That was that. I regretted ever having gone – and not just because the police were no help. In doing so I had made myself into the victim I refused to be.
But it carried on in London for several years. He worked out where I was living. It’s one thing to access a student room on a relatively accessible corridor. It’s quite another to gain entry to a London property with three high-security locks on the door. And then we moved, and it kept happening. The items that went missing were always of a similar kind. On the surface, valueless, but all with some inner significance. The tiniest doll from the very inside of the beautiful painted matryoshka I was given by my beloved godmother, before she died from cancer. The batik scarf I bought in a Greek village on my first holiday with Julien – the summer of our second year. The woven friendship bracelet that Katie gave me in our first year of knowing each other.
I thought I’d always have my stalker. He had begun to feel like a part of my life, a part of me, even. But then, out of the blue, it stopped. A couple of years ago now. At least, I think it stopped. I’ve received no packages, no notes. But sometimes, when I misplace something, I have that old frisson of fear. There was that silver baby rattle I bought from Tiffany’s recently, on a whim as I was walking down Bond Street. I’m sure it will show up somewhere. I’m not the most organised person, after all. I tell myself that it’s just paranoia. But I haven’t ever shaken that feeling of being watched.
I haven’t told anyone – not even Julien, or Katie or Samira, say – of the feeling of creeping horror I get, sometimes. Moments when I am in the middle of a crowd and suddenly convinced that someone is standing right behind me, breathing on my neck … only to turn around and see that there is no one there. Or a sudden certainty that someone is watching me with an intensity that isn’t normal. You know … that prickling feeling you have when you know you are being looked at? It’s happened at music festivals and on shopping trips, in supermarkets and nightclubs. On the tube platform I sometimes find myself staggering back away from the edge, convinced that someone is standing right behind me, about to give me a shove.
No, I don’t tell anyone these fears. Not Katie, not Julien, certainly not my amused dinner party guests.
I have bad dreams, too. It’s worst when Julien is away on business trips. I have to double-check all the locks on the doors, and even then I’ll wake in pitch blackness convinced that someone is in the room with me. Similar to the sort of tricks your mind plays on you, if you’ve just watched a horror film. Suddenly you’ll see sinister shadows in every corner. Only this is a hundred times worse. Because some of those shadows might be real.
KATIE
Miranda’s finally coming to the end of her little repertoire. Just at this moment the wind chooses to do a long, melodramatic howl down the chimney. The fire seems to billow out, a scatter of sparks landing just inside the grate. It is perfect, horror-movie timing. Everyone laughs.
‘Reminds me of that house we stayed in in Wales,’ Giles says.
‘The one where we kept having blackouts?’ Nick asks. ‘And the heating kept going off at random intervals?’
‘It was haunted,’ Miranda says, ‘that’s what the owner told us – remember. It was Jacobean.’ That place had been Miranda’s choice.
‘It was definitely old,’ says Mark, ‘but I’m not sure ghosts are an excuse for dodgy plumbing and electrical faults.’
‘But there had been plenty of sightings,’ Emma says, loyally. ‘The woman said they’d had people from Most Haunted come to visit them.’
‘Yes,’ Miranda says, pleased by this. ‘There was that story about a girl being thrown out of a window by her stepbrothers, because they’d realised she was going to inherit the property. And people had heard her, screaming at night.’
‘I certainly heard someone screaming at night,’ Giles says, grinning at her. There had been a lot of hilarity over the thinness of the walls, and certain ‘noises’ keeping everyone up at night. Miranda and Julien had been singled out as the main culprits.
‘Oh stop it,’ Miranda says, hitting Giles with a cushion. She’s laughing, but as the conversation moves on she stops and I see a new expression – wistful? – cross her features. I look away.
Giles’s mention of Wales has opened a conversation about other years past. It is a favourite hobby, raking over our shared history together. These are the experiences that have always bound us, that have given us a tribal sense of affiliation. For as long as we have known each other, we have always spent New Year’s Eve together. It’s a regathering of threads that have become a little looser over the years, as our jobs and lives take us in different directions. I wonder if the others experience the same thing that I do, on these occasions. That however much I think I have changed, however different I feel as a person at work, or with the few non-university friends I have, at times like this I somehow return to exactly the same person I was more than a decade ago.
‘I can’t believe I drank so much last year … while I was pregnant with Priya,’ says Samira, looking horrified.
‘You didn’t know at the time,’ Emma says.
‘No, but still – all those shots. I can’t even imagine drinking like that now. It just seems so … excessive. I feel like an old lady these days.’
She certainly doesn’t look like one. With her shining black hair and dewy, unlined skin, Samira looks like the same girl we knew at Oxford. Giles, on the other hand, who once sported a full head of hair, looks like a completely different person. But at the same time Samira has changed, perhaps more dramatically than Giles has. She used to be spiky, slightly intimidating, with that razor-sharp intellect and impeccable style. She was involved in everything at Oxford. The Union, several sports, theatre, the college orchestra – as well as being a notorious party girl. Somehow she seemed to fit ten times the normal amount of activity into her four years and still emerge with a high First.
She seems softer now, gentler. Perhaps it’s motherhood. Or things going so well with her career – apparently the consultancy firm where she works is desperate for her to return from maternity early; it’s not hard to imagine the place being on its knees without her. Perhaps it’s simply growing older. A sense that she doesn’t need to prove herself any longer, that she knows exactly who she is. I envy that.
Julien’s talking about a place we visited in Oxfordshire a couple of years ago – Emma’s first New Year’s Eve with us, I believe.
‘Ha!’ Mark takes a sip of his drink. ‘That was the one where I had to show those local oiks who was boss. Do you remember? One of them actually tried to beat me up?’
Not quite how I remember it.
This is what I recall. I remember the group was exactly the wrong size. Fifteen people – not big enough for a party, not small enough for intimacy. The plan was to go to the races on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve. I had been expecting something a bit more glamorous, scenes borrowed from My Fair Lady and Pretty Woman. Not so much. There were girls wearing skirts so short you could see their Ann Summers’ thongs, and boys in cheap shiny suits and bad haircuts and sun-bed tans, strutting around and getting more and more raucous as the evening went on. The food was less champagne and caviar, more steak and ale pies and bottles of WKD. And yet it was all a bit of fun. They were all just kids, really, those mini-skirted girls and those shiny-suited lads, preening and swaggering and hiding their self-consciousness beneath the haze of booze, just as we had all done before them.