‘You know,’ Julien says. ‘I always thought it was someone you knew. It had to have been someone who was always there, near you – close enough to take those things.’
I see Katie dart a look at Mark, and then quickly glance away again. I’m sure I know what she’s thinking. I bet her pet theory is that he was the stalker. He has always had a crush on Miranda. Yes, I know about it. No, it doesn’t bother me. It’s harmless, I know it is. Mark is, at heart, a fairly simple soul. He has a temper, yes, but he lacks the calculating nature needed for such behaviour.
I see the pity in the way Katie looks at me sometimes. It irks me. I do not need her pity. I wish I could tell her that, without sounding like I am protesting too much.
MIRANDA
People have always been entertained by tales of my stalker. I know how to dress them up to give that little ghost-story shiver down the spine. And it’s such a bizarre thing, isn’t it? A real-life stalker. Everyone seems to think it only happens to celebrities: actresses, singers, breakfast TV hosts. Sometimes I’ll catch the person I’m telling looking at me: squinting, head on one side, as though they’re assessing me. Do I really deserve to be stalked? Am I really that interesting?
I often bring up my stalker as a piece of dinner party conversation. At times it feels like he’s an exotic and fascinating pet, or a particularly gifted child. It starts conversations. It can stop them too: the idea of someone watching you, knowing everything about you. And then I’ll segue neatly into my whole routine – about how, when you think about it, in the times we live in we are all stalkers. All of us knowing so much about one another’s lives. Even people we haven’t seen in years. Old childhood friends, old school mates. I’ll talk about how we all submit to being stalked. How we think that we’re in control, sharing what we think we choose to share, but really putting a lot more out there than we’re aware of.
‘So really,’ I’ll say, at this point in my performance, ‘my stalker was just a bit ahead of the game! A trend-setter, of sorts. He was just analogue. Although having probably been a student at Oxford too’ – little pause to let that settle, let it glimmer and impress for a moment – ‘for all I know he’s probably behind some social media app anyway. Sharing his expertise with the world!’
Cue: wry laughter. Cue: an ongoing discussion about privacy, and what we should submit ourselves to and where we should draw the line … and how privacy is the true battleground of the twenty-first century. Cue: an exchange of various weird experiences people have had: private messages from strangers on Instagram, trolling on Twitter, a creepy friend request on Facebook from someone they’ve never met. None of it, however, nearly as strange and special as my own experience.
I will sit back, feeling a little glow. As though I’ve just performed some well-practised routine, and pulled it off with even more sparkle than before. My own little social gymnastics display. Julien will probably be rolling his eyes at this point. He’s heard the whole thing – what, maybe fifty, a hundred, a thousand times before? And he’s never been able to see the interesting, or amusing side of it. He was the one who thought, all those years ago, that I should get the police involved. He used to look annoyed when I brought up the subject, because he thought I shouldn’t make light of something ‘so fucking creepy’, as he put it. Now I think he’s mainly just a bit bored of hearing it.
But the truth I don’t tell anyone, is that I was – am – frightened of my stalker. There are things the stalker knows about me, secret, shameful things, that I have told no one. Not even Katie, not even back then when we were thick as thieves, not Julien.
The stalker knew, for example, that every so often I liked to dabble in a bit of recreational shoplifting at Oxford. Only at times of high stress: exam season, or before a big paper had to be in. My therapist (the only one I’ve told about this little habit) thinks it was a control thing, a bit like my dieting and exercising: something I had power over, and was good at. She thinks it’s in the past, though – she doesn’t know that sometimes I’ll still snaffle the odd lipstick, a pair of cashmere gloves, a magazine. There’s the thrill of getting away with it, too; my therapist hasn’t worked that part out.
I stole a pair of earrings from the Oxford Topshop. Gold hoops with a little painted parrot sitting on each one. A few days after I’d lifted them they disappeared from my room. They were returned a few weeks later in my cubbyhole, with a note: ‘Miranda Adams: I’d have expected better from you. Sincerely, a concerned friend. xxx’ The kisses were the worst fucking part of it.
He must have been right next to me in the shop when I did it. It had been crowded, I remembered: and there had been men in there as well as women, trailing after girlfriends, or making their way down to Topman. No particular face stood out, though. I had no memory of anyone looking at me – more than normal – or acting weirdly.
While the earrings were missing I remember seeing a bespectacled girl in the Bodleian in that exact pair – and almost chased after her into Short Term Loans. Until I realised that anyone could have bought them. They were from Topshop, for Christ’s sake. There might have been twenty – fifty – girls in the city with them. This was how paranoid my stalker had made me, bringing me to the point of chasing down a complete stranger.
Then there was the essay that I bought from a student in the year above, with the intention of plagiarising it for my own. Both had been sitting on the desk in my room – the original, and my poorly disguised copy. I’d gone out for a drink at the pub and returned to find them both gone. I’d had to cobble something together, drunk, in the hours before the deadline, and ended up getting a bare pass, my worst mark yet – though not ever. A week later they were returned to me. The note: ‘I don’t think you want to go down that path, Miranda.’ And yet, a week later, when a few students got held up for their own acts of plagiarism, I was almost oddly grateful.
And there was the time, very early on with Julien, when I cheated on him. A drunken shag with a guy in my tutor group. As luck would have it, my period didn’t arrive that month. I took a pregnancy test – thankfully negative – which was returned a week later with a note that read, ‘Naughty, naughty, Manda. What would Julien say?’
The casual use of Manda, which is what only my closest friends call me.
I didn’t tell anyone of these particular communications. Not even Katie, or Samira. They revealed aspects of myself that I would have preferred no one know anything about. And I feared that if I did something to displease my stalker he would use all my secrets to destroy me.
Nevertheless, I did go to the police – though, again, I didn’t tell anyone. I took along a couple of the notes: the ones I could bring myself to show. I wasn’t taken very seriously. ‘Have there been any threats made in the notes, miss?’ the officer I spoke to asked.
‘Well, no.’
‘And you haven’t noticed anyone behaving in a threatening manner?’
‘… No.’
‘No signs of forced entry?’
‘No.’
‘It seems to me,’ he picked up one of the notes again and read it, ‘that one of your mates might be playing a prank on you, my dear.’ Patronising arse.