who knew our names and where we lived, and hated us enough to try and kill us.
There’s a place in Oxford called Jericho which sounds solemn and biblical, but is actually full of cafés and arty-crafty shops and student hovels. Turn down any of the side streets towards the canal and you’ll find bicycles leaning drunkenly against every lamp-post and railing, curtains closed until mid-afternoon, wheelie bins overflowing with empty bottles and the pavements strewn with the fall-out from kebabs. If you walk north along the towpath and turn right, you eventually come to a close, a development of six modern houses, all out of tune with the surrounding architecture, but pretty in their own way. One of these – the one that is now dark and abandoned, and under surveillance from a camera hidden in the bedroom of the house opposite – is ours.
Unlike Jericho, our turning is quiet, day and night. The other residents are made up of retired couples, young professionals and an elderly widow The only noise you are likely to hear at weekends is the whirr of garden-grooming equipment – hedge trimmers, lawn mowers, leaf hoovers – and the occasional crump of car doors as people come and go.
Until this summer I never minded being in the house by myself, which was lucky as Dad and Rachel were not very good at co-ordinating their timetables, and from the age of about twelve it wasn’t an uncommon occurrence to find myself home alone.
That all changed one Thursday night in June. Dad was out at a retirement do for one of his colleagues at the Institute, and Rachel was celebrating the end of Frankie’s A Levels. (Rachel’s friends all seemed to finish their exams on different days and require separate festivities. This was the third in a week.)
I had lined up a programme of activities for myself to fill the empty hours until bedtime. 7-7.30: homework. 7.30-8.00: clarinet. 8-8.30: dinner in front of the TV (jacket potato with bacon, sour cream and chives.) This was one of my favourite meals, outlawed by Dad on two counts: cholesterol and fuel consumption. I had to wait until he was safely out before committing the eco-crime of running the oven on full for an hour and a half to cook a lone potato. 8.30-10.00: MSN. 10.00: DVD of Pride and Prejudice which, as it was a set text, also counted as homework.
When the potato was nearly done, I spread a couple of rashers of bacon under the grill and left them spitting fat while I went outside to pick some chives. As well as a small vegetable plot at the bottom of the garden, in which Dad was growing runner beans, hops, tomatoes, spinach, radishes and redcurrants, we had a few tubs on the patio containing useful herbs. Basil for pesto, chives for salad and parsley for disguising garlic breath before an important kiss (Rachel’s idea).
It was a warm evening, and the pot plants were looking rather limp and thirsty, so I filled a can from the water butt and gave them a good drenching. I ignored the parched veggie patch as this was an altogether lengthier job now we had a hose ban, and it was Not My Turn. I was wondering whether I could be bothered to brave the mutant monster spiders in the shed and bring out the patio furniture when a shrill bleeping reminded me that I’d left the grill on. I raced back into the kitchen, beating my way through billows of greasy smoke, to switch off the cooker before attempting to disable the alarm, which was still emitting an unbearable noise. There seemed to be no off-switch, so I finally resorted to prising off the lid and removing the battery which was no easy task with my fingers in my ears.
On inspection, it turned out that the culprit was not the bacon – which was surprisingly still edible, if somewhat brittle – but the centimetre of molten fat in the unwashed grill pan.
I retreated to the living room with my plate of food and shut the door, leaving the fan whirring wheezily in the fog-bound kitchen. With no one else at home, I was Queen of the TV Remote, so I made the most of my reign, watching five channels in strict rotation. By switching over every minute and skipping past adverts, it was possible to get a fairly good grasp of five different programmes at once. I wondered if this time-saving method could be applied to other areas of my life, schoolwork for example. If I read every fifth page of Macbeth, Pride and Prejudice, my GCSE Science Study Guide, Luke’s Gospel and Lernpunkt Deutsch, would my brain automatically fill in the gaps the way it just had, so effortlessly with prime-time TV? I made a mental note to try it some time.
Later, when the smoke had dispersed, I returned to the kitchen to tackle the washing up. As usual, someone, probably Rachel, had been taking liberties with the duty roster: as well as the devastated grill pan, there was a pile of crockery on the side left over from breakfast – coffee mugs and cereal bowls pebbledashed with dried muesli – and last night’s crusty lasagne dish soaking in the sink. I set to work, turning the radio up high, and plunging my hands into the cold, oily water to dig out the flabby pasta that was blocking the plughole.
“I predict a riot!” I sang defiantly at my reflection in the darkened window above the sink, as hot water thundered into the bowl, spraying me and the surrounding worktops with foam. Something moved just the other side of the window, a black shape in the blackness of the garden, looking in. For a fraction of a second we were face to face, but it was like no face I had ever seen. Then I let out a sound that was somewhere between a gasp and a scream, and the figure took a step back and ducked out of sight. The soapy bowl slipped from my hands and I turned and ran, across the hallway, up the stairs and into the bathroom – the only room with a lock – a strange, animal instinct making me burrow deeper rather than escape. I slid the bolt home and sat on the edge of the bath, my heart clubbing wildly as I listened for any sounds of breaking glass or forced entry.
Then my heart almost stopped altogether as I remembered the kitchen door: I hadn’t bothered to lock it when I came in from the garden; in fact, I couldn’t now be sure I had even shut it. Surely I had left it open to let the smoke out? I felt dizzy with fear. Perhaps the prowler was even now moving through the house, creeping from room to room to find me? I cowered in the corner of the room, wedged between the washbasin and the wall, hardly daring to breathe, straining to pick out approaching footsteps over the crashing of blood in my ears.
Why had I trapped myself up here with no protection but a feeble brass bolt, instead of running next door for help, or calling the police? I thought of my mobile phone, lying uselessly on the coffee table downstairs, and almost cried with frustration. The window above the basin, a small frosted porthole not much bigger than a dinner plate, faced on to the blank brick side of our elderly neighbour’s house. She was deaf and unlikely to hear a call for help, and still less likely to be able to act on it.
I waited, tense with anxiety for what seemed like hours – perhaps it was, I didn’t have a watch – but around me the house was silent. By degrees, the sense of immediate and urgent panic began to wear off and I was able to emerge from my corner and make myself more comfortable on a pile of folded towels. But I was still too scared to open the door. He might have been Out There, just the other side, waiting and watching through the strange distorted eyeholes of his balaclava. That was what disturbed me more than anything – his masked face, and the thought that he must have seen my every movement in the brightly lit kitchen, while I had no idea I was being watched.
At the age of fifteen I had discovered something new about myself: I was a coward. Until this moment I had never experienced anything remotely threatening. I had never been abused at home or mugged on the bus, hassled in the street or bullied at school. My life so far had been absolutely peril-free and yet, for some reason, I had just naturally assumed that I was brave. The discovery that I was in fact spineless was a bitter disappointment.
Eventually I must have dozed off where I sat because I was woken by the familiar sounds of Dad coming home – the car engine and the scrape of his key in the lock, and then the various exclamations of annoyance: “What’s that smell?” “Look at the state of this place!”
