Page 23 of Watching You
‘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 andsetting 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 shecould 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 knewthat 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 andshe’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.
