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RACHEL
I slept the night in Ben’s bed again, inhaling the perfect smell of him, worrying that it was fading
away. I couldn’t think of sleeping anywhere else.
When I woke up my body ached, crying out for proper sustenance, which it hadn’t had for days. I
could feel my hip bones protruding where they hadn’t before, my stomach concave.
My eyes drank in what they could in the dim light before dawn.
I could see Ben’s posters, his Dr Who figurines, the silhouette of his piled-up boxes of Lego.
I could just make out the dark stain on his carpet where he’d left a felt tip pen with its lid off and I
remembered how cross I’d been with him when he did it.
It had been our first week in the house, one of the first weeks in years when I’d had to wonder how
I was going to pay for everything, now that I wasn’t cushioned by John’s salary. I’d shouted at Ben,
and he’d cried. Had he thought, I’d raged at him, how many hours somebody would have to work to
pay for a carpet like that? Had he? Did he realise what life was like for most people? I’d been so
angry.
The memory was a sharp pain. It made me sit up and pull a cushion to myself, hunch over it, and
cry with great gulping sobs. It made me detest my previous self-absorption and shallowness. It made
me wonder whether I’d been everything I could be to Ben, especially in the past year. Whether I’d let
him down terribly, filtering his needs through my own, letting my anger and depression seep between
us, where it shouldn’t have been.
I couldn’t forgive myself.
It was a noise from outside that got me out of Ben’s bed to stand at the window. It was the creak of a
fence, the thump of a landing. In my back garden was a man; he was standing in the shadows, beside
my studio, half concealed by shrubbery, but only half. He wore a dark coat and a beanie hat. A camera
obscured his face, its long lens trained on the back windows of my house. Kitchen first then a slow
tilt up towards me. He was scavenging, like the fox. I stepped back, snapped Ben’s bedroom curtains
shut. From behind the curtain I pounded on the window.
‘Get out!’ I shouted. ‘Go away!’
My sister ran into the room. She moved me aside and peered through the curtains to see the shadow
of him disappearing over the fence into my neighbour’s garden. The stairs rumbled as she rushed
down and outside to confront him, but he’d gone.
Out the front the rest of the press pack feigned ignorance. As I watched, standing back from the
window in my own bedroom, shaking from cold, Nicky went out into the street in her rosebud print
nightie, hair greasy and wild, nipples on show, goose bumps on her flesh and told them what she
thought of them.
‘You are vandalising our family!’ she shouted and her words echoed up and down the quiet street,
interrupted only by the mechanical dawn chorus of the camera motor drives.