Page 21 of Watching You

Two Years Earlier

The canvas that Mol had intended to be full of light and blossoms had turned into a muddy mess.

She’d mixed in too much red and been clumsy with the tree line, at which point her foreground figure had been thrown into shade and by then she was simply wasting paint.

She quit and began cleaning her brushes instead.

Her mobile started to ring, and while she hated to be bothered, it was the music from Grey’s Anatomy that signified her mother was calling – their not-so-subtle private joke from long evenings in front of the TV with cheese and crackers, commiserating over how few doctors in real life were as dreamy as McDreamy.

Mol grabbed a towel then answered.

‘Hey Mum, you okay?’

‘I am, but I just wanted you to know there’ll be a delivery there momentarily. They need a signature. I didn’t want you to be concerned if there was a knock at the studio door, sweetheart.’

‘You gave them the code?’ Mol asked, gripping the towel hard enough to make her knuckles ache.

‘I did, and you don’t have to answer the door unless they get it right. I don’t want you stressed, you hear me?’

‘I’ll be okay, Mum, but thanks for calling to let me know. I can hear a car pulling up. That’ll be them. Gotta go.’

‘Message to let me know you’re okay?’

‘I will. Love you.’ Mol rang off and took her rape alarm from her bag together with one of her mother’s scalpels.

She put the rape alarm in her pocket and kept the blade in her left hand, tucking her fear away where it didn’t stop her living her life and forcing herself to act as if everything was normal.

Standing half behind the studio door, she opened up but left the two chains on, staying far enough back that no one could reach a hand inside to grab her. Outside was a young man, his moustache little more than a line of fluff, looking flustered.

‘You have the code?’ she asked.

‘Shit, yeah, er, I’ve got it in my pocket. Give me a sec.’ He started rooting through his overalls and finally pulled out a scrap of paper. ‘I taste a … sorry miss, what’s the word?’ He turned the crumpled paper towards her.

‘Liquor.’

‘Oh yeah, liquor. I taste a liquor never brewed. That’s proper weird.’

Mol’s pulse slowed fractionally. ‘That’s fine. You can set the box down there. Pass me your tablet and I’ll sign.’

‘Sorry, new company rules. I have to keep hold of it while you sign. Could you open up? It’ll only take a couple of seconds.’

The lurch of her stomach was familiar but the prickle of adrenaline remained uncomfortable. He had the code. It had been written down for him. They changed the Emily Dickinson poem every week. It was perfectly safe.

‘Fine. Wait there,’ she said, pushing the door closed and setting down the knife so she could slide the chains across to detach them.

Her fingers didn’t want to obey. They fumbled and missed, then wouldn’t let go. It was ridiculous to be so scared, and impossible not to be.

‘Sorry, I’ve really got to be off,’ the delivery man called.

Mol was a child again, at the top of the slide with her father at the bottom, all impatience, telling her to let go. Telling her there was nothing to be afraid of.

‘Damn it,’ she said. ‘I have to live my life.’ Opening up, she was pleased to see he’d taken a step back and was holding the tablet out for her to scrawl a digital signature on before he took a photo of the box at her feet.

He left and Mol took the box inside, ignoring the fact that her hands were shaking as she bolted the door and slid both chains back across.

She checked her watch. Still five hours until her mother’s shift ended and she could get picked up.

Until then she was a prisoner in her own studio, knowing perfectly well that all hope of creating anything beautiful on a canvas was done for the day.

A year ago, there would have been endless other tasks to complete.

Her life had been glorious chaos, with never enough time for cleaning up, ordering supplies, answering emails or booking events into her diary.

Now she had nothing but time. There was no mess to be seen, and some empty shelves where there would previously have been canvases drying or waiting for extra touches or needing to be wrapped and couriered. Recently, the studio had become an empty shell devoid of creativity.

As had she.

Mol moved robotically towards her little paint-spattered kettle and flicked the switch before opening the delivery box. The contents confirmed how much her life had changed.

Nestled in the cardboard was an external post box that her mother had ordered so they could have the mail slot in their front door sealed once and for all.

There were things you didn’t want landing on your doormat.

Even if all you could do was reject them before they could violate your doormat and hallway, that was still an improvement.

Mol’s stalker – she refused to say his name any more, even inside her own head – was the sort of person who could have been extraordinarily successful in life if only he’d chosen to commit the same level of devotion and hard work to something other than making other people’s lives a misery.

She let the kettle billow its steam, gave up on the idea that a chamomile tea would soothe her corroded nerves, and sank to her knees.

It was where her stalker wanted her, after all.

There had been times when she’d thought that it might be easier to give him what he craved and could have done so had her mother not been there to keep her defiant.

Karl Smith, Carl Smith, Carl Smyth, Carlos Smit, and more recently Cal Smee might have been an army rather than just one man.

That army had waged a hate campaign against her that a New York public relations agency would have been proud of.

Social media accounts, many and varied, told stories of her private life, from sleeping with husbands of unnamed friends, to having cheated in exams. There were doctored photos of her that claimed she’d long had an illegal drug habit which both fuelled her creativity and implied that any funds from her art sales would simply be snorted at the end of the day.

Names, dates and details were lacking from any of the posts, and friends did their best to counter the accusations, but it was like trying to stop a flood with a child’s fishing net: everything but the odd twig sailed straight through.

In the beginning, there was fury. Mol raged at it all as if she could overcome the wreckage being made of her life by sheer force of will.

Then came quiet determination. Good always triumphed over bad, didn’t it?

She was an intelligent, well-respected, amiable person.

Surely no one would believe such scurrilous rumours, let alone repeat them?

For the first couple of months, Mol managed to keep it from her mother.

Keep it, not hide it. Her mother spent that entire period asking what was wrong.

Did she feel unwell? Had something happened?

Was Molly under too much pressure with all her commissions?

Only when a family friend had called her mother to ask about a rumour that Mol was in a rehab unit for drug addiction did her secret bubble burst.

Beth Waterfall, exceptional surgeon and brilliant mind, had assumed there would be a way of dealing with it.

A system with built-in accountability. They would just report the fake posts to the people who ran the social media sites.

That should deal with it instantly. Mol had explained patiently, then less patiently, how it all worked.

Beth’s disbelief and outrage didn’t help the situation.

Once the horrible reality of how social media worked had sunk in, Beth had suggested that they engage a lawyer.

Said legal expert had considered the case in detail and at no small expense then concluded that there was very little that could be done.

Contacting the social media companies was useless, and nothing Mol hadn’t already tried.

Trying to identify the source of the defamatory posts was a joke.

The accounts disappeared as soon as they’d done their intended damage, and only years of fighting for court orders with international effect would obtain further details.

In the end, Beth Waterfall had become just as frustrated, desperate and angry as Mol, and that hadn’t helped either of them.

Requests for newspaper and magazine interviews dried up.

There were no more places on awards lists.

To be fair, Mol knew that might be because the quality of her work was suffering rather than the judging panels falling prey to prejudice.

With the reduction in publicity – the good kind at least – went the commissions.

Her paintings still sold but tended to sit on display at the galleries far longer than they had before.

Mol had withdrawn from social media and stopped looking to see what was being said about her.

Her true friends had rallied but Mol found it increasingly hard to communicate with them, wanting their support without wanting to see their pity on display.

Only her website remained. It was the only way members of the public or galleries could reach her unless they wanted to go to the trouble of sending a letter.

Her studio was her sanctuary. She would drive there, country music blasting, certain in the knowledge that there were better times ahead, and free her mind of anything but positive thoughts.

She was well aware that a single man was behind that smear campaign.

He might have assumed many forms, become people with different skin colours and unfamiliar names, might have opened new email accounts to fool the very basic social media security, but he hadn’t fooled her.

Mol had found herself caught in the headlights of a sociopath, an obsessive one at that, and now there was nothing to do but wait until he was so bored of her that he finally moved on to pastures new.

Then the first package arrived.

Left outside her studio door on a hot summer’s day, it was nothing more threatening than a box of fruit if you discounted the flies.

She heard it before she saw it, the frenzied buzzing making the air hum as she climbed out of the old Datsun 240Z that was her pride and joy.

She’d bought it with her first big cheque and had washed and polished it weekly ever since.

The first of the flies had splattered juicily on her windscreen and she’d stupidly thought that was going to be the most annoying part of her day.

The box had been positioned directly in front of the little door to the studio, so it was impossible to avoid the parcel if she wanted to get in.

She couldn’t even simply kick it open to see what was inside, because of the lengths of Sellotape involved.

Nudging it to the side so she could open up, her gut was already telling her to do the sensible thing.

Put on gloves, shove it in a bin bag, and throw it into the industrial unit’s commercial waste bin.

But her name was neatly printed on the top and there was a postage stamp and there was a chance, just a chance, that one of her clients had tried to do something lovely for her, and that if she didn’t open it up, she might fail to send a thank you.

Perhaps, after all, it was just a huge mistake.

Mol slashed at the packaging with a Stanley knife, having donned gloves and a mask, and threw open the lid.

Inside was a feast fit for a horror movie.

A mountain of once-luscious grapes sat at one side, balanced by past-life peaches that had formed a sodden yellow mass.

Between them a grey-green orange was surrounded by plums from which new life was bursting in the form of maggots.

The whole of it was a bed of flies not at all bothered by Mol’s intrusion.

She grabbed her stomach and vomited to one side, narrowly missing the box and tripping to land painfully on her hip.

Picking herself up, refusing to cry, refusing to scream, refusing to feel anything else at all, she wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her old painting shirt before ripping it off and throwing it down on top of the stinking box at her feet.

She stormed into her studio, grabbed a bin bag and an old shovel, and marched back out, teeth gritted.

‘Fuck you,’ Mol muttered as she scraped together the detritus and ejecta that so appropriately represented her life. ‘Fuck you.’ Another spadeful in the bag. ‘Fuck you.’ And another. She didn’t care what she looked like. It wasn’t as if anyone in the industrial unit would care either.

‘Fuck you.’ The final, grotesque remnants slid from shovel to bag with slimy finesse.

She threw the shovel down and it clattered and clanged on the paving slabs as she grabbed the bag and tied the top before stomping towards the huge bins and thrusting it inside, slamming the lid. She bared her teeth at it.

Enough.

Mol Waterfall stayed awake for the next two days, painting non-stop.

By the time her mother pulled her bodily from the studio she was dehydrated, freezing, ranting and senseless.

On her easel was a painting of a box of rotting, insect-ridden fruit so life-like it made Beth Waterfall gasp in disgust even as her fingers reached out to touch.

‘Beautiful and terrible,’ Beth murmured.

The gifts, in all their rotten majesty, did not stop coming.