Chapter 27
27
Cam
Sometimes, Cam thinks she sees him. In a crowd, boarding a Tube. She does it today at the school gate, somebody in a dark blue jacket and a hat, even in the heat, disappearing behind a flower-lined wall.
Cam blinks. It was nothing. But something about it makes her stop, makes her chest feel hollow and spooked. The feeling of eyes on her, just like at the Tube at Putney. She darts across the pavement, looks up the street, but he’s gone.
Polly appears in the distance, distracting Cam, surrounded as ever by a gaggle of friends. ‘You’ll have to give me a tour of your house!’ Cam hears her exclaim to somebody so new Cam doesn’t even recognize her. She stares at her shoes and smiles at the overfamiliarity of her daughter, the American inflection from too much YouTube, and waits, thinking how interesting parenthood is. That this person was in there all along; even as a baby she found everything funny and happy-making. Cam spent her childhood reading Goosebumps books on playground benches: she sometimes finds she has no idea how to parent an extrovert.
The weather is close, air clouded over, sun only occasionally slicing through, like smoke curling underneath a door.
A conversation between two school mums, Kelly Bentley and Isobel Morris, plays out next to Cam, the tone gossipy. Cam pauses, her body as still as an animal in the wild. Nobody at the school apart from the head has yet worked out what Luke did. Many have assumed he’s an absent father, an acrimonious divorce somewhere in Cam’s past, and Cam never corrects them. She is therefore, as Cam Fletcher, mostly under the radar, but goes on high alert whenever she overhears anything remotely salacious.
Polly has stopped walking now, but is still talking animatedly with her new friends.
‘I have such awful IBS,’ Isobel says to Kelly, and Cam relaxes. IBS, not infamy. Well, good. But it reminds her of conversations she used to have with friends … her closest friend, Holly, the freelance editor. Their relationship limped on for a year or so after the siege, but Cam couldn’t keep pretending her life was normal enough to have a glass of wine with a mate. It just wasn’t. They lost touch, texts unanswered by Cam.
Kelly catches Cam looking, and says, ‘Sorry for the overshare. TMI discussion over here.’
‘Not at all,’ Cam says, waving a hand. ‘I used to have that, but, do you know, peppermint tea really did help.’ This is a total lie, but it erupts out of Cam, nevertheless. This is how she does it. Keep them going. Keep them talking. Never let them know she’s weird, and lonely, and fragile. Act natural, so natural no one ever gets too close.
She distracts herself with her phone. Libby has sent a characteristic string:
So jaded this morning.
Look at this awful house I have to market.
A photo of a messy living room, clothes everywhere, a curtain hanging off the rail at one end.
Also.
How’re you?
‘You’re based on Bucks Avenue, right?’ Kelly says, interrupting Cam’s reading.
‘Where are you?’ Cam asks, not answering directly.
‘Oh, nowhere as nice as that. I love it there, the little houses with the bedrooms downstairs?’
‘That’s it,’ Cam says, and she’s got to get out of here. She doesn’t know these women, and so the scales are unevenly balanced. They know where she lives: what if they know who she is? She knows it is irrational, but she can’t help it. She turns away from them, folding her arms across her body. And, she swears, she can feel it: the look they exchange about her.
Come on, Polly, she thinks, willing her daughter to get moving.
Cam checks her email. She needs more immersion than her phone will afford. She has a submission from a debut author called Jenny, about a woman who discovers her son is a member of an incel group online. Interesting pitch, she thinks, and opens the manuscript right there at the school gate.
It’s bone cold on the Saturday when I decided to finally follow Nate. He doesn’t notice at all, his lit-up gaze drawn downwards always to the bright mobile phone in his hand. We go like this, me a few hundred yards behind him, for the mile to the bus stop. There is nowhere to hide in the blank-skied winter, but he doesn’t look over his shoulder. Not even once.
Cam’s breathing instantly slows. She’s away from the heat, the school gate, and she’s there. Somewhere else, some one else. She requests the full manuscript immediately. Anything that grips her she requests: that’s her rule. As simple as that. Not worried about genre, about saleability. Good books find a home with Cam.
Polly stops talking and eventually arrives, and Cam puts her phone away, rushing to her, squatting down to her level. ‘What’s new?’ she says to her, one of their phrases, and Polly beams at Cam.
‘Sandwiches for lunch, Sam has a cat, my new friend has moved into a house called the Cuckoo’s Nest,’ she says in her typical Polly way, streams of information bursting forth like a geyser.
Polly reaches her arms out to Cam, and there is something so wholesome about this, so pure, it makes Cam forget everything: parenthood is an exercise in mindfulness that you didn’t even know you needed.
Cam holds her to her chest. ‘And a butterfly came into the class!’ Polly exclaims so loudly, right into Cam’s ear. Cam’s eyes film with tears as she finds herself having the thought she manages mostly to keep at bay: Luke would love her. He would have loved whoever they made, but he would love Polly.
‘Right,’ Kelly says. ‘I need to get home to chop vegetables. Scintillating life I lead.’
As she leaves with her child in tow, Cam thinks that her own behaviour is so sad, it’s so very sad: Kelly and Isobel probably only want Cam to be their friend.
Miss Ashcroft comes out now, heading for Cam, who winces but relaxes as she passes her, off to talk to some poor other parent. Luke has come up only once, in an incident six months ago.
‘Got a second?’ Miss Ashcroft had said on a freezing cold December day. It was almost four, twilight, Christmas lights entwined around the school fence, and Cam felt those three words so vividly that she could almost see them written in the air, her breath hot-dust white, a warning flare in the night.
They headed inside, down a corridor that smelled of lemon floor wax, plasticine and stale lunchboxes, and into Polly’s classroom.
Polly was still with the teaching assistant, being encouraged to tidy her tray. Cam had eyed the two of them, half amused. It was not surprising that Polly was messy, and Cam smiled as she watched the TA try to extract loose pencils and wax crayons and curled sugar paper in order to pull the tray out. Funny how genes worked. Somewhere, on some DNA strand deep in her husband’s and her daughter’s bodies, was coded: I’d really rather be having fun than tidying up .
‘Fathers came up today,’ Miss Ashcroft said, as if reading Cam’s mind. ‘Who has daddies, who has two mummies, and so on. One of the kids asked about something they’d seen on TV about single-parent families.’
‘Right,’ Cam said.
‘So Polly asked if I knew where her father was?’ Miss Ashcroft said. ‘She says you say the police say he’s bad, that he had to go away. But nothing more? Obviously, Mr Daniels has advised me … but – well. We wondered when you intended to tell Polly the full truth.’
And with that, an arrow was fired right into Cam’s heart. She remained standing there, listening, but her real self was speared against the back wall in the Christmas bauble display, blood splattered everywhere.
She met Miss Ashcroft’s gaze. ‘When do you advise?’ she asked her. Too direct, too acerbic, but she couldn’t help herself. Anger at the police, anger at Luke, anger at even the anonymous dead bodies … it all spills out sometimes, on to teachers, her sister and, most of all, herself. For marrying him, but being so lovelorn that she doesn’t even regret that. That she lives with hope that he will one day come back, or that she will receive an explanation. The conflicting emotions of it all.
‘Why was it being discussed?’ she added, an unreasonable question, but she needed to set out her stall: off limits. He is off limits. Cam’s stance is not that it didn’t happen, but rather that he simply still belongs to her. His memory belongs to her. Don’t take him from me.
Cam had glanced over at Polly. Her eyes were the same as Luke’s; her hair was the same. Cam loved it: she could still see him every day. Could pretend he was still here, and, in many ways, Cam is sure that he is. She’d know if he were dead. She would .
‘It’s natural for us to discuss fathers in school,’ Miss Ashcroft said. ‘The management and I are aware of your situation and try our best.’
Cam had to disclose it when Polly started school. There’s a form you have to fill in – another one – where you have an unusual family circumstance . That one didn’t have the right boxes for Cam to fill in, either.
‘Obviously,’ Cam continues, ‘the truth is very delicate.’
‘I know.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said Polly should speak to you.’
Cam cringed. Later, she’d brought it up with Polly. Had asked what Miss Ashcroft had said. Polly waved a hand: ‘Oh, something about dads,’ she said. The in-the-moment life of a seven-year-old. Cam had let a breath out: on borrowed time, still, but she didn’t care.
Nothing happens today. Miss Ashcroft has passed by. Isobel’s child comes out with extra spellings to work on and Cam feels a grim spark of Schadenfreude .
As they leave, Polly looks across the street, exclaims, and points. ‘Look!’
‘What?’ Cam says, following her gaze. And it’s the man. The man in the dark clothes and beanie she’s sure she saw ducking away from the school gate.
‘He was staring at us!’ Polly says, and Cam watches him go, not looking at them, darting back into the Tube station, body language furtive.
‘Oh – no, he’s fine,’ she reassures her daughter. She wishes she could believe her own words.
Cam is looking at the many books in her bedroom and thinking that it’s funny how she had craved this alone time, this me-time, when Polly was little, and she never got it. And now, single, she has far too much of it. Swathes and swathes of these slow-moving evening hours. She moves Luke’s AirPods off his bedside table and fiddles them absentmindedly.
She drags Adam’s Jiffy bag on to her lap, her treat, and pulls the manuscript out. She hasn’t started it yet, has been saving it in the way you don’t quite want to crack open a perfectly smooth Easter egg. But now she peels back the first page.
It started with a task.
Good opener.
The air was cold as gunmetal and the moon was up out ahead, a snowball thrown into the sky and forgotten. I left my house with a job to do set by my father. I’d debated whether to take it, and in the end had decided to. It turned out to be the worst decision of my life.
He’s done it. Cam can feel it. The book feels propulsive and intentional to her. And it’s so delicious, the slide into make-believe, that she can almost feel it on her skin like a warm embrace.