Alice Feeney - I Know Who You Are

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.

Galway, 1987

I feel lost when I wake up. I don’t know where I am.

It’s dark and cold. I have a tummy ache and feel a bit sick, just like I do when my brother takes me out on Daddy’s fishing boat. I reach out into the darkness, my fingers expecting to meet my bedroom wall, or the little side table made out of driftwood from the bay, but my fingers don’t feel that. Instead they touch something cold, like metal, all around me. I start to panic, but I’m very tired, so tired I realise that I must be dreaming. I close my eyes and decide that if I still don’t know where I am when I’ve counted to fifty inside my head, then I’ll let myself cry. The last number I remember counting is forty-eight.

The next time I open my eyes, I’m in the back of a car. It’s not my father’s car, I know that without having to think about it too much, because we don’t have one any more. He sold it to pay the electricity bill when the lights went out. The seats of the car I’m in are made of red leather, and my face and arms seem to be stuck to it when I first wake up; I have to peel them off.

I stare at the back of the head of the person driving, before remembering the nice lady called Maggie. Then I sit up properly and look out of the windows, but I still don’t know where I am.

‘Where are we going?’ I rub the sleep from my eyes, gifts the sandman left behind scratching my cheeks.

‘Just a little drive,’ says Maggie, smiling at me in the small mirror which shows a rectangle of her face.

‘Are you taking me back to my daddy’s house?’

‘You’re staying with me for a wee while, do you remember? There isn’t enough food for you at your house just now.’

I do remember her saying that, I’m just so tired I forgot.

‘Why don’t you have another little sleep, not far to go now. I’ll wake you when we get where we’re going. I have a lovely surprise for you when we get there.’

I lie back down on the red leather seat and close my eyes, but I don’t sleep. Even though I do like surprises, I’m scared and excited all at once. Maggie seems nice, but everything I just saw out the window looked so strange: the houses, the walls, even the signs on the side of the road.

I might be wrong, but it feels like I am a long way from home.

London, 2017

I think homes might be a little bit like children; maybe you need to establish a bond as soon as possible to achieve a lasting emotional attachment. Long days on set have meant that this house has been little more than somewhere to sleep at night. I’ve spent the evening searching for a picture of the man I have been married to for almost two years. I should have been learning my lines for tomorrow, but how can I when everything feels so wrong? I’m left with more questions than concern, unanswered mainly because I daren’t ask them.

I stare down at the only photo of Ben I’ve managed to find: a framed black-and-white picture taken when he was a child. I hate it, I always have; it gives me the creeps. Five-year-old Ben is dressed in a formal suit that looks strange on a boy so young, but it isn’t that. The thing that upsets me is the haunting look on his face, the way his smiling eyes stare out of the picture as though they are following you around the room. The child in the photo doesn’t just look naughty or devious, he looks evil.

I asked him to put the picture in his study so I wouldn’t have to look at it, and I remember him laughing at the time. Not because he thought I was being ridiculous, but as though the photo were part of a joke that I wasn’t in on. I haven’t seen or thought about it since, but staring down at the black-and-white image now stirs such a peculiar feeling inside me, something that is equal in dread and disgust. My husband and I don’t have any family left on either side, we are both adult orphans. We used to say that it was just me and him against the world, before it changed to me and him against each other. We never said the latter, we just felt it.