The Followers

THE FOLLOWERS

AFTER

In the visitor centre, Judith bundled her satchel and coat into the locker. She added the keys from her pocket and the ham sandwich she’d felt too queasy to finish, wrapped by her grandmother in about nineteen layers of cling film. ‘For the road,’ Gran had said, as she always did. Her gran, who never said anything that might be misconstrued as tender, who almost never smiled, still did what she could to fortify Judith against these visits, if only through the provision of snacks. During the search last time, the officer had fished out from Judith’s pocket a single Hobnob, which looked like it had been shrink-wrapped. Judith was as surprised as the officer was.

‘My gran must have put it there,’ she said, which was met with raised eyebrows. ‘At least it’s not crack,’ she added. An ill-judged comment, but the oxycodone she’d swallowed on the train had put her in an expansive, freewheeling mood that made it hard to keep her thoughts internalized.

Now, clutching her passport and locker key, she joined the subdued band of visitors making their way over to the main prison. A couple of them she recognized, but she didn’t greet them. Inside the first set of doors, she waited as she was patted down with rather unnecessary thoroughness—they probably remembered the crack comment—then followed the officer into the visits hall.

It was, she thought, the closest approximation to hell she was likely to experience. Neutral paintwork and plastic chairs, the smell of bleach; another scent beneath it, sour and harder to place. Judith tried not to look at the other prisoners as she made her way over to her mother. Stephanie was sitting in the far corner, hands folded neatly in her lap, eyes fixed determinedly on her hands. I don’t like to look up too soon, she had told Judith once, in case you haven’t come.

‘I always come,’ Judith had said, unsmiling. She was wary of people who teased out your sympathy and used it against you.

Now her mother stood and hugged her. A strange embrace, one that pinned Judith’s arms to her sides and left her unable to respond. They sat.

‘It’s good to see you,’ Stephanie said.

Judith noticed that her mother’s hair was looking thinner. Her face had taken on a dry, crumpled look. Stephanie had gone into prison young but she would come out old. Perhaps she would look at herself and be amazed.

Judith realized that her mother was speaking.

‘Sorry?’

‘How’s Gran?’ Stephanie said again.

‘She’s fine.’ A pause, then she added, ‘Thanks for the birthday card, by the way. I liked—the elephant picture.’

‘You’re welcome. Twenty-two. You’re a real adult now.’

Judith had no reply to this.

‘I’ll get you a present,’ her mother said. ‘When I can. You know, get it myself. I’ll get you all the presents from your last few birthdays, OK? When I can.’

Judith tried to imagine being deluged with all the debts owed to her younger self, things she might once have wanted but no longer had any use for: My Chemical Romance albums, notebooks, Xbox games. Like unspooling time, being pulled back, back, back.

Searching wildly for a conversation topic, she came out with, ‘I watched this old film with Gran the other day. An Officer and a Gentleman. I heard it was like Top Gun, which was shit, but it was OK’

‘Richard Gere,’ her mother said. ‘I fancied him when I was your age.’

‘I didn’t get why they had to make it so fucking depressing at the end. And then try to pretend everything was happy again.’

‘You mean the bit where his friend—?’ Stephanie said, breaking off as though afraid of spoiling the plot for invisible listeners. Judith glanced involuntarily over her shoulder, but the other people in the room were absorbed in their own visits. At a table nearby, a woman shared a bar of chocolate with an elderly man, meticulously measuring each of the pieces against the others.

Judith turned back to her mother. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘When he kills himself.’

‘I didn’t like that bit either,’ Stephanie said.

‘It wasn’t what happened that annoyed me. I just hated how they tried to have a happy ending afterwards. Like Richard Gere would just be fine again. And we could all just forget it.’

‘Our film last week was The Descendants,’ Stephanie said. ‘Some of the others screamed whenever George Clooney was on screen.’ She attempted a smile. ‘Which was a lot. It was a bit distracting.’

‘I saw that,’ Judith said. ‘It was alright.’

‘I prefer Colin Firth,’ her mother said. ‘We had The King’s Speech the week before. I enjoyed that. He’s gorgeous.’

Judith nodded, suddenly tired of this topic. She said, ‘I’m learning to cook. Last night I made a pork casserole.’ She didn’t add that she’d drunk too much in the afternoon, and bought all the ingredients except the pork. (‘Ah. Tomato stew,’ her gran had said drily. ‘Very economical.’)

‘That sounds nice,’ her mother said. ‘And how’s Nick?’

‘Oh,’ Judith said, regretting that she’d allowed this to be wormed out of her in the first place. ‘Well, I haven’t seen him for a while.’

Her mother seemed to deflate before her eyes. ‘What happened?’

‘Nothing.’

Of course, Nick had found out who she was. Judith still didn’t know how, but she’d seen it in his face when he’d suggested coming to see her mother with her. Her mother, who lived so far away.

‘It’s a long journey,’ Judith had said. ‘And she’s not that interesting. She’s just my mum. Very ordinary.’ She’d given him that bland, deflecting look she was so good at. But she knew what he was thinking all the same.

That was the end, because how could it not be? She’d done it over the phone the next day, and hidden upstairs in her room when he came round.

‘She’s not here,’ she heard her gran saying over and over, until he finally left. Judith had allowed herself to cry for a little while. Then she’d gone downstairs and it hadn’t been mentioned again.

Her mother said, ‘If he’s upset you in some way, or if you’ve upset him, perhaps you could talk to him about it. Find a way to forgive each other.’

Judith shrugged. She wanted to say, ‘I don’t believe in forgiveness,’ but the words stayed in her head. She turned her eyes to the window instead. It was too high to see anything except a square of light, framed like it had been hung there. They were almost out of time.

When Judith got up to go, her mother said quickly, ‘See you next month?’

Judith hesitated, letting herself imagine, just for a second, that there was more than one answer.

‘Of course,’ she said.

I

BEFORE

1

Stephanie didn’t know what it was about the man in the corner because as far as she could see he just sat there quietly and read his book. But the other girls jostled for position on Thursday mornings to serve him, and then competed again for who would clear his table.

‘He usually has a cappuccino,’ Helen told her on her first Thursday, as though she were revealing the secrets of the universe. ‘But sometimes, just occasionally, he switches to breakfast tea.’

‘Right,’ Stephanie said.

She decided to leave them to it. Plenty of other customers to serve and plenty of other tables to clear. She hadn’t been here long and she wanted the other girls to like her. The risk of losing your job was ever-present these days, everything so shifting and unstable that it was best to keep your head down and get on with it. Three years she’d been at the bookies, had made the mistake of thinking she was safe—why worry about losing a job you hate, anyway?—but as it turned out, she’d been the first to go.

The rent was a problem, as constant as her exhaustion. She still remembered a time when she’d actually relished the idea of rent payments. On those nights in her early twenties when she’d left Judith with her mum and gone out for a drink, she’d enjoyed dropping it into conversation with her friends: ‘Better not have another, or I won’t make the rent this month,’ or, ‘No, it’s a rubbish job, but you have to pay the rent somehow, don’t you?’ It was a magic word back then, transforming her into someone she wanted to be: adult, bold, a little haphazard, perhaps, but making it all work. Her friends—many still sleeping in their childhood single beds—had been impressed.

She was thirty-one now, and the charm of paying rent was long gone. Too many moves. Too many cramped, dreary towns, each time hoping for better. Everyone was paying rent now, and much less precariously than she was, it seemed. And Judith’s dad had never been much help, neither with money nor with anything else. No sign of him for ages now. It wasn’t Sean who had to worry about paying the rent, or finding the cheapest way to make bolognese without Judith complaining it was grey.

It seemed to happen as you got older that instead of expanding, the world shrank around you, so that in place of all that freedom you’d been promised you got breathlessness and fear and the daily drudge of making ends meet.

Stephanie began to hate the man who sat in the corner every Thursday, who had nothing better to do than drink coffee and read a book on a weekday morning.

‘What does he actually do?’ she said to Helen on her third Thursday.

Helen was vague. ‘I think he’s a teacher.’

‘Where? St. Joseph’s? The FE college?’

‘Don’t think so.’

‘There’s nowhere else.’ Not in this wasteland, she added silently; nothing but the moors and the wind and the rain.

‘Well, then,’ Helen said, ‘he probably works further afield, doesn’t he? Bradford, even.’

‘Bradford? Right.’

Stephanie looked over at him again. Early forties, maybe. Dark hair that curled a little. He was OK-looking, she’d give him that, but nothing special. The others were welcome to him.

Then, an accident. Helen had gone out for a cigarette and Liz was wiping down the tables by the door so that somehow Stephanie was alone at the counter when he came up, his polite half-smile already in place. She didn’t smile back.

He said, ‘Please could I have a chocolate croissant?’

Soft-spoken, with quite a posh accent—a little like he was about to read you the news. Mainly, she noticed his eyes. A strange pale green, too light for his colouring. Stephanie had never seen eyes like that before. They unsettled her.

She focused on the pastries instead, lifting the plastic lid and using the tongs to retrieve a croissant for him.

‘That’ll be 90p, please.’

He said in his gentle voice, ‘You’re new, aren’t you?’

‘Been here nearly a month.’ She wasn’t sure where her irritation came from. Maybe because he made it sound like he was the one who belonged here, like he was welcoming her onto his territory.

‘Nice to meet you,’ he said. Then, ‘My name’s Nathaniel.’

Her ‘Stephanie’ sounded silly coming after his curiously old-fashioned name.

He had paid and was holding the little plate with the croissant on it. But he didn’t walk away.

He said, ‘I come here every Thursday.’

‘I know.’ She regretted saying it immediately. Made it sound like she’d been watching him, same as all the others. A short silence, during which she felt those pale eyes on her again. She’d been staring down at the cash register, but now she made herself look up and meet his gaze. There was something patient in his expression that made her feel like she was being unreasonable.

‘I’ll let you get on,’ he said, and the next moment he’d gone back to his table with the croissant and picked up his book. He didn’t look at her again after that, not when he’d finished his coffee, not when Helen went over and they seemed to be chatting away, laughing together, not even when he left.

‘What’s so special about him?’ she said to Helen later, as they were closing up. ‘Why do you all fancy him?’

Helen snorted, gave her a shove. ‘I don’t fancy him. He’s just nice, that’s all. Nice manners, you know?’

Must be the polish of Bradford, Stephanie thought. She just managed not to say it out loud.

Shrieks of laughter greeted her from the front room when she got home. A moment later, Judith burst into the hall, and Stephanie thought, as she often did, that it was a peculiar gift on Judith’s part that she could make even a school uniform look scruffy.

‘We’ve made a talk show, Mum,’ Judith said. ‘I’m the interviewer, and Megan’s my guest, and she’s a pop star, but she’s off her head on drugs and keeps answering with stuff that doesn’t make sense. Do you want to see it?’

‘Not just now, love.’ Stephanie stuck her head round the living-room door, where Megan seemed to be conducting some kind of elaborate mime by herself. ‘Megan, hadn’t you better be getting home? Your mum will be wondering where you are.’

‘She knows I’m here,’ Megan said placidly.

‘She means she wants you to go home,’ Judith said, coming back into the room. ‘She’s not being rude. She just wants to make our supper and watch Coronation Street in peace. Come on. I’ll walk with you.’

‘Judith!’ Stephanie said, but the girls had already gone to get their coats.

When Judith returned, Stephanie had the beans heating up on the stove and was buttering toast. Judith came and leaned against the counter next to her. She seemed to be getting bigger at a rate that Stephanie found alarming, taking up more and more space as Stephanie felt herself diminishing. It struck her as extraordinary, when she thought about it, that she’d produced a child like Judith: this bright, self-assured person who seemed like no one but herself.

Judith said, ‘You know, Mum, you should see people more. It’d do you good.’

‘I see Megan often enough, don’t I?’

She hadn’t meant to snap, but Judith seemed unfazed.

‘I mean friends your own age, Mum. Why don’t you invite Megan’s mum round for coffee?’

‘Kay is not my age, Judith. She’s in her forties, for God’s sake!’

‘Yes, but you’re both mums, aren’t you?’ Judith said, as though that settled it.

Stephanie closed her eyes briefly. ‘Shall we have supper in front of the telly?’

Another accident: this time, entirely his. She was wiping down the tables the following Thursday when she heard a quiet sound of frustration behind her, and looked up to see that he’d knocked his mug over, sending a wave of coffee over the table and soaking the paperback that rested on it.

She went over with her cloth, and did her best to absorb the worst of it before it flooded his lap. He picked up the book and flapped it uselessly, as though he could shake out the coffee that had already sunk into its pages.

‘I’m such an idiot,’ he said.

‘We all do it.’ He was looking at the book so sadly that she added, ‘If it’s ruined, you can get another copy, can’t you?’ She couldn’t see what the book was, but it looked old and tattered, the pages yellow where they weren’t stained with coffee.

‘Well, yes,’ he said. ‘Only—’

When he broke off, she found it impossible not to prompt him. ‘Only what?’

A quick, rueful look. ‘Sounds stupid. But it was my mother’s book.’

‘Oh—sorry.’

‘No use being sentimental though, is there? It’s only a book.’

‘Did you lose your mother recently?’ she said. Was this OK to ask? Did people ask things like this?

He didn’t seem to mind. ‘No. Back when I was a kid.’ He remained thoughtful a moment longer, then gave her an unexpectedly charming smile. ‘Sorry about the spill.’

‘It’s fine. It’s nothing. It’s just a shame about your book.’

‘It’s my own clumsiness,’ he said. ‘I sometimes wonder if my brain’s failed to understand the length of my arms. I’m always misjudging distances when I reach for things.’ He had placed the book back on the table now, and she was able to read the title: Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot, which sounded like an Agatha Christie novel, though wasn’t he the one who wrote poems about cats?

‘Is it any good?’ she said, gesturing to the book.

He looked up at her, and those pale eyes locked onto hers so that for a moment it was as though the rest of the world stilled and receded and there were just the two of them there. He said, ‘This is one moment, but know that another shall pierce you with a sudden, painful joy.’

It took her a couple of beats to realize he was quoting. She didn’t know what to say, but she couldn’t drag her eyes away. He seemed clever, she thought.

He freed her by giving a small huff of amusement and looking down at the book. ‘It’s a bit strange, to be honest.’

‘Sounds it.’ A pause, then she said, ‘I’d better get on.’

Back at the counter, she made him a replacement cappuccino and took it over to him, with a breezy, ‘On the house,’ and then winced inwardly, because this expression belonged to television, not real life. She brushed off his thanks and walked away, not trusting herself to linger any longer.

The following Thursday was her day off. She started out by cleaning the flat, then gave up and went to bed with a magazine. It was hard to focus, though. She wasn’t used to having time to herself; she felt she was wasting it.

On Friday, Liz said, ‘He asked about you yesterday.’

Stephanie could tell who Liz meant from her sidelong look. She felt something in her stomach, a wriggle of excitement.

She affected nonchalance. ‘Oh?’

‘He asked where you were, if you were ill. I said you were working at the weekend instead. That he’d have to make do with me and Helen.’

Stephanie didn’t comment. She told herself it was weird he’d asked.

He was there again the next Thursday. She wasn’t at the counter when he placed his order, but he made a special point of bringing his empty mug up himself later, when she was replenishing the pastries. The coffee shop was quiet that day, so she was able to pause in her work and say, ‘Did you dry your book out OK?’

‘It’s not too bad,’ he said. ‘The pages have gone quite an attractive shade of brown. I think I prefer it. Before long, everyone will be doing it.’

‘I’m not sure about that.’

As she turned to wipe down the coffee machine, he said, ‘So have you always lived round here?’

‘No. Leeds, originally.’

‘What made you come here?’

Stephanie shrugged. She’d followed a boyfriend here a few years back, only he hadn’t stuck around, and now there seemed neither anything to keep her here nor any reason to move on. ‘You know,’ she said. ‘Life.’

‘And are you happy here?’

A strange question. ‘It’s alright,’ she said. But, feeling his directness required a more honest answer, she added, ‘It’s not where I imagined I’d end up.’

‘Things don’t always turn out the way we expect, do they?’

He said it softly, almost to himself. Something made Stephanie ask, ‘Are you from round here?’ It already seemed obvious he wasn’t.

‘No, I grew up with my uncle in London.’

She wanted to ask about his parents, but didn’t know how. Perhaps his father as well as his mother had died when he was a child. Stephanie’s own father had been killed in a road accident when she was six, and though she hardly remembered him, though her mother never spoke of him, Stephanie seemed to carry with her a physical memory of his death, a pain in her chest when she thought of him that was like being winded.

‘Everyone’s always telling you that things turn out for the best,’ she said. ‘But don’t they just turn out, without any scheme behind it? And anyway, we can’t say things have turned out for the best or the worst because we don’t know what the other options would have been.’ She had taken herself by surprise—the words seemed to burst out of her in his presence. She risked a glance at him. ‘What?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ he said. ‘I had a feeling about you, that’s all. And I was right.’

‘What feeling?’

‘I suppose—that you think about things more deeply than other people.’

‘Oh!’ she said, trying to hide her pleasure. ‘Hardly. Look where I’ve ended up. Working in a cafe.’ A single mother, she almost said.

‘It’s not about what we do,’ he said. ‘It’s about who we are.’ When she didn’t answer, he added, ‘Actually, I think there is a scheme to it all. But we can talk about that another day. I’d better leave you in peace now. People will think I’m making the world’s longest and most complicated coffee order.’

She smiled at him. ‘See you next Thursday.’

But the next week he didn’t come. Stephanie told herself she didn’t mind, she would see him again the following Thursday. But he didn’t appear then either.

‘Maybe he’s found another coffee shop,’ Helen said gloomily.

‘Maybe he’s dead,’ Liz said.

Stephanie didn’t comment. Isn’t this typical, she thought. It was almost worse than if he’d never spoken to her. This was what they did, men: made you think it meant something to them as well, when really it was just a passing fancy, throwaway remarks.

That evening, she stood in the kitchen stirring pasta sauce, thinking of nothing. She was dimly aware that Judith was talking to her, relaying with an unnecessary level of detail the plot of the film she’d watched