I squint up and see a man with his back to me chatting to a woman in line; I catch the name:Greg. So, this is the Greg Pam mentioned, and he is, as I suspected, the same man I saw in running shorts on my first day. This is the man who Pam told me had wanted to buy my house and owns the two either side of mine.
I try to block out the noise of the café so I can isolate his words.
“No, she doesn’t know. Obviously, there’s no way she’d be living here if she knew,” he tells the woman in the cherry-red cardigan. She frowns, clearly concerned.
“But what if she works it out?” the woman asks, with a shake of the head at the imagined implications of that.
Greg shrugs. “We’ll see, I guess. We had a scare the other day. The police arrived at her house, middle of the night. It was weird. Then nothing. I don’t know what’s up with her. Pam says to leave it be. I don’t know. But every day I’m thinking shouldn’t we just get on with it and—”
He stops abruptly as a redhead with a large Irish wolfhound asks to squeeze past him. He smiles politely and lets her pass, suddenly turning in my direction.
I spin away in my seat in case he catches a glimpse of my face. When I peek back around, they have disappeared inside. I blink, the sunlight suddenly blinding now that the shadow of the queue has moved on.
I feel my face flush, and the deli I had momentarily felt calm and safe in now feels like a microscope slide I have been affixed to forexamination. I pull out my phone, open the message app, and tap on Arabella’s name. We haven’t spoken since she came over but I feel like I could ask her, couldn’t I?
But what would I say?What’s wrong with my house, Arabella?Heard Greg gossiping about it.But what if she’s in the same camp as Pam and she doesn’t want me knowing—whatever this is—either? I’ve spoken to both of them recently; they had ample opportunity to tell me whatever “this” is. If it was in their interest to tell me wouldn’t they have already?
I down the remainder of my coffee, grab my bag, and slip from my seat, joining the anonymous street traffic and regaining my invisibility, London embracing me, hiding me with its usual, unsentimental hive mentality as I desperately try to make sense of everything.
I walk from the café to the canal, then cut down and walk all the way to the river, my thoughts finally loose and free as I stride alongside the wide and choppy waters of the Thames: liners and water taxis glide beneath and cut white waves in its surface all the way to where the river bends and they disappear from sight, the gusting wind over the water battering those brave enough to be out on the sunny boat decks, cold spray spritzing them, their eyes squinting against it.
As I walk back over Millennium Bridge from the Tate Modern, hair whipping my face, my mind finally begins to clear. The couple at Number15. The angry bike man and his threatening message. Greg’s conviction that I would never have moved onto the street if I’dknown.
And the footage.
Of the basement window.
How the woman limped.
I stop suddenly, someone bumping my shoulder as they rush past, and pull out my phone to open my internet browser.
I tap the address of my new house into the search bar.
Sales photos and listings for my house fill the screen, going back all the way to the 1990s: unflattering photos of it with old box aerial televisions on entertainment cabinets, Artex ceilings, and flouncy floral curtains.
I scroll through two pages of internet searches before results morph from 18 Northcroft Road into 18 North Court Street, Edinburgh.
I tap the street name alone into the internet search, then click on the news tab. Only the top result is relevant, an article about the street’s annual charity-fundraising party from the local gazette.
Maybe Greg’s comment was about something pedestrian like my house being riddled with damp—which wouldn’t be ideal but would definitely not be as off-putting as anything else my thoughts have conjured.
Just as they might currently be conjuring a nightmare happening somewhere else on the street, in a basement. Yet I know she is real, the video was real.
All I need is to get her on film one more time and take that footage to the police.
My thoughts stumble once more, doubt creeping into my still-bleary-around-the-edges thoughts: What if there is something wrong with my mind, if it’s not solely a question of sleepwalking? What if no matter how real what I sawfeels,it wasn’t? There’s a chance I’m not right and there was no woman.
I think of Blue out there now, collar on, filming, breaking the law, and wonder if perhaps I might have put myself in a very vulnerable position. A criminal caution would destroy my chances of getting the kind of job I want. I could so easily send myself down a track that is impossible to come back from, all on the basis of a feeling, the memory of something.
—
When I return to the house, Blue is not yet back. Doubt compounds inside me.
I resign myself to the fact he might not be back until the evening. So there is no more I can do until then.
I am about to head up to the spare room office when the doorbell sounds.
I swivel on the bottom step and look at the unknown figure through the glass; there’s no pretending I’m not in, as I imagine they can see me as well as I can see them.
