Free Last Kiss by Louise Phillips Page A

the more I saw. You see, I hadn’t realised a part of me was smiling. The camera can do that: it can tell you things you didn’t know.
    Last night, I stood on their front lawn looking at the house, my shape caught in shadow. Everything was quiet and utterly still. There were no lights coming from the windows. I imagined her upstairs, perhaps peering out into the dark at nothing in particular. I visualised the troubled look on her face, part of her already knowing of my presence, and I could almost taste her fear.
    They have a pretty house with a stone fountain tucked away at the end of their back garden. I laughed out loud when I looked at the two figurines, a little boy and girl – I named them the stone children. He has already spoken about her being infertile. He didn’t want to talk about it at first, but then the floodgates opened. I had to fake empathy, having no interest in his whimpering. It intrigued me, though, her putting a permanent reminder of what she cannot have so close. I decided to play a little game with the fountain. I placed pebbles from the drive in the bottom of the stone basin. When I did, the water ricocheted with tiny spatters into the bowl. I enjoy making subtle changes to a place I visit. It’s like leaving a mark. She might wonder about the pebbles, do a double take and ponder on the unexplained.
    When she’s nervous, she tends to get flustered, fiddling with things. She can’t help it. Depending on what she wears, she can display that pretty-girl-next-door appearance, the kind of woman many men end up marrying. The attractiveness appeals to them sexually, while conjuring up goodness and potential home-making, prize maternal qualities for their offspring – sow your seed, reproduce yourself. I don’t want children. One of me in the world is enough.
    I don’t doubt that men find her attractive and, on occasions, some may have allowed their imaginations to take flight, visualising a little fun, but they would never cross the line, not with her. She’s not the type. Women see much more than men when it comes to the fairer sex. Men can be foolish in that department.
    I’ve been playing other games with her too – moving things around the house, putting objects in places they don’t belong. Afew days ago I dropped an empty water bottle on their smooth lawn and placed flower petals near the front door, petals that couldn’t have come from their garden.
    She might have dismissed the water bottle as something left by a passer-by. It might have caused her to complain about people being sloppy and uncaring, but the petals, I would imagine, perplexed her. The inexplicable will cause anxiety. I don’t want to frighten her too much – at least, not yet. For now, it’s a bit like stepping into another person’s life with the ability to make alterations along the way.
    I have my own woman in the shadows, waiting for her time to pounce. She warns me not to get too confident and relishes my mistakes. She would have got a nice kick out of the failed Rick affair. At times I call my hunched shadow ‘the witch’. She reared me, but she wasn’t my mother. My real mother died in childbirth, aged fifteen. For a long time, I thought my life had taken hers. It isn’t easy, believing your first breaths in this world killed another – especially when she was the person who gave you your life. It sets you up for being different. I discovered later that most of what I had been told was a lie. It wasn’t me who killed her. She’d died because of abandonment, and because the woman in the shadows wanted it to be that way.
    I never knew my mother, but part of me believed that she would be pleased if I killed the witch. I had thought the witch’s death would end her control. I was wrong. It gave her cruelty greater power. I still remember her laughing in my face, telling me about burning my mother’s body, calling her a whore, saying she was desperate for it, like some wild boar. I’m not looking for