom of the garden. Esther felt as if she could read the animal’s thoughts, understanding its dilemma. One route offered familiarity, the other the unknown.

Up close, the cat appeared in a worse state than she had thought the previous day. Its eyes were a piercing bright green but one of the sockets was slightly more squashed than the other, as if it had taken a blow at some point. The patch of fur missing from its head left a stubbly blotch of skin exposed on the back of its neck, while its tail seemed as if it had been bluntly sliced in half. Instead of the long furry length that most cats would have, its tail was only a few centimetres long, with the cut at an angle.

Esther held her hand out, opening her body. ‘Come on: there’s some water for you here. I’m not going to hurt you.’

The cat took a few more steps forward, keeping eye contact with Esther and making sure it always had a paw in the air in case it needed to run for it.

‘My name’s Esther. What are you called?’

Two more steps and the cat stopped staring at Esther, peering down to sniff the water.

‘How about Patch? That’s a nice name.’

Slowly, the cat lowered its neck and lapped at the water. Esther reached out to stroke its head but the animal pulled away, head at an angle as it cowered from her hand.

‘I’m not going to hurt you, Patch.’

The cat didn’t seem too happy but as soon as Esther rested a hand on its back, it stopped cowering. Very slowly, Esther began fondling the fur on top of Patch’s head. The cat mewed quietly and then took another sip of the water. Esther traced her hand around the damaged area on the back of his neck – noticing the giveaway sign underneath his tail that it was male – and then started to caress his back.