two together and coming up with a paranoid five.
Anya left the room, coming back in with my trainers in her hand. She had her sandals on now.
‘Well, we can sit here and wait with the wind blowing through the window, or we can clear it up and sort out a glazier.’
We got to work.
The glazier took hours to come. I insisted Anya go back to bed, which she reluctantly agreed to, then set up camp in the living room, with my iPad on my lap and the sound turned low.
It took no time to find Lee Bennett’s Facebook page. It was pretty much exactly what I’d expected. Selfies with his shirt off; posts with such gems of wisdom as ‘Mourinho really has fucking lost it now. Time to go’ and a couple of pictures with Tyler in them, mainly at football matches. He hadn’t made much effort over his settings, so I delved back a bit until I found some with a woman in them.
She was blonde, and delicate-looking with a pointy chin and large eyes. She and Bennett together, clearly on holiday, with tall cocktails, tans, and lots of flesh on show. Only one with her and Tyler, where he was sitting on her lap on a train and clearly reaching for something out of shot.
The thought of anything happening to Anya caused a tight feeling in my throat, not unlike the sensation just before you throw up. What if, for whatever reason, he was going after me and putting my wife in danger? He thought he knew me. Maybe he was incubating some perceived slight based on mistaken identity.
I must have dozed a little because when my phone started to ring from the floor next to me, I leapt from the chair in shock. It was the glazier, telling me he was outside.
It was almost four thirty am when he was finally done. He was a taciturn Eastern European man, who had barely said a word the whole time he was here. I presumed he was usually called out to deal with robberies and the aftermath of fights in bars. I was a bit surprised to discover that all he was prepared to do was board up the thing. Seems you had to pay all over again to have the actual window replaced, at a sensible hour.
He was probably wondering why we didn’t patch the window up ourselves, just for the night. But there was no way we could have gone back to sleep; it wasn’t a huge window, but it was quite big enough to allow someone in who had any kind of malign intent. I had, after all, hoped my days of sleeping with a baseball bat next to the bed were long gone.
Anyway, I didn’t imagine the man was complaining, judging by the eye-watering amount of money he charged before I was wearily able to send him on his way.
In the bedroom, Anya was sleeping deeply and making small, endearing sounds through her nose. I climbed into the bed, desperate to warm my frozen limbs against her body, but I knew it would wake her up. One of us might as well get some sleep on this miserable night. So, I forced myself to keep away from her sleeping form, huddling into the duvet, trying not to think about how soon it would be before I had to get up again.
I reached for sleep, telling myself to clear my mind. I counted down in eights from four hundred, a trick I’d read on some website for insomnia, and got all the way beyond zero, but my mind still buzzed and sparked like a faulty strip light. I kept thinking about Lee Bennett, and Anya’s weird mood lately.
Almost inevitably, however much I tried to yank them back to the present, I found my thoughts drifting back in time.
Mum, sitting in her favourite chair, fags on one arm and a glass of lager on the table next to her, gusts of husky smoker’s laugh at The Vicar of Dibley.
Our windows had got broken a couple of times, on the estate. But we didn’t summon twenty-four-hour glaziers who charged two hundred quid an hour. We boarded it up until a man who knew a man came and sorted it as a special favour to Mum.
When the alarm went off, it felt as though I’d only been asleep for minutes. Parts that hadn’t ached previously now hurt – elbows, the other knee, and, weirdly, my neck. Anya had to leave early to get into London and when I came out of the shower she was almost ready to leave. She was drinking a cup of coffee and staring out of the window.
She was dressed in a silky blouse and black trousers, her glossy red hair in a ponytail and a slash of bright red lipstick standing out against her pale, freckled skin. For about the millionth time I wondered what on earth I did right to end up with someone like her.
It was only after she had gone that I remembered my broken bike. I’d intended to leave with her and get her to drop me at school. I didn’t know anything about buses here. It took a good half an hour to walk and I was meant to be in early today for the weekly staff meeting.
I was sweating profusely by the time I got to school.
The meeting was almost over as I came into the staffroom and I caught Zoe’s eye. She pulled a doomy face and sliced a finger across her neck.
‘Elliott,’ said Jackie Dawson, our head teacher. ‘So glad you could join us.’
I smiled sheepishly. ‘Sorry. I had an accident on my bike.’
I knew it was a mistake the second the words left my lips because I saw Jackie’s eyes sweep over my sweaty, but clean, light blue shirt and grey trousers. I didn’t look remotely like a man who had just taken a tumble onto a road.
‘I mean,’ I added quickly, ‘I came off it last night and, er, it took me longer to get to school this morning.’ I found myself holding up my scratched palms as proof.
Jackie liked me, but for some reason this morning her expression was cooler than I would have expected. She nodded after a moment and said, ‘Okay, well I’m sorry to hear that. But can we have a quick word before you go off to your class?’
‘Sure,’ I said and something uneasy twitched inside me.
Meeting over now, staff scattered to collect belongings and down the dregs of drinks.
I followed Jackie to her office, which was down a corridor in a part of the school. She gestured for me to close the door and my worry increased.
Jackie had been the head here for ever, as far as I could tell. Late fifties with curly brown hair, she had a mumsy softness about her appearance that belied how tough she really was.
‘I won’t keep you, Elliott,’ she said. ‘But I have to tell you that a parent has made a complaint against you.’
I let out a heavy sigh.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I bet I can guess who. Tyler Bennett’s dad, by any chance?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Look,’ I went on, leaning forward in my seat. ‘It really was nothing. This guy just took against me, I think.’ I paused. ‘Didn’t like the cut of my jib.’
Jackie was blank-faced. ‘He said you pushed Tyler and then you were rude to him.’
A hot blast of outrage. ‘That’s ridiculous!’ I said. ‘I didn’t even touch Tyler.’
As I said it, I remembered this wasn’t strictly true. But it was such a gentle push to his shoulder, so it hardly counted.
‘Are you sure?’ said Jackie, her expression now softer. She wasn’t enjoying this any more than I was.
‘Yes,’
