A door slams outside on the street. It’s still very early, dawn light spilling in past the bedroom blinds.
I check the nightstand clock: 5:56.
Soon my neighbors will be starting their days after a night of broken sleep.
I think of all the boardrooms, Harley Street private practices, Inns of Court, and skyscrapers that they’ll be yawning and rubbing their eyes in today, all because of me.
I stretch to the window and peek around, a jolt flipping my stomach when I see who is leaving first.
—
It is Marina, now locking her front door, then adjusting the Goyard Artois bag slung over one shoulder, laptop and yellow notepads visible within.
It feels unsettling seeing her in daylight, living her everyday life. She heads for her gate, lifts the latch, and swings out through it with a dancer’s poise.
As with last night, though, she doesn’t look like she did in the video. Here, in the morning light, she looks strong, confident, staunchly professional in her bespoke suit and kitten heels. But people can mask anything, of course.
She turns to look both ways before crossing the road, though it’s far too early for through traffic, her loose hair swishing as she does. She trots across and out of my field of vision. I wonder if I should try to engineer a meeting, to ask her if she is okay, gauge if she is safe, at least. I have the perfect excuse to catch her, after all: I need toapologize for disturbing everyone last night, and she can be the first. I am up and thundering down the stairs. But by the time I have opened the front door, she is a receding figure up the road, her heels click-clacking as she turns the corner toward the Tube station.
From years of working in brand development, I’m good at clocking visual signifiers. The people around here are riddled with them.
Arabella, Matt, Aoife, Marina, all of them.
But social signifiers and the reality they hide are obviously two quite different things.
Marina appears to be, demographically, an “affluent female financial decision-maker.”
Her bag, light and laptop-friendly, ubiquitous but a statement of functional anti-trend.
Her hair glossy and loose, makeup natural but flawless, the suit tailored, and that all-important extra lift in her shoes for rooms where she will almost always be the shortest one, though she will be careful not to appear unserious.
The rest of the street is quiet. The buildings giving away nothing, but most cars are still here. This is the earliest I’ve been up since I arrived.
When I had a job, I used to get up at six to get to the gym before starting work. Now I don’t even have a membership. Though I do constantly worry about the state, and direction, of my life, which seems to do more than Pilates ever did.
I wonder if the older woman I saw again last night, Marina’s next-door neighbor, can hear the couple’s arguments through her walls. It can’t be only me who knows what happens inside their house.
I think of the blond man, and I wonder if he is still asleep in the house now. I haven’t seen him in the flesh yet, which makes me wonder if he ever leaves the house. Or if their house has a back street entrance as well.
Though if I do run into him at some point on the street, I’m not sure I’ll be able to act normally. The image of his muscular frame, his rage-filled expression, is seared in my mind. No amount of pleasant small talk between us could dislodge it.
It sends a shiver through me—how easily he could have done more. How he might have in the past. And how no one might have seen it until me.
Help Me.
I push the thoughts away. I haven’t slept properly, and it would now seem I am wandering in the night.
—
After breakfast I call and request a doctor’s appointment. While on hold, Blue meows incessantly to be let out and though I haven’t even had a chance to check yesterday’s recording I am forced to slip on the camera collar again and let him out. I haven’t had a chance to buy a new collar yet. Legality will have to wait until after I have seen a doctor and sorted out whatever it is I’m doing in the middle of the night.
I’m offered a same-day GP appointment and in less than two hours I am signing in to the appointment system at my local surgery.
I sit on the bleach-scented vinyl seating and consider what I might need to tell this new GP to get help without sounding like a crazy person and having to tell them all about my divorce, my anxiety, and my new “illegal” filming activities. It’s odd to think of myself as an anxious person; I don’t feel that way on the inside. I feel like someone responding with exact appropriateness to a series of absolutely upending life events. I cling to this. My narrative for seeking help clarifies: I will blame the events and not myself. I will blameBenfor this disruption of my peace and mental health.I will blame thedivorce.
I promise myself I will not cry. I will not mention the affair or the miscarriages or any of it. I’ll stick to the basics.
Twenty minutes later, a tissue in hand, and with hot, aching eyes, I am back in the waiting room, a pharmacist potting up a new diazepam prescription and passing it out through her hatch in the waiting room. Sleeping pills. I take the bag as if it contains something illicit, slipping it like something shameful into my bag. I’ve never taken prescription meds before in my life—well, except for antibiotics and IVF drugs. But these seem more robust, serious, these seem like something someone with a real problem might need to take, which makes me nervous.
