You by Joanna Briscoe

filling her with disproportionate distress.
    ‘He’s very clever, isn’t he?’ said Nicola in a tiny voice.
    ‘Oh,’ said Cecilia. ‘Yes. I think so. Very.’
    ‘I think he went to Oxford.’
    Cecilia paused.
    ‘What do you think of his wife?’ she said, demonstrating her lack of concern by appearing to study the lockers.
    Nicola screwed up her face. ‘Horrible,’ she said. ‘Bossy. Stern.’ She was silent. ‘I don’t think he likes her very much.’
    Cecilia almost laughed. ‘Poor him,’ she said.
    ‘Yes, poor him,’ said Nicola fervently. ‘He’s so . . . He’s such a good teacher, isn’t he?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Cecilia, loitering. She caught Nicola’s eye again and hesitated, Nicola blushed, and then they burst into simultaneous laughter. Cecilia couldn’t stop. Tears began to run down her cheeks. Nicola laughed in quiet gulping gusts. Cecilia held on to the door, and every time she tried to stop, she could not catch her breath, her abdomen ached, and fresh laughter caught her. In a moment of silence, unable to breathe, she saw that Nicola’s laughter also bled into tears.
    ‘How long?’ she said when she could finally speak, and then laughed again.
    ‘Always,’ said Nicola. ‘Zeno too . . .’
    ‘From the beginning of term?’
    Nicola nodded, her fringe obscuring her eyes as she looked at the floor. She shook her head. ‘Since we saw him on the drive.’
    ‘We were only children.’
    ‘But look at him.’
     
    James Dahl then arrived, nodding at the girls without looking at them, carrying his briefcase and beginning to hand out the class’s Hardy essays before he sat.
    I love you, I love you, I love you , Cecilia thought, jabbing the words into her margin. She glanced at the boys slouching on the desks opposite: pustular and intermittently purple: dismaying creatures she had never touched and barely talked to. She let herself catch a glimpse of the man at the end of the class with his authority and dark lashes and sense of faint, abstracted sadness. James Dahl , she wrote as a pledge.

Seven
    February
    Someone was there on the lane beside Wind Tor House again that night. Cecilia stumbled to the window, almost asleep, and caught a movement as the trespasser hid among the tangle of teasels and long-dead grass at the top of the river field. She heard a rustle, and then there was silence.
    She called Ari in London. ‘I feel weedy for needing you,’ she said, shivering steadily.
    ‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘Because I’m a man , you mean?’
    ‘Yes,’ she said. Her teeth chattered. ‘Precisely. A bit pathetic.’
    He laughed.
    ‘One of those despicable creatures. Get over it. Have they gone?’ he said.
    ‘I think so,’ said Cecilia, her small voice echoing in the large room, her nightdress ghostly around her in the darkness.
    ‘Right. Call the police if they come back.’
    ‘It’s a sleepy little in-the-sticks station in Ashburton. They’ll be in their beds.’ Her breath rose as she stood there, her spine tight with the cold. ‘They probably wouldn’t even be able to find this lane. You try being on your own with three children all week,’ she said heatedly. ‘Sorry,’ she said after a moment.
    ‘It’s only till June. Be patient. Call me and I’ll speak to the police in Exeter,’ he said.
    ‘I don’t like you being away. What if you fall for someone else?’
    ‘Oh Cecilia. Don’t be ridiculous. I won’t. You know I won’t.’
    ‘You’d better fucking not.’
     
    Dora couldn’t sleep. Her breast was tender where her scar lay as she shifted in bed. Her cancer felt, at times, like the most terrifying intruder, so stealthy that an escapee from the prison would be a preferable visitor. She could hear someone walking by her cottage on the lane that led to the back route to Widecombe. A poacher, she conjectured, or one of the roaming dancers and travellers who lived for weeks or months at a time in a converted chapel at the end of the Widecombe lane.
    She turned in