Читать книгу I Know Who You Are - Alice Feeney - Страница 18

London, 2017

I check my phone again before getting out of the car. I’ve tried to call my agent three times now, but it just keeps going to voicemail. I even called the office, but his assistant said Tony was unavailable, and she used that tone people reserve for when they know something you don’t. Or perhaps I’m just being paranoid. With everything else that is happening, I suppose that’s possible. I’ll try again tomorrow.

The house is in complete darkness as I trudge up the path. I keep thinking about Jack and the way he kissed me on set. It felt so … real. I wear the idea of him like a blanket and it makes me feel safe and warm, the cloak of fantasy always more reliable than cold reality. But lust is only ever a temporary cure for loneliness. I close the front door behind me, leaving longing back in the shadows, out on the street. I switch on the lights of real life, finding them a little bright; they permit me to see more than I want to. The house is too quiet and too empty, like a discarded shell.

My husband is still gone.

I’m instantly dragged back in time, reliving the precise moment when his jealousy climaxed and my patience expired, generating the perfect marital storm.

I remember what he did to me. I remember everything that happened that night.

It’s a strange feeling, when buried memories float to the surface without warning. Like having all the air sucked out of your lungs, then being dropped from a great height; the perpetual sense of falling combined with the unavoidable knowledge that you’re going to hit something hard.

I feel colder than I did a moment ago.

The silence seems to have grown louder, and I look around, my eyes frantically searching the empty space.

I feel like I’m being watched.

The sensation you get when someone is staring at you is inexplicable, but also very real. I feel frozen to the spot at first, trying, but failing, to reassure myself that it’s just my imagination. Then adrenaline ignites my fight or flight response, and I hurry around the house, pulling all the curtains and blinds, as though they are fabric shields. Better safe than spied on.

The stalker first entered my life a couple of years ago, not long after Ben and I got together. It started with emails, but then she appeared outside our old house a few times, and delivered a series of hand-written cards when she thought nobody was home. Someone broke in when I was away in LA, and Ben was convinced it was her. It was one of the main reasons I agreed to move here, to a house I hadn’t even seen, except online. Ben took care of everything, so that we could get away from her. What if she found me? Found us?

The stalker always wrote the same thing:

I know who you are.

I always pretended not to know what that meant.

I feel lost. I don’t know what to do, how to feel, or how to act.

Should I call the police again? Ask for an update and tell them the things I didn’t last time, or just sit here and wait? You can never really predict how you will behave when life goes non-linear; you don’t know until it happens to you. People are capable of all kinds of surprising things. I’m dealing with the situation as best I can, without letting others down any more than I already have. I know I must be missing something, not just my husband, but I don’t know what. What I do know, is that the only person I can rely on to get me through this, is me. I don’t have anyone left to hold my hand. The thought triggers a memory, and my mind rewinds to when I was a little girl; someone always liked to hold my hand back then.

Something very bad happened when I was a child.

I’ve never spoken about it with anyone, even after all these years; some secrets should never be shared. The series of childhood doctors I was made to see afterwards said that I had something called transient global amnesia. They explained that my brain had blocked out certain memories, because it deemed them too stressful or upsetting to remember, and that the condition would most likely stay with me for life. I was just a child, and I didn’t take their diagnosis too seriously back then. I knew that I had only been pretending not to remember what happened. I haven’t given it too much thought in recent years. Until now.

I think I would remember if I had emptied and closed our bank account. I think a lot of things; the problem is that I don’t know.

I keep thinking about the stalker.

I can’t seem to stop my mind replaying the first time I saw her with my own eyes, standing outside our old home. I heard the letter box rattle and thought it was the postman. It wasn’t. A lonely-looking vintage postcard was face down on the doormat. There was no stamp. It had been hand-delivered, and I remember picking it up, my hands trembling as I read the then-familiar spidery black handwriting scrawled across the back.

I know who you are.

I opened the door and she was right there, standing across the street looking back at me. I thought I was going to throw up. I’d never seen her before, Ben had, but until that moment she was still little more than a phantom to me. A ghost I didn’t believe in. The previous emails, and then postcards, hadn’t scared me too much. But seeing her in the flesh was terrifying, because I thought I recognised her. She was some distance away, her face mostly covered with a scarf and sunglasses, but she was dressed just like me, and in that moment, I thought it was her. It wasn’t. It can’t have been.

She ran away when she saw me. Ben came home early and we called the police.

I should be more worried than I am about my husband.

What is wrong with me? Am I losing my mind?

It feels as if something very bad is happening again, something a lot worse than before.