C.L. Taylor - The Fear

‘Monty!’ Wendy Harrison lays down her shovel, dusts the soil from her gardening gloves and stands up. ‘Monty, I’m going in now!’

At the sound of her voice, her piebald springer spaniel comes bounding out of the bushes and pads across the grass towards her, his pink tongue lolling.

‘Hello, Monts.’ Wendy rubs a hand over the top of his head. ‘I think we both deserve a treat, don’t you?’

The dog’s ears twitch at the sound of the word treat and he trots obediently beside his mistress, his eyes never leaving her face, as she makes her way inside the small terraced house on the edge of Great Malvern.

Wendy takes a bite of her custard cream, chews, swallows and then pops the other half in her mouth. When that’s gone she sips at her tea and picks up another biscuit. She was only going to have one. She’d even entered it into her Slimming World diary – custard cream, 3 syns – but somehow half of the packet has vanished.

Sod it , she thinks as she moves her finger over her laptop’s mousepad. I’ll start again tomorrow.

For the last hour she’s been flicking back and forth between the same three websites – Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. It’s the fourth time today that she’s logged on and it’s only 2 p.m. She tries to distract herself – with gardening, her part-time bookkeeping job and walking Monty – but her mind always drifts back to those websites. Has something new been posted? An update, photo or location? The panic builds in her stomach. What if the information is deleted before she reads it? What if she misses something important?

She can’t remember what first prompted her to google Lou Wandsworth. It might have been a passing conversation she’d had with her friend Angela about finding an old school friend on Facebook, an article she read in the paper, or maybe she was having one of those days where she woke up feeling as though a dark cloud had settled in her brain and nothing brought her joy, not even when Monty laid his head on her knee and stared up at her with his searching brown eyes.

It didn’t take Wendy long to track Lou down. She was the only Louise Wandsworth on Facebook. The trouble was, she could only see her name, an image of a cartoon character as her profile picture and a list of her friends. Nothing else. Angela had shown her how to set up her own Facebook page but she couldn’t use that to try and connect with Lou. She made a new page instead, called herself Saskia Kennedy, and added a few photos of a woman that she’d found online who was about the same age as Lou.

Wendy’s heart trembled in her chest when she pressed the ‘add friend’ button. But nothing happened. Her request was ignored. Days went by, then weeks. Wendy did some more googling: How do you get someone to accept a Facebook friend request?

She discovered that it looked suspicious if you didn’t have many friends, or any in common, so she set about adding random people who lived in London and looked about the same age as Louise. Men were easy – the woman in her fake profile picture was attractive – but it took a little longer for women to start accepting her requests. Once she had fifty friends and had filled her wall with silly photos and the same sort of updates as her ‘contemporaries’ she tried adding a few of Lou’s friends. To her surprise they accepted her, at least half a dozen of them. When she tried adding Lou for a second time her friend request was accepted.

She was in.

She felt jubilant as she clicked on Lou’s photo albums. All those months of detective work and she’d finally found what she had been looking for. Not just one photo of her but dozens and dozens. Lou had long brown hair pulled back into a ponytail. A hint of make-up around the eyes but no lipstick. Skinny. But not in an attractive way. Her jacket sloped away from her shoulders and her skirt bagged below her knees. There was a pinched, haggard look to her cheeks, despite her youth – the hollowed face of a long-distance runner or one of the dieters in Slimming World magazine who’ve lost four or five stone in a matter of months.

As Wendy clicked through the photos, a weight settled in her stomach. Lou might not be conventionally attractive but she was surrounded by people in every shot. There were photos of her in dim bars, chinking cocktail glasses with dewy-skinned friends. Shots of her running through the waves on a tropical holiday, not an ounce of fat protruding from beneath her string bikini. Lou on top of a mountain with a cagoule hood pulled tightly around her head with a look of triumph on her face. Lou in fancy dress, one foot cocked behind her like a fifties starlet, kissing a dark-haired man dressed like Clark Gable. She was vivacious, well-liked, well-travelled and content. Everything that Wendy was not.

Wendy didn’t go back on Facebook for a week after that first discovery. She didn’t even open her laptop. Just walking past it made her feel sick.

But then curiosity got the better of her.

‘I’ll just have a quick look,’ she told Monty as she settled down at her dining room table and opened the laptop lid. ‘Then I’ll stop.’

That was seven months ago.

‘Give me a second, Monty,’ Wendy says now as her dog nudges at her knee. ‘We’ll go for a walk in a minute.’

She reaches for a custard cream and pops it into her mouth. Outside, storm clouds are gathering in the sky. If they don’t go out now they’ll be in for one soggy walk. One last refresh of the screen , Wendy tells herself as she clicks the trackpad button, and then I’ll get my coat on .

What she sees on the screen makes her inhale so sharply a tiny bit of biscuit whizzes down her windpipe, making her cough. Lou has just updated her Facebook page.

I got the job in Malvern and I’m moving in a month’s time. London, I’m going to miss you.

Saturday 21st April 2007

I’ve spent the last month trying to ready myself for this moment but nothing could have prepared me for the cloud of memories that descend as I catch sight of the Malvern Hills, curving like a dragon’s back, as I head down the A4440: buying penny sweets in white paper bags from Morley’s, laughing at the girls from the local boarding school in their brown ‘Batman’ cloaks, walking up to St Anne’s Well with Mum and Dad feeling like I was climbing a mountain, and stepping into The Martial Arts Club for the first time, feeling sick with nerves. An image of Mike, smiling and holding out a hand in welcome, flashes into my brain. I try to blot it out by focussing on the road as I speed past Malvern and along the A4103 towards Acton Green. It’s not a journey I’ve ever driven before – I passed my test in London – but the road is imprinted in my memory from all the times Dad ferried me to and from karate lessons. My phone bleeps on the passenger seat as I pass Dad’s favourite drinking haunt, The Dog and Duck. I snatch it up, hoping it’s a text from Ben, knowing it won’t be.

I haven’t seen or heard from him since that awful afternoon in Dover four weeks ago. He caught up with me after I fled, half a mile or so along the seafront.

‘Louise?’ He abandoned his car on a double yellow line and ran after me, grabbing my hand, forcing me to stop. ‘What’s wrong? What’s the matter?’

I shook my head, hating myself for what I was about to do.

‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘What just happened?’

When I told him that I didn’t think we should see each other again, the concerned expression on his face morphed into confusion. Why, he wanted to know. What had he done wrong?

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing at all.’

He searched my face for an answer. ‘Then why?’