On again. His face leers, centimetres from her own. “None of your fucking business.”

“But Tel, you’re going home to Jasmine aren’t you? Who’s got Jasmine?”

Terry looks at her again. His eyes are dancing dangerously now and he holds her gaze for a long time. When finally he answers, he doesn’t answer at all. “Go on, job to do,” he taunts, and waves her away.

She can’t move. Not in either direction. The canal path feels precarious, as though with just a misplaced foot she could slip and drown. A goat on a cliff edge. Jasmine sits frozen before her eyes. Terry watches her amusedly, enjoying her terror. The moment flows on and on, slowly, like the canal. Eventually she gathers herself enough to respond, but even as she does so she feels the smile she has fixed onto her face faltering at the edges. Terry laughs even before she has started speaking. “You know what,” she coughs anyway, with absurd levity. “Maybe I will miss work today after all. I’ll come home with you. See Jas.”

“No no.” Terry turns her shoulders back towards the canal, grinning at her wildly, eyes dazzling blue. “No no. Go on, you don’t want to be late. Your grand job’s awaiting.”

Veronica

Somehow, Veronica slept. Not at first. It was past four in the morning when she pulled herself out of bed, legs itching incessantly, to email the school with excuses of illness. A little before six she was still awake enough to notice George showering and dressing and creeping out of the house. But sometime after that, she had successfully slipped into oblivion. When she woke, it was almost midday. Long bands of light had nudged their way through the bedroom curtains, pumping like bold veins across the room, mocking her cowardice. It had become too warm under the duvet and in her sleep she had thrown it off, but she lay nevertheless in a narrow, contained strip right on the edge of the mattress. Even in slumber she seemed to be curling inwards, making herself small.

No matter how much George had attempted the night before to reassure her, she couldn’t help but feel terrified of Terry. Rarely in her life had anybody spoken to her with such venom, and what made it most disconcerting was that she couldn’t fathom what had caused it. There had been plenty of times over the years when there had been a valid reason for somebody to take issue with her, whether they did so openly or only in whispers behind her back, like Sarah now; but she had barely even brushed shoulders with Terry. She had heard him enough, suffered his vileness, pondered what a disgusting man he must be; but she had never said so. George did square up to him. Still, that hatred – that was something that neither she nor George could possibly have caused in the space of one conversation. In some ways that was a comforting thought. It meant that it wasn’t really because of her. But on the other hand, having not caused it led Veronica to conclude that she had little power to fix it. And it was this thought, this maddening, recurring helplessness, that kept Veronica awake into the small hours, even after the music next door had finally stopped.