Jane Renshaw - Watch Over Me

Flora could only nod.

‘Sit down. I’m making you a hot chocolate. Okay?’

Sitting down suddenly seemed like a very good idea.

It wasn’t a nice table. It was one of those cheap varnished orangey pine ones, and there was a sticky patch of something under the palm of her hand. Caroline wasn’t what you’d call houseproud – better things to do with her time. There was dust all over the shelf in the bathroom and mouldy grout in the shower, although the loo was clean enough.

The smell of the hot chocolate made her feel sick, but she smiled at Caroline as she handed Flora the steaming mug and sat with her hands around it.

‘Ailish was right,’ she said. ‘I am MegaParentFail.’

Caroline spluttered into her hot chocolate. ‘Like a character in a cartoon. This is a job for MegaParentFail! ’

‘No, but really – I lost it with Beckie this morning. I just lost it. As if things aren’t bad enough for her already.’

‘Give yourself a break, Flora. You’re a good person in a really difficult situation.’

‘But I’m not! That’s the whole problem – I’m not a good person, I’m –’ She stopped herself just in time.

‘You’re what?’ Caroline put her slim, elegant hand over Flora’s podgy one.

‘I – when I was young…’

But she couldn’t tell Caroline. She couldn’t tell anyone. If the Johnsons found out –

‘We’ve all done mad things when we were younger.’ Caroline made a face. ‘Don’t tell Ailish, whatever you do, but I’ve got a conviction for drunk and disorderly. Apparently I was actually dancing on the roof of this poor bastard’s car. In stilettos. Knickers on display. Can’t remember a fucking thing about it, but there is photographic evidence in a dusty police file somewhere. Whatever you did, it can’t be as bad as that? Can it?’

Flora stared at her, this wonderful friend she had somehow made. She felt closer to Caroline, already, than she’d ever felt to Pam. Could she tell her? If she swore her to secrecy?

‘Eh, Flora?’ said Caroline gently.

She shook her head. No.

She just couldn’t take that risk.

She made herself smile, and the lie came smoothly: ‘Well, no, nothing I did ever resulted in a conviction.’ She pulled her hand out from under Caroline’s and stood. ‘Sorry. You must be so sick of us and all our dramas.’

‘Don’t be daft. You can talk to me, you know, any time. If you want to. About anything.’

‘Thank you. You’re… I don’t know what we would do without you.’

Caroline stood too. ‘Everything seems a hundred times worse than it is at 2:15 in the morning. Look, why don’t you go and see your GP tomorrow and they can maybe give you something – just for now, just to help you sleep and stuff. I’m guessing you’ve not been sleeping much.’

‘Not much.’

‘You’re going to get through this, Flora. You’re –’ She stopped, staring past Flora’s shoulder.

Flora whipped round, scanning from window to door –

‘What?’

Caroline shot round the table to the back door, cupping her hands round her face to peer out through one of the glass panels in its upper section. ‘I thought… I thought I saw…’

‘Oh God. You saw someone out there?’ Flora went to the window, but all she could see was a reflection of herself, a madwoman with staring eyes in an old towelling robe. She pressed her face up against it, but it was too dark out there. The light from the kitchen illuminated only a few square feet of weedy concrete slabs.

She rested her palm on the cool glass: single-glazed, as all the windows in these listed old houses were. No protection at all.

‘Just something moving,’ said Caroline. ‘It was probably a fox. Little bastards seem to be making themselves at home in the jungle I call a garden.’ She expelled a breath. ‘God, what are we like? Jumping at shadows. Come on, back to bed with you. You don’t want Beckie waking and wondering where you are, do you?’ But Flora noted that she turned the doorknob and pulled at the door to check it, and then removed the key that had been left in the lock.

Flora was virtually certain that the yob sitting across the waiting room staring at her was a Johnson, or a Johnson’s minion. She knew she’d seen him before. He had a long neck and a little head and a big Adam’s apple like a turkey, and sharp little eyes fixed on her.

There were three other patients in the room, but they were all elderly women. They’d be no help if he went for her. And Sheena, the receptionist in the little office behind the glass window, probably had a non-intervention clause in her contract that meant she would sit there watching if one patient decided to attack another in front of her.

He was definitely looking at Flora.

Thank God Beckie wasn’t here.

Neil had driven Beckie to school while Flora walked to the Health Centre. She’d felt the need for exercise, the need to get rid of all the pent-up energy inside her. She had expected Neil to object, to worry that it might be unsafe for her to walk even three streets to the Health Centre in broad daylight.

But he hadn’t.

He’d just said, ‘Can you pick Beckie up this afternoon?’

And the energy was still inside her, still making her legs twitch, her heels jig up and down on the carpet as if she was some hyperactive child come for her Ritalin.

The waiting room was smaller than she remembered.

A lot smaller. She felt as if she could reach out and touch the wall opposite, reach out and punch that yob right in the Adam’s apple – he’d better watch it, she was ninja trained – oh God, Ailish’s face when Jed-Bag had gone flying out of the window!

And then suddenly the yob was up and out of his chair and coming for her, out of nowhere, and she caught a huge gulp of air and jumped up and yelled something, and she was kicking out at his crotch and he was yelling too, and he was staggering back, away, and ‘ Bastard! ’ she was shouting, and now, thank God, there was Dr Swain and she was telling him what had happened and the Johnson was whining and denying it, ‘I never touched her,’ and she was screaming, ‘Keep away from me, you fucking bastard ! Keep away from my daughter !’

Her head felt enormous and fragile, like her brain had swollen up and her skull was a thin bony balloon and all the nerves inside it were being squashed up against it and soon the whole thing was going to burst open. It hurt to open her eyes. She was lying down on something that felt funny – a piece of paper of all things, a giant piece of paper. She was on one of those narrow beds in a consulting room.

She could hear Neil’s voice and another man’s, talking too quietly for her to hear.

‘Neil?’

‘It’s okay, Flora. You’re okay.’ Her hand was squeezed tight. ‘You’ve had a sort of panic attack, the doctor thinks… Do you remember?’

In the queue of traffic up Inverleith Row, she sat on the passenger seat, clutching her bag in her lap and looking out at all the people strolling by on the pavement, all the people with nice safe normal lives.

‘I’m not going mad,’ she finally said.

Neil, always a nervous driver, gave her a distracted look. ‘Of course you’re not. No one’s suggesting that.’

Dr Swain had told her he thought her ‘panic attack’ had been a result of a combination of stress and sleep deprivation. He’d written her a prescription for an SSRI – just a short course of it, for a month. Then she was to go back and see him again.

‘Neil, that man –’

Neil grimaced. ‘Yeah, he’s not pressing charges or anything. I explained our situation –’