Follow You Home

‘How can we help?’

  I didn’t know where to start. I gabbled, mixing the whole thing together non-sequentially—the train, the forest, Alina, the border guards . . .

  The policeman held up two huge hands. ‘OK. Slow, please. I don’t understand.’ He came out past the desk and gestured for us to follow him, saying something in his native tongue to his colleague, who gave us a dark look that I didn’t understand.

  The large policeman instructed us to leave our backpacks behind the desk then led us down a short corridor, seeing us into what I assumed to be an interview room, where we sat down on a pair of plastic chairs. Laura still hadn’t spoken. She sat there shivering and staring into space.

  The policeman kept glancing at her suspiciously.

  ‘What are your names?’ he asked.

  I told him and watched him write them down.

  ‘I am Constantin.’ I wasn’t sure if this was his first or second name. ‘OK, tell me. From the start, OK?’

  So I told him about what had happened on the train, that we had fallen asleep in the sleeper carriage, that we had woken up to find that our passports, tickets and money had been stolen. That we had been thrown off.

  He looked up from his notes. ‘Why were you . . . thrown off?’

  ‘Because we had no tickets.’

  ‘You had no ticket?’

  The atmosphere in the room changed. He glanced at Laura again, who was shivering even harder now, her teeth chattering.

  ‘I think she’s in shock,’ I said. ‘Do you have a blanket? A hot, sweet drink?’

  He ignored my request, going back to his previous question. ‘So . . . you were on the train with no ticket.’

  ‘No! We had tickets, but they were stolen.’

  He shook his head, like this made no sense. I didn’t want to tell him that we had been in a private compartment that we hadn’t paid for, or even that Alina had intervened and angered the guards. I felt instinctively that this policeman would side with other men in uniform.

  He pointed at Laura with his pencil. ‘Your girlfriend. She is on drugs?’

  ‘No! I told you, she’s in shock. She needs medical attention. And I need to tell you about what we saw in the house in the forest.’

  The pen he had been tapping on the desk went still. ‘House in the forest?’

  ‘Yes. That’s what we’re here to tell you about.’

  He stared at me. ‘Let me see your passport.’

  ‘I told you that too. They were stolen.’ Beside me, Laura made a whimpering noise. ‘Listen, she really needs to see a doctor. Or, please, a sweet drink.’

  He sighed heavily and made a great show of hefting himself to his feet. He left the room and came back a minute later with a tepid can of Coke, which he set before Laura. I cracked it open and passed it to her. She took a sip and winced.

  ‘So,’ the policeman said. ‘You have no identity?’

  I opened my mouth to reply but no words emerged.

  ‘Does anybody know you are here?’

  ‘No. But . . .’ I produced my dead iPhone from my pocket. ‘Can you let me charge my phone so I can call home? Or let me use yours?’

  ‘Wait.’

  He got up and left. Beside me, Laura’s shivering had abated somewhat but she still appeared on the verge of passing out. I put my arm around her shoulders, tried to pull her closer. She could have been made of stone.

  This was maddening. Constantin hadn’t yet given us a chance to tell him what had happened in the house in the forest. The vision of it loomed up inside my head and I dug my fists into my eyes, as if I could rub the memory away. I had to tell him.

  I paced the room for ten minutes, Laura sitting silently, before Constantin finally returned. He didn’t have a phone with him. He had the demeanour of someone who’d just been asked to make a difficult decision.

  Before he could sit down, I blurted, ‘I need to tell you what happened . . . There’s been a crime.’

  ‘In the house in the forest.’

  At that point, the policeman who had been on the front desk appeared in the doorway and said something to Constantin in Romanian. Constantin huffed impatiently.

  ‘Wait here,’ he said, placing his hands on his thighs and pushing himself to his feet. Before he left the room he turned back and said, ‘You are sure . . . no one knows you are here?’

  ‘No. I’m sure.’

  He left the room and I heard their footsteps recede, their voices growing quieter.

  ‘We have to go,’ I said to Laura. Her expression was blank. I took hold of her arm and pulled her up. ‘Come on. We need to go now.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘There’s something not right here,’ I said. ‘Why does he keep asking if anyone knows we’re here? I don’t like it.’ I went to the doorway and looked out. There was no one in sight and I couldn’t hear either of the police officers any more. ‘It’s clear. Let’s go.’

  Laura staggered to her feet and I put my arm around her. I took another look down the corridor. I could see nothing but could hear shouting. Maybe Constantin had been called away to deal with a difficult prisoner. Whatever, we had to take our chance to get out of this place.

  We hurried to the exit, reaching the reception desk, which was now empty.

  ‘Our backpacks,’ Laura said in a quiet voice. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘We’ll have to leave them,’ I said. I was so convinced that Constantin was not to be trusted that leaving the backpacks behind seemed like a necessary sacrifice. As we stepped out into what was now a warm, sunny morning, I felt a surge of relief. I took Laura’s hand and pulled her along, asking someone for directions to the train station as we went. We cut across a field towards the station and, to my great relief, I had just enough cash in my pocket to pay for a train out of town.

  ‘What happened after that?’ Dr Sauvage asked, blowing a stream of water vapour into the air.

  In the distance, I could hear cars, a man shouting, a door banging. But above this, I could hear my own heartbeat, the rushing in my ears, like I was underwater.

  ‘Daniel?’

  I turned towards her.

  ‘Our tickets only took us to another small town, where we found a pawnbroker who was willing to buy my watch. I got just enough for the fare to Bucharest. Once we got there, we found the British Embassy and, after lots of phone calls, they gave us temporary travel documents and found us a flight.’

  ‘Did you tell anyone else what had happened?’

  ‘No. We haven’t told anybody.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘We couldn’t. We can’t.’

  Her voice was soothing. ‘Daniel, I hope you will soon be able to tell me. Like I’ve already told you, only then will you be able to deal with the way you feel.’

  There was a thinning patch on my jeans where the denim was almost worn through. I stared at it now, unable to meet Dr Sauvage’s eye. ‘You don’t . . . I don’t know if I can. Not yet. Maybe next time.’ We had another appointment later that week.

  ‘What are you seeing, Daniel? In your mind’s eye.’

  ‘A Polaroid exhibition of horror.’

  ‘What?’

  I lifted my eyes towards her. ‘Polaroids,’ I repeated.

  Flash. A crouching man, a glint of metal.

  Flash. Numbers scrawled in ink. 13.8.13.

  Flash. Flash. Flash.

  I stood up. ‘I have to go.’

  ‘Daniel . . .’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  I left Dr Sauvage’s office and headed down the road. I felt queasy, still reeling from telling even just the part of my tale I’d been able to share. I thought about my watch in the pawnbroker’s shop in the little town in Romania, the name of which I couldn’t remember now. That watch had been a present from Laura to celebrate my deal with Skittle. It had cost
half a month’s salary, but that wasn’t what mattered. She’d had it engraved with a few simple words: Till the end of time, Laura xxxx.

  I took the bus back to Angel and visited the supermarket—milk, bread, paracetamol, red wine, white wine—before heading back to my flat.

  Even as I headed up the stairs I knew something was wrong. I lived in an old Victorian building that had been divided into flats. Laura and I had long been planning to move to somewhere bigger and better but, even with the windfall from the sale of my app, we couldn’t afford it.

  I hardly ever saw my neighbours. My main contact with them was when they pinned notices to the wall in the lobby, complaining about each other. Noisy parties, bicycles and buggies left in the hall, somebody failing to put their recycling in the correct bin, another miscreant parking in the wrong spot . . . But today, the atmosphere was quieter and emptier than ever.

  I reached the second floor and saw that my door had splintered around the lock. It had been kicked in.

  Tentatively, I pushed the door open.

  Chapter Fourteen

  In the living room, the bookshelves had been emptied, paperbacks scattered across the floor like bricks from a bombed building. Paperwork from the desk lay among the mess, the drawers half-open. In the bedroom, the chest of drawers had suffered the same fate; there were clothes everywhere, along with pills and condoms and random items from the bedside table. Boxes had been pulled from beneath the bed and emptied, and photographs tossed aside, Laura’s face smiling up at me from the floor.

  In the bathroom, the sink was full of pill bottles and a tube of toothpaste lay squashed on the lino, its contents squirted across the floor where someone had trodden on it. I went back into the living room and looked around, mouth dry, heart thudding.

  My laptop, which had been charging on the desk, was gone.

  My recent work—what there was of it—had been saved to the cloud, but there were other files, including most of my photos, that I hadn’t backed up yet. Log-ins to my bank account, social media accounts, e-commerce sites, every website I used—it was all saved on there too, my computer set to automatically log in to nearly all of them. With that laptop, anyone could run riot through my life.

  I looked around to see what else was missing. The PlayStation 4. My iPad. The Bluetooth speaker that I listened to music on. So they had only taken gadgets, as far as I could tell. Had they made a mess just for the hell of it? Or had they been looking for hidden jewellery and cash?

  I called the police, then phoned my bank and asked them if they could temporarily freeze my account.

  I needed to get to another computer so I could change all my passwords. And I didn’t want to be alone here, among this mess, the rotten ambience of my violated home.

  I went back into the bedroom, treading gingerly through the debris. I sat on the bed and picked up a photo of Laura. She was so beautiful. And soon she would be six thousand miles away.

  Erin answered the door, looking even more pregnant than she had the day before.

  ‘Hello again,’ she said, kissing my cheek. ‘Laura’s not here.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘But you can come in and wait if you like. To be honest, I’m going completely out of my mind with boredom. Maternity leave is great at first, but there’s only so much daytime TV a woman can take. Now I just want this little bugger to arrive.’

  We sat at the kitchen table where I’d sat the day before. There was a giant cardboard box on the side, full of nappies and bottles and baby wipes.

  ‘Laura’s popped out to the shop, but I’m glad I’ve got a chance to talk to you on your own.’ She laid her hand on mine. Hers was warm. ‘She would kill me if she knew I was talking about her to you, but . . . well, I know how much you still care about her.’

  ‘Is it to do with the thing at the Tube station?’

  ‘Not really. I mean, she insists now that she tripped, that she can’t have been pushed, and I believe her. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that when she initially told me she’d been pushed, she was doing it to get a reaction, like she wanted sympathy.’ She met my eye. ‘But I think Laura’s starting to imagine things. Really weird things.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well . . . I often have to get up in the night because this baby’s pressing on my bladder. About three times every night, actually. I’m sure it’s nature’s way of prepping me for all the sleepless nights ahead. Anyway, the other night I got up and heard a noise down here.’

  ‘In the kitchen?’

  ‘Yep. I came down and Laura was standing by the window. She was just wearing a pair of knickers, nothing else. Rob would’ve been delighted. And she was staring into the garden. I said her name and she didn’t respond, and I thought, shit, she’s sleepwalking.’

  The fridge emitted a clunking noise that made me jump.

  ‘I said her name again and she turned round. Her whole body was covered in goosebumps. I mean, like she was freezing, even though the heating was on in the house. I didn’t know what to do. You’re not supposed to wake sleepwalkers, are you?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Anyway, that’s when she spoke. She said, “Out there. In the trees.” And she pointed towards the garden, down where the shed is.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  I looked past Erin into the garden, which appeared neglected, as if Erin and Rob had decided not to touch it till spring. There was a little copse of apple trees at the end of the lawn, their branches bare, surrounded by damp, mulchy leaves. I could imagine how they looked at night, creepy silhouettes reaching towards the house. I shivered.

  ‘Then she walked past me, went up the stairs and back into her room. I woke Rob up to tell him and he was mainly pissed off that he’d missed the nude show.’

  ‘Did you go out and take a look?’

  ‘Yeah, Rob did. But there was nothing there. We didn’t expect there to be.’ She frowned. ‘I’m really worried about her. Add to that the whole thing with her almost falling under a train . . . And now saying she’s going to move to the other side of the world. I can’t work out if that’s the best thing for her, or the worst. Can you talk to her? Try to persuade her to see someone? She won’t listen to me.’

  ‘She won’t listen to me either, Erin.’

  She stood up, running a hand over her belly. The baby inside had no idea how lucky he was to have this capable, caring woman as his mother. ‘Well, try again.’

  Erin went to the loo and when she came back I told her about my break-in. She was shocked and asked why I hadn’t told her straight away, and she let me use her laptop to go onto all the sites I use so I could change the passwords.

  Two hours later, when I was about to give up waiting for Laura and go back to my flat, to begin the painful task of clearing up, the front door slammed and she came in to the kitchen. It was six o’clock.

  ‘Oh,’ she said when she saw me.

  ‘Hiya.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’ She was carrying a couple of shopping bags, one of which, I was pleased to see, contained two bottles of red wine. She seemed a little spaced-out, distracted. I noticed that she was wearing her poppy hair scrunchie, which I thought of as her signature item. The number of times she’d lost it and we’d spent half an hour crawling around the flat searching for it.

  ‘I’ve had a break-in at home. I came here to use the computer.’

  ‘A break-in?’

  I explained what had happened and she looked suitably horrified.

  ‘It’s as if we’re cursed,’ she said.

  ‘Laura, don’t be silly. You don’t believe that, do you?’

  ‘I guess not.’ She unpacked the wine from the bag and immediately unscrewed one of the bottles, pouring herself a large glass.

  ‘Aren’t you going to offer me one?’

  ‘Why, are you staying?’
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  ‘I want to talk to you, Laura.’

  ‘Not about Australia. Please.’

  ‘No. I just want to chat. We’re still friends, aren’t we? And I don’t want to go back to the flat yet. I don’t have the energy.’

  She poured me a glass of wine and sat down at the big solid table and asked me more about the burglary, and for the next hour or so we talked. As the wine slipped down, she relaxed, her moodiness vanishing, and I made sure to stick to innocuous subjects. No reminiscing, no mention of our trip, nothing about our relationship or her plan to move abroad. We talked about mutual friends, and TV shows that we used to watch together, and music that we both liked. Erin and Rob came in and told us they were going to order an Indian takeaway if we wanted some, and the food came and we ate, opening and drinking our way through the second bottle of wine.

  It was lovely. For two hours, I forgot about all the shit, all the stuff that I had to deal with. I felt like my old self. It was like we were a couple again, the couple we were before. The only negative was this niggle at the back of my head, that I needed to ask her about the sleepwalking incident. But I didn’t want to spoil the mood. For the first time in three months, I felt happy.

  ‘The wine’s all gone,’ Laura said with surprise.

  ‘How did that happen?’

  She laughed tipsily. ‘I think we drank it.’

  ‘Shall I pop out to get more?’

  She looked up at me through her fringe, a look in her eye that made me tingle. For a while her leg had been pressed against mine beneath the table. I knew she must be aware of the contact, was thrilled that she hadn’t pulled away. ‘Actually, I’ve got a bottle of Jack Daniels in my room.’

  ‘Do you want me to go and fetch it?’

  ‘No, let’s stop hogging Erin and Rob’s kitchen. We can drink it up there.’

  I tried my best not to look excited when she said this.

  ‘Come on,’ she said.

  She led me up to the room where she was staying. I had slept here before, when Laura and I had stayed over together, and it was weird to think that Laura was living here now, her clothes filling the wardrobe, her essential possessions piled up against the walls. The room wasn’t much bigger than the double bed that filled it and there was nowhere else to sit, so I perched awkwardly on the end of the bed while Laura sat cross-legged in the centre and opened the bottle of JD.